2. Search drives more sales, but shoppers are thinking longer before buying.

3. Does Google Analytics overstate the value of search? Econsultancy research shows that it might.  Make sure to at least set your cookies for 30 days.

4. our friend, Linda Bustos from the Get Elastic blog asks “Is Free Shipping More Attractive Than A Dollar Discount?”

5. A great example of why Amazon is one of the smartest online retailers. They get Social Media, Too.

6.Catch my interview with my buddy Tim Ash Interview on his Landing Page Optimization show on WebmasterRadio.fm. We discuss Brain types and personas and how they influence landing pages.

2. Dr. Ralph Wilson interviews my good friend Avinash at the eMetrics summit about Useful Key Performance indicators for small business. Ralph also did a few interviews with me. Here is the first one on “The Winning Edge“:

3. Mars Chocolates is being punished for a bad ‘Fling’ – first when people search for the website they end up sending people to a porn site. If that wasn’t bad enough, Marketing to Women guru Michele Miller explains how they missed the mark entirely on this product launch. Make sure to let Michele know what you think of her recently relaunched website Wonder Branding.

4. I am looking forward to presenting at SES Toronto June 8-10th. I’ll also be meeting several OnTarget clients as well as non-clients. Be sure to come say hello to me if you are a GrokDotCom reader and are attending the conference. Ruud Hein from Search Engine People and Sarah Benmaza of NVI interviewed me prior to attending the conference. One of the sessions I’ll be doing is “Tool Time: The Search Marketer’s Free-to-Cheap Goodie Bag.” I’ll be sharing some of my favorite tools from 33 free tools to improve your website and few others not on that list. Do you have any Free-to-cheap tools you use that I should add?

5. Larry Chase who has been publishing his newsletter, Web Digest for Marketers, just slightly longer than Dr. Ralph Wilson’s, Web Marketing Today (I’ve been a faithful subscriber to both of their newsletters for over a decade) interviewed me about the 3 common mistakes in web analytics.

6. My friend Stéphane Hamel shares some web analytics market research and his take on it from his collaboration with Forrester’s John Lovett.

* Photo: Courtesy of Shutterstock Images LLC. Shutterstock and their PR agency Morton PR are doing a wonderful job at pitching bloggers like me to use their images.

2. Google Analytics also announces the availability of a read-only API to their application. Several customer examples of applications built on this API are announced, including FutureNow’s OnTarget for Google Analytics. We can now leverage customer’s Google Analytics tags and bring in the data into OnTarget where our analysts can provide you your to-do list of conversion improvements.

3. According to the Silicon Alley Insider the U.S. now has almost as many paid bloggers as lawyers. As my friend David Cross asks “what do you call 10 bloggers at the bottom of a lake?”

4. Interesting analysis of why these twelve major brands that will disappear by the end of 2010.

5. In March 2009, Business.com completed an analytics study of more than 27,000 B2B web sites. It’s a great study and well worth downloading.

6. Fivesecondtest is a simple online usability test that helps you identify the most prominent elements of your user interfaces that we stumbled upon last week. It’s enlightening to do a few tests yourself to see how little about a website you can gather in just five seconds. I am not sure it compares favorably to other forms of usability testing.

Roy William’s published the 10 things never to do in your advertising. How many are you doing?

Why Advertising Is Failing On The Internet – I don’t completely agree with the author but Danny Sullivan strongly disagrees.

Which one of the 14 Types of Twitter Personalities are you? I am most like the Link Mogul/Retweeter.

Linda does a great job explaining Personalization: What Sort-By Reveals About a Customer. Don’t forget to subscribe to the blog when you are there.

Will you be at Search Engine Strategies in NY this week? If you will be please be sure to come and say hello.

So start your headline optimization process with a close look at scent.  These links will help drive home the point:

Bryan Eisenberg gets interviewed on Scent and Landing Page Stickiness:

Click here to view the embedded video.

How lack of scent feels like “bait and switch” to website visitors

Broken scent between e-mails and landing pages accounts for 35% of failed campaigns

Step 2. Angle of Approach: After you understand what it will take to provide continuity of scent, you’ll need to do the research and idea generation to come up with that compelling hook, or angle of approach that will compel readers to stop and scan the article.

