Hi All

Once you have your web site up and running with prospects knocking at your door waiting to sign up or emails going out to promote your products you need to find a way to determine what works from what doesn’t.  The best method for doing this is split testing.

To explain this further, you basically take you web site that you know is converting prospects into subscribers or sales and create variations of individual components to test against each other.  The important thing to remember however is to only test one aspect at a time…so you know where the change in results (positive or negative) is coming from.

There are various components of a web site that you could test, the headline, body copy, sign-up box text or design….you can basically test anything you want however if you have not done any split testing before, the easiest place to start is with your headline or the sign-up box.  Just take the headline that you have at the moment and create a number of variations (if you are a beginner, you might just want to start with one or two at any one time).  You then alternate the headline that is displayed to each visitor and wait for the results to come in.  Once enough people have seen each one, you will soon know what works and what doesn’t by comparing your sign-up or purchase rate for each headline.

There are numerous tools out in the market to allow you to handle split testing, some you can purcahse and some which are free however if you use Google Adwords to drive traffic to your site, they have a great resource built in that allows you to change components of your site and even tracks the results for you.

If you want to test your sign-up box then you are best off doing this with a proven program.  I currently use Aweber to collect my leads and they have a great function that allows you to change the sign-up box and alternates them for you showing you which one performs better.  You can test the location, headline text, length, colour, pictures or even field order – basically whatever you can think of.  Considering this is the place where all the action happens on your site, it is a pretty important thing to be able to test.

Just remember, split testing is the best way to optimise your site to get better click through rates and more sales.  Start out simple if you haven’t done it before and work your way up.  Your will be suprised at the results.

To Your Success
Brad


Filed under: Internet Marketing • split testing

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