Okay the holidays are past and we are now 10 days into 2009 and the Week In Review is back. Lots going on this week and even more upcoming.

First to the blogs.

WordPress Made Easy

• Using Adsense on your blog
• Are you going to take action this year?
• 3 Easy Tips To Improve Your WordPress Blog
• 3 Ways To Personalize Your WordPress Theme
• Keeping up with WordPress
• Tweet My Blog and WordPress 2.7
• 3 Ways To Monetize Your Blog

Three Turtle Marketing

• Stop fighting for food and move to the back of the tank
• Happy New Year from the 3 turtles and baby too

New service at Your WordPress News. Trying to keep up with the changes in WordPress can be a bit overwhelming so I created a resource blog where you can find the latest news on WordPress drawn from a variety of sources. If you prefer you can keep up to date with the latest items by following WordPress News on Twitter.

New Recommendations

PLR Package on Boating and Scuba Diving – May be gone by the time you read this as there will only be 100 sold but in earlier posts on this blog is a plan to use this and similar items as a business in a box.

Screencast Profits – You may not know who Lon Naylor is but people like Jeff Dedrick, Mike Filsaime and many others do. Lon is out to rid the web of crappy videos and is giving away 94 minutes of free training as a start.

MBA In A Box – New free report from the guts at Stomper. Just click the button and download the report. No optin necessary. You might want to check out there videos from the link below but definitely need to grab the report.

Best of Marlon Sanders – Another free report from one of the best teachers on the net. The report is killer and Marlon is someone whom you want to be on his list. His content is great each week and will help you to improve your business.

Upcoming

Tracking Your Way To Profits has been rewritten and is in the process of being set up on a new script. The changes in Hits Connect and the new free option for it has brought about the re-write. Should be re-launching shortly.

There is a Monster in the wings. Can’t say much more at this time but if you have been having trouble putting the pieces together for your list building the Monster may just be the solution.

Thats all for this week. Putting my nose back to the grindstone to get things done and look for lots more content this and every week.

Mike Paetzold

Follow me on Twitter

Technorati Tags: Hits Connect, Marlon Sanders, MBA, Niche PLR, plr, stomper, tracking, WordPress News

One of the soap boxes I get up on all the time is the importance of testing and tracking your results. Guess today will be another time but this time there is a difference.

Robert Puddy has introduced a free level to his Hits Connect tracking system. Now there is no excuse not to get started tracking your results.

Yes it is limited for free members but once you start improving your results through tracking you will understand that tracking is one of those expenses that actually increases your income and becomes an asset not a liability.

After all if you double, triple or more your results you will realize the value and the savings more than offset the small cost.

Check out Hits Connect today and start improving your results today.

Need help using it properly check out the report I created and how tracking can improve your profits at Tracking Your Way To Profits. No sign up just download it from that link.

Mike Paetzold

Technorati Tags: Hits Connect, split testing, tracking

Getting back to the business building series.Today is probably the most important piece of the puzzle and the one that separates the winners from the losers.

Testing and tracking

Hey I’ll be the very first person to tell you that this isn’t fun. It is where the money is though. See I am not smart enough to guess exactly what will work and what won’t. Too many personal prejudices. To easy to think like a customer and not a business person.

You need to be constantly improving your process and updating it. First you need some tools to do that. Here is what I use and what will be mentioned in this post.

• Google Analytics – A free resource
• Google Website Optimizer – A free resource
• Hits Connect – A paid service
• AWeber – A paid service

You can also grab a copy of my report Tracking Your Way To Profits.

For this discussion we will talk about your squeeze page first. After all that is the key to your business.

AWeber will allow you to add a tracking code in your form. Create a different form for each page you are testing and you can see which page got you the results.

Now you need to be sending traffic to your site. Hits Connect will allow you to see which source sent how much traffic and if you add the pixel on your thank you page you can see which source actually converted into a subscriber.

Hits Connect will also allow you to set up a rotator so you can test two pages and use the same link to send half the traffic to each. This also allows you to make changes on the fly at one place and not have to go change each traffic resource. A great time saver.

Now what do we want to test. Start with your headline. That will usually make the most difference. If your headline doesn’t catch people the rest of your copy doesn’t get read.

Keep going until you have a clear winner. Get rid of the loser and create a new test. Each time you keep the winner get rid of the loser.

Once you have a good headline you can test other parts of your page. It is important in this type of testing to only test one thing at a time so you know what made the difference.

In the meantime you are also testing your traffic sources. If you were using 5 traffic exchanges in this example my experience has shown that 2 will probably be head and shoulders above the rest. You can keep to 5 but keep changing your bottom source of traffic to test a new one. Just like the headlines keep the winners and replace the losers.

This can very easily increase your response as you test but this is a never ending process. Traffic sources change and your best source today may stink 6 months from now.

With traffic exchanges you should be able to get your squeeze pages to one signup per hundred page views or better. That should be your goal.

Now you want to be testing the same way in your email series. Take advantage of the stats you get at AWeber and use their tracking to see which offers are getting clicked on.

Also keep track of where people unsubscribe. If you are marketing correctly you will be getting unsubscribes so don’t let that part bother you. Not everyone will like your style not even affable Old Bald Guy’s like me.

What you do want to be tracking is places where the unsubscribe rate jumps. If you are seeing a significant increase in unsubscribes on email #5 and (this is important) it is not converting significantly higher then you need to look at that email.

Sometimes a really strong call to action will generate more unsubscribes but will also convert into more cash too. Look at both sides and remember what my mentor Robert Puddy says “Give them quality but ultimately the purpose of the list is to make you money.”

Likewise if certain calls to action aren’t being clicked then that needs to be addressed too.

If you are using sites like blogs to get organic search traffic or if you are using PPC you need to use Google Analytics to understand which posts are being indexed and which terms people are searching for that send them to you.

For our process we won’t get into Google Website Optimizer but it will allow you to do Taguchi testing on your squeeze pages and sales pages. Once you have gotten comfortable with the A/B testing described here it can be worth your while but there is a learning curve in using it.

Technorati Tags: aweber, Google Analytics, Google Website Optimizer, Hits Connect, testing, tracking