Think of it this way, if scent is about matching information, keywords, and look and feel, angle of approach is about matching your copy to visitors’ emotional drives, motivations, hopes, dreams, fears, etc.  Of course, it’s also about introducing a compellingly interesting thought into the reader’s mind.  For some incredibly helpful tools and techniques on Angles of Approach,take a look at the following blog posts:

How to connect with your prospect’s dominant emotion

How to polarize an audience to speak to the prospects you most want

Roy Williams on Choosing Whom to Lose

Why writing to a specific person (or persona) Overcomes the 200 Headlines Myth

The power of Magic Words – and how to find them

Sean D’Souza on the Power of New & Knew

Sean on how specifics beat generalities when it comes to Angles of Approach

Roy Williams on Framing First Mental Images

Compelling the visitor to keep reading

Why your headline may want to refer to an unseen action

I’d recommend you come up with at least a couple of different approaches and test them.  This might cause you to rewrite your first paragraph or two of body copy for each test variant, but it’s well worth the effort.

Step 3. Wordsmithing: Once you have the angle of approach and the “Scent” requirements, then it’s time for some of the traditional wordsmithing normally associated with writing headlines.  Can you sharpen the point?  Can you increase the curiosity factor?  Should it be a statement or a question?  Can you swap out words to create different emotional associations or connotations?  Can you test fractions vs. percentages?  What kind of presuppositions can you bury in And so on.

Here’s a monster list of links containing some of the best stuff I’ve seen on Headlines:

First, go sign up for Sean’s newsletter and get his free PDF report on Why do most headlines fail.

Second, read through Jay Abraham’s list of 100 Greatest Headlines Ever written

Third, listen to Gary Bencivenga’s explanation of why you should build credibility into your headlines

Now feast on Brian Clark’s brilliant headline articles:

5 Simple Ways to Open Your Post With a Bang

10 Sure-Fire Headline Formulas That Work

7 More Sure-Fire Headline Formulas That Work

Warning: Use These 5 Sure-Fire Headline Formulas at Your Own Risk

How to Get 53% More Readers for Every Blog Post You Write

And for sheer tonnage of listed techniques, it’s hard to resist Chris Bloczynski’s post:

99 Headline Techniques Revealed

Or SEO Blackhat’s 54 Headline Templates That Sell

Of course, it goes without saying that with all these choices, you’ll want to test and optimize, and the Grok’s own post on Top 10 Ideas for Testing Your Headlines is a great place to start, or you can watch the webinar on testing headlines and calls to action:

The spending level for Valentine’s Day gifts this year will be slightly lower than last year – $140 to be spent by men (versus $166 in 2008), and $75 (versus $90) to be spent by women, according to the BrandKeys Valentine’s Day Index, writes RetailerDaily.

Mature consumers prefer single-image advertisements over ads with multi-image collages by a margin of 66% to 34%, and also gravitate to images that show products and lifestyles,  according to a recent image-preference survey by Creating Results according to their “Photo Finish” study of more than 400 Americans age 40+, reports MarketingCharts. This is something to consider as you work on “hero” shots for your website as well.

Paul from WiseGrass attended our Wizard of Web class a while ago. I just came across this great Google Maps Mashup on his website. He showcases his wonderful lawn care work by letting people know where his showcase lawns are.

There are plent of businesses that could leverage something like this. Could yours?

The Google Website Optimizer team launches an official GWO YouTube channel. You’ll find several videos there including several from our Always Be Testing webinar series.

If you missed last week’s webinar I did for the Web Analytics Association with Akin Arikan and Josh Manion you can see the recorded version now. It’s titled Testing, Testing, Testing. Anybody Can Test. So Why Don’t You? Registration is required.

Thanks for all your support. This is the second year in a row that we have won a SEMMY award. Our article Three Reasons Your Visitors Don’t Convert to Leads took the award in the Design & Usability category. Congratulations to all the other winners and runners-up. There are some great articles there.

Don’t miss my interview with David Szetela on PPC Rockstars today. You’ll hear us discuss the top page and ad elements that every PPC advertiser should test.

What do you think – Is Twitter the Next Second Life? http://tinyurl.com/8nof7j. You may also want to read The State Of The Twittersphere? http://tinyurl.com/6upklq. GigaOm claims Followers Aren’t Really Friends on Twitter. This leads to some of the challenge of measuring influence on Twitter. http://snipurl.com/90lob.

