Testing, Testing, 1.2.3.
It is absolutely amazing to me when people say “I tried XYZ, and could not make it work, you must have been lucky.”
I am not lucky, I am diligent, I take calculated risks, I learn from my mistakes. I can only think of one instance where the first thing I did came out of the gates a runaway winner. Just about everything since has lost money or broken even right out of the gates.
If you give up a niche without first testing at least 4-5 landing pages, as well as several different ad copies then you are not trying. Sure I have had a few flyers that crashed and burned that cost me some money, but it is rare the field that I cannot make work to some extent.
The best way I can encourage you to test is by stating that every test will cost you money. Either from the ads you buy or the potential lost revenue if you had not been testing and landing on your normal pages. Testing does cost you money, no way around that. But it costs you money exactly once.
On the tests you learn things on, you will get paid every single day going forward for the balance of the campaign. This more than compensates for the tests that don’t work, and even the ones that don’t work should teach you things.
I have seen tests where conversion rates have gone from 2% to 20% from little small things that add up. The difference between the 2% page and the 20% page could almost be a game at the back of the Sunday News Magazine, Look at some of those games, the first few differences are usually easy to spot, the last few are typically very subtle. The same is true with testing.
Test or Die.
