Thursdays profit tip for authors

Authors interested in maximizing their online marketing need to be testers; they not only need to constantly update their blog and website, they also need to continually test their content and design assumptions, and update their website on the basis of how their website visitors respond to their changes.

No absolutes in website content and design

No copywriter or web designer knows everything; no “formula” or “experience” can substitute for information learned from analyzing the behavior of visitors to an authors website.

Testing, in other words, is needed to replace assumptions, intuition, and subjectivity with real-world knowledge.

How to Test and What to Test

Profit-oriented authors interested in maximizing their online marketing success can learn how to test and what to test by reading Bryan Eisenberg’s Always be Testing: The Complete Guide to Google Website Optimizer. Written with John Quarto-vanTivadar and Lisa T. Davis, Always Be Testing will change the way you approach website content, design, and–ultimately–the choices you make when setting up a website.

Always be Testing starts with the assumption that the readers are not aware of the need for testing, provides step-by-step guidance for implementing an on-going testing program.

Part 1: A Marketer’s View of Testing: The Power of Optimization

The first 10 chapters provide a brief overview of the need for ongoing website testing and introduces the Google Website Optimizer and the reports that it can generate. There are case studies and brief descriptions of fundamental concepts, including establishing realistic goals and parameters.

Part 1 will be an eye-opener if your current website is a “hostage” site you cannot update and test yourself.  You’ll quickly learn how the lack of testing can be holding back your profits by not maximizing the value of each and every single website visitor to your site.

Part 2: What You Should Test

The next 31 chapters provide even more eye-opening. In this section, compromised of relatively short chapters, you’ll be amazed to discover the huge number of content and design variables that you can test and–by testing–improve your site on an incremental basis.

Website success belongs to those who constantly test and monitor the results of testing one variable against another. Even the smallest changes in content and design, like the wording, the shape, or the color of a “submit” or “order” button can make a significant difference in visitor response.

Cumulatively, the hundreds of details that matter can result in huge increases in lead and sales generation.

Since most of the variables that can be tested can be easily modified and tested, if the author has the ability to add and  edit offers, content (i.e. wording) and formatting (i.e., appearance), you can see how this book opens up doors of opportunity for no-cost blog and website improvement.

Part 3, Dividing Deep for the Technically Challenged

The final 5 chapters offer further perspective, tips, and suggestions for special applications, like the Webiste Optimizer’s Plug-in for WordPress and optimizing static and dynamic sites.

Creating a culture of testing

The goal, of course, is to adopt a testing mentality, or culture, that assumes nothing is perfect, no matter how much you like your site or how many newsletter sign-ups and book sales it’s generating.

Unless you can easily test your offers, your headlines, your first sentences, your prices, colors, borders, backgrounds, forms, and buttons, you can’t be positive that your blog and website are as good as they can possibly be.

Question: Are you able to test your website, in order to maximize the leads and sales it generates? What kind of testing do you do? How are you measuring the response of your website? What kind of results are you obtaining?