Internet Marketing Strategy

How to increase conversions in just 45 minutes!
Redesigning a website, or even a single page, can be a tedious and time-consuming process. Re-opening a project that you so happily completed can take major mental willpower. However, improving a website doesn’t need to take weeks, or even days. I’m a believer in baby steps: making incremental progress, small victories, minor adjustments with big results.

Using microformats to improve local SEO performance.
Microformats are gaining popularity, and if you’re not using them, you should be. Google’s introduction of Rich Snippets in May 2009 is just another indication that microformats will continue to gain popularity. And as more sites make use of this structured content, small businesses can capitalize on the use of microformats to help feed relevant information about their business to other websites by using microformats.

Employing the 80/20 mantra for increased effectiveness.
By doing an 80-20 optimization of your website — whittling your pages down to the 20% of things that produces 80% of the results — you’ll not only have a simpler site that’ll convert better, but you’ll have less work in developing and managing it since there’ll be less to think about.

I’m currently running experiments with different link sets and widget types for displaying products from Amazon’s catalog.

Currently the widget that converts to the most sales is using classic links placed within a well worded review with a nice picture of the product. Link them twice to the sales page in the text, and make the product image link to the sales page as well.

I’ve gotten a couple of conversions from the “My Favorites” A.K.A. the “I Recommend” widget, but I wish it was more customizable.

What’s your favorite Amazon widget? What works best for you?