By the way I had just created a nice post on Xanga and the editor timed out on me, prompted for my password and lost what I had written. So this is my first post to my Xanga blog using Windows Live Writer.
I just finished watching a short webinar given by Bryan Eisenberg and Tom Leung on website and marketing optimization. Since Tom is from Google and Bryan a Google partner, they talked a lot about a new Google product called Website Optimizer. They walked through some best practices and features of Website Optimizer and about Bryan’s new book on the same subject. I found it to be a very informative webinar, and you can click on the link above to see it in the archives.
Unfortunately, for photographers who use templates from one of the big template vendors, it’s going to be difficult or even impossible to get the vendor to cooperate with this level of testing on their designs. While you can say that their designs are optimal and are already optimized, I’d ask optimized for what? (optimized for selling more templates to unsuspecting photographers such as yourself) The templates surely cannot be pre-optimized for anyone who buys them. And your call to action is likely not going to be perfect without testing your marketing story on your audience.
If you have a custom designed site or somehow get the template vendors to let you make changes to their designs, you can begin to maximize the effectiveness and profitability of your marketing communications and call to action. Google’s free tools can be more than adequate to help you refine your efforts and improve the bottom lines. Now imagine the possibilities if you used Google Website Optimizer, AdWords and Google Analytics together?
My first experiment, to randomly display 3 variations on a link name to see which gets clicked on more often. Once data is available I will post a screenshot of the results.
