Oooh, I just love it when I get to play with new toys. I love it even more when those new toys turn out to be useful tools in a very short period of time.

I recently inherited oversight of a site that seemed to doing alright through the efforts of its previous web guy. It ranked decently for relevant keywords, showed nice new traffic stream, had a good number of pages read per visitor and an acceptable conversion rate. In other words, the previous site handler had all the ducks in a row, so this looked like a nice test bed for some new tracking apps.

Late last week, as I was sitting at my workstation doing my thing, a notification window popped in from Tweetdeck showing that someone had asked the question, "Do you have a strategy or a handful of tactics". I'm not even sure if an article was linked after the question, as I was preoccupied with the task at hand, and I let the window fade with as little fanfare as it had appeared.

Strangely though, the question refused to fade. In fact it stuck with me all weekend. It stuck with me to the point that I began to really think about it in regards to almost everything that occurred over the weekend. It stuck with me to the point that I'm writing on the subject today.

I have to get this out of the way immediately - the inspiration for this blog post (and future of its sort) lies squarely with Ion Interactive's own Great Online Marketing Reads of the Week. Not only is it a great method for me to share what I find of value over the course of the week, it is also a great way for me to keep notes AND takes the pressure off from having to come up with a new unique blog post on Fridays. Cheers, Ion.

While on the subject of Ion, I also want to mention a nice and incisive webinar they hosted last Wednesday on focus points and priorities for developing (or refining) your conversion strategy. A great take-away sentiment - "Spend the summer selling lemonade while your competition sips it.". If you missed the webinar, there are still two more in the series. You can register for free at http://www.ioninteractive.com/live-webinars/

Heat maps to become old hat?

There was a time...

Hmmm, perhaps I should re-word that...

Up until now, conversion optimizers had a handy toolbox of applications and knowledge to help them monitor visitor activity on a site, analyze that activity, draw conclusions and refine the site (architecture, content, graphics, presentation, etc.) to further ease the transition of visitor to customer.