Summary: Learn why you should test, test, test everything in Internet Marketing to find out what works.
There are a ton of “proven techniques” that are promoted in the Internet Marketing arena. But, no matter what you might read or who you might listen to one thing is certain. Testing your marketing methods is a fundamental activity that must be done on a regular basis.
Here’s the deal. We can’t assume that what works for one group of prospects will work for another group. We can’t assume that because it has been “proven” that it will work for us. We can’t assume that what has worked for us in the past will work for us in the future.
I know what you are thinking, “If I can’t depend on these things, then what can I do”. Well, here it is in three simple words; test, test, test.
Testing of your marketing methods should simply be a part of the way we do business. We should want to know if option A produces more results than option B. We should want to know if we are getting traffic from those paid clicks or if we are just paying out money for no reason. We should have some form of insight into what is going on in our marketing efforts and how we can improve their results. We should, test everything.
So how do we do this testing? One simple method is split testing. Let’ take newsletter sign up forms as an example. Split testing a sign up form is a simple way to know if one form gets better results than another form. Let’s say your two forms are exactly alike in all respects, except one form is placed within the home page of your site and the other form is included in a popup on that same page. Over a period of time, say a week or even a month, you see that more people sign up through the pop up form than through the inline form on the page. Now you know that the pop up form is the way to go.
