One of the most potent tools for every Web business to use is called split testing. Here's the short version of how split testing works: You create two or more variants of a webpage and test which variation gets you more clicks, more sales, more sign-ups or whatever it is you're after. In other words, you test which variation of the web-page performs best.
Let's use a practical example to show the process: Let's assume that we want to test a squeeze page, where the goal is to get people's e-mail addresses and their permission to send additional information (this way, you can sell them your products or services down the line). One possible thing to test would be video versus text. In other words, you'll make two different squeeze-pages, one of them explaining the reasons why the visitors should sign up in a video and the other one explaining the same thing with text. Now, you need to split up your visitors evenly, so that 50% of your visitors get to see the video and 50% get to see the text. To do this, you need to run some kind of script. There are many ways to rotate pages or split up the traffic to two different redirects and the technicalities of split-testing aren't that important. The point simply is: You need some kind of a program that will do the split-testing for you.
Apart from splitting up your traffic, you also need to be able to measure the performance of the variations of your page. In our example, the goal is to get people to sign up, so the performance can be measured on the "thank you" page (that's the page people reach after they've entered their name and e-mail address and pushed the "submit" button). Every split-testing script has some way of measuring performance. For instance, the script might track all of the clicks on your web page, or it might let you insert a piece of code that "fires" whenever a particular page is loaded. In this case, you'd insert this code on the page people reach after they've submitted their e-mail address.
For html sites, one option is to use the free split testing service by Google. For WordPress sites, the best option is a plugin called WP Split Test.
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After about 100 to 200 visitors have reached your squeeze page, you should have a pretty good idea of whether the text-version or the video-version work better. You can then take the winner and start split-testing a different factor like the title, the size and placement of the opt-in box, the text or video content, and so on.
It isn't unusual to see a sizable increase in performance as well as revenue, just from changing some fairly small factor on the page. It's not unheard of that a website owner managed to double their sign-ups simply by changing some small aspect of their squeeze page. What's more: Split testing is quite easy to do and all you need to invest are a few bucks for a split-testing script! Offline businesses never have such a great and powerful marketing opportunity (imagine trying to test two different versions of a physical store!). If you aren't using split testing as part of your Internet marketing strategy yet, you should get started right away!
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