Book Background:

I have been blogging for over 5 years now, and was approached by Tim Ash to do the 2nd edition of Landing Page Optimization (which ironically finally just got released too!). I loved doing that so much, that I started writing an ebook. Which my publisher heard about and wanted me to turn into a real book – Website Optimization: An Hour a Day. I jumped at the chance… particularly because Avinash Kaushik’s ‘Web Analytics: An Hour a Day’ was in the same series and was the book that got me started down the path of analytics and optimization back in 2007. And 18 hard long months of writing this in my spare time (tough with a full time job!) it finally came out today.

Book Contents:
This book is pretty unique I think – its a step by step guide to optimizing and improving any type of website, from ecommerce websites to media websites. And when I say optimize your website, i’m not talking about SEO – i’m talking about improving your website so that it engages your visitors better, increases your conversion rates, and generates you much greater revenue (well hopefully!)  Here are some highlights of what is included in it:

• Combines best practices in website testing, web analytics, website usability and online marketing to help optimize your website.
• Offers hundreds of test ideas for many types of web pages, from home pages, to product pages to checkout and signup flows.
• Advanced techniques including mobile website optimization, email optimization, and website targeting and personalization.
• Reveals 75 website and testing optimization tools that you can use to help test and improve your website
• A website optimization checklist so you know the most critical things to be doing first

Who it’s Great For:
Pretty much anyone that is involved with creating and marketing websites and wants to increase their conversion rates and make more money from their website – whether its for a small business website, or a Fortune 500 online business. It’s great for beginners, but also contains some great advanced best practices and test ideas for seasoned website testers to learn from.

Who Says Its Good:
It’s not just me that think its good… i’m honored that it already has some great advanced praise from industry experts!

“If you want to learn how to supercharge your website business performance, this is the book you’ve been waiting for. It’s practical, actionable advice delivered from a master practitioner.”
—Lance Loveday, CEO, Closed Loop Marketing and author of Web Design for ROI

“In nine exciting chapters Rich shows you, soup to nuts, exactly how to leverage usability, testing, and web analytics to transform your organization and achieve magnificent success!”
—Avinash Kaushik, Digital Marketing Evangelist, and author of Web Analytics 2.0

“This book is a must-read for companies serious about site optimization whether you are new to the game or have tried it in the past. Follow Rich’s steps to avoid the common mistakes that will derail your efforts!”
—Jason Burby, Chief Performance Marketing Officer, ZAAZ/Possible Worldwide

“Rich Page provides a detailed road map for creating a powerful conversion improvement practice at your company. Get this book before your competition does!”
—Tim Ash, Chair of Conversion Conference, CEO of SiteTuners, and author of Landing Page Optimization

Wrapping Up:
Testing and optimizing your website isn’t as easy as you might think. You need much more than just a tool – you need to leverage testing best practices, have the right resources available to you, understand your visitors and their needs, and make great use of analytics and online marketing, and develop a high impact series of tests. And this book will help you learn all those things and improve your website so its engages and converts your visitors better.

I think you will be very happy with this book – I know I am! To get a little teaser of it, you can even get the first chapter, table of contents and foreword by Bryan Eisenberg for free just by following me on Twitter. Not bad eh?

Oh, and to help me spread the word about this book launch, please tweet and Google+ about it, and like the new Facebook Fan Page about this book – I would be very grateful! And thanks to everyone for all their support and help during the making and launch of this!

Also included in this chapter 1 promo PDF is the great foreword by expert tester and marketer Bryan Eisenberg, the cover, table of contents and introduction pages.

Chapter 1 is entitled ‘Setting the Website Optimization Scene’ and contains the following:

• An introduction to website optimization, the importance of it, and how it isn’t easy to do.
• A history of website optimization (and the dot-com bubble bursting).
• The differences between website optimization and landing page optimization, conversion rate optimization and A/B testing.
• The difference website optimization and SEO (and may people still get this confused…)

Come and get this chapter 1 promo PDF by following me on Twitter!

Oh, and if you are already following me, ping me on Twitter and I will DM you the link to receive it. And if you aren’t on Twitter, add a comment below and I will email it to you.

Hope you enjoy reading Chapter 1 and Bryan’s foreword!

The 2nd edition of this great book includes over 150 pages of new material and is a must read for anyone that wants to learn how to increase conversions and revenue on their website landing pages. I’m definitely very happy with how it turned out (with the help of Maura Ginty too) and I’m sure you will be too.

