Testing CTR and Landing Page Optimizations

When it comes to conversion rates, SEO, CTR, and everything else to do with optimizing the revenue and traffic to a website we all like to talk about testing variations.

We look at testing landing page layouts, color on adsense ads, various SEO methods and then we analyze and then test again, and again, and again, and again.

That is great, we have to do that, on a high traffic site a 1 percent difference in CTR can make a big difference in revenue so every tweak can make a big difference, make sure you track the changes you make though and see what the results were.

I recently did this on a high traffic site of mine, it is a site that has had a very predictable CTR and RPC for over a year. To me this is the easiest site to test on sense any change you make can be compared to a long track record, if you have only had a site up for a month it is hard to compare any test data against a long term trend.

But after I tried my first test I did not get any meaningful results, so I tested again (all theme layouts targeted at getting higher CTR) and then I tested again. My last two tests actually dropped CTR compared to the long term trend.

What is interesting about that drop in CTR was that the themes I tried were actually very high performers on other sites, literally got 3 times the CTR than the theme I was using on the site I was testing, but when I used them on the test site the CTR dropped. Wow.

So, whats the moral to the story, test and test again but in many cases the grass is not greener on the other side.

Oklahoma.me On The Launch Pad

We have been actively working to get Oklahoma.me ready to go and are just a week or so away from a formal marketing launching. We are extremely happy to see the ease of deployment of our geo-platform onto another state and based on the tweaks we made moving from Missouri.me to Oklahoma.me we have accelerated our abilities to deploy on our other states moving forward.

One thing that we really strived to do from the beginning was to make sure that each state we launch had the same look and feel as the rest of the network but still use colors and logos that relate directly to the state being launched.

On that note, it is important for everyone to think about building platforms and not sites when developing. If you are looking to build a network of sites or simply product related sites that could benefit from the re-use of code in the background it is very important you plan for this from the beginning.

From inception we had the mindset that the face of the site was the simple part, the more complex part was the core platform in the background, how the interactions occurred between items and APIs from other sites all comes down to the core software platform which in turn is why we completely custom coded everything in the core of the system. It allows us to add new features and functionality to our network of state sites easier than if we would of built each site individually.

We look forward to serving Oklahoma in the same way we have Missouri. The feedback here has been great and we expect nothing different in Oklahoma.

Also, thanks to Ron Jackson for mentioning this in the Lowdown today. It was a great story about how domain developers are continuing to grow their businesses despite the downturn.

Dropped Domain to Minisite in The Same Day

With my focus lately on my geo developments I have not spent much time on domain drops or minisites. In the past week though I spent sometime going through drop lists and one of the names I acquired on SnapNames was DallasTexasMortgage.com which has a solid exact match result in the Google Adwords Keyword Tool with 8,100 local exact match searches and has a solid PPC value as well. For a financial or mortgage name I was pleased with those numbers.

After acquiring it yesterday I realized I had not put one site together in a few months, I thought it may be fun to spend a couple hours turning it up and building a few links. First thing I had to do was determine if I was going to use Wordpress or standard HTML. I chose to base it on one of the templates I had received from AEIOU.com in the past.

After choosing the theme it was time to make the modifications needed, I had someone throw together a quick header for me since I admittedly have no graphic skills and then I started making the proper changes to the site titles (per page), made the proper SEO changes to name of each file of the site, and then started to write the content. By no means is the site full of information, but for the time I was allowing myself I did not expect to have the be all end all of a mortgage resource site, that happens over time. My attitude is if you never start you can never finish.

After writing the content and making the proper title and meta tag changes it was time to load up the site which took less than just  a few seconds since it was a simple 5 page site. After that though a few links needed to be built to at least start the process, a few tweets, a couple stumbleupons, and a few posts on blogs that we have that get reasonable traffic and we were good to go there.

I expect Dallas Texas Mortgage to be a reasonably tough term to get ranked for but with the larger development plans we have for this name and some other links that we have at our disposal I hope to work this one up the Google search results over time. At the end of the day though this was done for fun and it should turn into profit as well, I was missing having my hands on the keyboard and turning up a site. From the time I started to the time I finished was less than 2 hours. Still some more link building to do but I am more pleased with this than I would of been with a purely parked site.

Domain Buy Offers From My Minisites

Although I do not speak about my AEIOU.com minisites as much here of late due to my focus on my full business development of Missouri.me and my other Geo domain names I do still keep tabs on them and do link building and other items related to the tender loving care of the sites. The majority of them are revenue generating and most lived up to the 10 month ROI that I was hoping for.

But, most importantly the thing that has been most surprising is the sales that have occurred from the For Sale link on the Minisite. I was always a bit skeptical about putting a For Sale link on a domain minisite since I was concerned about it pushing actual users away from the site even if the information on the site was useful. Luckily though that seems to not of been an issue since the CTR on most of the sites is quite solid (in some cases it exceeds 20 percent).

In the past 2 months I have had offers through the For Sale link on 3 different domains, 2 of them are closed deals and a 3rd we could not come to terms but if we had even at the offer that I received and turned down it would of been a profitable transaction. Also, before someone thinks that these are $500 deals after spending $200 on a minisite plus the domain cost that would not be the case. Both of the closed deals were mid $x,xxx, oh yeah and they were .NET domains.

