Bloggers Digest – 9/12/08

If you’re new here, welcome! And thanks for subscribing to Get Elastic. Friday is Blogger Digest day where we highlight posts from other blogs that are of value and interest to online retailers and Internet marketers.

Pre-show announcement: Jason Billingsley and I will be rolling around Vegas next week for Shop.org and Blog World Expo. If you are in town, please drop us a line or a Tweet – we’d love to meet! Jason is an all-star speaker and will be speaking at both events, and yours truly will be blogging for the Shop.org Blog.

But don’t worry, this will not affect the flow of content here on Get Elastic, with the exception of next week’s Blogger’s Digest. But please do keep your eye on the Shop.org Annual Summit blog – there will be plenty of content there with a handful of us conference bloggers posting several times per day.

Jason’s session at Shop.org is called Is There A Role for Social Media in Modern Retailing? which is one of Shop’s new “Critic’s Corner” sessions. Jason’s bullish stance on social media will face off with bearish Paul Miller, President of Paul Miller Consulting. I’ll be blogging about the session on the Shop.org Blog. Hey, you might as well subscribe.

Jason will also be speaking on Beyond Adsense: Exploration of Practical Monetization Streams at Blog World for all you publishers and blogaholics.

Alright, on with the links:

• For those of you patiently waiting for the replay of our webinar on website testing with Bryan Eisenberg yesterday, check out Bryan’s on-demand webinar archive including a session on headline testing and trust assurances. Or, check out this podcast with Bryan and Avinash Kaushik.

• Speaking of testing webinars, you can also learn a ton from this recent Marketing Experiments webinar on writing headlines. It’s really worth the hour to catch the replay – and forget everything you thought you knew about effective headlines. Seriously.

• You may sense a bit of a testing theme today…Tom Critchlow writes an interesting post for SEOmoz on testing for SEO – quite different than conversion testing, but important to consider.

• Get Elastic reader and web analytics expert Rich Page has just published a free e-book Improve Your Website for Free: Tips, Tricks and Tools (and How to Stop Wasting Money on Your Website Marketing) which covers a number of tools you can apply to various marketing activities, along with tips and tricks, as the title says. It also talks about the topic du jour – testing.

• Ayat Shukairy dissects 5 home pages in the flower delivery vertical (a category that typically enjoys higher than average conversion rates). She highlights areas of persuasion on each site, their strengths and weaknesses and tips for improving conversion rates. May give you some ideas for testing…

• Sticker shock squashing your conversions? Maxim Mironov explains how to squeeze better shipping rates by consolidating or shopping around. Test some of these ideas out!

• How might Google Chrome impact online retailers’ web analytics? Evan Schuman posts a blog reaction to Pingdom’s piece on Chrome and online privacy. If you’re not sure what Google Chrome is, you can catch up here. Though irrelevant, I’m throwing in one more gratuitous reference to “testing.” Have a great weekend, everybody.