How To Optimize A Blog Using Muvar 2009

Aaron Brandon pioneered this process and released a video showing exactly how he optimized the signup form on his blog. He may still sell these videos at this URL:

http://www.AaronBrandon.com

The idea is really very simple in his method. You don’t actually optimize the blog. You optimize specific portions of the page used by the blog.

In his example, he wanted to optimize the signup rate for his blog announcement list. His signup box was in the upper-right corner of his blog.

His first step was to create a folder called “signup” (or whatever you want to call it) in his home directory on his site. In that folder, he installed MuVar as you normally would. He then placed several versions of each section of his signup form to be tested.

It didn’t look exactly like the final signup form would look because it was being displayed across the entire page when you went to http://www.AaronBrandon.com/signup/, but that URL would never be given out.

Instead, he then modified the sidebar.php of his wordpress theme and inserted an iframe with the src parameter pointing to /signup/ on his site. The iframe was constrained with a width and height parameter and had no border and no scrollbars. To the observer of his blog, it looked like a part of the current page.

In fact, it was an iframe to the /signup/ page on his site. Each visitor to his blog received a different version of the signup page served up by MuVar. When they signed up, they were redirected to the thankyou.php page in the /signup folder to record the “sale.” The thankyou.php page simply thanked them for signing up.

We started out with the same technique. We took it further though. We mapped out every section of our header, sidebar and footer and placed them all in separatate MuVar pages. We weren’t interested in optimizing for signups. We were interested in profitability so we had the thankyou.php page for each of our sales pages load each of the iframed blog sections thankyou.php page to give them the profitability feedback.

To test the overall layout (and even blogging platform), we ended up moving the entire installation to a sub-folder and then running MuVar in the main folder of the site. The MuVar in the main folder of the site used a true frameset to select among several blogging platforms and themes.

The current winner of that test can be seen here:

http://www.DiegoNorte.com/blog/

In the end, we also discovered that having a blog on the home page wasn’t even the most profitable thing to have there. We tried various alternatives such as a random sales page, an introduction to the company, a squeeze page to force a signup to the blog announcement list and various other things. Our current winner can be seen here:

http://www.DiegoNorte.com/

For more information about running a successful Internet business, visit Diego Norte’s site here:

http://www.DiegoNorte.com/

520 C North Main Street, Heber City, Utah 84032