Market testing

In my opinion—the easiest way is just spent it and see what works. The beauty of the online world is this can be done for hundreds or even tens of dollars. Buy a few AdSense ads on Google. Buy different words or phrases. Use different offers, colors, and pictures to see which one gets the best return. Try the same thing on Facebook and LinkedIn.

Track everything to figure out which one’s work and which ones work the best.

Then just spend money on the ads that work. Spend if the sales/gross margin generated is more than the cost of the ad.

Clearly this approach does not work if you are selling big ticket items or things that people do not place the order right away for. And sometimes there need to be some assumptions. For example, if you are signing up a subscriber who pays $10 per month and the cost to get a customer is $50, is this a good decision? It all depends on whether the customers stick with you for more than five months.

If you happen to hit a success formula, your business can scale very quickly. Keep tracking though since success can be fleeting. Things change all the time so keep testing and tracking.

I am a big advocate of SEO (Search Engine Optimization) I read once that people click seven times more frequently on natural search results than they do on ads. So, once you know which words or phrases work to buy, SEO can magnify the result and can get the same traffic but often for less cost.?Similar, I am a big fan of PR.?People like to read news – not ads.

TechCrunch published an article by Robert J. Moore on the lack of statistical significance in many AB market tests. They also pointed out that over-testing can cause analysis paralysis. (I agree heartily with the latter point)

At first, Moore seems to be saying "do not AB test," but he is not. He is just saying "do not let it slow you down."

AB testing goes along the lines of my “fail often, fail fast, fail cheap” philosophy.?And of course it can be ABCDEGF testing also.

Now I am going to test if the time spent on this article gets a better return than going to the KBIS show which I am doing in 2 weeks.