Want to know the first secret I share from my 21 Secrets to Top Converting Websites presentation? It’s so simple, so obvious, but yet so many people forget to use it. Do you?

Watch the video:

Click here to view the embedded video.

Want to know the rest of the 21 Secrets? You can find them out on August 17th in San Francisco as I present the 21 Secrets at SES (part of Connected Marketing Week). If you show up and mention this post I’ll give you an extra bonus.

I couldn’t be prouder of my MarketMotive conversion certification students. Two semesters ago, one of those volunteer sites, a mobile application provider, increased their conversion rate by over 100% based on the recommendations of one of my students and today I was thrilled to hear about one of our volunteer websites increasing conversion rates by over 50% in just one week.

I need more volunteer websites to work with my students.

In order to achieve their certification, my students must perform a certain number of successful improvements for a website. Some of these students work for very large companies, that don’t make it easy for them to test on, while others their own sites may be too small in traffic and conversions to finish the tests on time. So…

I am looking for a couple of volunteer websites that want to improve their conversion rate that will allow my students under my guidance to analyze their website and set up a few tests. If you have a website, either retail or lead generation, and you have a good amount of traffic and conversions but want more please contact me so we can see if we have a match.

Think of it as money falling from the sky 

When we audit clients’ PPC (define) accounts, we look at their work from two aspects: the technical and the creative. While a 95-character ad shouldn’t be so challenging, common flaws appear in almost every account.

Let’s start out by examining the creative aspect.

Creating the PPC Searcher’s Journey

For visitors to convert, the five steps of the PPC searcher’s journey must be in alignment along the conversion path. I describe that five-part journey below. The model is simple, the execution challenging, and the businesses that effectively align these five parts are rare.

Intent: Behind every search is a person. That person has a want, a need, or an itch to scratch. If only we could tap directly into his mind, then we might be more relevant to his search. Imagine, if you knew the true intent of a search inquiry (query) and you could respond to that intent perfectly, then you’d convert most of the time.

Query: The searcher’s desire isn’t a keyword. The intent gets translated by a searcher into a keyword or key phrase that he hopes best expresses the need he has in their mind. Of course this process is complicated by the level of skills, intelligence, domain knowledge, language skills, and patience of the searcher. We, as marketers, must select those keyword we believe are most relevant to our business and choose the appropriate match types, negatives, and bids to maximize return on investment from these queries. Keywords are the bridge between the prospective buyer’s intent (want, desire, and/or need) and the experience you provide. Divining the searcher’s intent and responding appropriately should be the holy grail of all search marketing.

Google algorithm: Your keywords and key phrases are only the triggers for the actual search queries. Google uses a complex formula based on your campaign settings, budget, Quality Scores (define), Ad Rank (define), etc., to choose which advertisers ads will appear and in what position. It is your job to ensure all the technical settings are done properly and to continue to routinely optimize these settings. Many settings can be regulated by a rules-based system and can likely be automated or semi-automated based on criteria that you set.

Advertisement: The most important fundamental mistake we watch companies make is thinking of their Ad Groups as keyword groups. Bunching seemingly related keywords into one group and assuming that one advertisement can be relevant for the intent behind each of those keywords. Remember they are called “Ad Groups” not “keyword” groups. What does that means for you, as an advertiser? You must create ads that are truly relevant for the queries that your “keywords” will trigger the most relevant ad based on the actual query.

It helps to think of every hyperlink (PPC ads, SERPS (define), your navigation, banners, etc.) as a contract between you and your reader or prospective customer. Every time someone clicks on a hyperlink, he’s asking a question either implicitly or explicitly that he expects you to answer with precisely relevant information. Understanding and planning relevant hyperlinks and the content that corresponds to that hyperlink (UX people call this concept “scent”) is how we teach companies to maintain persuasive momentum. It is rarely good enough to use “dynamic keyword insertion” to ensure pseudo-relevance.

