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.

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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 Reining

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