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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.

While this article focuses on urgency and social proof, take a look at the way this Ruby Lane product page is designed.

Price is prominently displayedAdd to Cart button is high on the pageShipping is handled before entering checkoutThe product description is near the hero shot (and well written)Several high-quality photos are provided.All are above the fold or close to it. Are you working this hard to help your visitors buy?

Is your business or offering as difficult to explain as a financial investment? A website is often not enough. So it's interesting to see that stodgy financial firms are using humor and even hand-drawn cartoons to help their customers make some serious decisions. We're bullish on video as an online tool at Conversion Sciences. Ask us about our Video Science service.

What happens when you understand what your online recipe is? Magical things. More visitors. More sales. More leads. More revenue. This is not a job for a web designer or developer. As the business owner, marketing manager, or agency, you must know how to shepherd the development of a site into a repeatable, measurable formula. Here's an opportunity to learn more.

 @peeplaja has given us another great post, full of examples and destined to change your fortune if you put it to work on your site.

The primary barrier to speaking clearly about our business is that we must choose to communicate with someone other than everyone. In other words, we must risk being uninteresting to some portion of our audience in exchange for really knocking our value prop out of the park for others.

Read carefully. Then choose.

Here's the first line from this very helpful little post. "0 sales! What? But we got 517 unique visitors this week!" Airing your mistakes is not seen as smart marketing in many circles, but this kind of thing really is helpful. Besides the important moral of this story, there's another:

Failing the right way leads to success faster. Failing without knowing why invites unnecessary failure.

I predict good things for these folks.

@peeplaja offers a great post on shopping cart abandonment

In my book I say that abandonment is like cholesterol: There is a good kind and a bad kind. For each there is a strategy for reducing the impact of abandonment on your business.

Good abandoners leave because they aren't done with their shopping process. The challenge is to get them to come back and buy when they are done. There are several strategies here for retargeting the visitor who abandons using email and ads.

Bad abandoners leave because you surprised them or didn't provide the information they were looking for. This kind of abandonment can be treated by improving the checkout process and by using pricing and shipping strategies.

Abandonment is the most heartbreaking of conversion killers. it is also a fertile place to increase the performance of your website.

@pallavkaushish offers a nice check list for things to test. However, you should use this list to develop a list of hypotheses. Rather than just testing these, use your analytics to see if these might really be the problem.

I would add one more to the top of the list: headlines and copy around calls to action. This has proven more effective than testing CTA buttons for us.

The things that make us effective marketers or stand in our way often aren't external, but internal. Being a good marketer, copywriter or Conversion Scientist means coming to terms with our own demons, limitations and neuroses.

Dr. Aaron Balick maps out how our overburdened Ego does it's best "while being goaded on by the Id and being told off by the Superego."

Dr. Balick knows how to help us relate to these kind of issues.

We almost always test headlines on the landing pages we optimize. It's how we get some of our best wins to increase conversion rates. This orthography is a great primer for writing headlines that you can test on your pages.

In light of @joeljharvey's recent presentations on mobile web development, we are not surprised by the findings of this survey. Mobile visitors want a mobile experience, not because they thought about it, but because they are, well, mobile.

Come by The Conversion Scientist blog to hear what else we have to say about building great mobile sites.

What is the equivalent of a good headline when you're talking about online chat? It's the questions your greeters ask.

Like headlines, greeter questions provide better results when they are:RelevantSpecificNot cliche, i.e. UnexpectedOften, being relevant and specific is surprising enough to meet the last requirement: unexpected.

Content is the best way to improve your conversion rate overall. This is a great primer for those marketing departments that are committing to this powerful strategy.

How a visitor interacts with your site is important to conversion. Here is an analysis of the identities used to login to news, business, entertainment, and other sites

I'm pleased to be in such amazing company at the Landing Page Success Summit

Great summary of our panel at PubCon Las Vegas

There's nothing new here, but a nice summary of SEO and conversion basics.

Great if you're using Google Checkout of Paypal for merchant account.

Did you know that load times affect conversion rates. Google has recently started penalizing your page quality score if you have slow load times. Pingdom Tools measure the performance of your Web site and help you diagnose the source of slow loading pages.

Great case studies from AB tests