Being able to track everything that a visitor does on your site means that you can analyse is depth which items are attracting attention and which things are slowing progress through your site.

The key to any website is that it's designed to encourage the visitor to take the actions that you want them to.

The Crazy Egg tracking system enables you to accurately measure the effectiveness of your site's layout, navigation and calls to action.

My most recent tests involved the analysis of visitor behaviour on a couple of niche based blogs. I wanted to determine how to best utilise the high value real estate in the top right hand corner hot spot. You may be surprised at the results.....{+}

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I guess we all know how we can set up a split test of two or more pages to determine which one achieves the highest sales conversion rate.

When running any split test it's important that the results are "statiscally significant" based on the number of actions taken: Number of sales, optins, downloads, etc.

Assuming that you have X actions from your control copy, and Y actions from your test copy (where X is the better performing one).

If the difference in the number of actions (X – Y) is greater than the square root of the total number of actions (X + Y), then the difference is statistically significant.

It's generally thought that significance is achieved after 40 actions. But the above formula should be applied to be absolutely sure.

Check out "small changes : Big Profits" - it's probably the most comprehensive book available on the topic of testing and tracking.

Let's look at using split testing for competitive purposes..

First of all, have you considered evaluating a range of similar products as an affiliate?

If you want to discover which is the most profitable product to promote as an affiliate, simply set up your split test script to rotate all the competitive products, check your traffic stats with your sales and you'll see which product generates the highest revenue. As I'm sure you'll discover, the product with the highest commission isn't always the winner!

Secondly, here's one of my "secret" split testing strategies that I've never revealed before.....{+}

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Some of the more common ones include the text: "Purchase Now", "Buy Now", "Add to Cart", "Download Now" and many more.

Not only is there such a wide range of alternative texts, you'll also see buttons in every colour of the rainbow! Speaking of colour, what does the colour red suggest to you? It is usually associated with danger or the need to stop, so why would you choose red for a payment button? I can tell you that red buttons are among the worst performers.

Having tested a diverse range of text and colour combinations, I can confirm that the optimum results were achieved with blue, green and grey buttons that were compatible with the design of the site. Good conversions were obtained from buttons with the text "Add to Cart", although there is another choice of text that outperformed all others.. ...{+}

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Firstly, I recommend that you start your traffic planning by establishing your target annual income. Knowing how much you want to make by the end of the year not only gives you something to aim for, it also gives you the ability to work backwards.

Let's start with an example by setting a target income of $100,000 for the coming year.

If we know the average income from a single sale, we can calculate the number of sales that we need to make during the year. So, let's assume that a mixture of affiliate income and sales of our own products generates an average income per sale of $20.

That means that we need to make 5,000 sales per year, around 100 sales every week or approximately 14 sales every day.

The typical sales conversion rate is 2% and that means that if we want to achieve 14 sales, we need to drive 700 unique visitors to our sales page(s) every day.

Obviously, I haven't taken account of any overheads, advertising or promotion costs. My point is simply to encourage you to break your annual objectives down into management daily targets.

When you know that you need 700 unique visitors every day, you can determine where to go to source that traffic.

You can establish a routine of daily traffic building actions that will get you the volume of visitors you need. The real key is testing and tracking everything you do so that you can invest your efforts in what really works and cut down on, or eliminate, the activites that give you the least return on your efforts.