Website Optimization Techniques

Deciding the pricing of a product can be a tricky situation to be in. There is an optimum price tag for any product where the profits are maximized, but finding this sweet spot is the problem we need to solve.

Supermarkets are experts at this since they carefully analyse the data from millions of shoppers to finely tune their prices. But checking out the price of a can of beans in the supermarket does not help us much on the web I think.

So we have to do our own testing. It’s not efficient to guess, since if you get it wrong then you will make no sales. The price has to be dynamically adjusted to continually zero in on the most profitable price point for your product at any period throughout the year.

But to test with too many price points may be a problem if you have no idea of a suitable price and/or you have low visitor traffic to your sales page.

So it helps if you can get some knowledge of what digits to use in your online sales prices. Then you can produce a manageable number of variants of your sales price to test out.

To cut a long story short, the most profitable numbers to use are: 0, 1, 3, 5 to produce prices such as $15, $35, $100 etc. But this is not my data (it’s from the man from Costa Rica who shall not be named on Forums).

I am currently setting up a test with my own product and look forward to revealing results when I have them. Before this test, I did make multiple sales at $5 and one sale at $25

A while back I asked a question on a marketing forum why everybody was obsessed with using 7’s in their pricing since I couldn’t find any logic to it. And nobody out of the circa 100,000 members answered my question.

So that makes me suspect that the guru’s have programmed their automatic lemming buyers to respond to the “7″ digit. Of course, the guru’s do not reveal these kinds of secrets to their followers. Only those in “inner circles”. But let’s not get too mystical here.

p.s. I just found an option in my PayPal payment acceptance preferences that is set to “must have PayPal account” by default which I think would reduce sales, so I switched this setting, I don’t care what credit card processing system customers use as long as they buy.

If you have a selection of Ads to test, you are inclined to rotate them and see which ones work best. In my previous post I included some code to do this but to take it a stage further, there are some optimizations we can do to speed up the process of optimization of the Ads.

First of all you can monitor the clicks on the Ads. This is the first goal of a banner or text link Ad, to get the click. The second goal is to achieve a conversion to a sale or action such as a subscribe request.

As Ads get clicked, you can adjust how often they are displayed. The Ads that get clicked most should obviously be displayed more often but only after you have a statistically significant number of clicks to evaluate.

So you can give each Ad an exposure life time where they either perform or get binned. For example, 100 exposures. If the Ad gets exposed 100 times and there are no clicks on it then you may want to expire it. If most of the Ads in your rotation have similar dismal results, then you can start again with a higher exposure allocation and also, consider your web page content for improvement to get better relevancy to your Ads.

To further refine this process, we can track our visitors based on their IP address and attempt to give them a cookie. This way we can show the same Ads to this visitor so that we are testing the same set of conditions with them. What do you think? Is this the correct approach or should the Ads change on each hit on your site by the same visitor?

Also, we need to differentiate between real human visitors and robots. This is vital since it is very challenging to make a sale to a search engine robot.

The way I do this is by checking for common browsers such as FireFox, Internet Explorer and Opera. Since most of your human visitors will be surfing with just a handful of common web browsers, it is easier to check than trying to detect a bot. Some bad bots or content scrapers may fake the browser details but they should be in a minority, so this method should be accurate I think.

So now we have visitor data and click data for all our Ads. This allows us to calculate a click-through-ratio (CTR) for each of our Ads.

As the exposures build up, we can decide to make use of our CTR calculations to govern how often our Ads are displayed.

Say there are 3 Banner Ads in rotation: Ad1, Ad2, Ad3 and they have CTRs of 3%, 2% and 4% respectively.

3% CTR means 3 clicks in every 100 displays.

Reader exercise: can you think of the best way to display these Ads for maximum conversions given that conditions may change?

If you think that we should display the 4% CTR Ad all the time, it is the wrong answer I think since conditions can easily change such as your source of website visitors and anything else in the news etc.

If you do have wildly fluctuating sources of traffic (lucky you), you could look at creating separate landing pages for each traffic source.

