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I'm giving away free copies of my book Your Customer Creation Equation: Unexpected Website Formulas of The Conversion Scientist. There are no strings attached.

Starting December 15 and running through December 19th, my book will be completely free in the Amazon Kindle Store. Just click on "One Click Buy" during the promo dates, and it'll be delivered right to your Kindle free of charge.

Don't have a Kindle? Never fear. You can read it on the Amazon Cloud Reader on your computer, or through the free Kindle App available for your Smartphone or iPad.  

  So what is this book I am offering for free? It's called The Customer Creation Equation: Unexpected Website Formulas of The Conversion Scientist™. It gives readers the foolproof formulas to creating a website that not only gets the right traffic, but converts that traffic to customers, returning customers and advocates.  

Some of the great things you'll learn in this book:

- Identify the unique customer creation formula for your site. - Set up your own digital conversion lab to measure your progress. - Develop landing pages for your site that actually deliver. - Charge your marketing "batteries" to reduce your advertising expenditures. - Communicate authoritatively with designers, developers, and executives.

So please, do not buy this book.  

Go over to the Kindle Store and get your copy absolutely free. Your website will thank you for it.

If you want to understand the importance of charging your marketing batteries TODAY, just listen to Seth Godin, who has been building a following for a decade with daily blog posts, books and presentations: "[Kickstarter is] the LAST step, not the first one. I started working on this Kickstarter 9 or 10 years ago. That's the way you maximize your results. Dig your well before you're thirsty."

Seth was able to raise well over $100,000 to fund his new book using Kickstarter. He didn't set out to do that nine or ten years ago. When you've got a list and have built a relationship with its members, you can invite them to participate in new things as they arise. Start now.

As I'm putting the final touches on my up-coming book, it is very clear that content is the most important conversion strategy: It influences and enables almost every other strategy.

If you need to get started on content marketing here is a pretty complete list of resources to get you started.

Comic book ads as PPC inspiration. I love the unexpected, and Ben Settle has one for us. Look for "comic book classified scans" link.

Video has a relatively small part in my book, so I wanted to give you some more depth with this article by Joe Watson.

One of the things that freezes us when we're going to do video is the question, "what will we do?" From a conversion standpoint, the question is, "what will we test?" This implies more than one version of a video. There are ways to cut a video to test for length, style and focus, but testing implies multiple treatments. That's why we've been offering a video piloting service called Video Science.

Storyboarding may be the thing that gets you past considering. I know it works for me.

The folks at CrazyEgg have a wonderful summary of the five website formulas found in my book. Read this and you can skip chapters 3 and 4.

The folks at CrazyEgg have a wonderful summary of the five website formulas found in my book. Brochure Site Consultative Site Publication Site Online Store Online Service Read this and you can skip chapters 3 and 4.

Great primer on regular expressions for Google Analytics. You don't have to be a programmer to get something from regular expressions.

Dustin Sparks is another fixture in the Conversion epicenter we have here in Austin, an epicenter that includes both Bryan and Jeffrey Eisenberg.

Dustin provides a very comprehensive and easy to consume list of the landing page mistakes that are costing businesses money across the Web. To find out how you can get a free copy of the Kindle edition of my new book join my Friends of the Author list now.

 @smexaminer While images are important for social media to help break through the noise, they are also very important on our landing pages, home pages and other web pages.

Unfortunately, we often resort to what I call "business porn" in my book. Business porn includes stock photos of multi-racial smiling people, of graphs going up and to the right, and of cheerful women with headsets.

So if you are struggling with what to use for visuals on your site or in your emails, here are 26 excellent ideas. 

In my book Your Customer Creation Equation I talk about the two conversions that online services have:Conversion from visitor to trialConversion from tryer to buyerI recommend that online services find ways to get the visitor started as soon as possible. Online services have the advantage that we can try the product right there online.

This article is further proof that getting the visitor engaged with questions is a more effective way to find more tryers and buyers than the typical home page.

 @crestodina I spoke at the Conversion Conference #convcon this week about flipping your message according to your Web visitor. This can be applied to subject lines, search ads, display ads and landing pages.

One of the most powerful "flips" is between the four kind of visitors outlined by Bryan and Jeffrey Eisenberg in their book Waiting for Your Cat to Bark?.

Here is a creative twist on the four kinds of visitors you'll encounter on your website: video game characters.

Is the page, post or email you're working on right now targeting Frogger or Mario or Galaga or PacMan?

It should.

This article on ebooks comes at an important time at Conversion Sciences as we put the final touches on a unique ebook of our own (preorder Business Video Through the Eyes of Your Prospects).

Content is the way you charge and release the power stored in your marketing batteries (customer lists, email lists, social media networks).

And don't forget that ebooks now outsell print books.

 @eConsultancy brings the excellent teaching of Claude Hopkins Scientific Advertising into our online world. It's almost conversion steampunk until you realize that we haven't invented very much original.

And we've left some smart ideas behind.

Enjoy these nine tips and you should be able to find a free PDF of Hopkins' book somewhere on the Web.

If not, email me.

If you're a frequent reader of our blogs, you won't be surprised by this report from Custora stating that email is a more effective marketing channel than social networks.

In fact, I say in my book that email is the biggest social network on the planet. Business people plan their days by their inbox. They program audible notifications when new items come into their inbox. It's not smart, but it's true.

Of course, this doesn't mean that you should send self-promotional crap. That won't work in email, mail or social media. But certainly don't eliminate email from your marketing mix.

In my new book, I talk about the importance of having Marketing Batteries that store visitors attention for you to use over and over. The "Subscriber Battery" is your email list. The "Social Battery" will include your Twitter followers.

The problem with the Social Battery is that it discharges unreliably compared to the Subscriber Battery. As a result I recommend converting your social networks to email contacts. This charges your Subscriber Battery from your Social Battery.

Here is a great set of tactics to get more email subscribers from Twitter.

In my new book I liken abandonment to cholesterol: there is good abandonment and bad abandonment. SeeWhy.com CEO Charles Nichols was the person who helped me realize this, and his article shows you how to support your visitors natural need to abandon before they buy.

 @copyblogger: Content is king. In my upcoming book The Customer Creation Equation, I teach you how to charge your marketing batteries and then tap the stored marketing potential... all with content. If you don't yet know what content you're going to create, or find yourself stuck, this infographic may be just the ticket for you.

Barry Feldman @FledmanCreative leads this article off with a most vivid depiction of our end goal: "Start with a dead mouse." This is the ultimate goal of our content marketng. We want to accomplish something. The rest is equally as creative. My new book discusses content in the conversion process at length. I hope it is as entertaining as Barry.

It is a great sign that @SEOMoz included Conversion in their grand plan for Content Marketing. This infograph considers conversion a key component of content marketing, but in my upcoming book on conversion I make content a key part of conversion marketing. Different approaches, same result.

Enjoy the Infograph.

I've put forth in my new book that adding social media icons to a landing page is a bad idea. I get a lot of pushback on this. Here's some support for my position. Simplicity sells. "Engagement" doesn't. This article highlights three components that consumers need to make it easier to buy. They need to trust the information they receive.They need to learn effectively without distraction.They need to be able to weigh options confidently. Help your visitors choose and choose confidently. Worry about your social media strategy after the sale.