The percentage of offers on these names compared to parked names or minisites without an obvious For Sale sign has been a bit surprising. I did not expect the largest profit to come from domain offers compared to Adsense revenue from these AEIOU.com sites.

This is one time I am very happy to of been proven wrong, I honestly expected the offers to dry up on these names after a site was developed on it. I like surprises:)

The Value of Product Roadmaps when Developing Domains

As much as I try not to put to much structure in place and cause headaches when first launching this little thing called Missouri.me there are certain concepts and ideas that work well no matter how large or small your enterprise/product.

The one that I think is of the most value is the idea of having a product roadmap when developing your product, in this case a website. When developing any major site the first thing that you need to understand is that it will never be done, EVER. If you are dealing with people outside the tech world this may be a new concept to them. But if you think that you are going to wait to have every feature you will ever think of before you promote or sell product on your site you will NEVER make it to market because you will run out of money before you make it to revenue.

What we did was developed a phased approach, where phase 1 was based on core features, phase 2 on major core changes (speed, etc), and phase 3 on nice to haves.

Now within each of those phases we had a point by point description of what the feature would do, complexity, etc. Thats all fine and great but what happens next is once everyone involved starts seeing that their features are pushed out to later phases people start wanting to pull things into to phase one. Let me give you an example of this happening. Last year I was consulting for a group of doctors in the area I live in, they were starting a company and had a rather ambitious plan for a product they wanted to create. At one point in the process I stopped them and said ok, next meeting we have one item on the agenda, we are going to build a road map, I told them up front what would happen, they would all list features, they would agree to structure it in phases but then I let them know everyone was going to ask for their feature to be in phase one. So what happened, you can guess, out of all the post its we stuck on the wall (I used them to make a point), a total of 3 out of 50 or so were not in phase one. Hows that for making a visual impact of the problem.

So, how do you fix this, its natural to think your feature or idea is the most important, but you need to take the personal emotion out of it. Numbers work best. For the first few months of development I spent the largest portion of my time managing the expectations and requests from the sales side of what was being created (I was part of the sales side which makes it real interesting). I always laid out that if X feature was added then Y feature would slip and then did my best to show how revenue timelines or amounts would be impacted. So how do you balance when to add features and when to make a change in the road map, prove how many customers or how much more revenue could be added.

At some point you have to put a line in the sand though and say that phase one (launch product) is locked down, if you do not do that you will never get to revenue and your business will fail before it starts. That happened with that group of doctors, they never could get to launch because they wanted EVERYTHING day one. They could not prioritize features that were required vs nice to have.

At the end of the day your product should always be improving and growing, it should never be done, you need to have a plan and realize that you cannot have your developers changing course everyday, nothing will ever get done. Structure your development plan to get the most bang for your development buck and you will be successful.

DrugReform.com Launches – Provides A Voice to Both Sides of a Hot Issue

In the midst of all the work that has been going into the launch of my larger venture in the background I have been working to get another project moving. Drug Reform is a hot social issue that most people have some opinion on. I had a few ideas on how I wanted to develop a site focused on the topic but really did not have a lot of time to focus on the specifics due to everything else going on.

I did not want to do a minisite, for this site I wanted something that was fully developed and could allow both media rich content and social network interactions. Whether someone wanted to discuss marijuana legalization or prescription drug laws this would be the place to do it and have debate between both sides of the issue. I wanted to show no bias from myself on the topic when it comes to content and management of the site.

Well, as luck would have it about the time I decided to start moving on this I met the now famous Tia Wood,  if you have not worked with Tia on a development project you should talk to her next time you are in need of a web developer. She took 2 sentences from me on my thoughts and turned that little bit of vision into a feature rich site that has all the functionality I asked for and more.

NOTE: Tia did not ask me to say that, and there is no affiliate link there:)

The site traffic has picked up very nicely as of late and I have handed over control to a friend of mine working in a partnership arrangement, he will focus on building content and interest in the site.

We just really started the push the last couple days, but if you get a chance look at DrugReform.com

Biggest Decision of My Life – Thanks to Domaining

OK, so the title may be a bit dramatic but I truly feel the decision I made a few weeks back and executed this morning may be the most important decision I have made outside of children and marriage.

Today I walked away from a six figure income at a leading technology company to focus on starting my own business. After 15 years in the corporate world it was time to take that leap and believe in the possiblities of what I can create and what has been created over the past several months. I could tell for sometime that I had really lost the passion for next generation telecommunication networks (I had been involved in carrier class VoIP networks all the way back in 1996 at ATT) and my heart just was not in that piece of the communication world.

As many of you know I am a big fan of Geo domains and believe now is the time to act to create a business to take advantage of the shift to "hyperlocal" search that we all have seen as part of the domaining community.  Back in December I had an idea for a business model that would allow for certain customer types to be targeted more effectively than they have in the past and along with some other services would create an online marketing solution for small businesses that could not be matched by other media and technology companies.