Relevance is always relative to buying mode. Lots of factors affect buying mode (economics, demographics, psychographics, stage of buying process, etc.). You must plan your ads to match buying mode and still optimize those ads for click-through rates and conversion. All too often advertisers limit themselves to only having one advertisement and not testing multiple versions of their ads.

Landing page: We often say, “Keywords don’t fail to convert, we do!” Why? If you believe the keyword query that you selected in your PPC settings is relevant to your business, your ad and landing page must deliver a relevant and persuasive experience that explains to your visitor how you can scratch their itch and offer him greater value than your competitors. Keep in mind: the searcher’s experience doesn’t often end on the landing page on your site, but rather continues several pages deeper toward your conversion goal. All of these pages must be in sync with the searcher’s journey in order for them to convert.

The Three-Step Paid Search Management Process

To successfully align your business goals to the PPC searcher’s journey, you must also have an effective and nimble PPC management process.

Step 1: Targeting. This step involves choosing keywords and organizing campaigns. This is where you deal with understanding the searcher’s intent and query steps in their journey. This is an ongoing process that continuously needs refinement and adjustments.

Step 2: Valuing. In this step, you leverage your understanding of the pay-per-click engine’s algorithm and set match types and bids. Most of this work can be automated or semi-automated. Every keyword has a different value for each match type. Typically an exact match (define) will converts at the highest rate but will have the smallest reach. Phrase match (define) comes next in terms of conversion but will expand the reach of your ads. Broad match (define) will have the greatest reach but lowest conversion rate. Broad match should be used as a way for you to continue to find relevant queries in the search engine and use those to create new Ad Groups, ads, and landing pages that can deliver relevant experiences.

Step 3: Satisfying. Here is where you focus on creating compelling ad copy and landing pages to match the searcher’s actual queries. Most companies spend too few of their resources on this step. When you focus your resources on satisfying a searcher’s query, you will tend to be rewarded with higher click-though rates on your ads, higher Quality Scores on your keywords, and higher conversion rates. All of this will act as multipliers on the rest of your efforts. Many companies overlook this step because they don’t take the time to understand the economics of having poor Quality Scores or haven’t come up with an effective process to scale testing and targeting effectively on their landing pages. Unfortunately, this part of the process can’t be completely done by a machine and needs human intelligence and creativity to get the best results.

Where in the search management process are you devoting most of your resources? How effectively have you aligned your PPC management process to the search visitor’s journey?

Two weeks of West Coast jet lag while keynoting three conferences means a lot of parties. At a reception, a guy named Peter told me that he read my book “Call to Action” a few years ago and that he used it as the basis to redo his company’s shopping cart. Peter more than doubled conversions based on the advice we gave him. However, he said he had an unbelievable battle to explain and use an obvious technique: leveraging his company’s point-of-action assurances into the shopping cart.

Maybe I can spare you that grief.

What Are Point-of-Action Assurances?

At the point when a visitor is ready to take action, to fill out a form, to click on a button or link, they are at a seductive moment. It’s a delicate place. It’s at that point they could lose confidence in their decision and not take the action you want them to take. That’s why you must provide messaging to bolster trust and confidence.

Let’s look at a few examples of how this can be done.

One of the earliest tests we ran over a decade ago was adding the words “we value your privacy” near newsletter subscriptions boxes on several clients’ websites. We placed those four simple words near the e-mail form field and the button used to submit the subscription form. It often doubled the conversion rate from visitors to subscribers.

If you want to take this to another level, check out what my good friends and screenshotaholic enablers at TechSmith do on their forms with a reaffirming message from their president.

Point-of-action assurances allow you to handle the possible objections or concerns your visitors have just as they are ready to complete an action and without them having to go anywhere else on your website to look for the answer.

Take a look at the download button from Firefox as an example of adding point-of-action assurances on a graphic button. Notice how they tell people how large the file is, what version, etc.? You could do the same thing if you are asking people to download white paper docs, PDFs, or any other type of files.

Amazon used this strategy for years on its “add to cart” buttons. Even though they removed it, we have still used it quite successfully for clients recently. Notice how Amazon used the words “you can always remove it later” on the button and the use of the lock graphic and the additional words “shopping with us is safe. Guaranteed.”

