How to Use Conversion Optimization to Grow Your Blog

This guest post was written by Alex of ToMakeALiving.

It’s pretty well established that to grow your blog you need to write well, and you certainly wouldn’t struggle to find a dozen or so posts which offer suggestions that mostly boil down to “learn to write good content.” Well, duh…

But assuming you can write, there is plenty of other stuff you can do to improve your blog.

So rather than launch into yet another checklist about how to make a nice looking, effective blog post, I am going to share with you a more scientific method: conversion optimization.

What is conversion optimization?

Quite simply, conversion optimization is the process of using measurable behaviour data and testing small or large changes to see what effect they have on the page or site.

Basically, you can change absolutely anything on your site and actually test it to see what works best. So rather than spending hours umming and ahhing over exactly what shade of grey to use for your text, you can test a number of shades and get a precise result.

Why is it so awesome?

Well, as I hinted at above—and I’m sure you’ve all done this once or twice—most bloggers design their sites based on how they like them; this is totally missing the point, though. Assuming you want to grow your blog, it is your users that matter, not your own personal tastes.

Your personal preference on how to lay out your navigation might turn out to be less desirable than a layout that you would have rejected. Small things really can make a big difference, and I don’t know about you, but I would rather pick the setup that gets and keeps the most readers.

How to get started

Like I said, we are going to do this scientifically, no guess work involved. So we are going to start by finding the right application. Google have a free Website Optimizer, which works just fine if you are on a budget.

If you can afford it though, I highly recommend Visual Website Optimizer—it is far easier and faster to use, which means you will use it more, and that’s a good thing.

What can you track?

All manner of things. But we are talking about your blog here. So what matters most for your blog? Well here are the things I tend to track:

Bounce rate

If you can reduce your bounce rate, you will retain more visitors. That’s got to be good, right?

Signups

You are hopefully trying to get people to sign up to your mailing list. The better your sign up form works, the more subscribers you will get.

Key pages

You can track specific pages and navigation paths from one page to another, for instance, from a particular post to a page which tells people about one of your affiliate products.

Once you get to grips with the process, you can start testing other elements, but these are good things to start with because they are simple to test and they will make the biggest difference to your blog.

Setting up your first experiments

Actually using the software is simple enough, and you’ll soon get to grips with it, so I’m not going to go through the nitty gritty. The biggest challenge starting out, though, is thinking up some experiments to run. So here are a few ideas.

1. Look and feel

How many times have you been torn about what color to make your text? What font to use? What background image looks best? Well, for our first experiment we are finally going to answer that question.

For my first experiment, I created three different backgrounds—one was just plain light blue (this was the original one), one was busier, with black swirls, and one had a color gradient. I ran the experiment with all three backgrounds being split equally among users.

The aim of the experiment was to see which background produced the lowest bounce rate across the entire site.

The results were actually pretty surprising—the swirly background came out with the lowest bounce rate, at 51%, and the second-best was the plain blue, which came in at 62%. So overall this one experiment helped me to reduce my bounce rate by 11%.

2. Signup form

For my next experiment, I decided to test whether a popup would increase my sign ups, and also whether a popup would increase my bounce rate. My main concern was that I didn’t want to push away or annoy my visitors, but I did want more people to subscribe to my blog.

I created a simple signup form, and set it so that it wouldn’t keep appearing for repeat readers. Then I ran an experiment that tested this popup against pages where the sign up form appeared as a widget in the side bar.

As expected, the popup increased signups; the shocking thing was by how much—across just over 1000 visits, the popup form produced 72% more signups. Even more surprising was that the bounce rate was actually 0.5% lower than the signup form.

3. Key pages

For experiment number three we are going to target a specific page. One of my key navigation pages is 8 ways to make money. I wanted to experiment with how best to lay out the page in order to get people to click through to a relevant strategy, and not exit the site or go elsewhere.

I tried a grid layout of 2×2 panels against a simple list. I also tried pages with and without small descriptions for each section, and I tried different bullet points. All in all there were about 6 or 7 alternatives, so I let the test run for a while so that I could be sure I had enough data.

The results showed me that a 2×2 grid layout worked best, short descriptions did help, and bullet points didn’t make any discernable difference either way (so I got rid of them). Overall, I was able to improve the goal rate (visitor clicking on any of the eight “strategies”) by 46%.

Building your own experiments

So there you have it: three experiments to try out. As you can see, these are all pretty simple. The key is that you are testing them with real visitors so that you don’t have to rely on guess-work.

Sometimes you might find that the best layout is the one you already had, but if you keep testing different variations, you can really improve your blog, one small change at a time. I started with things like background images and other simple changes, but you once you feel confident you can change headers, tag lines, navigation—or whatever you want.

Just imagine if you could halve your bounce rate and double your signup rate; wouldn’t that help you to grow your blog much faster?

Targeting specific pages

Just a final thought: once you are happy with your overall site layout, you can start trying to improve individual pages. I always start by looking at my analytics—one option is to look for any posts that have a relatively high exit rate.

These are pages which are losing you traffic, so again, if you can reduce your exit rate, you will retain more traffic and increase the time that people spend on your site.

Your actual experiment can involve changes whatever you like. Simple things might be adding/removing/changing images. You could also play with headings and subheadings, and you can even try a complete re-write of the page or test long copy vs. short.

Summary

I hope this post has given you some inspiration to go and get started with your own simple experiments. You can do a lot to improve your blog by simply getting in the right mindset. Results vary and you can never be totally sure what will and won’t work, but when you can see the numbers in front of you, and a clear improvement, it is very encouraging.

Have you tried conversion optimization experiments? Share your experiences in the comments.

This post was written by Alex from ToMakeALiving a site dedicated to showing you how to earn money online. The site covers all kinds of money making strategies and gives you the complete guide from planning to monetizing.