For growing ecommerce or affiliate sites, the answer to increasing conversion and achieving better marketing results is A/B Split testing. And as I’ve found during repetitive searches for the most useful software available online for split testing, Visual Website Optimizer is hard to beat for the price.

If you are new to ecommerce, you have most likely focused your time and attention on the design and usability of your website. Many website owners separate their marketing efforts from the actual look and feel of the website. After all, even when you track landing pages it is difficult to gauge exactly what a user likes and dislikes about that certain area. What makes them choose to click the “add to cart” button or inquire about your services? It has been a hit or miss proposition until the advent of A/B split testing.

In website split testing, you direct traffic between two or more versions of the same page and then analyze the difference success of each. The first time I experimented with split testing I changed the color of the call to action on a sign up form. The results were nothing short of stunning. I found that changing the graphic from a color that blended and matched my website design to a color that stood out, in this case a outlandish red, resulted in a 23% increase in signups. It was a simple test, but it showed how quickly you can zero in on a potential design problem that was detracting from a proper conversion.

There are a few free products out there that will allow you to test elements of your website. Google Website Optimizer is a free tool that allows you to perform both A/B testing or multivariate testing. Although it performs well, I’ve found that the software is limited in its features and isn’t as intuitive as VWO to.

On the opposite end of the spectrum, there are tools such as Adobe Test and Target powered by Omniture. Although for small businesses, it could take a long time before you recoup your return on a $10,000 or more annual investment.

By far, the best bang for marketing dollars comes in the form of Visual Website Optimizer. The software is feature rich. Among the many distinct and user friendly features of VWO are:

Graphical charts
By and large, the simplest way to analyze data is by viewing it in color-coded charts. VWO utilizes the open source FLOT Charts to provide powerful, easy to use charts that will let you analyze your test results quickly and easily.

An example of the charts in Visual Website Optimizer

Clickmaps and Heatmaps
If you’ve ever wondered what areas of your web page gain the most attention, Clickmaps and Heatmaps will tell you. When combined with A/B testing, Clickmaps will pinpoint the tiniest area of your web page that gains the most clicks.

Integration with Google Analytics
When you are serious about your website statistics, you use Google Analytics to track visitors and landing pages. With the integration of the VWO plugin, you can harness the power of A/B testing and Google Analytics together on one page. Simply add one line of code to your Analytics code and you are ready to roll.

WordPress Plugin
There is a WordPress plugin so you have the ability to utilize A/B testing without messing around with the code, there is also a Drupal plugin for those of you yet to love WordPress.

API
For the advanced users there is an API that allows coders to automate and integrate their tests into their applications.

Visual Website Optimizer has features that make it as simple and plug and play, even for those just starting out. Beginners can utilize the assistance of a WYSIWYG editor to run both A/B split testing and multivariate testing. VWO will allow you to track both conversion rates as well as revenue metrics, which means that you can immediately see which links are clicked as well as how much each user is spending depending on certain variables. In comparison to Adobe Test and Target as well as Google Website Optimizer, Virtual Website Optimizer has more features for a better price.

In my opinion, I feel that Visual Website Optimizer is a fantastic tool that no online marketer or online business should be without. VWO is extremely powerful, and can be used to run tests while you are still in the process of learning about the strength of A/B Testing. And the best part? It comes with a 30-day trial offer, which means that you can take it for a test drive and have it earn its keep before you need to pay for it.

Quick Pro Tip

Although no one really knows what Google bases their search algorithm on, we do know that the popular search engine will reward a constant output of unique content with high page rankings. Because of this, a new type of writer has emerged from the ranks of Professors, Journalism majors, and reporters that previously dominated the Internet. I like to call this type of writer a “content provider” and you can find them producing page after page of search engine friendly articles in a quick, timely fashion. Even more advantageous for those who use content providers? You can often obtain a 500 word article for $5 or less. Great, right? But as your Father might have told you when you were growing up, you often get what you pay for.

How do you find the right type of content writer for you? You can focus on what you need from a content writer by answering the following questions:

What type of writing do you need?

