How would you like to maximize all your marketing investments, limit your downside, and boost your profits? Well, what you’re about to learn will put you ahead of 95% of the so-called experts in marketing, whether it’s online with business blogs or off-line with a simple post card mailing.

It simply amazes me how so many business owners waste away thousands upon thousands of dollars on marketing that doesn’t work. And that includes the dollars and hours they blindly dump into the new online marketing arena of business blogs. These are often the very same people who otherwise scrutinize every other dollar they spend in improvements or upgrades to their business. Yet when it comes to their marketing — they’re willing to take whatever comes their way without much thought.

But you don’t have to fall into that dark, dank marketing money-pit! In Law #10 of Marketing With Business Blogs you’ll learn the how your business blog can help you avoid substantial losses and maximize all your marketing.

Law #10. Test, measure, and track before you “go big” with your marketing

This is one of the single most profound marketing truths you’ll ever encounter. And it’s also one of the single most ignored. I’m going to let you in on a secret: companies that take the time to test their online and off-line marketing efforts outperform their competitors by as much as ten fold!

There are so many different elements you could potentially test, and I can’t possibly begin to cover them all here. But what I’d like to be sure I do is give you a solid introduction you can run with.

First — what do I mean by testing and measuring?

Let’s look at a couple of quick examples.

• In off-line marketing, take magazine ads for instance. The same ad, identical in all respects, may pull differently when run during different times of the year. You won’t know until you test.
• Or online on your business blog or website, how about changing something as simple as the headline on your name capture offer. We’ve seen this one change result in a registration difference of 250% or more! Once again you just don’t know what works best until you test.

If there’s one thing that you can take away from today’s installment that will save you tens of thousands of dollars, it’s this — always test small before committing a major investment of time or money to any marketing method.

Don’t ever agree to a discounted rate for running a new ad multiple times. Always “waste” a few dollars up front to run it one time to see how it works. If it works once, it will work again and you’ll quickly recover the few extra dollars you spent on the single run of a test ad. But if it you commit to multiple runs and it fails, there’s nothing you can do but take a huge loss for getting seduced by the multiple run discount.

The assumption that can cost you millions

Business owners and professionals that fail to test usually do so out of a fatal character flaw. They assume that they already know what their clients want. In fact, they assume that they know better than their clients. Then they’re shocked when their fancy marketing campaign fails to win more than a handful of sales.

The bottom line is that you can’t tell the market what to do. As a matter of fact it’s quite the opposite. The market will always tell you exactly what it’s going to do… whether you like it or not! My advice to you is this: treat every ad, every sales letter, every promotion, and every product as a test.

The REAL power of marketing with business blogs is hidden

When you’re testing online, marketing with business blogs can give you a host of advantages that you won’t otherwise get with a regular website or standard sales letter. Since business blogs are conversational and focused more on educating and/or building relationships with your target audience you can get a better measurement of what’s most important to them.

Much of what you read about business blogging will focus on comments, trackbacks, and other blog specific measurements. And while those are important components in tracking, for most business bloggers they won’t reveal the measurements that are most important. This is a topic we cover in depth in the Marketing with Business Blogs multi media coaching course, but here are the three most critical areas:

1. Traffic volume and flow
2. Keywords used in search engine to find your business blog
3. Response rate to offers made in the visitor landing areas

To discover the testing and measurement goldmine laying right under your own business blog you must be testing, measuring, and tracking in all three of these areas. When you do, your results will show you what you’re getting right with your target audience, and where you need to improve. This information will tell you in plain unbiased language what’s important to your target audience.

For most business bloggers, this will mean using a third-party site measurement tool like http://www.statcounter.com or http://www3dstats.com. And even though this testing and tracking is taking place online, the information you gain will be invaluable in both your online and offline marketing.

If you’re really serious about propelling your profits, testing must become the cornerstone of any marketing program. Only by careful and continual testing can you tell which ads, which headlines, which letters, which lists and media, which regions of the country or world, what niches produce the strongest, most profitable results for you. And with the right plan and strategy, your business blog can play a major role in revealing all these marketing secrets to you.

Yes this will take extra work on your part, but then again if you want to win BIG and lose small, this is the only way to do it. Successful marketing is a science, not art. If you want powerful results, you must follow the formula precisely. I promise you the rewards will be well worth it!

In the next installment of the Marketing With Business Blogs series, you’ll learn the secret to turning prospect attraction into list-building action!

Learn how to unleash the maximum marketing power of business blogs, podcasts, and RSS (in any industry, profession, or niche) with Marketing With Business Blogs™.

John-Paul Micek is a published author and weekly columnist for the business section of the Honolulu Star Bulletin. He’s known as the “Click-and-Mortar Business Coach” by business owners around the world thanks to members of the Business Owners Coaching Club™.


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