Landing page engagement

The words and pictures on your site are your main chance to actively sell something to your potential customers -- and you only have a couple of seconds to do it.

We all know that's common sense. But the point needs repeating. And it's often hard to remember to do it for each product we add, or each new bit of CM copy we add to a category page.
The Grokdotcom blog is full of great advice on the subject of persuading your visitors to become customers. This post about optimising your copy for skimming and scanning provides a very useful summary of the key things to consider:

Use bullets
Bold the critical text
Consider embedding hyperlinks for more information
Use sub-headlines to break up the copy
Use white space to make copy easier to scan
Avoid jargon

The article mentions that one of their clients increased their conversion rate by 24% simply by following this approach.
Why not use this as a check list and take a fresh look at your product pages?
Here are a some of extra tips:

Use your Google Analytics "Top Content" report and switch the "Analyse" menu to report on "Entrance Keyords". Note the bounce rates. Consider these as 'trigger words' and apply the techniques above. See if you can reduce the bounce for those words.
The keywords you've seen in the report will normally include your PPC keywords. But if you're launching a new campaign, optimise the page for those words in advance. It will help with your Google Quality Score and bring down your costs -- as well as increasing your conversion rate.
Be very careful about the advice on using hyperlinks. Be wary of encouraging people to navigate away from the page unless your products do require lots of supporting information and you really have plenty of it on the site.