This is a guest post written by Bruce Hopkins of No Nonsense Internet Marketing. He has been a good friend and very knowledgeable in the online business. He’s also the one that made $2k in one day from my $100/day post.

Everyone is always interested in building the readership of their blogs. After all in the blogging world more is always better, correct? You need more subscribers, you need more visitors and pages views. This is normally all most bloggers worry about, but could there be more?

If you have done any type of Affiliate marketing where you built landing pages to promote a product then I’m sure you have heard about testing various landing pages even if you have not never actually performed any tests. But why does this same practice not apply to bloggers?

Don’t we all want conversions too? I’m sure if you are running a blog on any niche you have a method for your readers to subscribe to your feed. Perhaps you even have an option for allowing people to subscribe to an email list whether its the Feedburner list or Aweber ( you should really be using Aweber for this and not Feedburner, but that’s another post). The bottom line is you want people to stick around and read more of your content.

Perhaps you promote affiliate programs on your blog so you also want people occasionally purchase a product through one of your links. The more the better, correct? Well I’ll agree and disagree with you. I will agree that you want more conversions; in fact, that is the only thing that really matters at the end of the day if your goal is to make a little money from your blogging endeavors. If you have some other sort of goal, then this post is not really for you.

So how can we test a blog? Its hard to do split tests since the visitor funnel is not easy to control. The visitor could come from a variety of sources so split testing is a little harder. Its not impossible if you know a little PHP and can do an if statement. Perhaps I’ll write that up later as it will get a lot more technical than I want to present here. You don’t really need any technical skills for what I’m taking about.

If you want more subscribers then tweak how you get them. Try asking for them. Many people use the “What Would Seth Godin do” plugin on their blogs and it has been proven to increase the amount of people who subscribe, but its not enough alone. If you really want to improve this area of your blog, then figure out what your readers want and need. If a section of your readers find a specific blog post or yours through a particular search term then shouldn’t you provide them with a little extra something to get them to stick around.

For example: Lets say you have a blog on dog training and in that blog you have a single search term that has good position in the SE’s. You analyze the term and realize it is bringing you traffic for “How to Train your dog to sit”. Its apparent the person who typed in this phrase wants to teach their dog to sit and in the bigger picture is interested in training their dog. You could put an affiliate link in your post hoping some of the people would buy from you and this is definitely something you would want to do, but at the same time you could super charge this and convert that visitor into a subscriber if you gave them a little extra incentive.

You could put together a little ebook on “How to Train a Dog to Sit” and offer it to the visitor in exchange for their email address. This is a win-win situation as the visitor will get extra information and you will get a new subscriber who is definitely interested in your dog training tips. If you build a relationship with these people then you will develop a highly responsive list which can earn you money for years to come. You could even segment these people into different lists according to their interest, but for that you need to be using Aweber or one of the other email list management applications.

There are multiple ways to accomplish this task if you start analyzing your site with a testing mentality. Jay has done this with his 100 dollar a day Adsense post. He asked people, maybe you, to subscribe to see the post. Then every once in another post he will refer back to the original. People may not have read the original but they are definitely interested in reading it, so they subscribe. Its a win-win, the visitor gets something they want and Jay gets another subscriber.

Now at this time you may be saying but I can’t write an ebook. I don’t know how. Big deal, you know how to write a blog post and sometimes that is enough. If you do need an eBook to entice the visitor and don’t want to write it then just head on over to http://www.master-resale-rights.com/catalog/PLR_eBooks-75-1.html and buy one for a couple of bucks. Edit it to make it unique to your audience and then give it away( well as long as the rights allow it).

This will only take you a few minutes to set up and you have improved the usefulness of your blog immensely from this one little tweak.

Now what would happen if you analyzed all your best search terms and changed each post to give the reader a little something extra. Would it not seem logical that these actions would help grow your blog?

Of course search terms are not the only place you should be looking. Try to think like a random reader, what would make you want to stick around and subscribe to a blog. Think of those things and then modify your design to meet those needs. Try out things. Move your subscribe icon to another location on the page and see if your subscriber count goes up. Add multiple methods to subscribe. Ask the visitor at the end of every post. If you test the placement and color of your subscribe button, over time you will understand what works best for your readership. If you understand what the visitor wants and then give it to them you will not be able to stop your conversion factors from improving.

Well, I told Jay I would do a single blog post, but this one is going to get really long if I continue. I guess I’ll have to do another one on the email subscriber box. but I will leave one thought with you on this area. Which has a better connotation “Subscribe to our list” or “Join our team”? Which would you be more apt to enter your email address into? This is a new tip of mine and I just changed it on my site a week or two ago, but since I got rid of the Subscribe and list words around my subscription box, my opt in conversions have nearly quadrupled. There may be something to this testing and understanding your visitors.

For more of Bruce’s ramblings check out his No Nonsense Internet Marketing Blog