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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.

 @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.

 @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.

"A mere 6 to 12 words stand between you and a lower bounce rate." This is how Joanna Wiebe begins a very comprehensive tutorial on writing your home page headline.

Home pages are hard. They have to deliver to a broad audience, and audience that could be visiting for almost any reason. However, half of our traffic comes to them on average. So, we need to get some things very right.

The first thing to focus on is the headline.

Of course, my primary advice is to hire someone like Joanna to write it for you, but if you aren't open to that, this is the best post I've seen on the topic.

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.

 The interesting graphic shown in this post by Custora shows how e-commerce businesses are gaining customers and how that has changed since 2009.

It is no surprise to see cost-per-click (CPC) search advertising growing over that time. However, it is gratifying to see that email has grown the fastest, far outstripping banner advertising, Facebook and Twitter.

In my book I say that email is the biggest social network on the planet. It appears to be so for e-commerce companies as well.

 @unbounce has provide a post with a double payoff. First, this is a great list of conversion-related stats and, second, a great example of how to design content to be sharable.

The content is sharable for the following reasons: The title contains the call to action "48 Tweetable Stats..." There's something here for everyone The quotes are Twitter-sized for easy sharing in 140 characters Each quote has a call to action in the form of a "Tweet this" link. Every quote So, if you've got something you really want people to share, follow this recipe. For article-style content, use pull quotes and put a "Tweet this" link with each.

These guys are real smarty-pants.

If you've ever wondered what "business porn" is, this post covers pretty much all of it.

The superhero, the running businessman, the meaningless graph, and the sexy business hottie.

If I was to add one more, it would be the suited handshake.

Megan Leap is available to take a look at your website and online strategy.

@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.

@tim_ash doesn't mince words, and his post on the pitfalls of stock photogrphy is no exception. "Marketers have turned to stock imagery as a crutch - hastily grabbing an image off the web rather than taking the time to develop an effective page design that will move visitors into the conversion funnel," he says.

Read on to learn how to NOT be one of these hasty marketers.

 @peeplaja has put into one blog post most of the hard lessons we've learned over the years of testing here in the Conversion Lab. Peep doesn't mince words ("There is no best color").

Don't let all of this scare you. It's better to try and learn from your mistakes than to not make any mistakes at all. Test away!

Marketers have it tough. Just look at all of the things we can optimize! Where do we start?!

Well, we can start with these 25 articles, including one from yours truly. Search Optimization Social Optimization Local Optimization Email Marketing (No Optimization?) Mobile Optimization Content Marketing Conversion Optimization Reputation Management

Here's a nice story about how data can be used to drive design and content decisions. Click tracking (heatmaps), session recording and user polling are all tools we put to good use here in the lab for our clients.

And if you want a fantastic example of using storytelling to educate and entertain, this post is just such a thing.

The Conversion Scientist gets a mention in this nice post.

Great summary of our panel at PubCon Las Vegas

How micro forums and links in White Papers increase conversion.

Quality Backlinks are one of the MOST IMPORTANT factors to be considered to rank any website HIGH in popular search engines like Google, Yahoo and MSN. We all know that Directory Submission, Article Submission, Social bookmaking or Blog posting is one of the most important ways to build incoming links to a website from a related page.

I'm part of the Conversations on Conversion Podcast series. Tune in.

Convert blog posts to podcasts.

Poor post-click marketing experiences can no longer hide behind the click.