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What Are You Testing Today?

What are you testing in your business today?

That’s a good question to ask yourself each day. As I’ve said many times, I haven’t become successful online because of my great brilliance (although I love to think I’m brilliant at times). It is simply because I’m willing to constantly test everything in small steps.

Does every ad I write become instantly successful? Not a chance.

Does every ezine ad I’ve ever place earn a profit? Nope.

Is every product a runaway success? No, every one of them has earned a profit, but they haven’t all earned enough to be worth their development time.

Are all my Google campaigns instantly profitable? I wish!

My approach is simply to be willing to test EVERYTHING in my business. And I’m only willing to invest a little at a time to see the results. If that $100 ad loses, I’ll have another one that wins. I’ll drop the loser and keep following the winner.

As much as I hate to admit it, at times ads I write don’t work. You might find a copywriter who claims they ALWAYS beat the control and everything they write is solid gold, but I’m sure you can figure out what I think about them without mentioning it…

This means I have to test my websites with different headlines, photos, etc. I may test two entirely different approaches.

Here’s a good example. Recently I mentioned how I purchased rights to 2 membership training courses. If you purchased one, I would automatically give you both. They’re both incredible information on getting your own monthly continuity program in place.

Both of them came with sales copy. My solution for figuring out which sales copy should be the base version…I ran a split test where both websites were shown. Anyone who ordered from either automatically gets both products (so 2 sales letters but the same end delivery).

Then I can go back in on the version which works best (actually too close to call at the moment).

On another site right now I’m running a headline split test with 3 different headlines being tested.

My Google campaigns all have multiple ads being tested on them.

This blog has been testing 3waylinks.net for a few months now. A few people have stumbled upon the link on here where it says other resources and asked about why I had some of the links. It’s because I’ve been testing them. My opinion so far: it appears to help, but Linkvana.com is more powerful (also more expensive).

It’s interesting that I’ve had several coaching clients ask me about “that test” without knowing for sure what it was. They of course received the answer. I wonder how many others may have been surfing my site and jumped to conclusions about it. They might have thought I had some big link trade going on personally (since it doesn’t refer to what it is).

That’s one of the mistakes when you copy blindly. You don’t know why someone is doing something on their site. It may just be a test, and you don’t have the end results of the test yet (I haven’t made a final decision on this test yet).

So my question to you is, “What are YOU testing today?”

Are you testing your on site Conversion with new headlines, photos, intros, offers, etc.?

Are you testing new Traffic techniques such as Twitter, article resources, PPC, etc.?

Are you testing new Products in your mix such as offering the same product with several different titles, different price points, etc.?

Here are the Testing Tools I’m Personally Using:

1. Google Optimizer A-B:

I love their basic split tester. Almost every new site goes up with at least a split test of the headline. If you’ve never tested anything before, start here. Set up a simple A-B split test of your headline. Run 2 or more headlines with everything else on your site the same. You’ll be shocked at how much of a difference it makes. While I’ve never seen an 1800% difference like I’ve heard other copywriters talk about, I often see 30% to 100% improvements from a new headline on a page. If you’re not at least doing this on every new site, you’re cutting your own throat.

Free after you sign-up for Your Adwords account.

2. Google Optimizer Multivariate

Have enough traffic to do multiple tests? Graduate up to their multivariate tester for your next series. Test headline, photo, intro paragraph, guarantee, and possibly even the price. This one is a little more complicated to setup but still very valuable if you have the traffic. Try it AFTER you’ve experimented with the A-B tester a few times. If you’re only generating 100 visitors a week, I’d go with a straight split test only of the headline.

Free after your sign-up for Your Adwords account.

3. Netofficetoolbox.com

I also run some basic advertising tests and A-B split tests with my shopping cart’s Ad Tracker at times. For example, on the Monthly Mentor Club, right now I have a testing issue. Google Optimizer requires that your thank you page be on the same domain as the page you’re testing. That club is not setup this way at the moment, so I’m using the ad tracker built into my shopping cart to track which headline is pulling the best on the new site.

$29 to $99 a month depending on which package you have.

Written by Terry · Filed Under All 

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Comments

11 Responses to “What Are You Testing Today?”

  1. Harry Spencer on January 12th, 2009 3:04 pm

    I’m currently redesigning a squeeze page for an offer of mine and have built the basic page and plan on testing various different aspect of the page including, headline, Auto-play video/audio, images/covers. Although I don’t think I’m getting quite enough traffic yet I understand the importance of testing as much as you can and will be try some of the solutions you’ve provided.