So it is best to balance the exposures of each Ad according to their CTR. So in this simple case we could give the Ads a bias of 3:2:4 in our allocation of visitor traffic.

Now, the best performing Ads get the most exposure, but the under-performers still get a chance to improve or will die off.

But we have to continually adjust the settings as we recalculate the CTR values. So we need software to do this automatically. Stay tuned for my software

You may wonder why we are going to all this trouble just to rotate a bunch of Ads. The answer is to achieve optimum results in the shortest time possible and ideally on autopilot. Since in marketing, time is money and why waste time maximizing profits?

Wow, this is an interesting subject don’t you think?

To your success,

Mr MultiVar

Here is some simple Ad Rotation code that allows you to rotate affiliate links or banners on your website to check which ones actually produce sales.

It can be tedious manually updating affiliate links and you can end up leaving non-performing Ads on your site for a long time.

This code allows you to simultaneously test many Ads.

This code works in php pages such as Wordpress templates. Insert it into the wp-blog-header.php file or another included file.

Simply replace a,b,c etc. with the code for your banner ads or affiliate links. And, set the number to how many selections you want inserted on each page view. The code randomly chooses the selections each time.

Then insert the code: banners(); in your template where you want the banners/links to appear. This could be in your sidebar or header for example.

So you can now try many different Ads to check which ones actually produce sales on your site. If they all lead to the same offer then you will need to add a tracking tag to the html link. This is normally of the form: ?tag=id.

You could rotate, banners, images, and links to landing pages.

Currently I am testing a more sophisticated version of this script that weights the exposures of Ads based on their performance. This means that the Ads that get clicked show up more often. I will post more on this when the script is finalized.

- Mr MultiVar

In my last post, I included a YouTube video. You do this by copying the embed video code from the main page at YouTube for the video that you are interested in. Then paste this into a Wordpress Post.

When I viewed the page, all seemed fine apart from some small typos, so I went back and fixed them, but I made the mistake of using “Save and Continue Editing”. This brought up the Visual editor which messes up the code if you embed a video. Refreshing the page of the post, it looked fine so I clicked on “Save” in the editor and I was done.

Then I checked my site today and found it all messed up.

It’s because I saved the Post from the Visual editor.

To avoid this problem, click on the “Code” tab when you go to write a post. And then “Publish”. If you then want to make changes, use the “Code” tab and click save to avoid the Visual editor messing up the embedded video code.

Alternatively, you can disable the visual editor by checking a box in your user profile.

Since using video will be an important part of our business building strategy, this should be helpful to you I hope.

Regards,

Mr MultiVar

Now I have added some web page content to this site, the next stage is to generate visitor traffic.

To get the site listed in search engines I linked to it from one of my other sites via a blog announcement and also I mentioned this new project on a forum and included a link in my forum signature.

What I want to do next is start creating videos to upload to sites such as YouTube. These will be educational videos on topics like I will be covering here on this blog.

If people like the videos, I should get a following and curious people coming to read the blog. Also, the traffic will be highly targeted and free.

I think what puts most people off making videos is things like the sound of their voice, their lack of presentation skills and their lack of teaching skills. Well, I am poor in these areas too but I am trying to learn and get better as I do more of it.

The first stage is to make it as easy as possible to produce good videos despite your weaknesses.

So, the first thing to do is to get hold of software that produces videos from the computer screen so you don’t have to show yourself in the video. The industry standard software for capturing on screen activity is Camtasia Studio. Lucky you can download a free version of Camtasia Studio that is perfectly adequate for making videos.

Next we need to look at the audio. I had great difficulty recording clean sound from a microphone on my PC. This is because there is too much digital noise and also, the recorded speech is not loud enough for some reason. One solution I heard of is to purchase a USB headset so the audio is digitized before it gets to the PC.

Or you could use a separate sound card rather than the on board sound, or you may be lucky and have a better motherboard than me. So I tried my camcorder acting as a webcam just to use it’s microphone. This had plenty of volume and less digital noise but then I found that the sound of the PC’s fan was being picked up to spoil things.

