You might not be familiar with the concept of persuasion marketing, even if you've had a business on the web for a while and have been paying attention to aspects of search engine optimization.

Persuasion marketing is a system by which a website is approached for maximum return on investment. The strategies provide a road map that direct business decisions, site design and marketing efforts across a broad spectrum of campaigns and approaches that enable web entrepreneurs to maximize results.

The key to an effective persuasion marketing campaign is a large amount of research. Not only do you need to know who your customers are and what they want, you need to know how they want information presented (text versus videos, for example) and what might persuade them to go from one-time visitors to your site to newsletter subscribers and ultimately paying customers.

All aspects of your website come under the control of a persuasion marketing plan. Your web design plays into your conversion rate, and even the style of your site, such as having a landing page or a more extensive site with a blog, can affect when or whether visitors turn into buyers.

You might not have given much thought in the past to how a user moves through your site and whether you can guide them in a certain way that makes them more likely to take action on an offer or sign up to receive a white paper or your top five tips on a subject.

But the fact is you can be in control of exactly how users interact with your site and you can lead them where you want them to go. With the right site design and persuasive and informative copywriting, you can not only draw more people to your site thanks to effective search engine optimization, you can also keep those people on your site longer and convert them into customers more effectively.

All of this can sound pretty esoteric when talking about it generally, but the basis of every step in a persuasion marketing campaign is research. Everything you do is based on solid information about what your site visitors are likely to do (based on testing) and how you can harness that knowledge to make their visits more effective, both for them and for you.

Most people don't go it alone in a persuasion marketing campaign. It helps to have an expert on your side who knows what to test and how to interpret results for the most effective use of your time and budget. But even without an expert's help, you can brainstorm how your users might want to use your site or ask them to fill out a survey that will give you a better idea of what they want so you can develop a road map that will help you deliver it to them.