A vital strategy for steadily improving your results is constant testing of one change at a time and then tracking the results. In fact, if you're not testing and tracking things in your online business all the time, you're leaving money on the table.
There's always something you can tweak in any sales page, marketing campaign, newsletter signup page, etc. that will improve your conversion or profitability at least a little - and sometimes a lot.
To grow your online business, you have to know what's working for you, and what isn't.
Although there are some very high tech tools you can use for testing and tracking, you can also start out by doing it very simply.
And of course, doing it simply is much better for your business than not doing it at all!
1) Decide on an element of your online business you'd like to test. Examples:
2) Keep your orginal page the same, and create a second page for the test page - which is identical to the original except for the one element you've decided to change for the test. (If you change more than one thing at a time, you won't know for sure which element caused the result.) Now you should have two versions - the original unchanged version, and the test version that has the single change made to it.
3) Give each version of the test a unique code (like “h1” and “h2” to represent “Headline 1” and “Headline 2”) so you can track them.
4) Keep an accurate record of what you're testing, and which version has which unique code.
5) Run your test campaign for a set length of time (usually until you've run a pre-determined number of visitors - say 100 people - across each version).
6) After you've reached your visitor quota according to your stats, compare the results you got with each version to see which is the winner.
7) Now take whichever version got the better results, and keep it as your new “control” version. Create a second page that's identical to your new “control” version, and tweak one new element to create your new “test” version. Run a new test and track your results.
8) Repeat again and again, always changing one thing and keeping whichever version performed better as your new “control” version.
Over time this strategy helps you evolve really keenly honed sales pages, signup forms, and other elements of your online business.
All this testing and tracking may sound like a drag, but it can actually be a fun game - especially when you hit on a test that gives you a huge boost in your income or traffic.
Don't settle for “good enough” results when you could be getting spectacular results with constant testing and tracking!