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Your brain works on two systems, one of which is the "adult" -- critical, discerning, investigative -- and the other which is "intuitive." While the intuitive just wants to have fun, the Adult shows up when there is a problem. If you are appealing to the intuitive with your website, don't do things that cause problems, otherwise, mommy will show up and ruin the fun.

If none of this makes sense, please just read this interesting article based on Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman.

 @KISSMetricsYou want to have a high-converting website. You really do. I'm not kidding.

It makes all of your marketing much cheaper by turning more of your paid and organic traffic into sales. It grows your business more efficiently because your visitors are finding what they want. It gets you off of the "more traffic" treadmill so you can focus on providing great products or great services.

Here is another awesome summary of the things you could be doing to make your site convert better.

 @PeepLaja Pricing is hard for online services. Part of the reason is that the kind of thinking that makes for great online services don't work well when applied to the psychology of buying. However, there are some things that are true for both apps and pricing schemes: keeping it simple, helping people choose the next step, limiting choices, and adding playfulness. Peep covers these and more with some great examples. These principles apply to other kinds of businesses as well, especially online publications and ecommerce sites. 

Where are we in the mobile revolution? This slide deck does a great job of telling us that we are early, but things have progressed beyond sitting and waiting.

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.

 @KISSMetrics - You don't have to be a psychologist to create good messages and strategies for your business, but it really helps to know the subtle things that make people more comfortable taking action. This article summarizes some of my favorite research on buyer psychology.

If you offer a trial of your product, use email to deliver "mints" of helpful information. This will increase the likelihood that they will buy. See #4.

Design your pricing in clusters around your most profitable offering. See #5.

Be specific in your calls to action. See #3.

Community involvement and social proof are also covered. See #1 and #2.

I hope you enjoy this as much as I do.

Taking a conversion approach to your website comes with some new thinking. There are challenges, unknowns, things that can't be predicted. There are plenty of disappointments among the wins. I wish I could tell you differently.

This little video makes you ask the question, "Am I open to possibilities or am I one of the roadblocks that will kill a performance-oriented marketing effort before its grown wings?

I find myself falling into some of these traps myself. Thanks to Roy H. Williams and the Monday Morning Memo for this.

It's great to optimize  high-traffic websites, but the traffic brings it own set of analysis problems. In particular, the number of things you can test goes up, the amount of data goes up and finding insights becomes more and more difficult. Excel is a great tool, but I'm looking for some tools to help cut the analysis time. Here is a nice list of free tools that I will be exploring over the coming weeks.

Peep Laja @peeplaja has put together a great list of ways to increase conversion rate. The remarkable thing about this list is that he provides a case study for each of his recommendations, proof that these ideas have works somewhere. This lets you understand the circumstances that drove the improvements in conversion and help you choose the tactics you will use on your site. Thanks, Peep.

Site as a Service Home pages have one purpose: To get visitors to become "tryers" of your application. In general, we want to be as efficient as possible, asking for only the required information to join a trial. Then we let email carry the mail. Lander offers an interesting experience on their home page. This treatment requires several clicks when one would suffice. This does two very important things: It conveys a sense of the company's personality and brandIt discourages poorly qualified visitors making their list convert to buyers betterThis is a good trade-off a lower conversion rate (to tryer) and improving the quality of a list.

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.

I hope you know your abandonment rate. Take the number of purchases you get on your site divided by the number of people who put a product in your cart. This is your cart conversion rate. Subtract this number from 1 and you get your abandonment rate, or the percentage of people who abandon their shopping cart.

If your abandonment rate is high (expect it to be over 70%) there are some things you can do about it. Here is a great infographic from Monetate that will show you some reasons people leave full carts.

@thisissethsblog I shared this for just one line:

"But where's the person in charge of Magic?" Even though we use science to get more revenue from a website, there is always a sense of magic. Things never work out the way we think. Surprises are the rule, not the exception.

Ultimately, we are using science to find the delightful, the remarkable and the relevant in your website.

That's what your visitors are looking for, too.

"Enclose" the checkout process.

This means to create a distraction-free bubble when your visitor has decided to take that bold step and buy your product.

The psychological thing you're working against here is that, when asked to let go of something of value -- like our money -- we are more than happy to delay that decision.

Maybe we'll just shop a bit more. Maybe we'll check one other place for the right price.

That is why any distraction in your checkout process can be an out for a buyer, an out that they may never return from. I've seen checkout processes that have social media icons in them.

Really? Is this the right time to remind someone that they need to check Facebook?

Go buy something on your site and just look for all of the distractions you find. You might feel a bit embarrassed.

 @richpage #CRO Checklists are very helpful when making decisions about your website. They take the immediacy and emotion out of your decisions.

I love checklists and this is a good one. It's ten things to consider when designing your checkout process.

My favorites are:10. Consistently Expose Your Value Propositions7. Offer help throughout the process5. Remove header navigation during checkout (so easy!)4. Reassure the Prospect that the Price is RightI'll let you explore the rest of the ten checklist items.

 @sitetuners offers a great way to look at conversions and landing pages through the eyes of cating. Don't propose on the first date. Suit Up! Show that you're the perfect match. Go for the second date. Read on to find out what this all means to your website.

 @conversionIQ has a list of ecommerce sites that seem to be doing things right. These are sites that follow best practices, and thus we would assume they are enjoying high conversion rates and strong revenue per visit.

Of course, if we were to make a list of 50 ways your site could improve its conversion rate and RPV, we'd be right on about 25 of them. That's why we always back our recommendations up with a series of A/B or split tests.

Nonetheless, it's always good to look at those online athletes that are at the top of their game.

Would you like a free strategy session with a Conversion Scientist?

@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.

 @richpage offers up 25 things you can do to impact your conversion rate. Not all of these are really "free" when you consider the cost of time and effort. None of them require sending money to an ad network or Google or an agency.

My favorites are: #7 State your value proposition clearly #8 Create landing pages for your PPC ads #13 Run an A/B test for the subjet line of your next email #18 Improve your webpage load time #22 Discover what your visitors are really doing using CrazyEgg

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.