|pros • per • ly|

I recently wrote a post on the 3 best things you can spend your time doing to make more money online, and since then have received requests on going into a little more depth on each of the three things.

Today I want to talk about certain things you can do to increase conversions on your site. Before I get into the specifics I should explain how we test whether or not conversions are improving or getting worse. Back in the olden days I would make a change to my site and then just wait to see if it seemed like I was making more money. This was the less effective way to increase conversions.

Luckily Google came out with a free service called Website Optimizer. You need to have an Adwords account (which is free) in order to use the tool but it is the awesomest free tool on the internet. This tool literally allows you to test two versions of a page and see which page converts higher. If you want to test very small and specific things like trying 2 different pictures to see if it makes a difference in conversions you can.

We use this tool all the time and more times than not what we thought would convert higher ended up doing worse. That is why we say you should always be testing.

So, what to test?

The best place to start your testing would be on your sales page, if you are selling a product. For example on Lawncaredirectory.com I sell a kit to help people start a lawn care business successfully. So most of the tests I run on that site are on the page where I try to sell the kit to people.

Here are some good things to test:

• Headline – this is what gets the conversation between you and your customer started. A good headline can make all the difference in the world. You will be surprised on how big of a difference a great headline can make in conversions.
• Testimonial Placement – If you don’t have testimonials on your sales page, you need to get some and fast. Then when you have them test where you put them on the page. Putting testimonials in the right spot can have a very good effect on conversions.
• Call To Action Placement – You need to find the best possible spot for your call to action button or link. This means the button or link to get them to buy your product or subscribe to your newsletter or sign up for your service etc.
• Call To Action Message – Not only should you test the placement of your call to action you should also test the message itself. You never know if a big “BUY NOW” button is going to convert higher than a link that says “Start your lawn care business now”.

Start with these few ideas as you test your own site. Don’t try to run too many test at once. Just pick one from the list and then test it. When that test finishes either run a new test on the same thing or pick another from the list and test that out.

The more you use the testing software the more comfortable you will get with running tests on other things and hopefully you will get ideas on new things to test.

As you begin to buy more websites your portfolio will obviously grow. If you’re careful, your total time invested will remain about the same (there is ALWAYS an incremental time cost when adding to your portfolio unless you just let a site grow moribund and die).

If you really want to run a successful online business you need to make sure you’re focused on the things that matter most. At Prosperly we have a laser-like focus on one metric only:

Revenue per Visitor

One of our employee’s job every morning is to run the previous days stats, calculate the total income derived from all sources for each business and then divide that by the unique visitors.

Each industry is different. Some have a naturally high revenue per visitor, others aren’t so high (though still highly profitable because traffic acquisition is easier — obviously).

One thing this has done for us at Prosperly is really help us recognize what is in our control. We can control revenue per visitor much more readily than we can our rankings in the search engines. We control revenue per visitor more than any other aspect of our sites because we have complete control over the site.

There have been times where we’ve made changes to a site and then watched our income fluctuate (up or down) — growing antsy with the change. Was it right? Will this be more profitable? We didn’t always focus on traffic AND revenue (which revenue per visitor is). So we’d see a dip in profits and be worried that a site change was unsuccessful. In reality, visitors had fluxed.

Now, realize that when you’re simply looking at one site day in and day out, it’s easy to monitor several metrics separately (conversion rate, revenue, traffic, search engine rankings for key phrases, etc.). However, as I mentioned above, your portfolio growth will necessitate that you dial those metrics down to one (maximum two) that truly matter. As you become dialed in on the metric that determines your online business success, you’ll see decisions are made more quickly, with better outcomes.

On one of my sites I decided to add some inline video (hosted via YouTube) to demonstrate some important aspects of the product.  I made four videos in about 20 minutes and was all set.  These are not professionally done at all — simple screencasts of me working through the software and talking.

At any rate, I placed the four videos in their relevant sections of the sales copy and began a splittest:

Original:  The user would click on a link, which would open a new browser window and launch a screencast I had made using Camtasia.  There was no audio, just popup bubbles explaining things.

New: The user sees the embedded videos right there inline.  The videos are about the same content-wise, but have audio of me explaining things as I go — no popup bubbles requiring reading.

The results have been phenomenal:

As you can see it’s holding very strong (98 conversions are enough for a statistically significant result…standing on its own) at 3.34% conversion.  Granted, Google’s Website Optimizer says it doesn’t have enough data to declare a high-confidence winner yet, but 97.4% was high enough to merit writing this post.

So what are some key takeaways from this?

1. It’s fairly obvious that visitors (at least in my niche) respond well to video.
2. 20 minutes of work can boost sales 33%.

For those of you that don’t know, on my lawn care website I sell a kit that helps people start a lawn care business. I sell two versions of the kit, a basic kit for $49.95 and a Premium kit for $99.95.

I just finished running a test through Google’s website optimizer tool where I tested just selling the Premium kit against selling both the basic and the Premium. To my surprise in a side by side AB test the original version where I push the basic and premium together converted 36% better than the version that only pushed the Premium. Ironically, during that time of testing 80% of the sales that came through the original version were for the premium kit.

What I learned from the test:
People like to have options. Even though the vast majority of the customers bought the Premium Kit, they seem to be more at ease knowing there is a cheaper version. At least the conversion rates would suggest so.

I will next be testing adding a third version of the kit. This should get interesting.

Sorry about the lame rhyming title. I couldn’t come up with anything more clever. Lately I have been running a split test on LawnCareDirectory’s sales page to see if I could increase conversions on the page. I have run many tests before testing headlines, page layout testimonials etc.

This time I was testing the header of the page. I have a header on the sales page that has a picture of the business kit I sell and then a button to order the kit and one to sign up for the email list I have. I wanted to know if having those two buttons there was taking away from sales. So I tested taking that header out.

Here is the original header:

And here is the test page where I took out the header:

As you can see the look of the page is significantly different without the header. Personally, I don’t like it as much. It seems less attractive without the header.

The visitors to my website didn’t care either way. I have been running this test for 2 months and sales are almost identical with both versions of the sales page.

Lesson learned: This particular header isn’t a deciding factor when people are making the decision to buy my lawn care business package.

Some people will want to say that this test was a waste of time. Even if the test page would have resulted in much lower sales it still wouldn’t have been a waste of time. No matter what the result of a split test is, I am always more knowledgeable after.