Vincent Sparreboom

Posted on April 14, 2010

If you are looking for a great Online Business Opportunity then my opinion is go with affiliate marketing and if you wanted to boil affiliate marketing down to its simplest, you are essentially trying to attract traffic to your website and then send them through to an affiliate program where if they buy anything, you make money.

It sounds simple enough. Set up a blog about fishing, dog training or mp3 players, plaster it with adverts from Commission Junction or Share a Sale and cross your fingers that you'll make money.

Some sites work, others don't but over time if you keep on building your profits slowly rise.

But the problem with this process is best described as "missed opportunity".

You see, you will often find that one affiliate program converts better than another, even for the same product. Send 100 visitors to each one and it's very likely that you will make considerably more money from one than the other. Strange but true.

Taking it another step, if you do some testing you will also normally find that some of the adverts on your website get far more clicks than others. And that adverts in certain places on your website get more clicks than adverts in other areas of your website.

So if you could find which affiliate program converts best, which advert converts best and where to place that advert on your website for best results, then got rid of everything that *didn't* work so well, as I'm sure you can imagine you're likely to significantly increase your affiliate marketing profits.

And remember that you don't have to write any more content, build loads more links or spend your life trying to build up visitor numbers.

All this extra money is simply as a result of some smart testing to reveal how best to monetize your affiliate sites. Surely this is leverage at its best.

By now I'm sure you can see the potential of this method and are wondering how best to actually go about the testing phase.

There are two ways to go about it. The first way is to simply make manual changes to your websites and see how the results change. However not only is this not exactly scientific, but it also takes quite a bit of time and effort to constantly move adverts around, keep an eye on clickthrough rates of adverts, affiliate profits and so on.

However Richard Adams just released a tool called WP split tester which will do most of this for you. It will make all the necessary changes to your website and track the results. Let the script do all the "heavy lifting" and you can just pull out the top-performers from the statistics area of the tool and make the necessary changes to maximize your profits.

I'm a stats and split testing junky, I test even the littlest button or graphic, I 'play' with titles and text to increase my search engine rankings and you're not doing any testing on your blog or sales page your missing out on profits.

WP Split Tester will make testing a whole lot easier and I highly recommend that you buy this plugin. If you buy this plugin and you have questions about it or you would like to request a new feature or something, catch me on Twitter. I'm planning on publishing more video's reviews and interviews and Richard will be on in a couple of weeks so be sure to try the plugin and send me your feedback in the comments or via Twitter.