People search for writers based on need. No matter what you are looking for, there are many websites available online that can help. It truly depends on what type of writing you are looking for:

• Filler content for a website: The term “Content Mill” applies to websites like Demand Studios. You would can purchase bulk amounts of website filler such as “How To” articles from these types of websites, all for an extremely low price. Demand Studios is not a site you would use to search out someone to provide you with custom writing.
• Original content, but you aren’t that interested in high quality: Textbroker has thousands of contractors available, and can provide you with content rewriting or original articles. You choose what type of content you want, whether it is two stars (low quality) or 5 stars (high quality). This type of service is great if you need a 10,000 product catalog rewritten or you want low quality filler content, because you can get what you want cheaply and easily. However, high quality writers will not sign up for Textbroker due to the fact that you have to work your way through payment scales from 2 stars to 5 stars.
• High quality writing: Odesk.com & Elance.com have providers located in both Canada and the USA, and are the sites to find higher quality content writers. If you need press releases, original articles, or even short novels, you can find a contractor that will provide you with what you are looking for. Often writers employed on Odesk have degrees or are journalists seeking side contracts, so the quality of writing can exceed your expectations. Even better, Odesk protects both the contractor and the employer by tracking the contractor’s work time.

How much are you willing to spend on your website content?

How large your writing budget is will often dictate the type of writer you find. As stated, if you only want to spend the bare minimum, you can find a writer on any of the above listed websites that will provide you with an article for less than a penny per word. I’ve seen contractors bid .45 cents for a 1000 word article, but I can only imagine that the end result was riddled with spelling errors or could have potentially been copied from another article. Writing a decent article takes time and research, and the price goes up accordingly.

How quickly do you need your project completed?

The Web is a great place if you need something done quickly, but quick doesn’t always mean quality. Writers can often churn out 5 or more 500-word articles per day if there is no research required. In fact, I’ve seen contractors on Odesk pull 10-hour shifts when doing an hourly job, submitting page after page of low quality content.

Many high quality writers will not give you a same day turn around, as it can be very difficult to write well about a topic you may know nothing about. Research is always key to sounding knowledgeable and providing a interesting and easy to read article.

Be clear with your content provider and you will be happy with the result

Once you have selected a content provider, it is important to be clear about your objectives. Let the writer know what type of tone you would like the article to take, whether it is casual, formal, or even funny. If you want keywords placed in the article, be sure to provide those up front as well as specifications as to how you want the keywords used. As well, set your word count up front. If your writer has no idea that you wanted 1000 words, they may only produce 500.

As you may never meet your freelance writer face to face, it is important that you protect yourself from possible scams or plagiarized content. Always pass your articles through Copyscape. You will ensure that the article you purchased is original, and not have to worry someone will ask you to remove it from your site due to plagiarism.

It is getting more tricky to drive traffic to your website, but with a constant flow of quality content, you will definitely be ahead of the game. The number one piece of advice that I can offer when choosing a content provider? Don’t be afraid to pay for quality. There is a reason that high quality writers get paid per word, and although you may feel as though you can get a better deal somewhere else, you may end up losing money in the long run.

Google is now rightly factoring site speed into the rankings of websites and although at the minute a slow score as measured by Googlebot and an aggregate score from Google toolbar users is only said to be affecting 12% of websites – it is going to become a bigger ranking issue over time. Putting a side the end outcome of increasing rankings another SEO benefit of a fast loading site is that search engines are more likely to crawl deeper into your site, after all crawling billions of pages takes time so the engines do reward sites that can feed them pages quickly with deeper more frequent crawls.

The following are some quick easy fixes and some more involved tweaks in order to optimize a WordPress website for speed.

Upgrade to the latest version

It might seem obvious but many sites are still running a WordPress install that is 18 months out of date. Not only is this a security risk, but also the later versions of WordPress contain many optimizations for speed that were not in earlier versions.

[box type="info"]But remember backup everything before you upgrade – especially if you are upgrading from a really old version.[/box]

Upgrade those Plugins

In the same way you have upgraded the core CMS, it is worth keeping on top of all plugins as plugin authors are always learning new ways of making it run faster, be more compatible and importantly fixing those security holes.

Delete Plugins you don’t need

While you are looking at plugins, one of the easiest fixes is to remove any unwanted plugins that are currently activated in your WordPress install. Every plugin gets loaded and executed even if they are not in use.

Install W3 Total Cache

One of the best WordPress plugins for optimizing your site for speed is W3 Total Cache. Not only will this plugin allow you to cache whole pages, but it also gives you granular control over things like Gzipping the HTTP delivery of the pages, Minifying your HTML, CSS and JavaScript and even an easy way to integrate you theme files with a CDN (see Below)

Make sure you set W3 Total Cache to strip comments out of your code, after all they serve no purpose for anyone but you and your developer and while you are at it might as well combine all of your CSS and JavaScript into One at a per template level in order to avoid extra http requests to your server.