Here are some details of what’s included in the updated edition of this bestselling book:

• Features fully updated information and case studies on landing page optimization
• Shows how to use Google’s Website Optimizer tool, what to test and how to prepare your site for testing, the pros and cons of different test strategies, how to interpret results, and common site design mistakes
• Provides a step-by-step implementation plan and advice on getting support and resources
• Includes a $100 Conversion Conference gift card and a $50 Google AdWords gift card

I finished my chapters/sections well over a year ago, and Tim recently finally got around to finishing his parts of the book (busy busy guy!) – the funny thing is that ironically it’s come out just 2 weeks before my own ‘Website Optimization: An Hour a Day‘ book comes out. While similar in topics, both books have different angles though, for example my book focuses more on usage of web analytics, web usability and online marketing to improve your website testing and optimization efforts. Both of course are excellent books in their own right! (shameless self plug over). Stayed tuned for the release of my own book in a few weeks time – I’m even more excited for that!

Used well, they can better engage and convert visitors for your key conversion goals. But used badly, they can annoy visitors and cause them to leave, or risk them not seeing the most important information buried away in one of your later slides. Therefore, I have put together a post outlining best practices and test ideas for improving these to better engage and convert your visitors.

First though – remember that the major goal of your homepage is for it act as a springboard to get your visitors as quickly as possible off it into the area of your website that most interests them, so your content slider should aid with this purpose!

Best practices to optimize homepage content sliders:

• Don’t make it rotate too fast. Often content sliders scroll way too quickly for visitors to be able to read and digest the content, and become frustrating for them. Best practice is 3 seconds per slide being shown – that way its not too slow either.
• Don’t use more than 5 slides in your slider. If you use more than this, it will take longer for your visitors to see all of your slider content – and they may miss later slides because visitors don’t often stay very long on homepages.
• ALWAYS show your most important slide first, and ideally it should be the one that aids your visitors the most and helps convert them too, for example helping to build unique value proposition for your website.
• Don’t presume your visitors will skip through your slider if you don’t automate the rotation of it (or even see your navigation options to start navigating the slider). Thererefore its always best to auto-rotate your slides.
• Offer tabs, thumbnails or links for each slide with short descriptive text that indicate to your visitors what is on each one. This way they can get a much better understanding of the contents of your slider without having to wait for all slides to show.
• Offer good controls to let visitors navigate through the slider contents. Don’t just let it autoplay in rotation – give visitors left/right buttons to go back and forth (and is another reason why tabs work well as they act as navigation aid).

Here is an example of a well designed content slider that uses many of these best practices:

Test ideas to optimize homepage content sliders:

• Test the height and width of your content slider. If it’s very high, don’t make it take up the whole browser width, and it shouldn’t take up all of the page-fold (or you risk visitors not seeing content below). You also test having important promos or calls-to-action at the side of your image rotator that increase the value to your visitors.
• Test adding and improving calls-to-action in your slides. These should ideally be in the form of buttons embedded into the slide, and should be in the form of an influential, action-based call-to-action for your main website goals.
• Test adding targeting to your slides to show your visitors content/products they have previously engaged with the most – don’t presume they will like everything you show in it. This forms an excellent way of engaging and converting your visitors better and can be done with advanced testing tools like Adobe Test&Target.
• Test targeting your new visitors with initial slides relating to benefits of using your website, first time purchase coupons or first time users guides. This will meet their needs better and increase the chances of them engaging and converting.
• Try testing static versus rotating slides. Auto rotating doesn’t always work best – test a single powerful slide that conveys the main benefits of using your website, and see if it converts better (increased click-through rates/conversions).
• Test usage of people in them. This can have a big impact – test showing different people (gender/age/race/groups) and also what they are pointing to and where they are looking. Ultimately they shouldn’t distract, they should help your visitors make a decision.
• Test adding testimonials in them. These are great for improving social proof for your website and what it offers, and adding these as one of your slides can help to convey benefit to your visitors better, and engage them more.
• Testing looping the slides versus ending the image slider on a powerful call-to-action slide to see what engages and converts your visitors better.
• Test adding rich media content like videos into some of your slides as an alternate way to engage, as Starbucks now does on their homepage content slider (see below).

The last important thing to remember though is to always test your slider – the usability and contents of it. There is no perfect slide show that will work on every website – keep testing and iterating until you find the version that increases click-through rates and conversion the most!

This book has taken me 15 long months to write, and hopefully readers will be very pleased. It takes a unique approach to help optimize your website from best practices in several key disciplines – website testing, web analytics, web usability and online marketing.

Not only will it help improve your conversion rates, but it will help engage and make your visitors happier so they come back more often.

