May is over. It is time to start evaluating my actions, and make decisions for the month of June
We have achieved our primary goal, which was to measure interest. We’ve jumped from over a million in the Alexa rankings, to just over 500,000. Now to be honest with you that really means nothing to me.
What’s more important to me, was to find out, using articles, what level of interest there was in the golf niche
To put it simply I wanted to measure traffic. Here’s the thing, without traffic you have nothing. You need traffic to test, and you need enough traffic in order to test properly.
We needed to know first if it would be possible to get traffic in this competitive niche without loosing our ass and if so how much?
Example, if you only get 100 visitors a week it will take you a considerable amount if time to test or just as importantly make a sale.
What I needed to find out was the following, would the articles I wrote get a lot of page views? Is the market I am going into too small? This we needed to find out before we preceded to invest more time & resources into this project.
The fact is we’ve proven that there is enough traffic and there is enough interest and now we face the uphill battle of conversion.
In actual fact we sent out some really crappy videos, we were not looking for perfection, in actual fact I learned to quickly get over perfection.
The goal instead was to take action, because by those very actions we could measure response. More importantly we could look at the subject matter of those videos and determine where to put more effort in - or just as importantly where not to put as much effort in.
Just like the articles we wanted to see how many views the videos would get and which ones would get the most? Which topics were of interest to the audience?
Once we found a winning video, as in how many people viewed it, we could then up the production quality to improve the traffic generating objective of that video. In addition we could now also start testing the message.
Because we have a testing engine in place that will track what a visitor does when they land on our web pages, we can move to ramping up traffic and looking for tell tale patterns relative to what is on those pages.
Now that we can get traffic we are in the driver seat, its time to pump it up and get as mush data as we possibly can so we can figure out what’s not working……. and what is, as quickly as possible.
Then when we have enough data, start sharing it with those of you on the list.
This month we will start split testing landing pages.
Last month we did 98 articles, we did some social book marking, we did videos, forum marketing, we got listed on directories, we did a Press Release and made posts on other blogs.
We have sold some product and we’re very happy about that, but the truth is, the return on investment at this moment is quite honestly terrible.
But just like any venture, we got the hard part out of the way, and that is actually taking action.
Going out there when you know that you’re writing skills aren’t very good, when you know that the video quality is poor, the production weak, it can be tough… however you don’t have to let that stop you, instead you just go out and do it, you take the hard knocks, you take the criticisms.
In addition you deal with the doubts that you have, you deal with the fear that creeps into your mind every day wondering if you’re doing the right thing?
That’s probably the hardest part of any journey, the part where you have to get of your rear end and face the music.
But one thing I’ve learned in life, which relates back to the test blog… and why it took me so long to let it out there, is this.
You will never get it perfect and if you fail to take action you will never get it right.
In actual fact perfection in my humble judgment is a “myth” and it is the very myth that prevents the masses from getting anything done, which relates back to the fear of failure.
In actual fact that is why so many fail to test their efforts because testing in effect exposes failure and in my next post I am going to go a little deep on this topic.
Kinda funny 
but I may go off the deep end, but don’t worry I will swim back. Now again you have to let loose, you have to run with it and put your heart out there.
See you on the next one, by the way we will be providing test results real soon to those of you patiently waiting.
Best Wishes
Paul