If you are looking for more smart people to follow, here are the Twitter IDs for The Top 100 Most Influential Online Marketers http://tinyurl.com/4owzd4. Thanks for voting me #21.

Sex Sells, but a Commitment Can Help.

Multichannel Analytics: Tracking Online Impact Of Offline Campaigns.

Has anyone played with http://www.wordvision.com/. It uses an algorithm to recommend the hot topics and keywords for SEO writers. Thoughts?

40 Inspirational speeches in 2 minutes:

Click here to view the embedded video.

We have diverse readership, which includes B2B marketers, retailers, publishers, non-profits, Fortune 500 managers, small business owners, lots of consultants and all sorts of surprising people. We love all of your comments, additional advice and dedication you show to the marketing optimization community. We look forward to providing you more great content for the rest of this year and 2009.

January

Marketing Lessons From Apple

Testing Add-to-Cart Buttons: Stuck in the Middle With You

7 Tips for Boosting Web Form Conversions

February

Hidden Secrets of the Amazon Shopping Cart

How to Prioritize Your Optimization

How to Elf Yourself Out of Millions

PayPal Should Go Undercover

March

Top 7 Tips for Optimizing Low-Traffic Websites

Recession-Proof Your Online Marketing

April

3 Reasons Your Visitors Don’t Convert to Leads

How to Increase Shopping Cart Abandonment

10 Questions to Ask Yourself Before Using Flash

May

Tips From a Client Who Doubled His Conversion Rate

How to Get Buy-in for Conversion Rate Optimization

June

Do Women Respond to “Free Shipping” More Than Men?

Firefox 3: How to Convert Seven Million Visitors in a Day

July

What Your Bounce Rate is Trying to Tell You

Tapping the Power of Social Media to Advertise to Women

August

5 Simple Tips for Lead-Generation Sites

Can An Image of a Pretty Woman Boost Conversion?

September

Why Rank #1 in Google

The Difference Between Great and Average Copy

Google Website Optimizer: Free Resources To Jump Start Your Testing

October

14 Tools to Legally Spy On Your Competition

The Ultimate Google Analytics Plugins, Hacks & Tricks Collection

7 Deadly Sins of Web Analytics

November

33 Free Tools to Make Your Website Better

7 Ways to Win Over Reluctant Buyers

Social Media Is NOT Media

Understanding and Aligning the Value of Social Media

Is Free Shipping a Must in this Economy?

December

Increasing “Qualified” Leads From Your Website

No More Consulting Indigestion

Any suggestions on what you would like us to cover in 2009?

This is horrific – Retailers Report a Sales Collapse.

Amazon is launching “Frustration-Free packaging“. – I think this is an interesting way to save thumbs, offer “greener” packaging and differentiate their offering.

8 Tips for Selling Social Marketing to CFOs – my long time buddy, Sam Decker answers the question “with the economic downturn, how will you convince the CFO that “social” marketing is a priority?”

Test Your Awareness? – Are you perceptive? Can you pick up all the changes in the following clip (hint there are more than 20).

Click here to view the embedded video.

What “Average” means – Many of us use the term average when we discuss metrics, this is a great primer to understand the term better. You’ll learn how and when to use Average, Arithmetic Mean, Median, Mode, Geometric Mean, or Harmonic Mean.

Did You Know? is a must see video.

Click here to view the embedded video.

25 Web Form Optimization Tips – Covers most of the basics, a good reminder.

Usability of Toilet Paper – who could resist this analysis, especially as my friend David Dalka reminded me – P&G said at a search conference, no one would ever blog about toilet paper. Should it be bottom up or top down?

If you are so inclined you can read the review on the new book “The Toilet Paper Entrepreneur.”

Does your blogging move people? My buddy Mitch Joel explores the BuzzLogic/JupiterResearch study finds blogs influence purchase behavior. I had the pleasure of meeting Sandra Ponce de León, Senior Director of Marketing of BuzzLogic, right before she presented this at the recent eMetrics Summit.

Google Notes – a new plugin to add business data to Google Analytics data. I did add it to The Ultimate Google Analytics Plugins, Hacks & Tricks Collection.

Happy Halloween! Feel free to share some very interesting posts below in the comments (but please be considerate of our readers).