From the Editor:

Is it November already? Black Friday is just around the corner and Christmas not far after that. There is little time left to polish your advertising and your sales pages, and make sure your marketing is persuasive. With this in mind, this month we've got a selection of persuasion techniques just itching to be put to use. From copywriting tips to the effects of fleeting attraction, we've got six tips to make your marketing seem meaningful.

And of course, all this advice is only so good if you're not testing it along the way. Even the best advice is still only an educated guess until you've tried it with your users. Contact us for more information about getting started with conversion testing.

Are Traditional Persuasion Techniques Valid Online?

In an age of virtually limitless content and mind boggling levels of information adaptive shortcuts are even more important to us than they were before, and it's these adaptive shortcuts that these persuasion techniques are relying on.

Maybe Michael and I disagree on the effects of grammar, but I can't disagree that using words and turns of phrase wrong is, well, just confusing. In this post, Michael lists 16 words and phrases that people either misuse or plain shouldn't use.

Persuade Your Customers By Challenging Them

Challenging your customers can have great effects on your abillity persuade them... sometimes. However, when those who have been introduced to the faults with a product realize they can't actually find any, their opinions skyrocket.

The Importance of Honoring Promises (Even Implied Promises, And Those Relating to "Free" Items)

Delivering on your promised should be a no brainer, but where people often trip up is with their "free" content. Be it whitepapers, webinars or blogs, people frequently think that, since these are content that they're giving away, they can produce low quality content.

Not so! Even if these things are free, you've still made a commitment to your users, and under-performing with these can hurt your users trust.

Alphabetical sorting rarely works. It's great when users know the exact name of the product that they are looking for, but useless when they do not. However, they're incredibly easy to implement, and as such have become a staple of lists. More ideal sorting methods exist, and in this post Michael Straker lists several.

From the Net:
The Influence of Fleeting Attraction

Sure, people respond better to people whom they feel are "like them". However, when Jerry Burger at Santa Clara decided to test responses to requests for favors, he found that people who believed that they shared more in common with the requester were twice as likely to respond positively.