Testing for Conversions

The second standout presentation from IMC Vancouver was given by Jared Waxman from Intuit who related some of the company’s experiences with testing. Intuit has built a testing framework that enables them to accomplish one day testing for new ideas. Quick testing means that they are able to try plenty of ideas and quickly reject bad ones.

Ten Pieces of Rapid Testing Puzzle

Loosely paraphrased the ten steps for quick testing are:

1. Create a testing strike force that has complete access to the site and the ability to make changes where they are needed.
2. Appoint one “approver” for what goes up. Have a single person approve the tests to expedite the decision making process.
3. Create one straightforward criteria to measure test success.
4. Report at the “go live” point of the test and then again when the results of the test are in. Between these two points, let the test run unhindered.
5. Develop ideas fully before implementing tests. While the testing team can tighten ideas, these ideas should be developed to their fullest potential before reaching the testing team.
6. Base test ideas on a reasonable theory and customer data.
7. Manage deadlines with quality and reduce scope as necessary to facilitate running tests and getting results in one day.
8. Take ideas from anywhere and everywhere, but allow the test team to maintain control of those ideas.
9. Maintain a flexible testing calendar. When one line of testing proves unfruitful, an open testing calendar will allow you to change your strategy and implement a new line of testing.
10. Practice one day test sprints. One day test sprints allow for the testing of many ideas and make testing a part of regular business rather than something only done once in a while.

Faith-Based Business?

Both Jared and Avinash emphasized that much of the work that we do on websites is unnecessarily faith-based. There’s no need for this approach. Available tools (like Google Analytics and Google Website Optimizer, which are both free) tell us what actions site users are taking and provide information to help us hypothesize what changes we can make to improve the function of the site. All that’s left for us to do is to create the tests to ensure changes are positive ones and use the results of those tests effectively and to our advantage.

Constant-Content is heading out to New York this week to participate in Affiliate Summit East!  We’ll be there through the whole event from August 9-12.

Were going to be exhibiting at the Affiliate Summit Meet Market, so if you’re an affiliate in the market for content to build out your websites, swing by our table (#73) and strike up a conversation. We’re friendly! We’re going to be kicking off a promotion at Affiliate Summit for new customers so if you’re there come on by and pick up one of our promo cards for 25% off the first article that you purchase. (Note to Writers: Don’t worry we’re taking this portion out of the CC cut, it will have no impact on the amount that writers earn for each sale).

If you’re heading out to Affiliate Summit in New York leave a comment and let us know. I’d love to meet up and discuss any content project that you might have on the go.

Keyword Research

Keyword Research is a difficult task. Anyone who has tried to drive eyeballs to their website can vouch for this fact. It’s also well known that increasing traffic is not necessarily going to benefit your site, but increasing well-targeted traffic – people who are qualified to be interested in your product or service – will almost certainly benefit the bottom line. With this in mind there is little point in adding content to a site without making sure that you have defined your keywords clearly and are working to include them in your content, internal and external linking, and PPC campaigns. To fail to do this would simply dilute the effectiveness of this type of business development.

 

Local Words – Fresh Traffic

One of the essential components to good keyword development is knowing the local parlance and phrasing that surrounds your topic. For those immersed in their subject matter, it can be difficult to see their subject from different angles, but to develop a great keyword campaign, tapping into markets other than the market that you’re familiar with can be a big help. People in different countries use different word patterning and their languages exhibit specific linguistic nuances. This can present an opportunity to unlock traffic from new parts of the world as your keyword understanding expands. In the same way that much of the fun of traveling can center around experiencing cultural differences, engaging a multi-cultural business model will inevitably illuminate differences. One favorite example of local languages conveying the same meaning with different words include the greeting equivalents, “How you going?” for Australians and, “How you doing?” for Canadians and Americans. Another example can be seen in the the grand ‘biscuits‘ vs ‘cookies‘ confusion. This suggests that to pick one or the other is to err; incorporating multiple voices into your keyword strategy will allow your campaign to include potential clients from other locations.

Online marketers know that this difference in language can mean the difference between catching the eye of your target market and missing it. People often search the internet using spoken English, so understanding the way that a product is spoken about across a broad spectrum will allow for a larger and still well-targeted sales campaign. Finding how keywords are used in common vernacular in other regions or languages is difficult, but it is possible to get help.

