Happy New Year! I’m planning for 2010 to be my most successful year ever, in terms of financial independence and growth. My goals are a mixture of personal development, business goals and lifestyle design. I’m often told I work too hard, so that’s why I’m making plans to play just as hard!

1. Massively increase my website income

I have a number of websites that I run and maintain, but none of them are earning me a fortune. I think that my biggest downfall is that I spread myself too thinly over too many projects. My aim is to have 3-4 great websites rather than 10-20 so-so websites.

To achieve this, I’ll be letting some domains expire, selling a few websites, and pushing some projects firmly into the background. This includes putting my mentoring consultancy on the backburner. Projects that I’ll be focusing on this year include SpyGadgets.org.uk, EnviroGadget.com and BlogSynergy.com.

I’m very unhappy with my current website income, as I feel that it’s very low and has much more potential. My goal is to increase my monthly earnings by 1400% by the end of this year! I’ve intentionally not specified my current earnings, however, to give you some idea, they are well below minimum wage.

Considering I run my websites as my full-time job, I want to be doing much better. It’s a matter of pride as well as necessity.

2. ‘Crack’ affiliate marketing

I started venturing into affiliate marketing in 2009, with some good results (i.e. I actually made money via commissions). However, I’ve still got a great deal to learn. I think I’ve worked out what mistakes I’m making (i.e. why I’m getting poor conversions), and I have several plans to resolve those mistakes in 2010.

I want to thank a couple of people who’ve been helping me on my affiliate marketing journey, particularly Mark Boyd (@hairycornflakes) and Kirsty McCubbin (@AffiliateStuff), plus everyone over at Affiliate Doctors. No doubt they’ll be getting more questions from me over the next few months, but I am really grateful for their support so far.

3. Conquer my issues with demotivation

One of by biggest weaknesses is that I get easily discouraged if something goes wrong. In 2010, I will beat this weakness, and become an expert at handling problems with grace and optimism.

4. Clear out unwanted possessions

We all end up collecting crap. I’ve got a load of bits around the home that I’ve been meaning to clear out. In 2010, I will sell off or give away all of the ‘stuff’ that I have that I no longer need or want. I did clear out a lot of stuff in the first half of 2009. Now I need to clear out the stuff that I collected in the 2nd half of 2009.

I get a great sense of achievement when I clear out my unwanted possessions, and all it takes is a little time and effort!

5. Do an evening class at least once a week

I’ve got some money saved, so I plan to do a pottery class once a week. Pottery is something I’ve always wanted to do, but never got around to doing. I didn’t get to do it when I was at school for some reason, maybe I was off sick. Anyway, I’m calling the local college as soon as they’re back from the Christmas break.

6. Do 15 or more professional firework shows

Those of you who know me well, know that I love pyrotechnics! In 2009, I was lucky enough to get a part-time job working for a very reputable professional fireworks and special effects company. In 2009, I got to do a total of 8 shows, including New Year’s Eve 2009.

Now that I’ve done my basic training, I’m keen to do at least 15 professional firework shows in 2010. I absolutely love doing it, and it keeps me happy!

And so it begins!

I’m going to make 2010 my best every year in terms of professional and personal growth. I’m really excited to get started!

Please let me know what goals you’ve set for the new year. You can either write them as a comment, or post a URL to a blog post about your goals. I look forward to reading them.

In an attempt to boost my commissions via affiliates on my eco-gadget review site EnviroGadget, I wanted to see if I could improve the number of visitors clicking through to the merchant website. I don’t get a commission for all of the products I review on EnviroGadget. However, for the products I do earn a commission, I wanted to make sure that I was getting as many people clicking through my affiliate links as possible.

Therefore I decided to run some experiments with different types of button. Just by changing the colour of a button and changing its text a little, I found a way to triple my click-through rates (CTRs)! Yep, you read that right, triple! Read on to find out how.

The Technology

I have some relatively complex code that I’ve written to handle the affiliate tracking, and it’s beyond the scope of this article to explain it in detail. However, I’ll cover the basics. My affiliate tracking code allows me to create a URL like this:

http://www.envirogadget.com/recommends/a-solar-powered-gadget/g_bn

When that URL is clicked, it redirects the user to the product page on the merchants website, dropping a cookie to ensure that if the user makes a purchase on that website, I get a commission.

The ‘a-solar-powered-gadget‘ part of the URL is the code for a particular product. The ‘recommends‘ part of the URL tells a script on EnviroGadget to redirect a user to a product page using the product code I just mentioned.