You can also use point-of-action assurances to help retail visitors overcome their shopping fears and reduce shopping cart abandonment.

Notice the use of the lock and the “Shop with Confidence” messaging alongside the credit card input fields in CafePress.com’s shopping cart? This point-of-action assurance helps visitors feel more secure about entering in their credit card information.

The folks from 37signals use this well-designed strategy quite effectively in order to get their visitors to provide them with credit card information to set up a free trial account for their Basecamp product.

Visitors to retailers often have other questions that should be answered as point-of-action assurances inside the cart, instead of making visitors search your website for answers to your return, shipping, or guarantee policies.

Notice how Shoeline.com spells out its policies from the shopping cart page all the way through the final checkout page? This is how it lets visitors know that all its products are guaranteed and that visitors can return products within 30 days for a refund or exchange.

So You Want More Leads, Huh?

Well, this strategy of providing point-of-action assurances is a must, then!

Keep in mind that, according to studies, a lead loses six times its effectiveness within the first hour of contacting you. So an effective strategy is to set expectations of how you handle your leads, what will happen after they fill out your form, and when and how you will respond. Take a look at what Rad-Direct.com is doing on its Web forms:

First, it sets expectations about what you can speak to a systems engineer about. Then, above and below the form, it lets you know that it will respond to all inquiries within two business hours (it also has the point-of-action assurance about respecting your privacy):

Use this simple and powerful technique of point-of-action assurances that direct marketers have been using in their work for years and watch how your visitors reward you with more actions taking place.

My last two columns focused on evaluating the five dimensions that make the 10 design elements of the anatomy of a landing page convert better. A prominent feature found on many landing pages is a form to complete, or at the end of a retail landing experience, forms required to complete a check-out. I haven’t written about designing forms on ClickZ since 2004 or on how to reduce shopping cart abandonment since 2003. (Sorry, as you can see by the 300+ columns I’ve written here, there are many topics to cover under optimization.)

Today, let’s cover seven factors to consider when designing your forms for maximum conversionability and persuadability:

• Size
• Fields
• Labels
• Benefits
• Prominence
• Call to action
• Confidence building

Size

Size does matter sometimes, if you want to see customers take action! How many actual pixels (height and width) does the form take? I have seen forms that ask for very few fields, but because they look long, they intimidate users into a misconception about the amount of time it might take to complete a form. This is also one of the reasons you seldom want to place form fields horizontally next to each other – it makes the form look scary. For example, you never want to have a check-out with the billing information in the right-hand column and the shipping information in the left column. This is also related to how many fields you ask people to complete as well; the more fields, the bigger the form will be. Don’t make your form look like tax or department of motor vehicle forms.

Fields

The type of questions you ask in your form can also make or break its conversionability. If you start asking for a Social Security number, mother’s maiden name, blood type, what they had for breakfast, etc., you can stop a visitor in their tracks. This is the constant battle that marketing faces with sales about what data they need for a lead, while marketing struggles on the quantity versus quality issues related to leads and form completions. The fields you require should always be tested.

Labels

Now, it isn’t just what you ask but how you ask it. How you label a form field can have a tremendous impact on its ability to persuade a visitor to fill in the information. In fact, I remember asking my friend Bernardo de Albergaria, VP and GM, global marketing and eCommerce for Citrix, about his most surprising test while I was recording podcasts for the launch of my “Always Be Testing” book. He recalled how the label on one field for a Go ToMeeting account had such a surprising impact on conversion.

Benefits

Too many companies present their visitors a form without reminding them of why they should complete the form, what are the benefits of completing the form, and what will be the next steps after they complete the form. Check-out processes should show people what items they are ordering (both in text and visually), when the order will arrive, and the total costs early on. One such example is when we added the beautiful gift box that one of our jewelry clients sent with their products in the check-out process – it had an immediate and direct impact to conversion. In lead generation, you could do similar things especially when promoting a white paper or Webinar; merchandize your B2B offering effectively.

