MindValley Labs Internet Marketing Blog

I was listening to a CD by Jay Abraham last night. Jay’s the uber-marketing Guru credited with helping the founder’s of Fedex launch their billion-dollar company. When Jay speaks - marketers listen.

One thing Jay mentioned really caught my attention. It’s a lesson I truly wish more website owners - from ecommerce players to Web 2.0 site - would pay attention to.

Jay’s message is this: You’ve got to TEST different elements of your site. First know what it is that you want your visitor to do. Is it purchase a product? Sign up for your latest Web 2.0 application? Download a PDF?

Pick a goal.

Now you need to test two or more copies of your site to see which variation creates the better response to your goal. So far - pretty obvious right?

But here’s what Jay stressed - the single most important thing to test is the headline and opening paragraph. Forget the rest of your copy. Forget your fancy graphics or design. Forget the colors and layout. Test the headline. If you test anything else before the headline - you’re just not getting it!

This advice resonated with me last night. Today I saw a beautiful example of this first hand.

I always test two copies of my pages. At any given time, we use the analytics tool Clickmuse to run two copies of a page and gather data on which copy is perfoming better. Checking my Clickmuse account today - I saw something that made me jump for joy - a new headline I dreamt up a few days ago had more than DOUBLED my sign-up rate.
Here’s the old headline:

Here’s the new one:

Percent improvement in sign-ups = 74.8%!

If sign-ups correspond to your sales - in our case they do - can you imagine seeing your profits go up by that much just by testing a few headlines?

So What made the new headline so much better.

I can come up with many hypotheses. For example, the new and improved headline starts with “How” and visitors that come to our site are trying to learn “How to grow their site.” However, that is not the point of this post. The two points to take away are:

1) A different headline can have a HUGE impact on the sign-up rate of your site

2) Creating a new headline can be done in just a few minutes

So, test, test, test! The key is to have a good testing software that allows you to test two headlines simultaneously so that you can rapidly improve the sign-up rate of your site. For testing, we of course use ClickMuse, which is our own site optimization software. (blatant plug).

PS - those of you from Reddit, BlinkList and Digg, will notice this same effect on Social News Sites. Often articles with the best headlines get pushed up further by virtue of drawing more attention. Great articles with crappy headlines lose rank pretty fast.

Recent posts by Mike

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About the Author

Prior to MindValley Media, Mike was the Head of New Ventures Strategy at eBay where he conceived of the strategies that led to the investment in Craigslist, the launch of Kijiji.com and the acquisition of Skype. Mike has an MBA from Stanford and previously worked for the Boston Consulting Group. He is also a certified Google AdWords Professional.

Check out other posts by Mike

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