Remove unwanted PHP from templates

You may have bought an amazing theme from the likes of Woothemes.com, but when they made it they didn’t have you in mind and built it for any one to customize via a variety of backend menus. Once you have customized it to your site it is worth going into the templates and hard coding the choices that you have made. If you do this you can save many database calls on the following:

• Site Name
• Logo URL
• Site Description
• Navigation links
• Links to Social Media Profiles
• Variables that check if a featured box is to be show or not

Move that JavaScript

Move any inline Javascript to the footer of the site if it is unable to be loaded asynchronously, this allows the rest of the page to render in a users browser instead of it having to wait for the Javascript to be loaded and executed.

Optimize your WordPress Database

Over time the MySQL database that powers a WordPress site vane benefit from being optimized. You can either do this via phpMyAdmin or an easy way is to use the Optimize plugin from Yoast.

Remember to deactivate it after use to avoid it being loaded for no reason!

Move the Database to a separate server

On very high traffic sites it’s worth looking at moving the database to its own dedicated server and using Memcached to reduce the number of queries that actually reach the database. WordPress can utilize Memcached easily via the awesome W3 Total Cache plugin.

Turn Off Post revisions

Every time you fix a spelling mistake within a post you are causing you database to bloat as WordPress stores extra versions of your post to enable you to restore to an older version. This extra data takes up space in the database and probably isn’t required and cause a database slow down. Also WordPress itself gets sluggish when you approach the 10K post mark so having a whole load of redundant revisions is getting you there quicker.

To disable post revisions add on of the following to wp-config.php

define(‘WP_POST_REVISIONS’, false); // to disables post revisions completely

define(‘WP_POST_REVISIONS’,2); // to only keep last 2 revisions

Social Media Buttons & Badges

They are great for driving traffic and helping your users to share content, but do you really need all of them?
The most popular social media buttons display an interactive vote or like counter using a JavaScript call back to the social media mother ship. This is an additional http request and pause and can have a detrimental impact on speed when you have a lot of these buttons on a page. The best advice here is to look at where you traffic is coming from and where it has potential to come from. For example unless you are paying a network of power users don’t bother with a digg.com button it won’t bring you traffic but it will slow down each page load. The Facebook button also makes a request back to Facebook which is often slow, but chances are Facebook will deliver decent traffic so its worth keeping.

One thing to avoid is including social media Javascript on a per post level on list pages, as this can cause 10 calls to each social site for the single page load.

Embedding Videos

If using video embed codes from YouTube or Vimeo make sure you use their latest iframe embed code as this will not slow your site down but instead load in parallel. In WordPress you cannot just paste an iframe so instead you need to use a plugin in order to enable the use of tags for that player, but there are plugins to make it work.

Avoid the http traffic jam

The http spec implemented a suggestion that no browser session should hold more than 2 sockets to the same server and many web browsers keep true to this even today. One easy solution is to move all of your assets such as images, videos, CSS, JavaScript to a new sub domain such as static.yourdomain.com. This allows the browser to load files from the main site and the subdomain at the same time, effectively doubling the amount of files that can be loaded by the browser at once. If you have a site that contains a lot of assets on each page – for example a grid of thumbnail images – you can scale this to run over many subdomains such as static1, static2, static3, and static4 and then use PHP to randomize the host that is called per file.

If an image is required more than once per page, you will need to ensure that the randomization is intelligent enough to assign both instances of the file the same host. If you don’t the different host name will make the browser think that it is a different file and then reload the image rather than pulling it from the cache.

Use a Content Delivery Network

Content Delivery Networks take a copy of a set of your files, such as images or videos and cache them on many servers around the world. The idea here is that the files are then available on a server only a few hops away from any user requesting them. For example a user trying to stream a video that is hosted on a London server, who lives in Hawaii will greatly benefit from the video being cached in Honolulu. CDNs used to be only for the biggest websites as the big CDNs like Limelight and Akamai are financially out of reach of a small website. Recently new CDNs have emerged that are aimed at the smaller website, these include MaxCDN and Amazon Cloudfront.

WordPress can easily be set up to serve static files from a CDN without making any code changes to the theme, you simply need to use the W3 Total Cache Plugin which has a CDN configuration page.

Use Asynchronous Google Analytics

Google analytics is traditionally a piece of JavaScript that sits at the bottom of each html page and once loaded captures the information on who is on the website and what they are doing. The trouble is that the old Analytics code was synchronous meaning that it acted as a bottleneck for your browser and when it loaded the browser was unable to finish rendering the page until it was complete. Google have recognized this and released a new asynchronous JavaScript code that gets called from the head of the page. With the Asynchronous JavaScript the users browser is able to load it in the background while continuing on to the rest of the html, resulting in a slightly improved load time.

The simplest way to utilize this on WordPress is via this Google Analytics WordPress plugin, which also has some great customization options.

