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One of the most potent tools for just about any Online enterprize to use is called split testing. The basic concept of split-testing is quite simple: You create two or more versions of a webpage and analyze which version gets you more clicks, more sales, more sign-ups or whatever it is you're after. In other words, you test which version of the web-page performs best.

Here's a basic example to illustrate a split-test: Let's assume that we want to test a squeeze page, where the goal is to get people's e-mail addresses and their permission to send additional information (this way, you can sell them your products or services down the line). One possible thing to test would be video versus text. In this case, you'd create two versions of your squeeze page, one with text explaining the benefits of signing up and the other with a video, explaining those same benefits. Now, you need to split up your visitors evenly, so that 50% of your visitors get to see the video and 50% get to see the text. To do this, you need to run some kind of script. There are many ways to rotate pages or split up the traffic to two different redirects and the technicalities of split-testing aren't that important. The point simply is: You need some kind of a software that will do the split-testing for you.

Apart from splitting up your traffic, you also need to be able to measure the performance of the variations of your page. For this example, the performance of the page is determined by how many people sign up by entering their e-mail address. Every split-testing script has some way of measuring performance. For instance, the script might track all of the clicks on your web page, or it might let you insert a piece of code that "fires" whenever a particular page is loaded. In this case, you'd insert this code on the page people reach after they've submitted their e-mail address.

As mentioned before, there are many choices for split testing scripts. For html-based sites, check out Google's free split testing service. If you are using WordPress to build your websites, there's a great  WordPress plugin for split testing on the market as well.

Check out this video of WP Split Test in action:

After about 100 to 200 visitors have reached your squeeze page, you should have a pretty good idea of whether the text-version or the video-version work better. You can then take the winner and start split-testing a different factor like the title, the size and placement of the opt-in box, the text or video content, and so on.

It isn't unusual to see a considerable increase in performance as well as revenue, just from changing some fairly small element on the page. It's completely possible to double your sign-ups by modifying some of the page content! What's more: Split testing is quite easy to do and all you need to invest are a few bucks for a split-testing script! Offline businesses never have such a great and powerful marketing opportunity (imagine trying to test two different versions of a physical store!). If you aren't using split testing as part of your Internet marketing strategy yet, you should get started right away!