The ezPalm Blog

Everybody talks about the importance of testing your sales copy or a page layout. After all, proper testing can help you modify your page in a way that will drastically increase your conversion rate.

In this article, I would like to describe a way to shorten the amount of time it takes to test your pages and to increase the probability of success.

Before I go any further, I would like to introduce a few concepts and notions that will be used in this article.

Attribute — a specific visual or conceptual element of a page, an ad creative, or a sales letter (used in fine-grained performance comparison testing). A few examples of what might be considered attributes:

• headline text

• headline font

• headline color

• order button size

• order button color

• order button text

Please note that even though those six things are related to only two elements, they are all separate attributes.

Attribute value - some particular setting of an attribute.

Here are a few examples of values:

• order button color, red

• order button color, green

• order button text, “Buy Now”

• order button text, “Add To Cart”

I just listed two values for two separate attributes.

Significant attribute — an attribute that affects the performance of a page.

Insignificant attribute - an attribute that does not affect (or has little effect on) the performance of a page.

There are some obvious significant attributes that are universal for everybody.

One example of such significant attribute is a headline.

It has been proven many times over that changes in a headline have a huge impact on the performance of a campaign or an offering, in any medium for any industry. You can find a lot of information about universal significant attributes in any book that deals with testing and response rates.

A much harder problem would be trying to identify significant attributes that are unique to your site, product, audience, or traffic source.

As I described in my report called “How To Win The AdWords Game,” the famous 20/80 rule applies to attribute testing just as well as it applies to many other things in our lives. In other words, 20% of the attributes you improve will produce 80% of overall performance increase.

Out of 100 attributes you decide to test, testing 80 attributes would be a waste of time. This is the reason many people fail to realize the importance of small attributes.

After all, if you follow the conventional wisdom of testing only one attribute at a time, you end up with no visible results and a firm belief that small attributes do not affect conversion. It is only logical to quit after testing 10 different attributes, one at a time, and having to wait one week for each attribute. The truth is, you have most likely spent that 10 weeks testing your insignificant attributes.

Since there is no way to know in advance which ones of your attributes are significant, the only reasonable thing to do is to test. You need to test and find out which attributes have the most effect on your visitors’ behavior before you start testing different values of those attributes.

Let me give you a simple example of what I mean:

You need to establish that a color of an order button is in fact a significant attribute before attempting to find the best producing color for that button. If you start testing different colors when that attribute is not significant, you just waste your time.

So how can you find which attributes are significant and which are not in a reasonable amount of time? It’s simple. You need to test in parallel.

You need to think up as many different attributes as you can and create different values for each of them. After that, you need to present a random set of attribute values to each new visitor, and keep the same values for returning visitors. Once you do that, you need to collect and track your test data to measure performance based on the sets of values.

For example, let’s assume you tried the following attributes (with a set of values):

• a color of an order button: blue, green

• a text of an order button: “Buy Now”, “Add To Cart”

• a color of the font that lists the price: red, black

That way, one visitor might see a blue “Buy Now” button next to the red price, while another one might see a green “Add To Cart” button with the black price, and yet another one might see a green “Buy Now” button with the red price, and so on.

With this set-up, you get 8 combinations of three attributes.

Once you ran a test, you got the following conversion rates:

From this data, you can tell that you got the most performance difference by changing the text of an order button. This is your significant attribute. Forget about the other two for now and start testing the text of a button.

You can take this concept a step further and test combinations of attributes. You might find that changing a color of the price together with a text of the order button produces better results than changing the color alone. I will not cover this topic now, but will write about it in the near future.

For now, let’s just concentrate on picking stand-alone attributes that show to be significant to the performance of your page.

Once you have identified those attributes, it’s time to start tweaking their values and test results, also in parallel. You need to apply the same concept, to testing values of attributes this time.

Keep in mind, that small attributes are often unique to your site and your audience. What might work for you, might not work for other people. Nevertheless, if you can correctly identify your small, but significant attributes, you should be able to increase your conversion rate. The effect of those small attributes might not be as significant as with headlines or other well-known attributes, but the more attributes you find and optimize the higher you increase the overall performance of your page.

Copyright 2004 Konstantin Goudkov

If you would like to receive more of my tips, ideas, articles, and reports about testing, tracking, conversions, marketing, and sales - send an e-mail to: newsletter@in-the-name-of-profit.com

About The Author

Konstantin Goudkov is an affiliate manager with www.GenericGifts.com. He specializes on visitor tracking, split-run testing, and discovering ways to increase conversion rates for different presentation / action scenarios.

