However we have no way of guaranteeing that these “improvements” will work, so the only logical thing to do is for us to test EVERYTHING. Or at least test what we can.

If you own a site then you should have a methodology in place for optimising it. I don’t mean SEO (which is important), but improving the website to encourage whatever activity you want from your visitors.

This is a break down of the kinds of testing we do and the tools available to optimise your site.

AREAS TO OPTIMISE

1. Page design
There are certain pages that you should be constantly optimising. Registration and payment pages are key examples which are easy to monitor as you only need to measure conversion rates. Changes like a simple text change, a new button or a completely new layout can all have an effect. We do this as an ongoing tasks constantly trialling small and big design changes.

2. Core logic
In the case of Besinful these are things like: What features our members pay for, how many messages they can send, is it free to read or send messages, how much they pay for 1 months membership etc.
Tracking and reporting on changes to core logic is harder than simple design tweaks, however it’s still massively important. We recently made 1 small change which resulted in members becoming 3x more likely to upgrade! It was obviously worth while us making this discovery!

3. New features
If you have a site which is constantly evolving like we do, you’ll have a roadmap of big development milestones. While on the face of this it’s easy to assume that more and better features is a good thing it is definitely not always the case. Site users are often attached to what they currently have, big changes might aggravate them if they don’t personally like them, or scare them away if it’s not easy to use. Facebook is a prime example of this, every time they roll out something new a small % of members go crazy! Although in Facebooks case they clearly test everything very well and based on their success it’s impossible to argue they’ve done much wrong.
We recently introduced a new user dashboard on Besinful. While we had immediate positive feedback via member emails, the real sign for us that it was a good feature was an increase in the number of pages visited by members, longer time on the site and an increase in uploads – all of which we were aiming to achieve.

TOOLS FOR TESTING

1. Google analytics
It’s free, constantly being improved and works directly with google adwords so you’d be mad no to use it! Though it’s not exact, you’ll be able to see where your members are coming from, what pages they’re visiting, how long they’re staying for, set up goals and funnels, and segment the data in many different ways, plus you’ll see all the results in some lovely easy to read graphs.

2. Google Website Optimiser
This is an extension to google analytics which is also completely free that makes it very easy for you to split test different versions of the same page with a few lines of code, and find out which version has the highest chance of success, and with what probability it has of out performing the others.

3. 3rd party solutions
There are restrictions to using google analytics. Primarily the biggest problem is that you have no link to your own database. As you’d expect there are numerous solutions out there that promise to provide you with much better insights and results than you’d see using just google. Some might offer ways of integrating with your database to give better segmented targeting or testing, even more specialised reports, or they might have a managed solution whereby they provide suggestions for improvements, run the tests and report the results to you.

4. In-house solution
Because of the restrictions of google analytics and the cost of 3rd party software we opted to build in tracking and reporting to our own system. We know what the conversion rates are for members that come in from different sources using google analytics, but by storing campaign data in our own database we know the the spending habits of members from different sources which is much more useful. No point in paying for traffic that appears to convert well, but in reality they’re only spending 1 penny over their lifetime!
We also filter by user demographics: country, region, age, gender… by usage demographics: registration dates, payments dates, last login dates…. by what features members have access to (when we roll out a new feature we don’t make it available to everyone allowing us to compare how the feature is used)… and a lot more besides!

CONCLUSION

Make use of everything you can get your hands on, especially free tools. Don’t assume that just improving your site will give you better results.
Have someone responsible for continually testing your pages – it doesn’t matter if it’s yourself, an employee, freelancer or another company.
If you’re developing a site yourself rather than using someone else’s software, build in to the specification some extra reporting tools. This doesn’t have to be any more than recording a little bit more about your members and having the ability to manually run a query on the database. You just need to decide what it is you want to know about your customers to determine what data to store about them.
Don’t delay – do this from day 1. If your site is more optimised from day 1 your bottom line will be better from day 1.

If you read this and think missed anything off let me know. We’ve applied a simple, logical and mathematical approach to optimisation, but there are other tools we could be using and other things we could be doing which I’d always be willing to explore.

Happy optimising!

The most interesting numbers though are from Besinful.com. Since the proper launch in November it’s been doing all the right things and growing each month, which has all taken place with no extra spend on marketing or investment in development.

This shows the daily sales, weekly average and 30 day average. All following a steady growth.

The tracking system we’ve developed also allows us to constantly optimise the site to suck the best performance from it too. This is one factor that will help in ensuring this graph continues to go up.

Other factors which will also soon be playing a part are: several site updates in the short and mid term, big improvements to the eCRM (the volume and quality of emails we send members) and now we’ve got some data on member values we’ll be actively marketing the site.

