The number one key to success in Internet marketing – in fact, the key to success in just about every endeavor – is abiding by one simple principle.
The principle of continuous improvement.
In Japan, it’s called ‘kaizen’ which is a nice, shorthand way of saying you must always strive to improve, and that in order to improve you must constantly:
- Test different approaches;
- Track (or measure) which works the best; and
- Innovate or come up with a new approach to test.
Ideally, kaizen should govern every single aspect of your business – from how you recruit and train staff, to your production processes, to how you handle the books. After all, every improvement counts. To your bottom line.
But whatever you want to improve, it’s essential to choose the right measure; otherwise your efforts to test, track and innovate will prove fruitless. For most businesses, the measure should have a direct or indirect impact on profits.
When it comes to marketing, and in particular Internet marketing, there are numerous elements you can test, track and innovate.
For example, our company, Kikabink, focuses on two general components of Internet marketing:
- Generating web site traffic; and
- Converting it into customers.
Therefore, our aim in testing, tracking and innovating is to measure and improve such things as the quantity of traffic, the conversion of visitors-to-sales, the conversion of visitors-to-optins, sales, and profits. And since there are numerous influences on traffic, conversion rates, sales, and profits, there are numerous things to test!
Fortunately, testing on the Internet is relatively inexpensive. To the point where it’s almost inexcusable for any online business not to test.
However, it’s easy to be overwhelmed by so many testing opportunities too. So, unless you’re capable of running complex multivariate tests (where you test numerous things at the same time), I suggest adopting a simple, methodical approach.
Divide your marketing into different categories, identify all the elements within each category, and then test them one at a time. This is critical - you need to be able to isolate exactly what causes a change in your results.
For example, you might consider traffic-to-customer conversion as one category. Some of the items within this might be the:
- Product
- Offer
- Headline
- Price
On that basis, you might select one of these to test first, get to a level you’re happy with, then move on to the next.
Which brings us to an important point: when do you stop testing? According to the principle of kaizen, the answer is never.
In practical terms, though, it’s reasonable to continue to test something until the rate of improvement start flattening out, at which point you can move on to testing something else.
However, if, for example, you started by changing the price… and then you changed the product, and then the offer and then the headline… you’d definitely want to retest the price!
Above all, embrace the principle of kaizen – you will literally grow your online profits by doing so!