Call it bad vibes, gut reaction, instant dislike, or hitting a
major hot button. Truth be told, there are just some people
we don’t like, don’t want to associate with, and want to avoid.
But, when they’re our co-workers, we can’t avoid them. We
may have to work closely with them, day after day, until we
successfully complete the job.

If you are stuck with your difficult person, it may be time to let
go, to change how you feel about and deal with your own
industrial strength difficult person.

Letting go doesn’t mean excusing bad behavior or denying
how we feel. It means detaching ourselves from feeling bad.
Letting go means not letting the other person determine
how you think and feel. You can detach by taking charge of
how you see them and yourself.

Ask yourself:

1. Who else has the same issues and problems with your
difficult person that you do? How is this third party like you?
Not like you?

2. Who doesn’t seem to have problems with your difficult
person? Again, ask yourself how they are like or not like you.
What do they do, how do they relate to your difficult person
that doesn’t seem to trigger the same feelings or problems
you have?

3. Who does your difficult person remind you of? They may
well have a different name, a different face, but their
behavior, attitude or style is familiar to you. Why? They
remind you of someone else, someone you don’t like.

Take a mental leap to the next level. Start thinking of the
larger issues. Is this a question of values, personality or
attitude that stands between you and your difficult person?
Or, are your differences in professional focus or training?
Does age or culture play a role? Or, do you still have
unfinished business with your difficult person, and are
letting it get in the way?

By identifying who else does or doesn’t have trouble with
your difficult person, you can see other ways other people
have of dealing with the person you find so troublesome.
You may well find an alternative you can use for yourself. Or
you may decide not to do what you see others do.

The objective of this exercise is not to change the other
person, or minimize their difficult behavior. Or even to
become buddies.

The objective is to see the other person and yourself more
clearly, and detach yourself from upsetting feelings.

By understanding the dynamics of how a difficult person
“makes” you feel, you can choose to take charge of your
feelings.

Copyright © 2005 Pat Wiklund. All rights in all media
reserved. This article may be reprinted so long as it is kept
intact with the copyright and by-line.

Pat Wiklund is known as the One-Person Business
turnaround specialist. She works with professional services
business ownership they can make more money and get
more personal satisfaction from their work. Start taking
charge of your business and your life with her TakingCharge
mini ecourse from her latest book, Taking Charge When
You’re Not in Control by sending a blank email to tcnic@1PersonBusiness.com

Pat@1PersonBusiness.com

Many people wonder what the active cause for acne to occur on an individual really is a result from and some folks even attribute it to roasted peanuts. The truth is acne, zits and blackheads can be caused from a variety of reasons. Your diet is really just one small piece of the acne causing problems. Other factors include exercise, cosmetics, diet, hormones, hygiene, medications, shaving and stress. For the subject of this article I’ll stick with the diet portion and how it can influence your resistance or encouragement of acne.

Studies show that diet does not play a role in either the cause or the treatment of acne. However, what is recommended for acne preventative care is a healthy diet along with a vitamin regiment that should prevent any sort of zit or blackhead outbreak. Here is a small list of healthy vitamins, minerals and other supplements that have been known and recommended to prevent and help conquer acne breakouts:

Vitamin A,

Vitamin B Complex,

Vitamin C,

Vitamin E,

L-Carnitine and

Zinc

In terms of diet the following measures can be taken with the hope of preventing an acne outbreak or at the very least minimizing further outbreaks of zits and blackheads. It’s recommended that you add more fruits, veggies, seeds and nuts to your regular diet. This can be accomplished by eating more salads, dried fruit and nut snacks and by drinking more juices.

It is recommended that you decrease your daily intake of caffeine, sugar and refined carbohydrates. There have been some clinical studies showing that caffeine can increase the levels of stress hormones inside your body, provoking or worsening acne conditions. This means you should cut back on your consumption of tea, coffee, chocolate and other beverages containing caffeine. The same advice goes for sugar and refined carbs. For instance white bread, rice, flour, and pasta can result in an insulin surge, resulting further in an excess of male hormones that stimulate skin to discharge lots of sebum, which in turn leads to clogged pores allowing bacteria to grow and acne to appear.

Finally it is also recommended that you decrease your dietary intake of red meat and dairy products. Since both are more difficult for our bodies to digest and some researchers say that when the body puts forth an increased effort in the digestion of high levels of animal protein, waste products are not completely processed as usual, instead they can shed slowly, blocking pores, causing acne.

Hopefully these few diet tips will help in your quest to stop the appearance of acne, zits and blackheads. And remember it hasn’t really been proven that roasted peanuts cause acne.

Timothy Gorman is a successful Webmaster and publisher of Clear-Skin-Solutions.com. He provides more acne clearing solutions, remedies and home acne treatment information that you can research in your pajamas on his website.