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By Scott Miller on March 17, 2006Do benefit headlines still work?
By Scott Miller on March 16, 2006Bob Bly had an interest post to his blog, reporting that the best headlines may no longer involve strong benefits. Since we strongly advocate the importance of testing headlines, this should definetly be food for thought.
Looking for things to test?
By Scott Miller on March 9, 2006Many people struggle figuring out things to test on their sites. It takes a keen eye to break a page down into its most elemental components. Lets take a couple common test elements and see how they can be further refined.
1. Headline: We normally test different versions of text for the headline, but you could go so far as to include additional modifying variables like: font size, text color, typeface, alignment, horizontal position, vertical position…
2. Bulleted List of Benefits: When most people look at bulleted lists, they see a text list with little tick marks. We see possibilities. Obviously you could test different sets of bullets. You could also test which bullet comes first (since the first is often the only one read,) how many bullets to include, whether including a bold leader helps, bullet style (image, square or circle), plus the normal formatting stuff….
3. Hero Shot (Image): The hero shot is the main image of your product or offer. Its usually quite important. Lots to do here too: testing the subject of the image of course is a biggie, size of the image, horizontal or vertical orientation, left or right (center?) aligned with your text, drop shadow or not, blend background with page or not, link image or not…
So there you have it, in a quickie blog post I have identified 25 different testable things, and this is just a start.
SES NY Report and Slides Link
By Scott Miller on March 6, 2006Last week was the Search Engine Strategies New York conference, where I was speaking alongside Jamie Roche from Offermatica, Tim Ash from Sitetuners, and Allan Dick of Vintage Tub and Tile. The show was great. Attendence was huge, probably the biggest ever, and the weather was good too, provided you got out of there on Wednesday night like I did. I guess the thursday storm caused some major hassles. We had the largest session room available, at 850 seats, and I am not sure that it was big enough. By my estimates there were probably 750 people in there, give or take. It was packed.
Anyways, I welcome any new readers to Optimize IT! and encourage you to subscribe, check back often, yada, yada, yada… Welcome! If you are looking for my slides from the presentation, they are here: Vertster 2006 SES NY Slides.


