I just wrote an article about how most of our purchase decisions are made in the unconscious part of mind.

There are actually three parts of our brain. We have the part we control. You are using that part of your mind right now as you read this.  Then there’s the part that controls how we feel as we read. Then the part of our mind that controls our breathing and keeps us alert to what is happening around us.

All but one of these things is happening subconsciously, we can’t control, this is just happening without us even being aware of it.

Let me give you an example;

Let’s say I’m driving down the road there are three things happening;

1.  I’m thinking about a fight I had with my daughter.
2. I’m angry because there are a lot of things I should’ve said that I didn’t.
3. I’m  driving the car.

I am subconsciously driving the car down the road.

Now someone pulls in front of me. I immediately (without even thinking) slam on the brakes and turn the steering wheel.

As I get control of the car here’s what is going on in my mind.

1. I am no longer angry, I just want to get home to hug my daughter and tell her how much I love her.
2. I am still driving the car
3. I am crying.

We do not have as much control over the decisions we make as we might think we do!

We have less control of the decisions we make then we have control over them.

John Bargh ran a series of experiments where groups of people had to unscramble a list of words.

• Group one: unscrambled rood, angry words.
• Group two: unscrambled words that were neither angry or calm.
• Group three: unscrambled words that were happy, calm, pleasant and easy-going or laid back.

The second part of the experiment had these people, once they finished unscrambling the words, go down the hall and find the instructor. When they walked into the instructor’s office the instructor was talking with someone else.

Now…the someone else is part of the experiment. The idea is to see how if there is a difference in how the person that unscrambled the rude words would react to having to wait when compared to the people in the nice or nothing group.

• What they found out is that 20% of the people that unscrambled the happy calm words interrupted the instructor within 10 minutes.
• While 40% of the people that unscrambled the neither, rude or happy words interrupted the instructor within 10 minutes.
• But a whopping 60 percent interrupted then instructor from the rude word group.

When they asked the group of people if unscrambling the words had any impact at all on how long they were willing to wait before interrupting the instructor, all said no.

This tells us that our unconscious mind has more control over the decisions we make in our conscious mind then we do.

And this tells us that there is no way possible for someone to be able to consciously tell you what causes them to click or not to click on a particular item on your website.

It means that they can’t tell you what colors would have the most impact on them, or what makes them purchase from one website over another.

That’s why it’s important that we are constantly fine tuning, tweaking, and testing our website designs and offers to test the impact it’s having on our website visitors.

1) Yahoo Answers.

2) Myspace.com

3) Yahoo Groups

4) Stumbleupon.com

5) Forums

6) Craigslist.org

7) Site maps

E-Book Giveaway

9) Website Design

10) Submit To Directories

11) Tell a Friend

12) Search Engine Optimization

13) Squidoo.com

14) Social bookmarking sites

15) Article Promotion

16) Site Explorer

17) Epinion.com

1 Alexa.com

19) Newsletter Box

20) Scribd

21) Get Links from Relevant Websites

22) Increase the Size of Your Site

22) Send out Press Releases

23) Advertise On Online classified Ad Sites

24) Use Firefox Plug-in

25) Add a Forum to Your Site

26) Add a Blog to Your Site

27) Optimize Your Blog for The Search Engines

2 Comment on Other Peoples Blogs

29) MySpace News

30) Digg

31) Banner Exchanges

32) Traffic Exchanges

33) Pop Unders

34) Technorati and ping it when your blog content changes

35) Use a ping service like pingomatic to ping RSS aggregators

36) Submit your blog to all of the RSS directories

37) Link to other blogs in your posts

3 Use Stumbleupon to stumble your posts.

39) Ask your readers to submit your posts to social bookmarking sites (Digg, Reddit, etc.)

40) Start a group blog.

41) Join SpicyPage and promote your blog

42) Join a webring.

43) Sign up for BlogWoods and promote your blog

44) Exchange Ads (not blogroll links) with complementary blogs.

45) Trade blog roll links with related blogs.

46) Use Twitter

47) Publish videos on YouTube

4 Search for Wikis related to your.

49) Join Hub pages and post links to your blog from articles you write.

50) Pray.

51) Create a MySpace Page. Put your blog on it, and get some friends.

52) Tell people you will link back to them if they review your blog

53) Most brands are not well established online, you review related content and it will rank well.

54) Review relevant products on Amazon.com.

55) Create product lists on Amazon.com

56) Review related sites on Alexa

57) Review products and services on shopping search engines.

5 Swap some links.

59) Try to get links from within the content of relevant content pages.

60) Sell items on eBay.

61) Target niche social news sites like DZone, Sphinn or Hugg

62) Whenever you send an email to someone, always add your website url as a signature.

63) Do email signature swaps

64) Tag blog posts at social bookmarking sites

65) Add photos to your blog with appropriate keywords – Google Images generates traffic too.

66) Tag blog photos at Flicker

67) Make a custom 404-error page for your website. You can provide a link back to your main website or even try to monetize it by offering a related affiliate program within your niche.

6 Outsource grunt work.

69) After someone orders from you offer a one-time offer that compliments your product.

70) Participate in Blog Carnivals

71) create a network of blogs in different niches, and then link them together

72) Give away stock images with a wee watermark of your URL

73) Find and discuss memes

74) Create a Yahoo Group in the niche your site sits.

75) Bookmark your site on Del.icio.us and if you’re really keen, add a Del.icio.us button to your homepage.

76) Place a free ad for your company on Gumtree.

77) Syndicate your site’s content by using an RSS feeds.

7 Submit your RSS feeds to aggregator sites.

79) Don’t worry about PageRank – worrying about PageRank is as effective as trying to solve an algebra equation by chewing bubblegum.*

80) Get a custom t-shirt made with your website URL on it, and wear it often.

81) Get a custom t-shirt made with your website URL on it, and wear it often.

82) Send out a newsletter!

83) Giving away an eBook is an excellent way to generate word-of-mouth about your site.

84) Ask bloggers and other Web site owners to review your site and/or products.

85) Add a “Tell a Friend” function to your site, so people can easily recommend you to their mates.

86) Share your banners on banner exchange sites.

87) Create a “lense” for your site on Squidoo

8 Do you have really hot content on your site that geeks would love? If so Slashdot will bring you a mass of traffic.

89) upload a favicon.gif file so that your users have a nice icon when they bookmark your site.

90) Set up a feed on MyYahoo.com so your site gets regularly spidered by the Yahoo search

91) Use Ping-0-matic to ping blog directories. Do this every time you publish.

92) Print your blog URL on your business cards, brochures and flyers.

93) Use Trackback links when you quote or refer to other blog posts.

94) Increase the list you ping

95) Use Facebook

96) Social Networking

97) Micro

9 Email Marketing

99) RSS Feeds

100) Get outside links to internal pages

101) Use free hosting and build sites and link them back to your main site.