Do you have a website that you want people to visit?  If not, what are you doing reading this blog entry? 

Since you are still reading I assume you do.

Now, when you start getting that magical traffic, are you throwing away money?  Probably!  Most people assume if they do one of the following the traffic will come and they are right…

• Write great, original content frequently
• Get links from sites to your site
• Comment on other blogs hoping people will click back to your site
• Build a list of visitors emails and email them information and offers
• Build page rank in results pages so Google will show some love and give your page even higher in their search results
• Buy traffic with PPC, CPA, etc

Now what if I told you that you had to immediately pay 2X or 3X more in time or money to get the same traffic?  Would you do it – maybe, maybe not!  If you have a good idea of your costs to get a visitor you might find that it wasn’t worth it.  The problem is you are doing EXACTLY that! 

No, you’re not you say?  Ok, if you can answer this question honestly and the answer is yes then you can stop reading this because you are in the vast minority…

Do you run a/b tests on your pages including your home page, sales funnel pages and squeeze pages?

Didn’t think so.  Why not?  Do you enjoy throwing away money?

A/B testing really is simple and it can increase your conversions and thus visitors who stick around by 2x or even more.  Now who doesn’t want twice the page views and potentially revenues?  The first time I did this I couldn’t believe how glaring my results were – literally a background color and position of one squeeze form performed over 300% better than the original one I had put up that came as a template form.  The crazy thing is you can test really quickly and easily with the tools available today – for free even.  Google has a great set of testing tools and there are many more available that add varying degrees of automation to your testing.

Recently I ran across a blog series from Cameron Chapman over at KissMetrics.com that includes the following articles:

• A Beginner’s Guide To A/B Testing: An Introduction
• A Beginner’s Guide To A/B Testing: Exceptional Web Copy
• A Beginner’s Guide to A/B Testing: Email Campaigns That Convert
• A Beginner’s Guide to A/B Testing: Better Pay-Per-Click Ads
• A Beginner’s Guide to A/B Testing: Effective SEO Landing Pages

Take 15 minutes and read over these great tips on testing and then take 15 minutes more to implement your very first test – if it doesn’t show you any differences then please contact me so I can hire you ASAP for my site!

Make sure you look at the third one on emails that convert as Cameron actually gives some examples of what you might use as a test…  Start with the big impact ones such as the subject line (ie, the headline of an email) – I really like the idea of varying it by something like “Product X on sale – 10% off NOW” vs “10% Discount on Product X – Today ONLY!”.  If you have any examples or anything you want to share please leave a comment below!  Good luck!