In the end I used my laptop which has decent audio and runs quietly. I just had to play with the microphone recording level to get it as loud as possible but with not too much digital background noise. There was just a small high pitched buzz which I hope to filter out later in software.

I will try and use Audacity for this which is free audio editing software.

I should mention that you can record your voice with Camtasia, but my plan is to dub audio onto the captured video or narrate the video (talk) as I watch it. This should minimise the number of retakes necessary. Also, I expect I will want to edit the video. There are lots of video editing packages available. Sony Vegas is one I have been recommended for power and ease of use.

So this is the basic setup to produce videos.

To get my voice sounding better, I spoke slowly and lowered the tone. Plus I concentrated on the timing of my word delivery. I took the laptop to a quiet room and did some test recordings using Windows XP Sound Recorder (Accessories » Entertainment tools). After some practise, I was getting some great results with low background noise.

After this I found a great video tutorial on speaking clearly:

So now I am ready to make some videos. I will post again once I have the first video done and embed it on this blog.Some of the steps I am taking may seem a bit OTT but I think the extra effort to produce quality videos should pay off.Feel free to post your tips on this subject in the comments.

- Mr MultiVar

Woohoo, this is my first post and what better subject to cover than optimzing a new blog which I have just done myself.

Hopefully I can remember everything that I did, here goes:

I downloaded and installed the latest version of WordPress since it is the platform of choice for most bloggers so you can optimise the time you spend doing the important stuff such as posting content and not be bothered much sorting out technical issues.

Also, Wordpress lends itself to easy SEO (Search Engine Optimization). The first step is to head for the “Options” and change the permalink structure to “%postname%”. This gets rid of the question mark in the URLs and replaces it with the keywords of your blog post titles which you can manually alter too in the “Post Slug” tab when you are writing a post.

After saving the changes to the options you will be prompted to save a .htaccess file to the root of your blog install directory. This works with the apache server on your hosting to re-write the urls to the search-engine-friendly ones.

Next, I changed the category stub from “categories” (which nobody is likely to search for to “optimization”. Then the category urls can be made to be in a keyword rich string such as “optimize/website”. Get the idea? So the category urls are not dead meat duplicate content candidates that you wish weren’t there.

Then, throw some more ping sites into your ping list in the writing options. But, bear in mind that content harvesting sites will be out to get you to add them to your ping list so that they can instantly republish your content! If there is a long delay, then the search engines should log your site as the original source of your content, but who knows, if there is just a few milliseconds between the posts?

Also, I make the RSS feed a snippet rather than a full feed. I think it’s madness to do a full feed unless you are embedding links and Ads in your feed that benefits you having your full feed republished.

For comments, I am starting out by requiring at least one approved comment before the posts are immediately published. This should stop most of the spam getting published and the comments will still come in but with some potential irritation to new found fans.

The blog roll can be wiped to start with. Later, it can be used to shock bloggers with related but not quite so good sites that finally somebody is linking to them and magnetize them to your site.

The template is very important but can be changed later. I design my own since I don’t want every page on my site linking to a theme author’s site, but I do like the idea of sharing my blog theme to get the links coming my way.

The template should be structured so that the content is as close to the top of the html code as possible. That’s why you often see the navigation and junk at the right hand side of blogs. This helps the search engines find the content easily.

Then, you should ensure that titles of posts are in an H1 or H2 tag. On this site, my site name is important to me so I gave it an H1 tag and the post titles get an H2 tag.

The actual title tag is hyper important. That is the title text you see in the top left corner of your browser. We already got the keywords showing in the url of posts. Next we need to ensure that they are in the title tag, which they normally are, but move them to the left. Many sites have their site name to the left. Switch them around in your template to get the most important words (the post titles) to the left.

This is where I am now, the blog is set up and I am writing the first post. Notice it is quite long and useful. The next stage will be to go out into the wastelands of the web and seek out other related blogs to do some synergy with

I think that’s about all I can recall now about optimizing the setup of a new Wordpress blog. So please subscribe to this site and look forward to more optimization tips covering all aspects of webmastery.

Best regards,

Mr MultiVar

p.s. if there is anything you would like me to clarify, please say so in the comments …