Here are some of the main topics that ‘Website Optimization: An Hour a Day’ will cover:

• Establish an optimization organization that drives better results quicker
• Optimize homepages and checkout flows to key page functionality
• Over 75 optimization tools and hundreds of test ideas for many pages
• Create and craft better test plans and optimization strategies
• Analyze your visitors and their behavior to better engage & convert them
• Advanced optimization techniques for mobile pages, email marketing & more
• Personalize and target your website to better fit your visitor’s needs
• Influence visitors using trust, social proof, scarcity & reciprocity techniques

In other news, the other book that I worked on, the Tim Ash co-author book, ‘Landing Page Optimization: 2nd Edition‘ is also finally finished after some delays and is now on presale for mid-April launch – ironically now just 3 weeks before ‘Website Optimization: An Hour a Day’. So I will have two published books out by May – very please about that!

This list includes some newer blogs, and some oldies but goodies for the newbies out there…. so without further ado, let’s get started:

1. Kiss Metrics Marketing Blog – A fantastic newer really high quality blog that covers all aspects of conversion, optimization and analytics.
2. Hubspot’s Inbound Internet Marketing Blog – This other newer blog is packed with very frequent short and sweet posts about all aspects of online marketing.
3. Wider Funnel Conversion Rate Optimization Blog – Great blog from the very knowledgeable folks at Wider Funnel, all about conversion optimization.
4. Get Elastic Blog – A fantastic blog about ecommerce website optimization, by the very talented (and blogaholic) Linda Bustos.
5. Unbounce Optimization Blog – A great optimization blog from the author of a fantastic optimization tool called Unbounce.
6. Marketing Experiments Blog – The name of this doesn’t do it justice – this is a fantastic website optimization blog by some serious experts.
7. Occams Razor – The pioneering web analytics blog from Avinash Kaushik, still producing excellent articles many years later!
8. Omniture Industry Insights Blog – A great online marketing optimization blog, with great posts from industry experts.
9. Future Now Marketing Optimization Blog – One of the oldest optimization blogs on the block, but still comes up with some good articles.
10. Wingify Conversion Optimization Blog – A great blog from the author of the creator of Visual Website Optimizer.
11. Conversion Voodoo Blog – There are often some great visually appealing optimization case studies found in this blog.
12. ION Interactive Blog – A great website optimization related blog from the experts over at ION interactive.
13. The Daily Egg Blog – Strange name but makes sense when you realize its the conversion blog from the folks behind Crazy Egg.
14. Amy Africa’s QLOG – Amy is a true website optimization genius, and her blog lives up to this with some fantastic articles.
15. Conversion Conference Blog – When one of these fantastic conferences rolls around, there is usually an influx of amazing posts from industry experts.

So there we have my full list of great website optimization blogs! If you have any favorites that I have missed, please comment below and let everyone know! Hope you enjoy….

Therefore, I have come up with a simple and effective 5 step testing approach for you to understand that will help improve your testing results:

1. Create Insights for Testing from Analytics & Feedback Tools. Rather than simply testing random things on your website , or listening to what your HiPPO wants to test, and limiting your chances of good conversion lifts, instead you should ensure that all of your tests are based on insights you have discovered about your website. This will help improve the quality of your tests and increase the chances of you seeing great conversion lifts. These insights should ideally come from findings in your web analytics tool and from feedback you have gathered from your visitors using great tools like UserTesting.com, Loop11.com, UserVoice.com and KissInsights.com.
2. Create a Test Hypothesis. After you have found some kind of insight from your analytics tools and visitor feedback tools, you should then come up with a good test hypothesis based off the insight. This should come in the form of a statement about your website that you then try and prove true or false by testing. This hypothesis would then be used to create your test plans, and after priotization occurs, an actual test. Here are a few examples of test hypothesis:
   a) By adding in website security logos on the shopping cart checkout page, this will reduce visitor purchase anxiety, resulting in higher order completion rate.
   b) By reducing the number of choices on the homepage, you will reduce confusion for what visitors should click on, therefore reducing bounce rate.
3. Create, Implement and Run Test. Next you need to actually create the test and implement it on your website and make sure it works correctly. While creating the test in your website testing tool, in particular you should know which success metrics you will use to help you measure success, and you should also set up visitor segments for your test for you to later analyze. Once you have implemented the test on your website (ideally with the help of a web developer) you should then QA the test to make sure its not breaking anything on your website, and check that the results are coming in to your tool as expected.
4. Analyze Test Results & Launch Winners. This next part is often where sub-par test results get pushed live without proper analysis. When analyzing your results you should in particular make sure you gather enough data (at least 2 weeks of results, and at least 100 conversions for each version being tested) and also make sure the predicted winner has enough statistical confidence from the tool to declare it a winner (at least 90% confidence). If you don’t do this you will risk pushing a version live that isn’t actually the best version, thus reducing your potential converison uplift. You should also not just push one winner live to all your visitors; instead you should segment your test results to find higher conversion lifts for different visitor segments (for example your paid search or first time visitors may convert higher to a particular test version) and push winning versions to each of these visitor segments.
5. Run Test Iterations to Maximize Conversion Lift Impact. This part is sadly often neglected by many online marketers who are testing and optimizing their website. Rather than simply moving on and testing something different, you should also iterate on your last test by learning from the results (even if the test didn’t work well you should be able to draw conclusions to learn from). Doing this test iteration usually results in much higher conversion lifts than your initial tests generate. Many companies don’t do a good job of this so it will be a great source of competitive advantage if you do it well. Here are a few examples of test iterations:
   a) After testing and optimizing your registration flow, test your key entry pages leading to your first registration page.
   b) After testing the color and size of your call to action buttons, you should then test the wording on them too.

