As one of the other comments has already touched on. You did not actually test smiling faces vs non-smiling faces as both the landing pages are very different in more than just one element.

Also, from my experience your industry to better suited to different types of tests such as the value proposition and the selling of the benefits rather than the features of your product.

Answer the visitors need/desire and they will sign up

I use Trello....

But I am still trying to get the optimum column setup to make me as productive as possible.

Would love to know what columns you all have on your Trello boards?

Backlog, This Week/Month/Quarter, In Progress, To Be Reviewed, Done

1 year.

Built up a hobby site slowly over the past two years, at the end of the first year it was making £7,700 a month..

It is still active and earning around £2-3k per month with only about 1 hours work a week.

Currently looking to sell it on as I have just started on a new project.

What do you mean by "hobby site"? A site covering a specific hobby or something else? Can you tell more about how you earn money (memberships, advertisements, something else)?

Things that people do outside of work like mountain biking, yoga, paintball, cooking, whatever. There is lots of opportunity for ad revenue and affiliate links

Yeah. You can get affiliate links for pretty much everything these days.

I have also just started work on this project: http://cupomterra.com.br/

Basically I started built a website and my hobby is to work on it and improve it.. The main goal was not to make revenue.

The revenue it makes now is through memberships and affiliate revenue.

Certainly something that sounds interesting..

Guess it depends on the cost of the monthly fee? If this is solely performance based I would argue that you would not need the monthly fee?

On the beginning the monthly fee will be required to reinvest the money into promotion and outreach. When the performance fee will get big enough, it won't be really necessary.

In terms of technical, seo, UX?

Is there a good easy to follow guide anywhere? What are the things I should be keeping an eye out for?

Tools I can run to check my site?

I have a project that I now maintain on just 2 hours a week... But I worked on it for 4 weeks, 10 hours a week...

So that is 136hr/y.

Revenue for the past 12 months is £26,500

26500/136 = £195ph

Thanks for all the interest everyone..

Got a nice selection of emails and am going through them to optimise them... Will post the results up in here!

This is something that I look to optimise...

Mobile site speed is growing in importance and this is something that I get asked to look at a lot..

If you want to drop me and email with your details I can take a look and make some recommendations for you?

I have two sites I wrote in Go that have hand coded templates. I am thinking about moving more in this direction. I have gotten a bit frustrated with WordPress lately as I cannot get the level of control I would prefer to have.

Thanks for the interest...

If you drop me an email to: david@blogoptimisation.com

Let me know your Wordpress Site URL that you would like me to take a look at.

I will then perform an audit for you and identify how much I can do to help you and I can then provide you with a list of changes to make to speed up the site.... Or I can go in and do the optimisations for you if easier..

That will get you some gains, but there is a lot more that can be done to get your site to load in less than 0.5 secs

Cool. Try warrior forum.com for your testimonials. Once you have the testimonials you could sell it as a wso (their marketplace). A big market there for this as Wordpress is popular. Although those people expect a big hyped up sales page to convince them to buy!

Thanks for the tip... I will take a look at that!