I wanted to get a quick post (2 am here) about a new blog I’m launching.  I really hate the domain this is on because I’m not really into poker affiliating much anymore and focusing on sports and stuff outside of gambling as much as I can.  I decided it was best to just launch an entire new blog with a more general domain name.

I looked for some keyword type domain names and couldn’t find anything I liked. I tried my full name but it wasn’t available plus no one can even spell my last name.  So I decided to go with a more brandable domain name that people would remember.

To stand out from other affiliate blogs I chose something simple and what I think is something that isn’t too hard to remember.  It also could create excitement and curiosity to people who don’t make money online and stumble across the site.  My new Internet Marketing Blog is going to be at DropoutGotRich.com.

I clearly explain in the “about me” at the top of the site that I am no where near rich right now, but it is just a goal for me to be wealthy.

I also am not proud or trying to promote that I “dropped out” of college, but I thought that would be catchy and again easily remembered.

“Dropout Got Rich dot com” just seemed pretty easy for me to remember.. and if someone was surfing the internet and came across the site and read the name they might get curious and read on (especially college kids).

So what am I doing with the blog?

I am going to just talk about anything I feel like, and basically blog about my life as an internet marketer.  I’ll review products I’ve tried, give tips, complaints, or anything else internet marketing related. Of course I want to make money through the site – I am not gunna lie about that.  I made a little introduction post to the blog last night.

Will I stop blogging here?

I’ll probably slow down here, but I will make posts from time to time – which may or may not include my monthly goals (I am not sure yet, going to think about where I’ll post those).  I will also make most of my poker, casino, sports affiliate specific posts here when I feel like writing about that.

If you have an affiliate blog and you update it somewhat regularly hit me up because I probably read it and will want to do a blogroll exchange.  I will also be hitting up some of you guys through IM or PM or whatever.  Would appreciate any links you can throw at it… and I hope you find it interesting to read.

January Recap of Goals and February Goals to come probably tomorrow afternoon!

I haven’t made many posts lately that actually really help out my visitors to my blog (most of my posts are just recaps on what I am up to business and personal wise) so I thought it would be cool to post one of the conversion tests I have recently done.  Over the past 6 months or so I have finally started to testing different things to help with conversions.. something that is vital if you want to grow your business.

One of the things I decided to test was my “Submit” buttons for a newsletter sign up at The Sports Geek.  I started with just one submit button (I think it was a blue one), but when I asked for a review of my new template I had a lot of people saying I should be testing different colours with the button.  I ended up creating a split test at Aweber (very easy to do) for different colors of the button and “submit” vs “sign up”.

After leaving the new buttons up there for a while I ended up seeing  “Sign Up per Unique Display” (S/UD) ranging from 0.1% to 0.4%… on average I was sitting around 0.3% S/UD for these buttons.  Instead of switching to the button that was giving me the 0.4% (Yellow button with navy blue “submit” text) I decided to try out a new kind of button all together to see if I could beat that.

I have been following a couple “make money online” type blogs and I know these guys are pretty awesome internet marketers.  A common theme I see in a lot of their sales pitch pages is a submit or buy now button that is circled to make it stand out (see pic below).  I decided I would give this a try to see if it worked.

Not only did it increase my S/UD to 0.5% it also looks 1000x better with the template too!

You may be thinking an everage of 0.3% to 0.5% isn’t a big difference… but over the long run it really is.

If I get 100,000 visitors to my site this year the 0.2% increase in sign ups would equate to 200 more newsletter sign ups.  If I were to get one million visitors over the course of the year it would get me 2000 more sign ups.

Those extra 200 or 2000 more newsletter sign ups could be $1000′s of dollars that would have been left off the table had I not done this small test on the submit button.

Bottom Line is that if you are not doing small tests like this to increase your conversions you could be leaving a lot of money on the table over the long run.  Even if you are a smaller affiliate – start this kind of testing now and you will thank yourself down the road when you have extra money in your pockets!

If you are not a member at Aweber I suggest you sign up today and start a newsletter on your affiliate site… mess around with different CTA’s and buttons and help yourself build your online business!