Initially I had planned to stay in the shadows a bit and let my business partner work the sales front and I would provide technology and marketing vision and drive the company from that side while I worked a rather demanding full time job. It would not be possible to provide much time to this endeavour and it was only fair to the company paying my paycheck that I gave them full effort on a daily , nightly, every minute of the day basis.

After the intial alpha launch of our site the intial reaction and success showed that we were onto something that would scale well and create a solid revenue stream for the company rather rapidly. But at the same time, once you see the possibilities you see that committing yourself fully could make the business much more than if you focused only part time.

So, after a few months of very deep soul searching I realized, do what I love. If you work on what you enjoy you will be successful, although there will be stress starting a business (Although strangely I feel none), at the end of the day the freedom and fullfillment you get from creating something and watching it grow is so much better than the daily corporate grind.  We have only been operational for a short time but the experience of watching customers react in such a positive manner is that much better when it is something you created (with a team, and never forget that).

Thanks to the domaining community for giving me the ability to create such a business. The support and advice I have received from the domaining and development community has been great.

Lesson learned here, develop, develop, develop, find an idea that is interesting and works from the business side AND that you will enjoy and good things will happen. Find a hole and fill it, provide solid service at a fair price. People will buy.

It is a GREAT DAY!

Ebay Affiliate Ads Instead of Google Adsense

I have not had the time to actually build many minisites lately do to a crazy schedule but tonight thought I would try something different than what I have done in the past. 

Although I have never focused much on affiliate ads and have always relied on Google Adsense and parking income I knew that to start increasing revenues I would have to get out of the Adsense addiction.  I have had accounts with Commission Junction and Linkshare for sometime but had been hearing some really good things (Thanks Bill!) about using PhpBay to integrate Ebay ads into your Wordpress blog in a very nice looking manner.

I actually started testing out the various functions of this nice script last night on ifones.com and plan on actually reducing the number of adsense ads I have and working to build more affiliate income. 

Tonight though I decided to focus on creating a more store like site, due to my wifes love of shoes I have managed to pick up several nice shoe related names based on her "inspiration", Stiletto Sandals is a term that gets searched several thousand times a month and is a very solid product focused term for a site such as this.

I also recently acquired Stiletto.net on a Godaddy auction and plan to implement something similar on it as well.

Before someone says, hey where is the content on StilettoSandals.com , the writer is already working on it and the site will have quite a few nice product focused articles on each of the types of Stilettos.

Now, I must say, this had to be one of the strangest research projects ever when it came to searching for various things for the writer to focus on and pics to include.  Some of the stuff on Flickr was pretty funny....

If you are looking to integrate Ebay into your wordpress site you may want to check out PHPBay.

Minisite To Google First Page In Less Than Month

Its been about a month since launched the Mathbooks.net minisite. I thought it would be good to review the results of the launch of this keyword rich minisite.

First off this site was done a little different than others I have done in the past. I had originally planned to build the site myself but due to time constraints I chose to outsource to AEIOU.com. So, this site is a combination of keyword researched content written by a selected writer I use for many of my sites and SEO and site development done by AEIOU.com. I also did a bit of my own link building but the majority was done by AEIOU.com.

Rather than take you through all 15 keyword selections I chose to target we will show the results for the top two: Math Books and Mathbooks. These are the most generic terms that could be chosen other than the singular version of the words which normally means that they will also be the most competitive. Math Books was shown to have a search volume of 90,500 in the month of March per the Google Keyword Research Tool.

Before the minisite I was getting anywhere from 1 to 3 visits per day parked. This created revenue but I knew I could do better with a site if I could rank well for the terms selected.

Well, the results are in, currently if you search for the term Math books the site ranks between 4 and 6 (seems to move around a bit but always consistent) and Mathbooks is ranking in the 4th spot. That is in less than a month, first page for a generic keyword in less than a month is a very solid result and shows that the work and investment can pay off.

Traffic is more than 10 times the visits per day than parked and revenue has obviously increased along with that. I very soon will be implementing Ebay Affiliate Ads on the page as well which should allow for even further increased revenues.

Free Minisite Ebook – Wordpress News Aggregator in 15 Minutes

Wordpress Minisite News Aggregator in 15 Minutes

UPDATE: A new version also now exists at How To Build A Wordpress News Aggregator although not in downloadable format, if you want a PDF this is the post for you.

Minisites for your Domains come in many different forms. One that has become popular is taking a niche and building a news aggregator using Wordpress and the FeedWordpress Plugin which is built specifically to aggregate RSS feeds from sources that you choose. This How-To Create A Wordpress Minisite Tutorial will show you how to create a Wordpress Minisite aggregating news for a specific topic, in this case using Cpanel and Fantastico.

If you do not have hosting with Cpanel and Fantastico then you should head to Hostgator.com, since they have packages that allow for unlimited Wordpress installations at very low prices, I use them for all of my hosting for both my dedicated servers and blog hosting for BruceMarler.com
Originally I was going to paste all pictures and info in one blog post but after seeing the length of the post I feel its best to offer it is a PDF document in a sort of informal E-Book format (for free of course).

To download the Wordpress News Aggregator in 15 Minutes Process click this link (its free) Wordpress Minisite News Aggregator in 15 Minutes

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