 

Listening for Keywords

To help us develop more sophisticated methods for creating keyword lists, Gab Goldenberg of SEO ROI Services, spoke to the SMX Advanced Conference in Seattle about embracing some new techniques. One main thrust of his presentation was the idea that listening can be used as a form of keyword discovery. Rather than simply letting Google/Wordtracker/Fill-in-your-keyword-discovery-tool-here recommend keywords based on your understanding of a topic, he recommended visiting places that people gather to talk about your subject – forums, blogs and Twitter – to “put an ear to the ground” and learn the language of people in your subject. Sifting through these conversations, you can learn the words people are using to describe the products and services that you provide from their own mouths and start to build keyword phrases that highlight the local vernacular of people already active in the subject area. This technique expands beyond just gaining a better understanding for the search terms in a field that you’re not familiar with. A great first step to building a keyword list to focus on in a new niche is to find out what the experts and influencers are calling your products and services. Find the experts and influential publishers in your niche and consider their publications as fertile ground for finding relevant keywords for topics in your niche. This will give you access to a nicely refined set of keyword phrases to focus on. As Gab made clear, with highly targeted keyword phrases, the competition decreases, and whether you’re doing PPC or organic search marketing, less competition is good.

With over a billion people on the Internet there’s a whole lot of searching going on. Sometimes it’s easy to think that we’re all searching for the same things using the same words. We’re not. We’ve all got our own brands of English and our own ways of describing things that might be unique to us, our town, our country, our group of friends. It’s both mind boggling and exciting.

How to Make Content Work for You

As an Affiliate or Affiliate Manager one of your most important jobs is developing not only the basic infrastructure to help move your sales from one level of up to the next, but also to give your affiliate sites an edge in a highly competitive industry. One of the easiest and most effective things you can do to improve your affiliate’s sites is introduce original, high quality and informative content. We’re working on a series of articles to highlight how content can help affiliate marketers and how significant the return on investment to develop and execute a plan surrounding the content that you have on affiliate sites.

Quality Scores and Bounce Rates

Anyone running a Google AdWords campaign should know how significantly a good quality score can affect the cost of doing business. Currently the largest factor in the Quality Score seems to be Click Through Rate (CTR), develop a high click through rate your quality score goes up and you’re CPC goes down.   On-page content can have some influence on your Quality Score but perhaps from the content point of view the most interesting part of the of adding content to an affiliate page, is the opportunity to turn people who would otherwise bounce into visitors that stay a while on your site.

Being able to direct people to a page of information that is well-written, informative and on-topic can reduce your bounce rate and effectively give you a higher value for the traffic that a PPC campaign bring to a site. Relevant copy that will capture a reader’s attention and prevent them from bouncing yields a better the opportunity to gain the users trust, engage the user and convert.  A user that bounces is a waste of money, therefore, finding ways to keep visitors from bouncing gives affiliates a greater chance to build a relationship with the visitor and effectively means subsequently provides greater value out of their traffic. The value of increasing your engagement with visitors can not be underestimated!  Where trust has been built through timely, on-topic information there is a greater opportunity to turn traffic into conversions.  Investing in content is a can add significantly to the bottom line and provide a healthy return on investment.  Ask yourself this question, “Who’s more likely to convert, someone who lands on your site and sees one page, or someone who finds what the information that closely addresses their need, builds a trust through a well thought out article and provides a solution.”

Preventing Google Slaps

Thin affiliate sites have been the subject of previous Google slaps and, while it’s difficult to know for sure exactly why Google chose to slap some sites and not others, there are a few pieces of the puzzle that we can draw together.  SuperAffiliateMindset.com has a great explanation of the March 2008 Google slap that came down and  what sites tended to be most affected.  It seems that the sites that got hit hardest tended to be sites that had little content or content that was posted in a haphazard way.  Which really highlights the need for affiliates to support their most valuable sites with regular, high quality, original articles.  The last thing that an affiliate or affiliate manager wants is to be shut down by a change in the way that Google Adwords creating a genuine site that provides top quality articles, linkable articles is a great way to safeguard yourself against any changes in Google’s policy.