It’s an interesting learning experience – developing an idea, building the site from scratch and seeing the positive results. Everything being learned now will be wisely used too as there are other sites we’re launching which I am determined to see exactly the same kind of results from.

It’s been a busy week. But I probably shouldn’t pretend that it’s been a long one considering it didn’t start until Tuesday, then I spent a couple of days in London with my lovely lady, relaxing at the Langham and pretending to be a darling by going to the theatre.

My laziness aside it still turned out to be a productive few days:

Besinful had it’s best week yet, and trust me – we’ve got a few things happening soon which will pale everything so far in to insignificance!

Our Real Interactive site got a bit of a makeover (not quite complete) as it’s been neglected and gone unused and unloved for some time.

And for me, the most exciting news is that after sorting out a few legal issues and a bit of restructuring, my outsourcing company, RS Outsource, is now fully set up with a UK office to handle all new clients. I’ll be working on this personally from now on. We’re currently looking at a couple of acquisitions to bring other outsourcing companies in to the RS Outsource business.

So I think I thoroughly deserve another couple of days off now.

After a period of steadily declining revenues in Real Interactive the trend is back on the up!

The reason for this decline is that I wanted to make a shift from having income that came purely from marketing other companies services/sites to being more focused on our own. Historically most of the income to Real Interactive has been from running websites powered by other companies software, hosting and billing. I won’t deny that this is a great way of making money – no overheads or start-up costs, but I have always felt a little bit uneasy about not having 100% control.

So while we’ve not been marketing these sites their turnover has steadily dropped, all our profit going in to development. I was never sure how quickly sales would decline so it was difficult to know exactly how much to spend on development of new sites. In hindsight a better mix of marketing and development could have worked out better. But all’s well that end’s well….

Besinful.com is growing every day, and with more updates and features being added it’s set to explode.

Growth for the last 3 months has been 45% month on month and that trend is continuing. This is good news for not just us, but for the girls on the site too as it’s going to become much more rewarding for them too.

KickStart

This is a new modelling competition I am involved in and it has just gone live. KickStart. The idea is very simple – to find some new talent and help “kick start” their modelling career. Winners are selected each month by a panel and by text votes. At the end of the summer there will be a big final and party where an overall winner will be decided. Any profits made will also be shared out with Cancer Research UK



The first month has over 80 girls competing for 2 places…

View the kickstart facebook page or visit the KickStart site for more details.

Besinful

Besinful is entering a new phase now. We’ve done much of the basic site development and testing and are beginning to see good registration and uploading statistics now. Soon we’ll be adding some large new features such as webcams which will really raise the time spent on the site. But even now we have enough traffic to begin optimising the whole site and user experience. The first 2 areas we’re starting to test are the registration/payment pages, and the membership pricing.



From the business perspective it’s important for us to get the best membership pricing to get maximum profits. But even more importantly, from the customers perspective they need to be receiving the best value membership to encourage them to extend their memberships over many months. We have a unique business model with Besinful where girls are paid for posting content to the site, so the challenge becomes balancing member value, with maximum reward for the girls. Too low a pricing means we can’t afford to give the girls anything, and premium content dries up. Too high pricing and members won’t want to pay, full stop. I don’t know where the perfect balance point is, but I intend to find out!

AdultSeeker

Development on AdultSeeker had dried up for a few months before we were really able to finish the site and give it a big push. We had to instead focus on making Besinful profitable. With this now being the case, taking on more developers and having spent some time in the Ukraine planning exactly what needs to be done, we’ll be working on final fixes and updates to AdultSeeker to put us in the position where this baby can start getting lots of active members too



My own time over the next few days is going to be spent in preparing wireframes for new pages to test on Besinful, and on general improvements to AdultSeeker.

I must at this point stress that Besinful is not a porn site. We have very clear boundaries. But what we do do is cater to a market that likes to be titillated, and we can provide that in abundance.

The particular individual today that takes care of composing these newsletters is still on holiday so I decided to have a little go myself. If you don’t know already I am pretty much good at anything so I am not phased by doing a little bit of email coding. (joke – I am actually useless at everything).

This is a screen grab of what my computer looked like at the time.

I only hope that all those people involved in this website do not resent me being subjected to work like this!

BeSinful is our glamour model community

An amateur and glamour modelling site which allows girls to manage their portfolio of photo albums and videos. Each girl has their own personal fan page charging members for access their premium and exclusive content and to enter live to chats.

Despite all the problems we had, we did get most fixed before the event, just in time! We’ve got everything for the next time and we have some much better ideas about how to make sure things run smoothly and get us really noticed – whatever we do next will be even bigger and better!