This simple approach really can be a game changer for your testing and optimization efforts, particularly if you currently only do random testing or adhoc testing. So before you run your next website test you should try this approach instead, and you should hopefully be pleasantly surprised by the improved results.

Lastly, this topic of testing and optimization strategy is going to be a key part of my upcoming book, where you will learn more detail about this approach and many other website optimization best practices. This book should hopefully be out by spring 2012!

I’m going to be writing this for Wiley, the same publisher who have an outstanding selection of online marketing books. To write this I’m going to be expanding on the 50,000 words that I had already wrote for my ebook, and turn it into a 300 page book in a similar format to Wiley’s popular  ‘Hour a Day’ online marketing books. I just finally signed the contract earlier today, so am excited to finally officially announce the news. Realistically the book won’t be out until late spring  next year at the earliest though,  given the amount of extra writing and organizing in my spare time that will be needed (there goes my fun time!)

The strangest thing for me is that I’m going to be  following in the footsteps of an amazing author who inspired me to get into web analytics – little did I realize that in 2007 when I first read Avinash Kaushik‘s amazing ‘Web Analytics: An Hour a Day’ book that I would one day have the privilege to be writing a book in the same series!

I’m also going to be looking for some great quotes  from other experts in the website optimization and testing world to go in this book, so if you would like to contribute a quote, please let me know.

You may also be interested to know what is going to happen to the old optimization ebook format that I had come up with. Well, I loved the idea so much and got some great feedback on it, so have decided to turn it into a much shortened, but free email course. Over a 30 day series of emails I will feature a high level overview of what you need to do to optimize your website’s conversion rates. Hopefully I will get some time to write this email series over the next month! Stay tuned for more news…

I recently moved back over the pond from Los Angeles to England because my work visa expired, and was planning on setting up my own website optimization consulting business here, but this was an offer I couldn’t refuse. I eventually hope to move back to the USA with Omniture within a year or two. I also just got back from enjoying a great 3 week tour of Europe, so that’s why I have been quiet in the world of Twitter too. Great trip, but it’s nice to be back in the working world, as crazy as that may sound.

I will also hopefully have some big news regarding my upcoming website optimization ebook soon too, so stayed tuned!

It’s the 9-page teaser ebook version for my new ebook called ‘30 Days to a Better Converting Website‘ and it’s now ready for you to download! You will also get a $5 coupon off the launch price too.

The full ebook is 50,000 words and 140-pages long, and is packed full of best practices, website tools and tests to optimize your website and make more money in 30 days. It has taken me over 6 months to write and I am very proud of it – hopefully you are very excited to read the full version when it launches in 2 weeks.

It’s perfect for anyone in website marketing or website design that wants to make their website convert better, no matter the type of their website – not just e-commerce websites.

This teaser ebook version contains the following sneak-peak content:

• Table of Contents
• Introduction
• A sample of Day 1: Set Up Analytics and Testing Tools, and Set Up Goals
• A sample of Day 3: Optimization Fundamentals to Help You Succeed
• A sample of Day 11: Focus On and Optimize Your Internal Site Search
• A sample of Day 23: Optimizing Your Website’s Mobile Experience

Plus, when you download this you also will receive a $5 coupon off the price as soon as it launches, and notification on the day the full ebook launches (in roughly 2 weeks).

Click here to get this free teaser ebook version and coupon. Note: This booked grew much bigger and turned into ‘Website Optimization: An Hour a Day’