Lately I’ve been playing around with optimizing my landing pages. This can be a really fun task or it can be very frustrating. The nice thing is there are plenty of free tools to help you split test and experiment to see what works and what doesn’t.

Google Website Optimizer
Google, in their quest for gathering as much information about people who browse the internet as they can, has  lots of free tools to help you also “see” whats going on with your site visitors. One nice tool from the Google Analytics tool box is the ability to split test traffic coming to your site. Google affectionately calls this the Website Optimizer.  Oh and its free of course!

The first thing you want to do is to create an experiment for your split test.  As soon as you do this you will be presented with the option to choose A/B test or Multivariate.  My advice to you is to stick with the A/B test, at least for now.  The A/B test will allow you to test two different pages side by side to see which one performs better.   As you set up your experiment, you will want to compare small changes between two different pages.  For example, test two different headlines and see which one is better, etc.

The multivariate test  – the multivariate test is a much more complex test -where you test multiple changes on a page at the same time.  It’s a very advanced, complex method of testing changes,but until your comfortable doing A/B split testing, I would stay clear of it for now.

To finish up your A/B testing you will obviously need two different pages to test.  Google will ask you to add some code to these pages so that they can detect which pages are getting accessed more.  Also, one of the pieces of code that Google will have you add to your site will do the redirects between the different test pages for you!  Google’s directions are pretty straight forward, just follow them along and you will have your split test setup in no time.

You should probably make sure you are getting some decent traffic to your website before you start split testing things.  I would say at least around 40-50 unique visits a day to be able to get a clear picture of your visitors behavior.

Exit Pop-ups
Another quick and easy trick to add to your website that really improves sign up to your mailing list is an exit pop-up.  Many people really hate pop-ups, but if you use them correctly and not nag your visitors they really provide an added benefit to your site.

One great free exit pop-up is from BigSellingOptins.com from Brian Terry.  Brian has a cool free plugin for wordpress that allows you to add popup optin form when people start to exit your site.   Configured correct, It really improves optins dramatically.  There are lots of options to configure this plug-in. Tune it so that it only pops-up once in a session or maybe even less.  I use it as a simple reminder for people not to forget to sign up for my free mini-course or ebook.  Again don’t overuse it and test to see what works best for you.

Do you have any tips or tricks for optimizing your landing pages?  Let us know!

Photo credit: Serendigity

More great Internet Marketing and Web building info from: Joseph L Wilson

Optimizing Your Landing Page

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