I can only emphasize the thing about blind split-testing.

For example, on one of my websites I have derived the now popular formula of
“headline, subheadline, short call to action, video, short call to action”
through blind splittesting of a lot of different candidates, even before that formula became popular.

Plus, there is a simple way of taking some blindness away from splittesting which gets results faster: If you have a good swipe file ( which are often included in marketing courses ), you can use those fill-in-the blanks proven direct-marketing headlines as splittesting candidates.

Those headlines usually outperform the headlines which you come up with yourself. If you are not sure, which way to fill-in-the-blanks, just splittest all candidates which come to mind. This is not rocket science.

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Example:

Swipe file:

They Laughed When I Sat Down at the Piano but When I Started to Play!

(classic headline from John Caples)

My headline (including the quotes):

“When they Saw the GUI of DemoRecorder, they Laughed at it But When they Saw the Results…”

(Mentioning both the biggest flaw and the biggest strength of the product in some tongue-in-cheek way…
This headline is a permutation of the swipe-file example. And it is one of the top-performers in my splittests…)

Another top-performing headline which is also based on a swipe file example ( but I don’t remember the original swipe-file example ):

“DemoRecorder is Not for Everybody, But Those Who Master it …”

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This strategy got me some good cost-per-lead…
Splittesting focus is still on lead-capturing because the number of sales is still too low for getting statistically significant results.

So I am still working on sales-conversion, which has to become better, although sales figures are already higher than expenses for traffic. But traffic is very limited in my niche, so conversion has to be the number one focus anyways, which is a good learning experience.

The craziest thing… even if one doesn’t know how to improve the page, blind split-testing is better than nothing. Not a quick route, but a definite one.

But conversation is not everything: also the quality of the product or service itself (plus how well it matches customer wishes) has a big influence on sales-conversion, especially if you are selling something which customers can try out before they buy, like software.

If you know what your customers want, and what they dislike in the current state of your product or service, you can plan the improvements of your products accordingly… which closes the cycle: You need useful conversation with your customers to get to know what they want and what they dislike.

That said, I have to become much more disciplined about doing some essential stuff such as sending my monthly newsletter montly and not every three or four months, or putting more quality messages into my autoresponder sequence etc etc and prioritize those tasks accordingly compared to doing improvements of the product… Especially in this changing economy, getting this right becomes vital, I guess.

Especially with Google slapping everything these days, conversions are that much more important…

Speaking from pain here!

Forest