Prominence

Make the form jump off the page. Do you make it obvious that you want people to complete it? Adding a bit of color behind the form and a bit of design around the edges, or a simple graphic or icon is often enough to make it more visually prominent. If you are offering a white paper, possibly include the cover of it by the form and remind them of the benefits.

Call to Action

What do they click on when they complete the form? There are several factors that matter here: text versus graphics, shape variations, colors, style variations, icon variations, size variations, legibility, location variations, and wording. You can read about the details about each one of these in this column, “Calling You to Action.”

Confidence Building

Establishing trust and credibility on a Web site should be its own column. However, there are several general ways to build confidence for your visitors; you can leverage others credibility (known third-party endorsements and reviews, trust marks, customer logos ,etc.), leverage the voice of the customer with reviews and testimonials, use point-of-action assurances to ease concerns, doubts, and fears, and do everything else to provide a quality experience.

Are you showing good form? Test and leverage these seven form factors and boost your conversion rate today!

If you knew the true intent of a search inquiry (query) and you could respond to that intent perfectly then you’d convert most of the time.

For more than a decade Bryan, John and I have been working with clients to determine all the different buying modalities (read “Waiting For Your Cat To Bark?“) and provide relevant pathways for them. That’s complex. It’s hard work. I won’t deal with all that here.

I will share just one powerful concept that will make you a lot of money if you execute it well.

If you want to convert your prospective customer into an actual one you’ll need to scratch her itch. That’s just common sense. The offer must be relevant to the query.

It helps to think of EVERY hyperlink (PPC ads, SERPS, your navigation, banners etc.) as a contract between you and your reader/ prospective customer. Every time someone clicks on a hyperlink they are asking a question either implicitly or explicitly that they expect you to answer with relevant information. Understanding and planning relevant hyperlinks and the content that corresponds to that hyperlink (UX people call this concept “scent”) is how we teach companies to maintain persuasive momentum.

Relevance is always relative to buying mode. Lots of factors affect buying mode (economics, demographics, psychographics, stage of buying process, etc.) but for the sake of this discussion let’s assume a rather straightforward-mythical-ideal you-have-what-I-need-at-the-price-I-want-and-I’m-ready-to-buy sort of prospective customer.

If this prospective customer finds you through SEO and it takes too many clicks with questions unanswered for them to find the relevant scent, shame on you. You may very well have lost the ability to convert them. It’s a lot of work, even if it’s worthwhile, to make sure that you’re relevant for all your prospective customers. Nevertheless, while SEO isn’t free at least you’re not paying directly for the privilege of disappointing your prospective customers like you are in SEM.

It’s so sad! Sad is the amount of smart companies we see paying for keywords that are not helping them convert well. The real money cost is often so large that it approaches tragic.

It’s not that these smartest companies haven’t thought through the you-have-what-I-need-at-the-price-I-want-and-I’m-ready-to-buy questions and provided mostly relevant responses. They have, and not only that but many have done extensive keyword research to find all the terms associated with their product or service. Additionally they’ve tested the SEM ad for click-throughs. Plus the very best of them have probably even done some landing page optimization. This is all good and necessary because there’s a deep connection between the landing page and the search query.

Keywords are the bridge between the prospective buyer’s intent (want, desire and/or need) and the experience you provide. Divining the searcher’s intent and responding appropriately should be the holy grail of all search marketing.

Bryan often says:” Keywords don’t fail to convert…it’s the fault of the marketer to not offer the right landing page experience.”

I agree.

If you get the landing page right you’re well on your way.

But wait, there’s more!

Have you ever considered that a landing page can become irrelevant simply because of the way you’ve set up an SEM campaign? Your keywords/ key phrases are only the triggers for the actual search queries. Both the ad and landing page need to be in sync with the intent of each query;  so it seems obvious that you need to focus on the keyword and the landing page.

But it’s not obvious that you need to pay really careful attention to campaign structure, match types & negatives when you test your ad copy and landing pages for maximum results.

