A colleague of mine is really passionate about Cialdini's work, and he actually put together over 50+ examples of the principles of Persuasion used in marketing

A colleague of mine is really passionate about Cialdini's work, and he actually put together over 50+ examples of the principles of Persuasion used in marketing, sorted by category. [1] I personally found it quite useful to peg the principles to real-world ideas, and the visuals help with memory/recall. As I mentioned in another comment– it's pretty easy to look at a principle in action and go, "Yeah, that makes sense." The real challenge is to then look at your own material critically, and see where you can implement it, what you're doing well, what you're missing out on, and how you can do better. That takes a lot of rigorous attentiveness and practice. The really cool thing is– as long as you're not making stuff up (eg: faking social proof for a product that nobody actually likes), you're going to legitimately improve perceptions of your product. For instance, if you do a search for your product on Twitter and you find that there are people saying positive things about it, it's totally worth quoting those tweets on your signup page! And so on. ___ [1] http://www.referralcandy.com/blog/cialdini/ http://www.referralcandy.com/blog/cialdini/