Fast Web hosting

Hosting your site on an overcrowded web server at a cheap web host is going to kill all of the speed optimization work you have done so far. It really is not worth saving a few dollars to end up with a website that’s takes 10 seconds to load and crashes at the first sign of popularity. A good web host will not only have made the investment in expensive infrastructure, but they will also be monitoring load and adding new resources to meet demand.

There is a hosting company who specialize in hosting WordPress sites, they are incredibly fast and have invested millions in infrastructure and bespoke development in order to host and deliver the fasted hosting that you could want for a WordPress website. The company is called WPEngine and they have received investment from the owners of WordPress (Automattic), so they must be doing something right. Check out WPEngine and try their evaluation tool that can assess your current site and let you know how much they can speed it up.

Find out what else is slowing you down

Once you have completed these steps you should also test your site using the Yahoo! Yslow browser plugin or Google’s Page speed tool. Both of these tools will highlight any other issues with un-optimized CSS, too many http requests or other issues that you may not have considered.

Angering Twitter even further, designer Kenneth Cole repeated the faux pas in 2011:

Millions are in uproar in #Cairo. Rumor is they heard our new spring collection is now available online.

The offending tweet was still online even after an apology was eventually posted.

There are some less sensitive hashtags, such as the popular “#FF”, which can be used more subtly if the tone behind them is genuine. Alex Burmaster, communications director at research firm Nielsen Online, put it succinctly:

The art is in being able to tap into those conversations without alienating people.

2. Tell the time

Bear in mind your audience, their routine and their location when you tweet. Many services which auto-post from RSS feeds, such as dlvr.it, can be set to stop posting at certain times. Unless you are trying to engage a global audience, there are usually certain times of the day which should be avoided.

The best times to tweet may surprise you: a recent study by Mashable suggests that Mondays are best avoided, and late night tweets well outside working hours convert to clicks far more effectively than you’d expect.

3. Crowdsource

Engaging the CEO is a tactic recommended elsewhere, and in Lord Sugar’s case it seems to have been a very savvy move. Having raised awareness of his autobiography, “What You See Is What You Get”, he has more recently crowdsourced the cover for his next book from his Twitter followers – a posse nearing the 1 million mark.

Lord Sugar may benefit from a great deal of behind the scenes advice on Twitter marketing, but there’s no doubt his tactics work, albeit with a few hiccups. A few comments on his potential book covers were less than favourable, and he halted a subsequent competition intended to attract new followers when he realised savvy Twitter users were crudely manipulating the stats.

4. Give something back

Small companies have huge success with giveaways and prizes on Twitter, and many are coming up with far more sophisticated ways to spread the word than asking their followers to retweet a marketing message (although this can be equally successful – it’s a tactic used by Korg and Eyeko, to name but two). Hip camera manufacturers Lomography regularly run games of Jeopardy through their Twitter account, offering cameras and accessories as prizes for the quickest correct answers. It’s a stroke of genius – a game perfectly suited to 140 characters that gets a marketing message out interactively.

5. Stay professional

Don’t hound those who unfollow you. Many will have good reasons for doing so. There’s nothing less attractive than a brand publicly chasing an ‘unfollower’ (particularly when they begin retweeting their meek and apologetic responses). Likewise, don’t retweet those who criticise in the hope you can mobilise your army against them.

6. Automate with care

Many guides and walkthroughs advise easy automation of Twitter feeds. In fact, fully automated feeds come across as little more than visual noise. Linking a blog with Twitter is generally considered acceptable, as long as the subject – as posted in the tweet – is descriptive enough to pair with the link to your blog post. However, most of your customers will not want to know when you post each of your 300 holiday photographs on Flickr.

Once you’ve linked up two or more social networks, have a look at the results. Truncated tweets with links back to Facebook are a particularly ugly outcome of automation which should be avoided.

7. Engage

Many companies now actively seek out less than favourable tweets. This kind of active support catches customers off-guard and is incredibly effective. Companies successfully employing this tactic include the Halifax bank, who have recently been responding to angry tweets when phone lines were busy, and Virgin Media. Providing a direct line of communication back to the source – such as a direct email address – is a sure fire way to make your customers feel wanted and create a positive user base who are more responsive to your tweets.

It also reflects the most important aspect of the Twitter marketing experience: be human. The more human your company is on Twitter, the more real life humans will want to know what your company is up to.

function from_apachedate($date)
{
list($D, $d, $M, $y, $h, $m, $s, $z) = sscanf($date, "%3s, %2d %3s %4d %2d:%2d:%2d %5s");
return strtotime("$d $M $y $h:$m:$s $z");
}

Would be nice if Twitter gave a unix timestamp as standard…