My colleague and friend Craig Danuloff, President & Founder of ClickEquations, offers a wonderful explanation of how to to do this in his free ebook “21 Secret Truths of High Resolution PPC“.  May I recommend that you download it, read it and put it into action immediately?

*** P.S. Full disclosure Bryan and I are advisors to ClickEquations

I couldn’t be prouder of my MarketMotive conversion certification students. For example, I had one of my students do a fabulous job critiquing websites at SES New York during a conversion clinic session and many of my students have been doing amazing work increasing conversion rates on their own sites and on several of the sites that volunteered to have our students work with them. In fact, one of those volunteer sites, a mobile application provider, increased their conversion rate by over 100% based on the recommendations of one of my students.

Listen to What They Learned: Live!

After 12 weeks learning “at the knee” of some of the industry’s best and brightest, these Internet marketing students are set to graduate… if they can just earn their faculty’s endorsement.

Four times a year, Market Motive offers intimate, faculty-led web-based courses in Internet marketing from All-star faculty members teach the certification courses: Dave Szetela, Matt Bailey (Fundamentals), Jennifer Laycock (Social Media), John Marshall (Web Analytics), Avinash Kaushik (Web Analytics), Greg Jarboe/Jamie O’Donnell (Online PR and Video marketing), Bryan Eisenberg (Conversion Optimization), Michael Stebbins (Email Marketing) and nailing down PPC Advertising. This time around, final project defenses are open to the public.

Since January, the all-star faculty has been shepherding this semester’s class through the latest in cutting edge trends and tools for SEO, Web Analytics, Social Media and Conversion Optimization.

But receiving a Master Certification from Market Motive requires more from students than just watching streaming videos and passing online quizzes. It also requires hands-on projects that reflect the kind of work they’ll do in the real world.

Those final projects are presented to the faculty in live screen-sharing webinars by students studying SEO, Conversion Optimization, and Social Media. This semester the public is invited to listen in by webinar.

Landing pages have become an important part of the marketer’s toolbox. To create effective landing pages, you should understand the anatomy of a landing page and it should be part of your landing page and optimization framework. After optimizing thousands of landing pages over the years, I want to offer this framework for understanding the 10 key elements of a landing page.

Not all of the following elements always need to be on a page to create an effective landing page. However, there are several elements that are essential to your success.

