This article is part of the Secrets of Creating and Growing an Online Business series. All week you will find articles that demystify what’s involved and what the secrets are to success.

I made a number of mistakes with my CustomBar product. One was not getting potential clients involved in the development process early enough, leading to much feature changes and wasted development effort. My next biggest mistake was not performing nearly enough tweaking and testing on my marketing methods and sales process, often selecting theory over measuring real results and leaving it at that. This was a mistake that cost me at least 500% of the revenues that I actually received from it.

How to Avoid Falling in the Same Trap

So you’ve released your product or service and the clients are starting to come, but your results just aren’t what you expected. You’re earning a few dollars a day instead of hundreds even though others in your field have received such incomes. This is where the real work begins! No matter how well you think you’ve thought up your website, your advertising, and the product itself, it is at best a vaguely shaped lump of clay compared to the finely chiseled creation that it could be. You need to begin the optimization process and with a little patience see your results doubling! Little things can make a huge difference!

Let’s say that I come up with two different versions of a web page for a new online product that I’ve just released. How on earth can I objectively say which one I should use? I won’t really know for sure until I try both. If one results in twice the people clicking on Buy Now than the other, then I can double my money just by making the right choice! That’s a pretty good case for putting in the effort to find out which works better. The good news is that this is rather easy to do, and can be applied for anything you change online or offline. The trick is merely to try all your options, and then select the best one!

In the case of a webpage a little bit of code written by you or your web developer can randomly mark each visitor as an A or B (creating an A/B Split Test). A visitors get one version of your web page while B visitors get another. The test is run over a period of time and the results are then measured. Select the version that got you the best results. That’s all! If you don’t have a way to get this coded then you can purchase a 3rd party testing application instead.

The changes in the pages can be small like a headline or a completely different site, but do note that you lose accuracy the larger the change is. A headline on site A may actually be better than one on site B, but the other elements on site B may still cause it to score higher overall. Thus after picking a major change you should then tweak it with smaller changes. Other testing methods are available which allow you to test more than two choices at a time, and it certainly wouldn’t hurt you to pick up a book on statistics to learn more. However the A/B method is certainly enough to get you started on recovering all the money that is currently being lost through suboptimal marketing methods.

I learned my lesson at a pretty big price in lost revenue and have since become a massive fan of metrics. I measure the results of virtually every change I make to this site and I pay very close attention to what brings in the traffic and what ad placements work. This goes for changes not only in layout but in content as well. I am very aware of which of my posts attracted the attention of the audience that visits this blog and which did not.

Things to Test

To get your brain rolling here are just some of the things that you should consider testing in your product or service.

• Effectiveness of your referal program.
• Price of the product.
• Performance of paid advertising in various places.
• Performance of the ads themselves.
• Any written copy.
• Your order process.
• Major headlines, graphics, screenshots etc.
• Free trials and demos resulting in sales.
• Money-back guarantees, sales, coupons for future products, and other “buy it now” incentives.

Resources

Steve Pavlina is a big advocate and success case for optimization. He has written a pretty hefty article on testing specifically for shareware developers. As always his articles are a great read for both their content and the inherent motivational value that they contain.

Getting Everything You Can Out of All You’ve Got covers far more than just testing, and it’s a terrific way to fill in all the knowledge you need to have intelligent marketing methods to test in the first place. I’m glad I bought it because for less than the price of a couple large pizzas I have gained countless insights into gaining more from what I create (which is the best way to describe the set of topics Jay writes about here). I’m also two large pizzas healthier.

Got something to say? Leave a response to this post.

 Get the latest updates by subscribing to the feed.

Semi-Related Posts

• The Secrets of Creating and Growing an Online Business
• What Long Overdue Tasks are Holding Your Business Down?
• Writing Effective Content for an e-Commerce Website
• 5 Specific Ways to Increase the Amount of Visitors Turned Customers on Your E-Commerce Website

This entry was posted on Saturday, July 8th, 2006 at 3:07 pm and is filed under Business, e-Commerce, Business Strategy, Marketing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.