When someone shows their trust in us, we tend to trust them in return. This neat psychological truism has been (mis)applied by con artists for generations... and can work equally well on your website.

Just to demonstrate how it works, let's first consider the dark side: how you might — if you were a con artist — use this technique to steal a camera while on a tropical holiday. Eight easy steps:

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Personalization can do a lot to help an email campaign. Split tests regularly show that personalization options hugely increase email conversion rates. However, lately I've been wondering about how we can use group targeting instead of personalization as a way to engage readership. Specifically, I've been wondering if, perhaps, we could further engage email audiences by adding them to targeted groups, and then addressing the groups directly, instead of the individuals. The reasoning has to do with how individuals interact in groups, specifically how groups provide identity, support, and guidance for their members. Would grouping people together engage them readily with the subject?

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What a week for news. There was more than I could include on almost every subject--even analytics! Paring it down to just a few, we have: newbie twitter mistakes, coding with lesscss, setting up GA goals, and the logic of good and bad usability.

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One of the funny things about working in web usability is that you become very sensitive to how unusable many things are (i.e. physical things, not just web sites). Long ago, I wrote about my experience with a microwave oven. Today I'd like to mention another of my pet usability peeves: the "One Touch" Control on my Holmes window fan.

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Due to popular demand, we've added additional days to our March Internet Marketing Essentials seminars. We've now got openings on March 4th, 11th, 18th, and 25th!

For those not in the know, Internet Marketing Essentials is a seminar series taking attendees through the four key components of Internet Marketing: designing persuasion, attracting visitors through SEO & PPC, and understanding & Optimizing your visitors with Google Analytics and Google Website Optimizer.

If you want to learn the tools to build an online empire then…

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Cool stuff this last week, even ignoring all the olympic bacchanalia. We've got CSS typography, installing GA on your Facebook fanpage, and madlib style signup forms.

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Over the past couple of years, I've been shifting my focus from creating sites that are merely "usable" to creating sites that actually motivate visitors to take action. In other words, to persuasive web design. From "can do" to "will do".

A great primer in the field is Dr. Susan Weinschenk's book, "Neuro Web Design: What Makes them Click?" An absolutely fascinating read, the book opens with the concept that we actually have three brains:

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When was the last time you checked your website’s link profile? Are all your links pointed to the home page? If the answer is yes then you’ve got some work to do. We all know how important links are, but you need to spread the link love around to help out your internal pages. Strengthening the power of these pages will help get them the visibility that they need to start making you more money.

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Over the last week a couple coworkers, clients and I have been discussing the effectiveness of email campaigns that we've received over the last few months. We've had arguments over whether or not headlines like "Why Is Your PC So Slow" and "Get $50 for 30 Minutes of Your Time" are effective at getting people to open emails. We've debated the usefulness of less-than-paragon tactics such as out-out's and disguised opt-ins (if you need an example of the latter go try to download Quicktime from Apple.com and tell me if you have to enter your email address in order to do so). We've settled on three general principals that we think creates a good, and effective, email campaign, including: trust & recognition, matching expectation, and affective quality of subject lines.

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From the warm sunny location of the Winter Olympics, it's another Monday Roundup. This week we have sunny +8 weather (highs of +12!), why keywords are overrated, using Google Insights for Search, and why the iPad(/pod/phone) will never have Flash.

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