Welcome back to Day 6 of my Quick Tips - how I would get started from scratch, taking my business online or starting a business online, knowing what I know now.
The next thing I would do, having done all of the steps outline in my previous tips in this series is..
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Learn how to use Google Website Optimizer.
This is really the one thing I wish I'd learned how to do earlier.
All those millions of variations of our website, all those changes, none of them tracked for effectiveness - what a waste of time and effort.
Essentially, if you are using it with a squeeze page, you simply set up an "experiment" within Google Optimizer, called an A/B Experiment.
Then Google gives you some code - two bits of code which you drop into the source / HTML code of your squeeze page, and then you create a second version of your page with, say, a different headline, and add another bit of code to the source code of that page.
Then you create one "thank you" page and put a fourth bit of code in the source code of that page.
Then you send all your traffic to your main URL, and Google sends half of it to one version of the page, and half to the other version, and the bit of code on the thank you page tracks which headline was most effective.
Devastatingly simple to use, and you will never have to guess about anything on your site again.
You can split test headlines, or colours of headline, or sub-heads, or calls to action, or the colour of your buy now button.
If you get enough traffic, you can even do something called multi-variate testing.
You can test many different versions of your page at once.
Wow! But be ready for the results - the customers always love the versions you hate! Can you see how powerful that is? So many people agonise about what to put on their pages...
now you don't have to.
Just test and measure, test and measure.