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If you are a .NET developer looking to escape the enterprise – give the post back on January 26th another look. I’ve talked to the dev who is looking these over, and he says (basically) “Most of these are a pile of *poop*.” So, that means the gig is still open, and yes, there is a fun place for your .NET skillz to flourish.

I saw this today on the RFT post, and thought it’s been awhile since I posted anything here, and thought I would share it:

RCResume2

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A good one about split testing your opt in page that you want to read:

What Are We Talking About

Opt In: This is the form that a visitor will fill out to join your mailing list. Your goal is to get the greatest percentage of visitors to give you their contact information. While free gifts can be big elements in conversion, they are not, by far, the only elements for success.

Split Testing (A/B Test): Split testing is one test you can run to determine which elements have the greatest impact on conversion. When you run a split test, you send half of your traffic to one Opt In page and half of your traffic to another version of your Opt In page. You then measure the percentage of conversions (people who signed up as compared to the total traffic number) and you have a mathematical answer to which version of the page has a higher conversion rate.

Variables: Variables are the specific elements you are measuring. To run the best, most accurate split tests, you need to isolate one variable at a time and split test it. If you have multiple variables in a split test, then you can not be certain which one was responsible for the best conversions. For example, if you have two Opt In pages that are identical except for the heading, you want to make sure you isolate one aspect of the heading to test. If one says, “Free E-Book Library For The Next 250 Subscribers” and the other says, “Sign Up Now For Your Free Report On Selling Your Book To Nursing Homes”, then everything else must be the same. If one headline is in a different location on the page, different font, or different size, then you will never know what variable had the biggest affect on your split test results.

Technically Speaking, now that you had a taste, you’ll want to read the rest…

More articles on A/B Testing that I found today really make you wonder why more business sites do not take the time to do it:

Why should you try A/B testing today

Unlike doing changes on website for improvement based on hunch or expert opinion, A/B testing uses your visitors’ clicks to determine what works and what doesn’t. This methodology is currently used by all kinds of marketers to optimize their landing pages, homepage, offerings, Adword campaigns, etc.

Some even use A/B testing to discover the right price point for their products. No matter what kind of website you have, if you haven’t tried A/B testing, it is a great time to catch up with most successful marketers and add this sophisticated tool to your arsenal.

Version A – default

Version B – Redesigned

Technically Speaking, you can find out more about this A/B Test right here.

More good reading on SEO, Landing Pages, and A/B Testing that I ran across:

First of all……..What is A/B testing

A/B testing is essentially (I’ll save you looking on wikipedia) “a method of marketing testing by which a baseline control sample is compared to a variety of single-variable test samples in order to improve response rates. A classic direct mail tactic, this method has been recently adopted within the interactive space to test tactics such as banner ads, emails and landing pages.

Significant improvements can be seen through testing elements like copy text, layouts, images and colors. However, not all elements produce the same improvements, and by looking at the results from different tests, it is possible to identify those elements that consistently tend to produce the greatest improvements” – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A/B_testing

In Practice, A/B testing allows you to display 2 different web pages and monitor the results. Simply, you can optimize your pages within an inch of their lives, in order to find the best converting page. Google Analytics offers the perfect platform in which to execute this format of A/B testing.

Technically Speaking, good stuff to read up on.

Social bookmarking and link sharing is probably the largest source of traffic for most of us. Sites like Stumbleupon and Delicious send hundreds of thousands of visitors across the blogosphere.

So how can we encourage more people to share our links? One of the easiest options is to include a set of links at the bottom of your posts which readers can click to automatically vote for your article.

There are plugins which can do this of course, but that requires you to work with their settings, names icons in their banner and it means having yet another plugin installed on your site.

If you would rather avoid that and have complete control for yourself, then you might prefer to code the links into your theme yourself.

Technically Speaking, great stuff, but I’d rather use a plugin!

Because Jones’ Big ASS Truck Rental and Storage is funny:

And if that’s not good enough, here is commercial # 2:

Technically Speaking, because it’s funny! btw, he is from Chicago and not the #STL as I was just told via AIM!