This Simple Graphic Doubled My Sales

I was reading about testing methods in a thread here recently, and I found one comment interesting. It was about ignoring the changes on small items such as headline color, font size etc.

And I agree... many of these kind of differences are too small to be able to test effectively. You can never be sure that a change in the weather or time of the day will be the real reason for movement.

However, I found a pretty good example of how just one simple graphic affected my sales dramatically. In fact I couldn't believe it at first, but as each day goes by the financial proof becomes more compelling.

A couple of weeks ago I decided to take a picture off one of my websites. It was a photo of me standing with my arms folded, smiling at the camera. I've used it for years.

But at that time 14 days ago, for some reason I decided that photo might be a little cheesy - a little too polished for the deliberately amateur-style page I had designed. I was looking out for any change on my site to make an improvement. So the pic had to go!

Over the next week my sales slumped, a lot. Maybe not 50%, but sometimes quite close to it. And to make it worse I had forgotten my graphic removal, and spent hours studying my stats to find out why my traffic was still high, but conversions were low.

A week ago, the penny dropped - I remembered what I had done. I put the graphic back in, and sales rose again to double the previous level, almost from that day.

And the reason I guess is obvious. Not only does the picture add more interest to the website, but you increase trust and confidence when your viewer sees the real person behind the product.

Simple stuff. And after 15 years selling full-time on the net, I should've known better.

Hope that helps anyone else who might be wondering whether their personal photo is going to be effective or not. My experience says yes!