1. Logo: The visitor needs some way to identify who they are potentially doing business with. A logo won’t make your sale, but a poor one can lose your sale. A professionally designed logo always helps establish some bit of credibility. Most sites have this in the upper left hand part of the page; some have it on the upper right.
2. UVP or UCP: Once the visitor knows who you are, they need to figure out why they should do business with you. You should communicate this in a simple statement that explains your value proposition (UVP) or your campaign proposition (UCP).
3. Headline: The landing page headline should reinforce the scent from the ad that delivered your visitor to the page; that’s persuasive momentum. Your headline can either be designed in a text format or graphical format; it doesn’t really matter. Many marketers use a dynamic system to personalize their landing pages for the ad or keyphrase that attracted the visitor in the first place, to have better continuity (scent) from ad to landing page. Dynamic tools work, but beware.
4. Offer: Direct marketers know that the offer is one of the most critical elements of a well-designed campaign. That is why they spend a lot of time testing their offers. Offers must be clear and concise. A maxim of direct mail is that a confused mind always says “no.” The offer is the deal you’re presenting to your visitor. Don’t get this confused with a “call to action,” which is the action you want the person to take. Sometimes the offer is actually delivered successfully as the headline.
5. Descriptive copy: What supporting copy do you need to explain what you do, what you offer, and how it will benefit your visitor? This is often a list of key features and/or benefits. Don’t overlook formatting. Will the copy be delivered in block text, bullet point, or some combination of the two?
6. Product/service presentation: This is the imagery you use to support your copy and style for your page. This often takes the form of a product image, a product or service tour (photos or video), screen shots, or lifestyle images. A good picture can be worth a thousand words if you can use it to engage your visitor and give them a sense of what owning your product or service will be like. Likewise, poor quality graphics or presentations can confuse or turn visitors away. A great image won’t make your sale, but a poor one can help lose your sale.
7. Calls to action: I break out calls to action into three types: hyperlinks, buttons, or forms. The objective of many landing pages is to get visitors to complete a form. If that is the case, make the form easy to complete on the landing page, and avoid requiring the visitor to take an extra step – and going to a form page – if possible. Other than your offer, this is an important piece to keep testing. Calls to action should stand out (think contrast) and be obvious from the moment a visitor lands on your page. The visitor should always know what is the next step they should take.
8. Confidence building: A visitor will not convert if he doesn’t have confidence or trust in you. There are dozens of factors that affect trust or confidence in your visitors on your pages, and dozens of things you can do to negatively impact trust and credibility. I’ll cover only a few types of things you can add to boost confidence. Basic confidence boosting elements can be the effective use of testimonials or customer reviews, leveraging examples of previous customers, using third-party validators (such as media mentions or reviews, as seen in references, or trust marks), and using point-of-action assurances near your call to action.
9. Link to more information: Many experts believe your landing pages shouldn’t have any additional links other than your main call to action. I believe it depends on several factors, including the complexity of what you sell and the buying stage of your prospect (early stage buyers tend to be in information gathering mode not action taking mode – so let them gather information). Don’t blindly follow “best practices;” use your judgment and test alternatives.
10. Template elements: These elements are usually found in the header or footer of a template. They may be your copyright notice, phone number, live chat, address, privacy or other policies, etc. These are usually not elements of the persuasion process, but many can be supportive. All pages should have easy contact information and privacy policies.

Look at your landing pages and your competitors’ to see if you can identify these essential elements.

In my next column, I’ll explain the five dimensions of landing page element design that impact its effectiveness.

If you would like to see some of these elements in action, you can sign up for an upcoming Webinar I am doing on April 1, 2010 – “Don’t Be April’s Fool: Proven Techniques To Maximize Your Advertising ROI.”

If 2010 is the year of conversion rate optimization, then people are going to have to move beyond today’s simplistic tactical application (pushed mainly by tool vendors anxious to sell technology fixes) of basic landing page optimization and testing, to the strategic worldview that conversion optimization should play in an organization.

Good conversion optimization should focus on uncovering and understanding your target market’s needs, your content strategy, and on delivering your brand promise and a remarkable customer experience. Great conversions come from developing persuasive systems that allow your audience to flow naturally from awareness to evangelism.

Last week, I was with a client who asked me several months ago if he should hire a conversion rate consultant before or after doing his redesign. I explained to him that especially in cases where the sale is a bit more complex than present product, he should bring a conversion consultant in at the beginning of the process. Within an hour of an analysis it was obvious what bright spots existed in his current marketing efforts, why they occurred, and why he had such a terrific opportunity to increase market share.

As I explained, he was really good at marketing to one or two of his target market personas, but he suffered from a “curse of knowledge” and was missing the mark with most of his current marketing efforts and Web site (when in actuality his target market consisted of six personas). The rest of the day we planned out his content strategy, looked at his wireframes, which we had to redo based on the personas, and looked at his PR and marketing strategy for the next 12 months to evaluate how each persona would respond. Is that what you’re doing to improve conversions?

This is why I told my MarketMotive students that while the coursework consisted of us learning from my book, they needed to get a solid foundation in “The Sciences and Disciplines of Web Site Optimization.” Someone suggested I create a reading list of the best books and resources that a conversion optimization consultant can’t do without.

The resulting list, below, is in no particular order and is far from comprehensive. It includes books and a few other resources that I know to be unavoidable if you want to talk shop and keep up with a real conversion consultant. Most people believe a conversion consultant should start off grounded in usability, analytics, and testing, but that is the difference from the tactical tool based application of conversion optimization and a strategic one.

A good conversion consultant should know all the tactical issues but also be well grounded in buyer psychology, persuasion, social psychology and dynamics, sales (online and offline) strategy, and the nature of advertising and media.

