Jack Humphrey 
Easy, fast conversion booster included at
bottom of the article
Most people only want to hear what I have to say
about getting them more traffic. Everything in my business is geared
toward more, more, and more targeted traffic.
While I am sure there are a few readers out there who have completely studied, tested, split
tested, and tracked their conversion results to a strong control
conversion, most people fail pretty badly at this task. I'm talking about
the optimization of your sales conversion and monetization strategy of
your site to come up with the most income you can generate with the
traffic you already get.
When sales aren't going well the universal
assumption is that more traffic will solve the problem. And if you are
converting at all, yes, you will technically do better with more traffic.
But how much of the traffic that you think you need are you wasting on
poor conversion and poor monetization?
I believe in more cases than
not, people who are generating what they think are low traffic levels
would be shocked at how much more money they could make if they even
tested just a couple things on their sites. I often ask clients this
question:
Do you want a million visitors or do you
want to make money with your site?
This is usually answered by
?huh??
You see, most people think traffic equals money. That they
are one in the same. They are not. There are more sites online that get
incredible amounts of traffic with very poor results than there are sites
with much less traffic who have optimized their conversion and
monetization strategy to blow the high traffic sites away in
profits.
Saying you have a million visitors a month does not
guarantee that you are living on your own private island in the Bahamas.
When someone starts to brag about how much traffic they have, I often just
wait to hear the rest of the story. If they are talking to me, there must
be something wrong or they'd have no use for my input.
Usually
what's wrong is they have no idea how to turn their traffic into
money.
Double Any Sites Income By Testing Everything
What
if you could keep the amount of traffic you have and simply double your
conversion? Have you tried? Have you tested everything on your site
against other ideas, headlines, copy, ad placement, banner and text ad
design and copy?
Things you can test:
- Headlines
- Ad placement
- The way you
review products (if you have a blog where you review products you are
affiliated with)
- Every aspect of your copy on direct
sales letters from headlines, sub headlines, testimonials, fonts,
graphics, pictures, guarantees, colors, to purchase buttons - they all can
have a positive or negative impact on your overall conversion right down
to the smallest detail.
And it can all be measured. It sounds like
a lot of work, but so is trying to get 1000% more visitors you might not
need to meet your income goals just because you have low
conversion.
In fact, it isn't anymore. Rather than simple trial and
error, which most people do on blogs like this one by testing ads in
different places and products that will ring positive with visitors, you
can test landing pages and static copy (direct sales letters) with
multivariate or Taguchi testing.
This method, for which there are
many pieces of software you can buy, tests many different elements of a
page at the same time, rotating in your different headlines, banners, ads,
color schemes, buttons, and copy segments, coming up with the ultimate,
best converting control possible among all the tests you run.
This
type of testing is impossible to do quickly by simple experimentation. It
uses mathematical voodoo to come up with the best performing total piece
possible among all the variables you choose to throw at it.
Here's a definition and description from Jason Calacanis' site:
- The Taguchi Method was developed 50 years ago and
has been used with great success to optimize automobile and other product
manufacturing. More recently, The Taguchi Method was applied to direct
mail and web applications. The Taguchi Method takes a number of elements
on a page with one or more alternatives for each element and dictates
exact combinations that will allow you to estimate the positive or
negative effect of each element/alternative.
- There are three extremely exciting aspects to this approach.
First, by creating a 'best page' using the best performing alternatives
for each element, significant improvement can be achieved. Second, the
length of the test cycle and the number of visitors required is
surprisingly small. And finally, since the 'recipes' are created using
modular element/alternatives, using a solution like Offermatica, Taguchi
tests can be designed and executed in a surprisingly small amount of
time.
- Taguchi tests have been run on
email, PPC ads and Landing Pages with great success. Where an AB Split
Test might create a 5-10% improvement, a Taguchi test cycle will regularly
return 25-45% improvement and has been known to improve results by 100% or
more. A test cycle includes two weeks of testing a large number of
elements in just two alternatives to identify which elements increase the
likelihood of converting a visitor to a customer, a second test where the
high-impact elements are tested with a greater number of alternatives, and
a final test of the 'best recipe' against the original page. The test
cycle takes from a couple of days to a month depending on traffic and
variance and can be designed and run without significant quantitative
marketing or statistics experience.
- A killer definition of Taguchi
and A/B testing is on Michel Fortin's blog. He includes the software
recommended for testing in his post as well.
Another spot to check
out is David Bullock's site. David is the $100,000,000.00 man. He's made
Fortune 500 companies that much more by working his testing and tracking
voodoo for the over the last decade. He?s got some great info on the topic
on his site.
You now have much of the testing and tracking puzzle
figured out with the above resources.
Quick and Easy Increase In Conversion Tip
What I want to show you is a simple conversion
booster I use even on blogs. It is a trust thing. And it really
works.
I found my affiliate and personal product sales went up
after I signed up with Hacker Safe. I know, you thought that only really
improved consumer trust on ecommerce shopping cart sites. I did
too.
Until I met a rep at Stompernet who showed me some very
impressive stats for non-shopping cart sites. I'd like you to take a look
at probably the fastest, easiest, and most effective thing you can do
today to improve your conversions, affiliate sales, and credibility in
your niche.
Hacker Safe is a very serious company with very serious
proof of concept with over 600 split test results for their security
program. It really does a lot for any kind of website running
it.
****************************
Jack Humphrey is the editor of
the Friday Traffic Report. He teaches blog marketing, social
marketing, and link building strategies. Stop by and subscribe to
his blog at http://www.jackhumphrey.com/
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