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Yesterday, I posted the Missing Google Analytics Manual. That was relatively easy to put together since there are so many wonderful resources already written about it. However, as I tried to put together this post, I realized a real gap in the knowledge base available. I'll be posting this as an ongoing series, that I might turn into a best practices whitepaper. The "Voice of the Customer" (VOC), can be obtained in many ways: surveys, reviews, customer requests, interviews, focus groups, field reports, etc. In order to find those golden nuggets that can lead to improvement you need to start with the segment of customers that like you the least.

Remember how, a while back, we talked about the benefits of using active verbs in your copy (Think Active!)? You must have got some benefit from that discussion - it's one of my most popular articles ever. So I think it's time we played Fun With Grammar again (if only your 9th grade English class had been so application-oriented).

Feelings and finances are as inextricable as the smell of popcorn and the craving for a salty snack. Over the years, we've interviewed psychologists, economists, CEOs, and investment analysts about the mood-money connection. Here are a few tricks the brain plays on our basic math skills, and a few examples of how marketers pull our heartstrings to loosen our purse strings. As the old saying goes, buyer beware.

The Web helps us make better decisions based on us doing often very detailed research. But certain decisions don't require any research at all.

Organizations take time to change and adapt. That's the one big lesson I've learned since I started in the web business back in 1994. It's easy to stand on the outside and pontificate about what needs to be done. It's much harder to drive the necessary change within an organization, no matter how well managed that organization is. And the larger the organization is the harder that change becomes.

Yesterday, Jeff Sexton blogged about the importance of watching your cost per visitor (CPV) and revenue per visitor (RPV) trends. One of the best ways to get a handle on optimizing these key performance indicators is to get a better sense of your traffic mix. Instead of looking at your traffic by what marketing efforts are bring the most amount of visitors and converting best, look at your visitor mix as a starting point.

I've written about this before, but new reports keep reinforcing the point that most organizations don't know what to make of their Web Analytics, meaning they can't take action to improve their site based on the information they have. And while the best bet in these situations is simply to hire an expert guide, that may not be an option for you (or maybe you're just a hard-core DIY-er when it comes to website improvement). If that's the case, here is a quick and dirty 5 step process to get you started:

I have reached the conclusion that most organizations have a blog simply because they feel they should. Many marketing departments fail to "get" blogging and have poorly visited blogs with few comments. Because their blog fails to perform, they conclude that blogging is an ineffective marketing tool and either remove it entirely or leave it to languish.

Here's the first thing to remember about frame switching as it applies to copywriting: All copywriting stories are "nested." Matryoshka+doll-1In writing copy you inevitably create - at a minimum - one frame of reference: the one between your authorial voice and the reader. In fact, copywriting teachers often advise aspiring writers to "talk" onto the page as if they're talking to a best friend, simply because that mental exercise animates that almost invisible frame of reference in the mind of the writer.* Writers who forget that frame of reference tend to produce artificial, corporate-speak copy.

Understanding what your visitors actually do on your website is an essential part of usability. Find out how to go about doing this!

Jaan Janes - SVP, Business Development, Pulse 360 Talks about Pulse 360 and what they do. Relvancy - Shows some good examples that his company does and some bad ones by Google. Relevancy: Do your ads even matter? Alot of......

A great post from Matt over at 37signals about how to get publicity. I've had a few people write me asking how they can get their blog "out there" -- I'd think all of these tips apply equally well to individual bloggers as they do to companies like 37.

I've been asked several times to give presentations on the basics of social media marketing, and have now refined my 15 minute introductory tour to the point where I think it's fairly good (and I'm really damn picky about my presentations). The following presentation (in visual and text form) should be helpful for anyone trying to convince their bosses, team or cohorts that investing in SMM is ...

A fundamental guide for businesses about the importance of customer retention and the four key elements to achive this. Why is customer retention at least equally important as customer acquisition?

If you're having heart surgery, experience matters. In that type of situation, visions of potential mishaps spring forth and we naturally look to experience as the surest path to loss prevention. But what about more run-of-the-mill situations or markets? Is experience still our top criteria when selecting a carpet cleaner? A baby-faced pilot might worry passengers, but would a baby-faced piano tuner inspire the same concerns?

In ecommerce, one of the most important things is search. And right now, search has been moved to a whole new level with what is called blended search. Blended search is when the search engine takes it beyond text links to include pictures, video, blogs, news and just about anything else. This is changing ecommerce search especially, because now product search is part of this.

Over at The Email Wars, there is an interesting post about personalized links in ecommerce emails. Instead of linking to the relevant email topic, many times an ecommerce marketing email will simply send me to a homepage, or a broad category page.

Many good ecommerce Web sites know that the product details page can have a material say in whether customers stick around - and even whether they come back. Customers like to learn as much as possible about a product before buying, and product details pages can allow customer to explore a product.