There are those who say that a blog making over $40,000 a month doesn’t need any tweaks. Fortunately, I am not one of them. Just because you have achieved an income level that you never thought possible does not mean you can relax in the sun all day long.
There Is Always Room for Improvement
No matter how big your blog gets or how much money it makes, there is always room for improvement and this is where tweaking comes in. You will be amazed by what even a small adjustment can do. Sometimes the tweaks don’t work but you’ll never know until you try it. Let me show you a real life example on how I tweak my blog.
Case Study – Aweber Lightbox
Aweber recently introduced a new web form generator tool that allows anyone with no design skills to easily set up and create an email signup form for their blog. The tool is very easy to use and one more reason why I love Aweber so much. I used the form generator tool to create the following Lightbox Hover signup form.
While the new Lightbox looked way better than the old one, it didn’t perform as well. I thought about switching back to the original Lightbox but decided to work with the new Lightbox to see if I can tweak to the point where it would match or outperform the old one. Going back to the Aweber web form generator, I fool around with the text, color, layout and came up with this.
The new Lightbox performed much better and was able to matched the sign up rate of the original Lightbox. At this point, I could have left it but I decided to keep tweaking. I moved the photo of the eBook to the right and that increased sign up a bit more. Then I played around with the wording. The final Lightbox looked like this.
Every time I made a change I would test it for 24 hours to see the results. A nice feature of Aweber is the built in stats that allows you to track the sign up rate. After making a change, I would reset the stats to zero and let it run for 24 hours. If it shows an improvement, I would keep the change the tweak something else. It it shows a decrease, I would undo the change and tweak something else. I even test the delay time for the Lightbox to fade in and found that eight seconds produced the highest sign up rate.
Tweak And Keep Tweaking – Never Settle
The take away from all this is to never settle for what you got. There is always something you can do to improve things. To get the most out of your tweaking, keep the following in mind.
- Have a clear goal on what you want to achieve
- Tweak one thing at a time
- Give time for your tweaks to take effect
- Track the tweak with hard stats, don’t guess
- Have fun with it
So far, I’ve managed to increase my newsletter sign up rate by 50% over the original Lightbox. I’m not done yet. Next, I’ll be split testing two Lightboxes to see which one performs better. Once you start tweaking, you just can’t seem to stop.