Making Testing and Research FUN!
Make more money and have more fun in your business with these Essential Blog Testing Tools.
Today I am going to discuss something that used to bore me terribly, but which today I find very exciting – Blog Testing, Research and Analytics.
Tracking and testing your website is one of key things you can do to increase profits and drive more traffic. Using the tools below you are able to do a lot of really cool things – from finding out where your visitor comes from, which pages your visitors spend most time on, where your visitor are looks on your web-page (eye tracking), what links they click and even which opt-in box color works best for your website.
Testing can mean HUGE money. For example is you were getting around 30,000 visitors a month to your blog and were making just $5000 there is no doubt in my opinion you can make a lot more by researching the actions / behavior of your visitors using the tools I am recommending below. You could see your earnings double, treble or even multiple 10 times plus as a result of using these tools. Indeed some testers have seen as much as a 1000% increase with millions of dollars in sales. For a business like Amazon.com it could even mean billions of extra dollars in sales.
Important Fact:
A lot of bloggers I meet find Testing and Analytic’s boring – it isn’t fun for them and generally anything that is not FUN we avoid doing. But I am going to suggest it can be a lot of FUN – indeed I like to think of Blog Testing as tweaking an already powerful engine to get even better performance. I compete with myself to find little tweaks and changes to see if I can beat my my previous best performance — a bit like athletes do I suppose.
If you can think of it like that then you will find these tools a remarkable addition to your blogging business.
Let me know your own thoughts on testing and recommendations for any tools I may have missed out in the comments below.
To Our Blogging Success
Michael
Top Blog Testing Tools
Google Analytics
OK I shall start with the one TOOL that I hope most of my readers are already familiar with: Google Analytics
Google Analytics is the first tool you should install on your blog. Google Analytics gives you amazing insights into your website traffic and marketing effectiveness. Very easy to use and very flexible (Just like about everything Google creates) this tool allows you to see and analyze your traffic data in an entirely new way. With Google Analytics, you’re more prepared to write better-targeted ads, strengthen your marketing initiatives and create higher converting websites. Visit Site >>
CrazyEgg
Ever wondered how your visitors are using your website? CrazyEgg allows you to see a lot of really cool information about your readers, you can see where they are looking at a page, which links are being clicked the most and lot’s of other great information. Visit Site >>
Google Keyword Tool
I haven’t been using this tool much till recently when I have been working on SEO. What you do is you type your keyword of your post, for example Web Hosting and it will give you all the other search terms people will be searching for. Now I take these terms and use them as tags and meta keywords to help me rank high in Google. It also lets me know which term will get the most traffic so that I know which one to use for my post title. Visit Site >>
Yahoo Site Explorer
This tool is great, basically to rank high in search engines you need lots of great links. Find someone who is ranking higher then you in your niche, put their URL in the Yahoo Site Explorer and you can see all the sites that link to it. Now go to these sites and negotiate advertising deals, link exchanges and guest blog posts. Visit Site >>
Go Try This
One thing that is really important as an affiliate, is knowing what converts. This tool shows me where my affiliates are getting clicked, so for example, I sell HostGator on my site and I want to know which page is converting the highest, this tool will tell me which page is giving me the most clicks. Also, it will redirect your URL’s so instead of giving a long HostGator affiliate url, I can have a URL such as /hostgator – which I have read, improves conversions. Visit Site >>
Alexa
Although not very accurate for their traffic details, it is a very useful tool. For those who don’t know how Alexa works, it basically ranks every website in the world by the amount of people who visit a site that are using the Alexa toolbar. Visit Site >>
Quantcast
Great piece of software for those though are buying advertising space, this tool allows you to see who you typically reader is, where they live, how old they are, how much they earn a year etc.. Visit Site >>
Market Samurai
Find out how to uncover “gold-nugget” keywords – each of these keywords can send hundreds, even thousands of free visitors to your site each day. Using this tool you can discover exactly how to beat the competition, and get front-page rankings in Google for high-traffic keywords in weeks or days – not months or years. Visit Site >>
Google Website Optimizer
This is one of the hottest pieces of software I’m using right now to test my site. It allows you to test different aspects of your website, for example say your not sure if your sidebar is converting well, design a second sidebar and use Google Website Optimizer to test which one pulls the most clicks. Visit Site >>
Website Grader
This tool basically allows you to learn everything about your site, how well it’s doing in the search engines, is it getting much traffic, how many social sites are linking to you.. etc. Visit Site >>
Tests You Should Try On Your Website
Increasing Affiliate Box Clicks
Go to your Google Analytics and pick one of your most visited pages, for me it was my Top 30 Earning Blogs post. I had a paragraph in it where I was promoting affiliate product, I knew it wasn’t making me much money so I decided to run CrazyEgg on this blog post. Over a couple days I saw that the affiliate links didn’t receive any clicks at all, I remember my friend told me using a stop sign really helps draw eyes to things. So using these two bits of information I tested different stops signs and ended up using a green sign to match the site. Adding this sign increased the clicks on affiliate links from 0 to 12 clicks a day. Admittedly not a lot of clicks but a lot more then what I had before, I now have rolled this out so that I use it at the bottom of every blog post because I used these tools and found it worked.
Finding Whats Converting Readers The Most
As an affiliate blogger, I need to know which page is making people take action. Running the GoTryThis software on my blog, I can see which pages are getting the most clicks on affiliate links and then comparing them to other pages, can see what call of action is making the reader take action.