Happy Friday! Below are my recommended reads from around the web for the week:

• Fans, Friends, Followers and Why None of It Matters – I had to lead off today’s link collection with this one, because I loved it so much. It’s not about what the title implies, it’s really about how you choose the “experts” that you follow for business advice. I couldn’t agree with the author more. So many people follow others based on their existing following instead of the content of their writing, and as a result a lot of people not worth listening to get a pretty big audience. I have so much more to say about this but I’ll leave it to a post of its own, for now, check out the article!
• 7 Takeaways from the Optimization Summit – Get Elastic nicely sums up valuable usability advice for conversion rate optimization
• Marketing Strategies: Customer Engagement vs Traffic Generation – Megan writes a lot of great stuff over at Craft MBA but this piece is absolutely one of my favorites. Not because she recommends a couple of Smaller Box tools, but because she so eloquently explains what so many of her readers get wrong about marketing.
• Payment Gateways and Merchant Processors – Good read for anyone who accepts credit cards on their own site (or wants to).
• Are Keyword Density Percentages Killing Your Content? – Great article that explains how writing for search engines instead of humans sabotages your marketing efforts
• 7 Powerful Trigger Words You Can Use in Your Blog Headlines to Get More Eyeballs – Terrific copy writing tips!
• How to Write a High Converting Sales Page – More good copy writing tips, this article is focused on sales pages
• Why Your Customer Service Team Should Be Your Biggest Investment
• SEO Industry Takes a Stab and Deciphering SEO Ranking Factors – SEO experts don’t know the exact recipe for the special sauce that makes up search engine rankings, but this article discusses the experts best hunches
• Craft Show Checklist: What to Bring With You