The ‘g_bn‘ part of the URL is an example of a special tag that I can use for additional tracking. So I could link to a product using the URL above using many different coloured buttons. If I used a different tag for each different button, it means I can track how many times each button can get clicked. This is what I used to test the different buttons in the experiments below.

Experiment 1 – The Hypothesis

All my affiliate buttons started off being a green Buy Now button. However, I wondered if a contrasting button colour would out-perform my green button (especially as the rest of the site is themed with green). I also wanted to test different button texts too, just too see if the wording had any effect.

Hypothesis 1:

“I expect contrasting blue buttons to outperform the more subtle orange buttons on click through rates”.

Hypothesis 2:

“I expect that the less imperative More Info buttons would outperform the stronger Buy Now buttons”.

Experiment 1 – The Results Data

Button Experiment 1 - Orange and Blue

Notes: I was told that “Shop Now” was a good button text to use, so I wanted to test that. For some reason, I didn’t use green in the first experiment. Can’t remember why!

Experiment 1 – Conclusion

From the results, it’s clear that my initial theories were completely wrong!

So the results show that the orange buttons considerably outperformed the blue buttons. The orange Shop Now button more than doubles the CTR compared to the blue button. Perhaps this has something to do with the emotive effect of colours, e.g. warm v.s. cold colours. Even still, the orange buttons are harder to see with a green background, and blue is more of a contrast to green.

The results show that More Info is a waste of time, performing the worst overall. However, Shop Now is the strongest performing text, with Buy Now being a close second.

Based on these results, I realised I needed to test some more combinations as my assumptions were very wrong.

Experiment 2 – The Hypothesis

Following on from the first experiment, I thought it would be wise to compare the performance of my existing green Buy Now button against orange buttons. I also wanted to test red against orange and green to see if it had any significant impact.

Hypothesis 3:

“I expect that the brighter red buttons will outperform the green and orange buttons, with the red Shop Now button being the best button for the highest CTR “.

Experiment 2 – The Results Data

Button Test 2 - Red, Orange and Green

Experiment 2 – Conclusion

I had clearly learnt something from the first experiment, and my theory was spot on correct in the second experiment. However, the range of values I obtained was very interesting.

The results showed that using a red Shop Now button (21% of clicks), rather than a green Buy Now button (7% of clicks), there’s a 3-fold increase in clicks through to the merchant website!

In general, red outperforms orange and green. The Buy Now and Shop Now are strong call-to-actions, which resulted in a high CTR compared to Buy This. I’ve not been able to come up with a reasonable explanation for the poor performance of the Buy This button text.

Overall Conclusion

From running these experiments, I learnt 3 things. These 3 lessons are:

• Check your assumptions – I was making incorrect assumptions, so testing my assumptions really paid off. I spotted my mistakes.
• Experiment and track everything – When you do test something, collect as much data as possible so you can analyse it.
• No-one will do it for you – I had to run my own experiments to learn my own lessons. Don’t rely on my data either, test your sites yourself too!

I hope you enjoyed the article and that it motivated you to run your own tests. If you like the pretty graphs, please leave a nice comment, as they took me ages to create!

Update – 30th Sept 2009

John Andrews wrote a great complement to this article on Always Be Link Building. John quite rightly emphasises the point that button colours, and therefore their respective click-through rates, are very specific to a website and its design. So just to re-iterate, test different button combinations yourself, don’t rely on my data alone!

Yup, at the weekend, the DanHarrison.co.uk site was compromised by an Algerian ‘hacking’ team. However, despite good security practices, the site still got hacked. I followed the most basic rules, such as keeping all plugins and the main WordPress install up-to-date, as well as strong passwords. And I still got hacked.

Just to be clear, these are the basic security principles I always abide by:

• WordPress installation is always up to date.
• All plugins are updated pretty much as soon as they are updated.
• All database, ftp and account passwords are long and random (digits, characters, symbols, etc).
• No password is used for any other site I own
• File permissions are set at the most strict – depending on what’s required.
• I keep regular file and database backups. All automated to backup every single day.

However, despite all of that, I was still hacked. I am working my way through JT Pratt’s security guide as a basis for making the site more secure. Essentially I’m locking down everything I can. However, with having many websites, I want to automate it as much as possible to save me time. Just before you ask, someone I know with 0 plugins still got hacked.

There’s a high chance of getting hacked at some point because you’re running a dynamic website. However, doing everything you can to make it too much effort for a hacker is a very good idea. And if nothing else, make sure you regularly backup your website!

Updates

Here are some more useful security articles I’ve since discovered:

• WordPress Security Tips (more plugin ideas and advice)