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October 2011 Issue --> Cover Story Article

The Finer Points Of Split Testing & Why You Should Be Doing It

By: Tammy Lawman and Jeremy Reeves

Jeremy Reeves is a published author, speaker and marketing expert who built a reputation as a stellar copywriter at the mere age of 22. His clients included many of the top Internet gurus of the industry as well as several best-selling inspirational book authors.

His innate knack for understanding people led to his majoring in Psychology in college until one day, he received a mail with the headline "Can You Write a Simple Letter Like This One?". That one letter jumpstarted his passion for copywriting which he now refers to as his true calling. He continues to share his copywriting and marketing expertise to clients who have made more money than they could ever have imagined with his help.

TAMMY LAWMAN: When you first told me your story, I thought it was so interesting and unique. Why don't you go ahead and tell our audience a little bit about yourself.

JEREMY REEVES: Sounds good. Mine actually starts when I was a little kid. Growing up, as far back as I can remember I always seemed to have this gift for understanding and connecting with people. As everybody on the call probably knows, that's really essential if you want to be a good marketer. You need to understand people and connect with them.

When I was 7 or 8 years old, I was the "relationship guy" on the playground for my friends. Whenever somebody had a problem, they came to me. Whether it was the girl they liked didn't like them back, they just got in a fight with one of their friends, their teacher scolded them and they were upset, or whatever the case was back then. For some reason, I was always the kid they came to for some consoling and for me to help them get through it.

What I later realized is that people did that because of one simple reason, which was that I was interested in them. Most people seem to be interested in themselves and don't really care what happens to other people. For example, if somebody tells you a story, and your first sentence back to them is something that you did, that's a good hint that you're somebody who's interested in yourself instead of other people. That's kind of naturally how we are. It's a little bit of a learned skill for most people to be interested in other people, but it's really helpful in everything from defining a wife to getting along with people to getting clients to being a good marketer.

Luckily, I was born with that for whatever reason. It actually led me to get a degree in psychology. What I realized a couple of years into it is that college psychology is a little bit different than the kind of psychology that I was interested in, which is human psychology.

College psychology is a person walks into your office with a symptom, whatever it is. You talk to them for a few minutes and determine what their issue is based on a checklist of things they give you. Then you prescribe them a drug. I've always been kind of against drugs and that type of thing. When I get hurt, I even hate taking Advil unless it's absolutely necessary. I really had no interest in that kind of stuff.

I kind of felt this growing void inside of me. That void eventually led me to business, which is where real psychology comes into play. In business, I could make it my life's work to actually study people - how humans think, how they tick, and, in marketing terms, what makes them buy. This happened in my senior year of college. That's when I really made the switch to marketing. I eventually did get a Bachelor's in psychology, but I'm not using it.

I finally found what I was looking for, and I started my business while I was in college. The funny thing is I can remember waking up at 5:30, which I still did to this day, to get to my 7:00 class because I had to drive there. I went to school usually until about 2:00 in the afternoon. Then I came home, got showered, got ready, and went to work at a restaurant until about 11:00 or so. They were pretty long days.

The cool thing about that was it taught me how to discipline myself, which, in my mind, is really what college is about. I don't use my degree these days, but I'm making several times what I could have in any type of psychology field and even several times what my professors were making. It's the kind of discipline that helps me provide a really good service to my clients.

That kind of service led me to working with some of the world's leading entrepreneurs like Robert G. Allen and Mark Victor Hansen, the authors of Chicken Soup for the Soul, real estate mogul Dave Lindahl, the guys who used to be the marketing managers for the well-known band Guns N' Roses, persuasion expert Joel Bauer, the Millionaire Maker Loral Langemeier, a bunch of Inc. 500 companies and dozens of seven and eight-figure online marketers. Most of them are kind of in their own little niches, and you guys probably wouldn't recognize their names.

For those clients, I've generated millions of dollars' worth of extra profit from the advanced marketing strategies I've put into place and different techniques I've used to increase the conversions and net profits of their businesses.

Here are a couple of other things about me. I'm also a certified website partner, a visualized optimizer, and have been certified as a landing page optimization specialist by MECLABS. Between the tests that I've done for myself and my clients, I have tens of millions of dollars of research under my belt. I bring quite a bit of experience when it comes to split testing, conversions, increasing your profits, and all that kind of stuff.

TAMMY LAWMAN: Thank you so much for sharing all of that wonderful information. You have had a very interesting journey to get to where you are. It's wonderful that you were able to discover your talent and apply that to start your own business. That's great.

JEREMY REEVES: I feel incredibly blessed that I did, especially at such a young age.

TAMMY LAWMAN: Some people have taken years and spent lots of money to discover their X-factor. That's fabulous. Let's talk a little bit about why our readers should be split testing.

JEREMY REEVES: There are a lot of different reasons. I could probably list several dozens of them. I'll just give you a couple of them. One of the biggest ones, obviously, is that split testing is pure profit. Let's say you're making $10,000 a month, and you increase your traffic by 50%. A lot of people would say, "You're making 50% more money." This is obviously assuming that your conversions stay the same. That's not true because your gross profits might go up by 50%, but you're still paying for that traffic.

It's the same thing with affiliates. If you get more affiliates, it's still only 50% profit or whatever you're giving the affiliates. It might not be 50%. It might be 20% or 80%. Then you have to take into consideration anything you're paying for employees. You're paying overhead, rent, and everything else that goes into running a business. It's really not pure profit. Split testing is.

If you're making $10,000 a month and you increase your conversions by 20%, that adds $2,000 a month straight to your bottom line besides maybe paying $50 or $100 a month for a split testing tool or something like that. Even if you're using Google Website Optimizer, that's free. There really is no added expensive.

Pure profit is obviously one of the biggest things. That kind of leads into everything else. For example, when you increase your revenue, it's not like you're just increasing the money you bring in. What you can do once you increase your conversions because of split testing is you can attract more affiliates because the better your conversions and earnings per click, the more affiliates you're going to get. Then you get more traffic, and the more traffic you get, the faster you can test and the faster your conversions go up. There's a big snowball effect in a positive way.

Another thing you can do is increase your customer cost acquisition. That's basically how much you can spend to get a customer. (It) lets you determine that when a…

This article is just a small portion of an hour-long interview, and is only one of several interviews conducted for Internet Marketing TNT. If you'd like to see the full call, as well as other interviews in this series, simply visit Internet Marketing - Very Important Profit Systems.

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