    Cheers. Harry

  2. Lee McIntyre on January 12th, 2009 6:27 pm

    Hi Terry

    Nice post as usual. When I first started testing I was shocked to discover how what I “believed” to be true was actually often different to what I “knew” to be true once I’d done the tests.

    As humans we like to think that what we “believe” is always correct, but where we can base our decisions on objective facts, rather than subjective opinion, we’ll be stronger for it (and make more money too).

    Recently we did a new article marketing campaign and we got a 9% CTR from article views instead of our usual 21%. I would have bet $100 that the resource box that yielded a 9% CTR would have beaten the resource box that gave a 21% CTR.

    I guess that’s why we MUST test!

    Thanks for the great post :)

    Lee McIntyre

  3. Terry Dean just said it all… | Big Selling Conversion Secrets on January 13th, 2009 12:31 pm

    [...] on over to Terry’s blog right now and read every word of this excellent article “What Are You Testing Today?“. Remember… -You can’t improve what you don’t measure!Last 5 posts…Big Marketing Secrets [...]

  4. Jay on January 13th, 2009 1:51 pm

    I didn’t understand the post from Lee. I’m currently researching different marketing strategies offered and stumbled upon yours. Back to the point at hand.
    I don’t understand what ” CTRs ” are and am a little confused when you talk about testing. Are you referring to making changes to your site and ” test ” them to see how they do?

    Thanks,

    Jay
    “

  5. Terry on January 13th, 2009 2:08 pm

    Hi Jay:

    Many of the terms we use at times can be difficult to understand when you’re just starting out. CTR usually refers to “Click through rates” or what percentage of people click through an ad to another site. So if I had ads on Adwords, how many of them are clicking through my ads to reach my actual site.

    When I’m referring to testing on this article I’m referring to having at least two similar pages (with at least one difference between them such as a different headline) that I’m testing at once. The Google Optimizer software automatically splits visitors between the two pages. So visitor one goes to page A. Visitor two goes to page B. And so on. Then I can look at the sales from each and see which page is doing better.

    It can get much more advanced than that as well.

  6. Welly Mulia on January 14th, 2009 6:30 am

    Hello Terry,

    Testing is 1 area that I need to improve as I haven’t test as much as I should have. Thanks for reminding!

    I echo what Lee said. Many times we “think” that this copy works better than that, without even testing.

    Cheers.
    Welly Mulia

  7. Adebola John on January 14th, 2009 9:07 am

    Hi! Terry, this is my first ever time coming across your website wish I was led to through an email sent to my box today14/1/09, wish was brilliant like some of others advertised. I have bought lot of e-books,audios,and vidieos still not get the proper clue required to start my own internet business because of lot of crap products. But,can I ask for your help,can you sell your retirement package to me ,set it up yourself ,deliver to me and start operation through your various automation built in tools.As site is operating, I will enrol in your mentoring program/ learning other stuff for proper sucess grinding. I wll indeed appreciate your help to this effect.

  8. Terry on January 14th, 2009 9:20 am

    Adebola:

    No one is going to “set up your whole business for you.” It takes time to setup a business (even the tools in the LIfestyle System take a lot of time in the beginning to setup). I do “set it up myself” quite often for projects, but they are my projects that earn me income.

    There is a strong misconception which some people happily keep pushing forward. Online business is hard work, especially in the beginning. It’s a whole lot better and more fun than any job I can think of, but it is still work you have to do. Anyone who promises to do everything for you without you having to do anything to set stuff up in the beginning is a scammer. Even expensive franchises take a lot of work to get the momentum going.

  9. Articles Spinning on January 18th, 2009 2:17 am

    You are right, Terry. It’s very important to do a lot of testing in one’s business. But sadly many people don’t. It really beats me why we don’t do what we ought to, even after being told. There are lots of people who will read this and shrug their shoulders but won’t do any kind of testing… and they wonder why their business is failing. Strange. Anyway, thanks for sharing, Terry.

  10. akiva on January 20th, 2009 7:02 pm

    Great article.
    I believe though, that sometimes, you should NOT change, but rather, should TWEAK.
    Tweaking makes it very easy to see how incremental changes create impact.

  11. Burton Kent @ Acupuncture Marketing on February 15th, 2009 11:46 am

    Hi Terry,

    You wrote: “Google Optimizer requires that your thank you page be on the same domain as the page you’re testing. That club is not setup this way at the moment, so I’m using the ad tracker built into my shopping cart to track which headline is pulling the best on the new site.”

    If you use a one pixel hidden iframe, you’ll be able to set the cookies properly for GWO.

    Burton.

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