Psychology, Human Behavior, and Persuasion

I chose to start the list with Chip and Dan Heath’s “Made to Stick,” because I referenced their concept of the “curse of knowledge” and they have a fabulous new book, “Switch” (you can see an early video review by my friend Chris Brogan).

• “Made to Stick” also by Chip and Dan Heath (if you keep running into brick walls with your messages or you feel that you just don’t have a strong message, start with this book)
• “Waiting For Your Cat To Bark?” by yours truly and Jeffrey Eisenberg
• “Persuasive Technology” by B.J. Fogg
• “Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion” by Robert Cialdini
• “Your Key to Sports Success: How Understanding Your Brain Type Will Enhance Your Athletic Ability” by Jonathan Niednagel
• “Please Understand Me: Character and Temperament Types” by David Keirsey
• “The Art of SpeedReading People” by Paul D. Tieger and Barbara Barron-Tieger
• “Why We Buy” by Paco Underhill

Marketing, Branding, and Selling

No doubt this is the most difficult category because there are plenty of fine marketing, traditional advertising, and branding gurus. I wanted to identify some books that will influence a lot of the great books still to come. Every one of these books is still relevant to marketers and the challenges we face online. You simply can’t go wrong reading anything on this list:

• “Ogilvy on Advertising” by David Ogilvy (this is a true classic that can’t be ignored)
• “Secret Formulas of the Wizard of Ads” by Roy H. Williams (this book will ground you in the principles of advertising and marketing success)
• “Call to Action” by Jeffrey Eisenberg and me
• “The Psychology of Selling” by Brian Tracy
• “How to Master the Art of Selling” by Tom Hopkins
• “The Sales Bible: The Ultimate Sales Resource” by Jeffrey Gitomer
• “Selling the Invisible: A Field Guide to Modern Marketing” by Harry Beckwith
• “5 Steps to Successful Selling” by Zig Ziglar
• “Focus: The Future of Your Company Depends on It” by Al Ries
• “Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces That Shape Our Decisions” by Dan Ariely
• A few tomes by my pal Seth Godin; my favorites are “Purple Cow,” “Permission Marketing,” and “Meatball Sundae.”
• “How to Win Friends and Influence People” by Dale Carnegie

Once you have these core human psychology fundamentals you can focus on the specifics of the medium we want to improve.

Usability and Information Architecture

• “Designing Web Usability” by Jakob Nielsen
• “Web Usability: A Designer’s Guide” by Jared M. Spool (don’t miss his research at UIE.com, either)
• “Information Architecture for the World Wide Web” by Louis Rosenfeld and Peter Morville (a.k.a., The Polar Bear Book)
• “Web Form Design” by Luke Wroblewski
• “The Persona Lifecycle” by John Pruitt and Tamara Adlin
• “The Elements of User Experience” by Jesse James Garrett
• “Don’t Make Me Think” by Steve Krug

Web Analytics

• “Web Analytics: An Hour a Day” by Avinash Kaushik (of Occam’s Razor fame)
• “Web Analytics 2.0: The Art of Online Accountability and Science of Customer Centricity” also by Avinash Kaushik
• “Advanced Web Metrics with Google Analytics” by Brian Clifton
• “Web Analytics Demystified” by Eric Peterson
• “Information Anxiety 2” by Richard S. Wurman
• “Envisioning Information” by Edward R. Tufte

To learn what kind of things you should be testing and how to test you should start with the direct marketing masters who have been doing testing for longer than the Web has been around.

