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Test, test and test again...

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Published: 12Sep2005
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Whatever type of online business you are running, one of the most vital things to remember is that you should test everything!

The beauty of the Internet is that you can test countless different ways of running your business without it costing you a small fortune (or indeed, anything at all). This is a huge advantage over traditional 'offline' businesses and something that should be taken advantage of. Think about it, let's say you have an offline business and you want to take an advertisement in a local newspaper. Once you have agreed the layout and text of the advert with the publisher, that's it - you can't change it once the newspaper has been printed if you don't get the results you were hoping for.

In complete contrast, with an Internet business, you can change your sales page and online advertising at any time which means you can 'tweak' every little detail to ensure that you are making maximum sales and getting the very best value for money from your advertising.

In general, when making changes to any website/sales page/advert etc, it is best to make only minor alterations rather than a major overhaul. The reason for this is that if you change everything on a page and it affects your sales, you won't know EXACTLY what made the difference. If you make one or two small changes at a time, you can see precisely which one made the difference to what your visitors/customers do when they get to your site. Remember, even tiny changes can make a huge difference - seriously - just something as simple as changing a headline can increase or decrease sales significantly.

Having said that, from time to time, I do think it is a good idea to give any website or sales page a major transformation, just to see what happens :-)
I have numerous sales pages and sites that haven't been altered for years yet still produce sales everyday. Though, in fairness, there is no reason why they shouldn't since most visitors to the pages in question aren't aware that they haven't been changed for so long and as long as the product is up to date and of high quality it really shouldn't matter.

With this in mind, I have recently set about re-writing some of my sales pages and if you have some pages that you haven't touched for a while, you might want to consider doing the same thing. One of the main things that occurred to me when I started re-writing my sales copy was that my own ability and experience has grown vastly since I first wrote the copy in question and like anything, the more you do something, the better you get at it. I am sure that this is the same for many of my subscribers - they have a sales page that was written when they first started working online and it works - it makes sales BUT the person in question now has a lot more experience than they had when they first wrote the page and is therefore capable of doing the same job a lot better....

To give you some idea of the impact that re-writing a sales page or re-designing a website can have, I have noticed that some of my 'new' pages are generating 25% more sales than the old ones!! This isn't the case with all of the new pages and it is likely that I will revert back to the old pages in some cases but as I said at the start of this article, it is all about testing.

Even if it takes you a day to write some new sales copy, isn't it worth taking the time to give it a go? That one day of work could increase your income by 25% or more for the next year (or even longer)!

At the end of the day, even if you don't want to completely change your website or sales pages (this also applies to your eBay auction sales pages etc), then I can't stress strongly enough the point that you should be making regular minor changes to try and improve your sales ratio.

Remember, it only takes a few minutes to make a small change to your site and it won't cost you anything. This is a luxury that offline businesses are not usually afforded so you really should ensure that you take maximum advantage of this 'edge'.

Richard Grady has been helping ordinary people earn online since 1998. He writes a free newsletter which is published every two weeks. To subscribe (and claim your free gifts), visit: http://www.thetraderonline.com/newsletter.html

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