The Learning Curve Options

[jake_us9]

I've had some learning curves in my time. 18 years ago I started teaching myself how to use a computer (An NEC PowerMate with a HUGE 20MB drive and I think it was 8mb of memory!) Five years ago, in a effort to keep more client money in my business, I bought my own DVCam camera to shoot the corporate videos I was producing and started to learn how to use that. A year later I installed my own editing software so I could edit some of those corporate videos for my clients. I’ve just delivered one DVD that's 90 minutes long and another that is 40 minutes long to one client and they're pretty happy so I guess the learning curve has paid off.

Now, three months ago I took on Internet Marketing thinking, initially, it would be a breeze. 90 days later I begged forgiveness for the forests I have denuded by printing out so many reports from the many gurus out there. What a learning curve this task is! Absolutely huge.

Great fun to learn so much new stuff but so easy to suffer information overload.

Interestingly, from a communications perspective I see a lot of mistakes even from the gurus (probably mainly from the gurus), which I plan to put into a special report. I don’t just mean spelling mistakes (like that one) and typos, of which there are a lot.

[Randy]

I'll give you the key to Marketing that'll help you more than anything else Jake...

Learn how to Test and then make sure you incorporate it into everything you do. More importantly learn how to tell when a test is giving you valid and conclusive data to work with so that you're making good decisions.

Conversion testing or conversion analysis is something that it took me literally years to get around to and wrap my brain around. But I can tell you when I finally did a few years ago it made a huge impact upon my business. Orders of magnitude in difference where conversions and income is concerned.

[jesse1]

I'll give you the key to Marketing that'll help you more than anything else Jake...

Learn how to Test and then make sure you incorporate it into everything you do. More importantly learn how to tell when a test is giving you valid and conclusive data to work with so that you're making good decisions.

Conversion testing or conversion analysis is something that it took me literally years to get around to and wrap my brain around. But I can tell you when I finally did a few years ago it made a huge impact upon my business. Orders of magnitude in difference where conversions and income is concerned.

just curious - what do you use for conversion analysis? I am having custom software made but maybe you also have some good resources? I agree with you on this!

[Randy]

I use a home-rolled application also Jesse. Frankly there's nothing available out there right now that I could recommend to someone just getting into it, because none of the commercial apps I've seen do anything to test for data validity or attempt to tell you when you have conclusive/inconclusive results. And in my book the only thing worse than not testing at all is to think you're testing but then relying on data that is either invalid or inconclusive.

I started putting together a little app last December that'll do it all with the idea of releasing it sometime this Spring. But I've gotten sidetracked by work on my real sites the last couple of months so turned the final coding work over to a code junkie I hired. Which reminds me, I need to fire him off an email to see where things stand and to make sure he understands how all of the various formulas work together.

[MaKa]

none of the commercial apps I've seen do anything to test for data validity or attempt to tell you when you have conclusive/inconclusive results. And in my book the only thing worse than not testing at all is to think you're testing but then relying on data that is either invalid or inconclusive.

I know about your reservations towards Google's Website Optimizer - on sharing data with Google and it may not be a real "commercial app" since it's free. It does shows a relevance rating and also an indication when the experiment provides valid results.

Section Relevance Rating
The section relevance rating is an measure of how relevant the variations of that section is to the experiment. A section with low relevance indicates that the performance of variations of that section are not significantly different. A section with high relevance indicates that the is a good degree of variation in performance among the variations, indicating the presence specific losers and winners.

Source: https://www.google.com/analytics/siteopt/si....html#relevance

[Randy]

I've not played with the Google tools much yet MaKa, though it's on my List to get to as soon as I can find some time. Probably a couple of months. I figured I'd wait til they got closer to being out of Beta before I looked too closely.

FWIW, the things I'm interested in seeing is if they apply any of the mathematical formulas to the collected data. Like standard deviation, degree of confidence, minimum sample size, minimum difference to detect, etc. This mathematical side of the equation (pun intended) is what seems to be missing from every app I've looked at in the past.