Direct Marketing Techniques

• “Scientific Advertising” by Claude C. Hopkins
• “Tested Advertising Methods” by John Caples
• “Drilling Down: Turning Customer Data into Profits with a Spreadsheet” by Jim Novo
• “The Copywriter’s Handbook” by Robert W. Bly

Copywriting

• “Persuasive Online Copywriting” by Jeffrey Eisenberg and me
• “Breakthrough Advertising” by Eugene M. Schwartz
• “Advertising Secrets of the Written Word” by Joseph Sugarman
• “The Associated Press Guide to Good Writing” by Rene J. Cappon
• “Writing Tools: 50 Essential Strategies for Every Writer” by Roy Peter Clark
• “Copyblogger Blog” by Brian Clark (while I’ve tried to keep this list to books, if you want to learn more about writing copy online, you must become a Brian Clark reader, possibly even a disciple)

Testing

There is a lot of science and rigor in the area of testing and statistics. And while marketing is becoming more accountable, we aren’t quite ready for the amount of rigor possible in this critical area. But we will be, and when we are there will be a few more books that make this subject palatable for the average marketer and conversion analyst. Until then, these are two solid choices to devour and have more than enough information to get you started testing, and testing well:

• “Landing Page Optimization” by Tim Ash
• “Always Be Testing: The Complete Guide to Google Website Optimizer” by John Quarto-vonTivadar and me

You want to be sure your conversion consultant is constantly improving his skills in this ever-evolving medium.

SEO, SEM, E-mail Marketing, & Social Media

When it comes to search marketing and other dynamic markets, most of the treasured resources are blogs or sites like ClickZ. Here are a couple recent books worth mentioning:

• “The Art of SEO: Mastering Search Engine Optimization” by Eric Enge, Stephan Spencer, Rand Fishkin, and Jessie Stricchiola
• “Winning Results with Google AdWords” by fellow ClickZ columnist Andrew Goodman, while we anxiously await “Pay-Per-Click Search Engine Marketing: An Hour a Day” by David Szetela
• “Social Media Marketing: An Hour a Day” by fellow ClickZ columnist Dave Evans
• “Email Marketing: An Hour a Day” by fellow ClickZ columnist Jeanniey Mullen
• “YouTube and Video Marketing: An Hour a Day” by Greg Jarboe
• “Six Pixels of Separation: Everyone Is Connected. Connect Your Business to Everyone.” by Mitch Joel
• “Trust Agents: Using the Web to Build Influence, Improve Reputation, and Earn Trust” by Chris Brogan and Julien Smith
• “Twitter Marketing: An Hour a Day” by ClickZ’s own Hollis Thomases
• “Inbound Marketing: Get Found Using Google, Social Media, and Blogs” by Brian Halligan, Dharmesh Shah, and David Meerman Scott

Get Reading

As you can see, I definitely left a few out. But every resource listed will help you on your way to understanding the ins and outs of how to be a great conversion consultant.

Did I leave out one of your must-reads? If so, please list it in the comments section below.

P.S. Don’t forget to sign up for my two free webinars hosted by my good friends at Widerfunnel.

Yes, you read it right. I have the opportunity to offer 2 or 3 websites the opportunity to increase your conversion rate. A couple of weeks ago, I started teaching a Certification course in Conversion Rate and Landing Page Optimization course. It has been going great as one of my students just sent me this note:

Thanks for teaching the course. It is simply fantastic. I have to admit that I was very skeptical when I first signed up but I couldn’t resist learning directly from you and Avinash so I signed up. I have already taken away so much from this course – The lack of optimized pages (with persuasive architecture) brings a huge opportunity. There was a time when small to medium players could do really well on the web and then it seemed to have shifted with a huge amount of resources that the larger companies could ‘throw’ in the game. This again redistributes the power and I simply love that! What am I going to walk away with? I still don’t know – I do know I’ve hit a gold mine – it remains to be seen what I can do with it

In order to achieve their certification, my students must perform a certain number of successful improvements for a website. Some of these students work for very large companies, that don’t make it easy for them to test on, while others their own sites may be too small in traffic and conversions to finish the tests on time. So…

I am looking for a couple of volunteer websites that want to improve their conversion rate that will allow my students under my guidance to analyze their website and set up a few tests. If you have a website, either retail or lead generation, and you have a good amount of traffic and conversions but want more please contact me so we can see if we have a match.

Think of it as money falling from the sky

* image courtesy of Shutterstock