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Happy birthday to us. It’s been a wonderful journey.

Even though it’s just 1 year, it feels like ConversionXL has been around for much longer than a year. It was one year ago when I posted the first article on pricing experiments. There’s now a total of 76 posts – that’s one post per 4.8 days.

Traffic stats

Since that very first post over 300 000 people have passed through (click to enlarge the image):

Traffic stats

You can see the traffic pattern here. It started with a bang – a few hit posts – then normalization of traffic took place. I blogged much less during the summer, and it showed in traffic too. July had the lowest amount of traffic of all the months - 20 572 visits. Traffic picked up a lot starting from August (76 268 visits) and this October was my all time high - just shy of 100 000 visits. Onward to a million per month from here.

My key learning from the year was that high quality content really pays off. I’ve focused on long, thorough posts that really add value since I started – and now 12 months later I can say it’s a strategy worth pursuing. Everybody wins.

More than traffic, I love getting your emails and tweets that say how much you like ConversionXL, how our newsletter is the one you always read and how you’ve gotten value of it it. Keep sending me those emails.

My best list growing tool

I’ve tested a bunch of tactics for growing my email list on this blog – from sidebar forms to popups to scroll triggered boxes. Nothing has converted like the scroll triggered box – the one that pops on the bottom right corner when you scroll down. 80% of my email list is generated through the form on that box. Why does it work so well? Here are my 2 guesses:

  • Unlike a traditional popup, it only becomes visible once you scroll down. This means the reader has meanwhile engaged with the content, gotten some value out of it and is now more receptive to any offer.
  • Human eye reacts to movement. Having it “appear” draws attention.

The plugin I use is called Qoate Scroll Triggered Box. It’s old. There’s an alternative and up-to-date plugin called Dreamgrow Scroll Triggered Box you can use just as well.

There were 3 flaws with the Qoate Scroll Triggered Box – when you activated it, it *always* popped up for everybody – becoming annoying to people who’ve long opted-in. Second, it made the mobile version of the blog difficult to use as it covered the content and was *really hard* to close. Third, it was once you chose to show it at the end of the post or at comments, you couldn’t go back and have the box appear say half way through the post.

So I had 3 changes done to the plugin, adding options for “disabling for mobile devices” and setting how many times the box is shown to a user (cookie based tracking) + improving the settings for when the box should appear.

You can download the updated plugin here, free.

I don’t claim any ownership over it, the original was created by Danny van Kooten. I hear the plugin conflicts with some themes, so pardon if it won’t work with your site. In that case use the alternative plugin.

A birthday present from you

If you’ve gotten value out of ConversionXL, I’d like to ask you for a birthday present. It’s something very easy. I’d like to show the world that lots of people like ConversionXL. For that I’d like to boost the “social proof” – the number of tweets, likes and +1′s the site has received.

Please click on any or all of these buttons below. They will count towards the home page of ConversionXL – and means you appreciate the whole site.

Thank you so much. And thank you for reading ConversionXL.