Imagine you had two different sales letters created for you. How do you know which one is likely to produce the better response? The only way is split testing them and comparing the results.

In 1886, retail businessman John Wanamaker famously quipped, “I know that 50% of my advertising is wasted. I just don’t know which half.”

But the truth is much worse.

In fact, most advertising is wasted, because most advertising is not based on what’s been proven to work.

So to go back to my earlier question: how do you know which ad will perform better?

To answer that question, you must first have a history of test results.

That is, you must have a pretty good idea as to what types of elements in an ad produce the best response, based on real-world tests.

• Not what you think or I think what will do best.
• Not your mother or next-door neighbor.
• Not even the million dollar ad agencies.

In fact, nobody would really know what to focus on, UNLESS they had access to these proven test results.

And in order to get these test results, there would have to be some way to specifically measure the results of any given ad. We would need to know which types of elements performed well and which did not. Then we could analyze the ads and determine the common techniques used among the successful ones.

Well, fortunately much of this work has been already done for you.

There are over a hundred years of history on advertising test results in which you can base your assumptions. So if you knew which kinds of ads performed better, then you might be able to take an educated guess as to which of the two ads would perform better than the other.

Of course, that kind of information is just a “starting point.”

You still need to split test your own ads. That means you’ll be using 2 or more versions of your ad, sales letter or whatever and compare their conversion rate.

The one that’s better is the winner. Once you have your winner, you immediately start testing him against another ad.

In the ‘split testing‘ articles on this internet business blog I’m going to show you how to test your own sales letter the right way, so you can cut the dogs loose and go with the winners every time.

No matter how successful your sales letter is, I can’t stress the importance enough of testing it to improve it even further. Sometimes the tiniest tweak can be responsible for boosting a sales letter’s conversion rate considerably.

But how will you ever find out which tweaks those are unless you split test them?

• Sometimes it’s fairly obvious what you could do to improve their response.
• Other times what we may think will work better can actually make things worse. In the end it doesn’t matter what you or I or other copywriters think.

It only matters what your prospects think, and they weigh in on how much they like your headline or offer by purchasing and becoming a customer.

The equivalent of printing money on demand.

Remember, the name of the game is to always try to beat your control (your former winner and best-performing sales letter).

Once you have a proven sales letter, it truly is money in the bank.

When you know your average response rate, you can predict what getting more of the same kinds of prospects to your website will do to your bottom line.

When you get right down to it, who wouldn’t want their average conversion rate to be as high as possible?

I don’t know of anyone who wants a lower conversion rate, but I do know plenty of people who don’t test.

Whether they realize it or not, they are settling for less than they’re capable of achieving.

With a good marketing funnel in place, you ideally want to match each message you portray to your market’s desires. That means everything from the initial pay per click (PPC) ad, article, ezine ad, or whatever method you use to funnel traffic to your site—all the way on down the line.

Everything.

1. Your opt-in/name squeeze page
2. Your email autoresponder sequence
3. Your audio and video podcasts
4. Your teleseminars
5. And certainly your sales page

You see, the real purpose of testing is to develop the most profitable marketing funnel. So you test all elements of your funnel, not just the entry point. It’s easy to see that each tiny increase in one part of the funnel will MULTIPLY with all other improvements of the other parts of your marketing funnel.

That’s ‘compounded’ split testing profit.

Basically you’re testing 2 versions of your web page to find out which one performs better:

• Which of 2 split tested squeeze pages gets the most confirmed subscribers?
• Which of 2 split tested sales letters gets the most sales?
• Which of 2 split tested PPC Ads gets the most clicks?

Most of the work is done by split testing software running on your web site. The only thing you have to do is to setup the 2 versions of your web page. Then the split testing software will control the test, record all data, and show you the results.

In the diagram the split testing software is represented by the gears

1. Each time a visitor arrives at the page, the split testing software sends him to one of the two versions of your testing page.
2. Each time a conversion happens (for example a sale), the split testing software will collect the information which web page that visitor has seen.
3. In the end you simply compare which version created the better results. You pick the winner and put it online, you dump the loser.

The result of your split test may look like this.

In this split test sales letter B clearly sells better than sales letter A. So you’d end this split test, you’d drop sales letter A, and continue running the winner, sales letter B.

If you’re smart, you’ll immediately start creating a new sales letter C and running a new split test C against the former winner B.

It’s important that repeat visitors see the same page each time. Otherwise you could not find out which version is responsible for a conversion.

1. When visitors arrive at the website, the split testing software checks to see if it’s a repeat visit or not.
2. If it is, the visitor is sent to the same sales letter as last time (to ensure the same offer is shown).
3. If it’s a first-time visitor, a sales letter is chosen at random, and the visitor is sent there.
4. The engine records which sales letter the new visitor is sent to (either by setting a cookie on the visitor’s computer or saving the visitor’s IP address), so return visits can be routed back to the same sales letter.

As you see, it’s not so hard to understand split testing. If you’re just starting out, keep it simple. Don’t hop on super complicated setups for your first test, maybe do something very easy, like just using 2 different headlines.

You’ll find more split testing articles here, and you can leave your questions below.

People ask for sales letter reviews and advice on how they should set up their site to be successful.

• How does my headline look?
• Is this a good price to sell my product?
• What kind of font should I use?
• What’s the best ending digit for a price?
• Should I send them to an opt-in page first, or send them straight to my sales letter?
• Will a picture of me help to add more credibility and lead to more sales?
• Should I use a header graphic?

And what’s the answer that marketing veterans and novices alike always give in response?

You guessed right!

“Test it.”

And while that answer is the right one for those types of questions,

• it’s amazing to me how many people know about split testing and still don’t practice what they preach.
• Still others know they should test but have no idea how to do it properly.

I’m not an expert on split testing. I’ve gotten better at it with practice, as will you. I’m also not an expert in statistics.

The nice thing about split testing is that it doesn’t require a lot of marketing know-how to do it. Neither do you have to be an expert in “statistical mathematical experiments”, or even software engineering.

Anyone with a few basic tools and a solid understanding of the basics can increase his profits using split testing.

Here the ‘ol cliché is true: it ain’t rocket science.

There is software available for your website that will automate much of the split testing process, letting you concentrate on the big picture.

The purpose of this ‘split testing’ category at internet business mastermind is to give you the bigger picture of split testing.

My split testing articles will explain the simple concepts for beginners, as well as giving you in depth ideas if you have already mastered the basics.

Once you get it, go out, get the tools, and skyrocket your profits.