Today I’ve been absolutely swamped in landing page reading materials, most of it from this gigantic compilation of articles found here. There are some good tips here, although I think it’s a bit of theory overkill, since really there is no perfect landing page for every niche. That’s why once again, testing and experimentation is key to success.
What you might want to do when starting to make a landing page for a new niche is look to your competitors for general ideas on what kind of basic landing page seems to be working well, whether it be something fancy, basic, list building, sales driven, etc. Then you can use some of the tips in those articles to tweak and refine these ideas into some nice new landing pages.
Of course, it’s nice to have a good base to start with, but to truly get the best results, you’re going to have to test a lot. That’s where split testing comes into play; this is when you have two or more versions of the same page, and have visitors sent to each to find out which page converts the best.
I just found this great tool called Google Web Optimizer, which can help you split test for free! Funny enough, I’ve been in the internet marketing community for a long time, and I’ve heard of at least 5-6 paid solutions before just recently finding out about this… Maybe free options are a secret 
Anyways, I haven’t had any time to test it yet, but it looks great. It offers classic A/B split testing, which is definitely the best way to start. This lets you simply take 2 separate pages, and feed your traffic to each 50/50. This should be used to test 1 variable, like a different headline for example. You can get very accurate results with this form of testing.
The other way you can test, one that I’m not as familiar with, but have seen products charging $177 for, is by multivariate testing, which will change many different aspects of a page. It’s more complex, and takes more page views to see definite results, but could yield very interesting data faster.
Like I said, I haven’t really used it much yet, but I know how important split testing can be, so I just had to share this little gem with you guys. I’ll definitely be implementing this with new landing pages I’m working on, and bring more results in the future.
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Multivariate testing is the only type I haven’t tried out yet. I can’t wait to see what that will do.
Damn I thought I was good at math. I just added your spam protection wrong and had to come back.
You can do Multivariate testing on Website Optimizer.
Only problem is, you may not get enough traffic to get significant results quickly with it.
It is funny you are discussing this, because I just posted a video on my site explaining exactly how to set up Website Optimizer. I go through it very quickly (11 minutes), which is about how long it should take to setup a split test.
I have using google optimizer for quite some time, and its delivering the right results, try out man.
Hmm.. something new, multivariate testing this is the first time i try.
AB testing is a great way to drive towards continuous improvement.
As a consultancy that helps companies with conversion optimization, this development has turned the Internet community on its head. By allowing multivariate testing to be accessible to all companies, Google is providing the tools for any web business to be successful.
I usually don’t trust a lot this testing tools but this one comes from Google right?
So I will definitely test it and see if it makes any sense to me
Absolutely love website optimizer from Google as it is an awesome tool and allows marketers to be able to test everything. Working with clients on their multivariate testing projects, we find that this tool works great and is all they need.
Certain sophisticated tests relating to page layouts need more robust tools but this is rare.