By Natalie Judd, co-founder, Internet Master Series



Let's say you have a piece of copy, you've been doing Internet marketing for a year and your sales letter is getting a pretty decent conversion rate of perhaps one percent. You make about 100 sales a month and your profits are based on how many products you sell. Then you decide to test a different headline while keeping everything else the same and you double that conversion rate to 2%. On the front end 2% may not necessarily sound like a big number, but in the back end it means that you've doubled your sales all because of a small change to your copy.

Split testing simply means that you split your list and give one version to part of your list and another version to the other. By testing copy all the time you can track not only how much better one headline is vs. another, but you can see how many sales you could have lost by not split testing.

To run a split test you can use a variety of different software programs to help you automate the entire process. You'll write the same piece of copy with two different headlines sending the piece with headline ?A? to half your list and the one with headline ?B? to the other half. Through the software program you can track how many visitors saw version ?A? versus version ?B? and how many on each group took the call to action.

Once you get the hang of testing, you'll want to continue to test other headlines, different colors and fonts, an introduction, different offers, price points and guarantees like a 60 day versus a 90 day guarantee. You can also test different order forms, bullets, calls to action, the length of your copy or an entirely different sales angle. The key is to change only one thing at a time so that you know what affected the change in sales.

Testing is one of the things that separates the great copywriters from the mediocre ones. Copywriting masters test, test and then test some more. Once you see the power of testing you'll want to continue tweaking until you get it right. Some revisions will net only small changes while others will be gigantic. For example, in one particular case just one added word to a headline bumped up response by 45%! But, they wouldn't have ever known this without a split test and neither will you.