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A few days ago, I wrote about the power of the word "New" to get our attention - if there's a more potent attractor out there, it's almost certainly "FREE!" For years, advertising gurus have listed "free" on every compilation of powerful headline words. Now, research conducted by Dan Ariely (a Duke behavioral economist, previously at MIT) shows us that "free" is far more effective than "almost free." Indeed, a preference for "free" seems to be another feature hardwired into our brains.

Plenty of studies suggest customers want demand free shipping: * 61% online shoppers prefer to shop with a retailer that offers free shipping than one that doesn't. - Forrester Research (2007) * 43% of shoppers abandon their shopping carts because of unexpectedly high shipping charges. - PayPal, comScore (2008) * 60% claim free shipping is a reason they are more likely to shop online. - Harris Interactive (2008) * 90% believe free shipping offers would entice them to spend more online. - The Conference Board (2008)

"The problem with free is that every time you double the size of your database the cost of maintaining the site grows 6 fold," says Markus Frind, the founder and CEO of Plentyoffish.com, a wildly successful dating site that makes a lot money by giving away for free what other sites charge for. But even for users who ultimately charge for their product there can be a downside to giving something away for free.

With 60% of online shoppers cite free shipping as a reason they are more likely to shop on the web (Harris Interactive, July 2008), if you use free shipping as a marketing vehicle, you want to make sure you communicate your offer at every touch point. In the current issue of eM+C magazine, you'll find my article Get Your Site Into Shipping Shape This Season with ideas on how "get the most mileage" out of your free shipping offer from search engine to shopping cart (this version includes screen shots):

his post is a follow up to my creating and managing your link campaign article. These are not techniques for gaining natural links rather they are methods of contacting other sites about your business and getting them to link to you - without initially coming right out and asking for a link. It occurred to me to add a few links to actual places where you can get free .edu links, however I did that before over at seomoz and the free sources are now useless due to being spammed.

We have worked with many demand or lead generation companies over the past 10 years. Most of the time when they come to us, they ask us to help them increase the number of people they convert into a free trial, a free download, or to create an account. Conversion Isn't an Event, it's a Process We always like to focus first on increasing the number of leads towards the top of the sales funnel. However, without the next step, consumption, the companies don't necessarily achieve their better but usually unstated goal of increased revenue. This is the same fuzzy focus that has companies intent on getting more clicks to their PPC ads just so they can show the increased traffic numbers without focusing on converting that visitor into a lead or sale. To tell you the truth it is not as hard to get visitors to take the uncommitted step, as it is getting them to actually use and consume the product. When you optimize for customer experience you really need to take the whole scenario from awareness (clicking your ad) through conversion and ultimately to consumption (and ideally to evangelism) into account.

good comparisson between the free website analytics services.

What are FUDDs? We're not talking about wabbit-hunters or the beer of choice in Shelbyville. FUDDs are fears, uncertainties, doubts and deal breakers that influence consumers' purchase decisions. How you address them can have a huge impact on your conversion rates. PayPal and ComScore recently conducted a study on shopping cart abandonment and discovered customers' top reasons were

BTBuckets is a free web-segmentation tool that allows sites to create user clusters based on their behavior. These clusters can then be integrated with your adserver, CMS, web analytics or any other site tool to create a richer user experience

According to a new report by Forrester Research, corporate blogs are the least trusted information source of all. Only 16% of online consumers who read corporate blogs say that they trust them. You can grab a copy of this report for free by filling in a form at Forrester. The full trust scale is below, with 'Email from people you know' the most trusted at 77%.

The Internet Marketer's Handbook was compiled by Danny Dover and is the result of literally hundreds of hours of study and practice in internet marketing and search engine optimization techniques. The information below represents the web's best resources and tools. All of the items listed below are available to the general public and most are free of charge. Enjoy!

So, it wasn't exactly Daniel Day-Lewis in There Will Be Blood ("I've abandoned my CAAARRRRRRT!!!"), but when Jeffrey told me today that he still hadn't bought his nephew the Fisher Price Grow to Pro Basketball hoop after two weeks of putting it off, I assumed he was being dramatic. Jeffrey claimed to be sticker shocked from shipping cost inflation, a common reaction while shopping online. One minute, you think you know the whole price. Then - bam - you proceed to checkout, only to find that the price has shot up as much as 25%. Was Jeff being cheap? Probably. But it's understandable. The truth is that online shopping has spoiled us. When Amazon ships for free - at least it feels that way if you buy into Amazon Prime - and when Zappos wants you to return those shoes (yes, really), anything less feels like a cheap plastic substitute for the real thing. ToysRUs.com does so many things right. The product image views are clear and show multiple angles. The customer reviews are helpful and thoroughly integrated. I could go on, but the important thing - the reason they still haven't sold Jeffrey a Fisher Price Grow to Pro Basketball hoop - is that they set a poor expectation of total cost before checkout.

Last April, I posted a script that allowed paid search advertisers to view the exact search queries of their visitors. This was essentially a free tool that gave website owners the ability to weed out ineffective keywords and put more money toward the precise phrases that were really driving their business. Google Analytics doesn't do this out of the box. It will tell you exact search queries for visits from organic listings, but for paid search, you're stuck with the keywords that you're bidding on. With broad and phrase matching, these could vary pretty drastically from what the visitors typed into the search engine.

The perception that search engine optimization is a limitless source of free traffic and sales is one reason that SEO campaigns sometimes fail to live up to expectations. Yes, SEO efforts can deliver excellent returns on investment. But how much expected return is realistic? This article will help you estimate the potential growth in traffic and sales that SEO efforts can drive to your site.

Get Demographic and Keyword Profiles Lookery's free reports provide a complete demographic and keyword profile of your site's users. Lookery's reports show the range of age, gender, location, and keywords for your users by month. Reports are updated daily so publishers can track how their audience profiles change over time and make month-to-month comparisons.

Are you selling your white papers short with poor merchandising? Many sites offering "free" white papers, case studies, or resources in exchange for some visitor information utterly fail to merchandise their downloads. Yet if your website doesn't treat your white paper as containing valuable information, your visitors won't either.

Google Analytics is undoubtedly the most widely used web analytics application. Emerged from and based upon the analytics-package developed by Urchin Software Corporation (which was bought by Google in April 2005), the tool has become publicly available for free under the new flagship of Google Analytics. In May 2007 the application was heavily edited, developed and released; the design was simplified and more advanced featured were added. Over years Google Analytics managed to gain on popularity because of its simplicity and many advanced features for curious site owners and professional marketers.

We are proud to launch the new ClickTale Real-Time Monitor, which enables you to see where visitors are coming from, and watch exactly what they are doing in Real-Time! See precisely which pages they are browsing, as well as all their mouse moves, clicks, scrolling and keystrokes. This is an industry first in web analytics, and we are proud to be able to offer it to you today, for FREE!

The video explains how to setup a brand monitoing dashboard using free available tools such as google alerts, social mention, techonarti search, twitter search, wordpress search and off course netvibes