Hi Everyone,
How would you like to improve your website by 285%?
Whether your site is making you money or building your mailing list, increasing its performance is always a good thing. I would take 200 new subscribers to my mailing list over 100 any day and I’m sure you would too.
Today I’m going to tell you how I improved one of my websites by over 285%. This is something anyone can do for free and it is something everyone should be doing.
My goal for this website was to capture new subscribers to one of my mailing lists. I know what it takes to accomplish this because that’s what I do. I am an expert at building websites that get visitors to take action (subscribe/buy/click). However, just because I know how to do this doesn’t mean I (or anyone for that matter) will get it perfect the first time.
All website visitors are different and respond to things differently. So how am I supposed to know what this group of people will respond best to? Well I can sum it up in one word…
TESTING!
I had four different ideas for this website.
- My original idea, which I was pretty sure would work best, was a sales letter that I had written.
- I also wanted to try that same sales letter with an audio intro.
- Another idea I had was to try a simple form with only a small amount of sales copy.
- I thought it would be a good idea to add the audio intro to this version as well.
Even though I was about 70% positive that my first idea was the best, I was 100% sure that split testing has always improved my websites. The way I was going to do this was with a free tool Google provides called Google Website Optimizer. You can find out more about it here. I am also doing an online seminar about how to use it next month for my Advanced Website Mentoring Membership. You can get a free trial here.
If you use Google’s Web Optimizer it will do the calculations for you but just so you can understand the results I am going to explain how they work.
Conversion Rate: The percentage of visitors that took action (signed up in this case).
Actions/Visitors x 100 = Conversion Rate
Improvement: improvement over original page. Example: if the original page got 1 sign up and the test page got 2 sign ups the improvement is 100%.
Test Page Actions - Original Page Actions / Original Page Actions x 100 = Improvement
Example: 1 - 2 / 1 x 100 = 100
Now I’m going to share my test results with you.
1: Original Sales Page:
21 sign ups out of 300 visitors
7% conversion rate (Not nearly as good as I had planned)
2: Sales Page with Audio
24 sign ups out of 300 visitors
8% conversion rate (Still not as good as I had planned)
14.29% Improvement
3: Short Form
48 sign ups out of 300 visitors
16% conversion rate
128.57% Improvement (Nice!)
4: Short Form with Audio
81 sign ups out of 300 visitors
27% conversion rate
285.71% Improvement (Hallelujah!)
As you can see my prediction was way off. This is exactly why testing is so important. It is what makes the difference in someone that is a great internet marketer and someone that creates a website that fails. Even though I know what I am doing I still have to test my websites every time to get the best results.
If I would have put up my original sales page without testing it I would have considered it a failure. This is what most people do when they get started. That is why 90% of them give up.
This just goes to show you that success can be a test away.
To Your Website’s Success,
Chad Conger
www.chadconger.com
P.S. If you want to learn how to improve your website try my Advanced Website Mentoring Membership Free for 30 days by clicking here.
