SFB Newsletter # 25

'You're one inexpensive test away from the truth'

Hey 👋 

Today I thought I would give you a behind the scenes view into my world and what I get up to business wise.

Two of the most important axioms that I use to run my business are;

“You’re only one inexpensive test away from the truth”

&

“The market knows the truth”

One of the big benefits of running a business online - You simply get a lot of data and it’s incredibly fast & easy to run split tests.

So I spend a lot of time testing things.

Whilst others wander blind in the labyrinth of business growth - I’ve found that you can simply turn on the light and follow the path.

You can run an ad to your website for less than $50 and within 6 hours have meaningful data on which type of copy/offer/creatives your dream clients are responding to.

You can then burn the losers, take your winners and perform new tests everyday!

Here is a test I set up this morning to test 5 variations of new ad copy. By 5pm I’ll probably have a winner I can re-test for tomorrow. You’d probably be surprised by the variation of results on these.

You see most people waste their time seeking the opinions of others,
(which is incredibly ineffective & inefficient.)

When you do this you delay your progress, especially if you’re asking your friends, family and ‘peers’ what they think of your websites, videos, blogs, emails etc…

This is a massive waste of time.

You end up getting 5 different subjective opinions pulling you in different directions. Plus, most of the time these people aren’t even in the market you’re trying to reach, nor do they have the depth of marketing understanding to give you valid advice.

This is going to sound simple… Perhaps so simple that it’s easy to play it off as unimportant…

“Don’t ask people if they would buy your product… Present an offer to your market instead.”

Remember you’re only one inexpensive test away from the truth & the market knows the truth.

When you do this - You will then be in one of two positions.

  1. You achieved your KPI - The test worked. You can try again tomorrow to see if it will work again (it could be a fluke)

  2. You failed - the test didn’t work - But you have bought data which gives you an idea what not to do.

You can use these two outcomes as a kind of binary coin toss to answer every question you have about your market.

Do videos or images work better?  

Long or short copy for cold people?

Talking head in the video or invisible head?

AI generated voice or my voice?

Instead of asking your parents, your dog, your friends, siblings, bf/gf’s or even your peers…

Run a test instead…

Then ask this… ‘I ran this split test - I have these two sets of data what do you think..?’

If the person tells you they have no idea what they’re looking at… Then their opinion is not valid, hence you should never have asked for it in the first place.

A well educated business person will quickly and easily be able to read the data…

They may even ask for more of it…

What’s your KPI? (Key performance indicator/goal)
What’s the CPM? (cost per 1,000 impressions)
What’s the CTR? (click through rate)

For reference here is an example here is an outcome of a test I ran yesterday…

I created various different versions of copy to see which would perform the best.

One of the versions cost me $0.60 to send traffic to my website.

Another cost $24.46 to send traffic.

A difference of 40.76 times 😅

However the more interesting thing is that the 3 generated leads came from ‘those more expensive ads’ - so the data is inconclusive and needs to be tested again.

Let me ask you this…

How many things have you tested on your website? Or did you just launch it based on opinion and now you’re wondering why it doesn’t create any sales?

How many things have you tested in your email subject lines?

How many pieces of copy, offers & creatives are you testing on a weekly basis?

For 99%, the answer to that question, you will unfortunately be able to count on one hand - and it’s the reason your business is stagnant.

Instead, start encouraging the mad scientist inside of yourself.

Edison tested 10,000 variations of the lightbulb before it worked.

Dyson tested 6,500+ variations of his vacuum before he created the multi billion dollar product you see today.

You see marketing is not about some silver bullet tactic that’s going to save you.

It’s a mindset that commits to testing 10,000 variables to find the control.

And then once you have it - it’s about re-testing it everyday to see if it’s still valid.

What’s truly amazing about online business - for the first time - these tests are fast, easy to perform & cheap.

With just $20 and 30 minutes per day within 1 year you could perform thousands of tests and be well progressed on the path of mastery.

The velocity and accuracy of testing you can perform today is truly unprecedented.

There is no other time in human history you can use simply a laptop, wi-fi and some intention that rewards your curiosity with a cashflow machine that pays you every single month.

In my opinion - building a business in this way has to be one of the most entertaining and enjoyable ways to build wealth.

Plus, over time you get better at predicting what will and won’t work, especially if you’re good at finding and recognising patterns - this becomes much, much easier with practice.

I speak to a lot of business owners who say things like - ‘marketing doesn’t work for me…’ blah, blah blah…

The truth is you don’t test enough, or you’ve tried to outsource your testing to an agency - who will NEVER show up with the same energy that you could bring to the scenario.

Or perhaps you’ve simply allowed yourself to listen to the opinions of weak minded unscientific business people.

Testing is hard sometimes.

Starting two weeks ago I launched a completely new type of product I’ve never sold before.

My goal is to be able to spend $1 and create $2 in profit by the end of the day. It’s a digital product also - so there aren’t many customer service issues or a cost of goods to deliver the product.

So far I’ve bought $1,350 of data (instagram/fb ads) and I’ve made zero sales.

I’ve created 3 different landing page variations. I’ve created hundreds of different variations of ads, headlines & copy.

Just this morning I had a breakthrough that’s brought down my cost per click by $2 on average (so far) so I felt it necessary to come in and share my mindset with you here.

I’ll simply keep going until I get it profitable.

One of the reasons I started the project was so I can share the results with my LeadFLOW community so they can learn from them and see the results live.

Every week we do 2 x weekly zoom calls, we’re constantly chatting together in a forum during the week about the tests we’re doing and the experiments we’re running.

Plus I’m constantly creating content and sharing it back into the community to help you improve your mindset, sales, products, lead gen, operations and profits.

We grow together - because if one of us breaks new territory we share it with the other members.

Just this past week I’ve been sharing the lessons from my Journal Funnel that’s done over $1M in sales to one of my members who decided to create her own version of it with her content.

We’ll be working together to scale up her system over the next few weeks.

If you’d like to join our group and start scaling with us - here is the application form.

Talk soon,

Ben.