There are two types of Internet marketers: those who test and track and those who don’t. The first group focuses on things like creating as much content as possible, promoting their websites, advertising, and others in volume. They know that if they double their traffic, their sales can literally double too. Nothing wrong with that, right?

The second group do all the things like in the former group, but carefully track their numbers and test and tweak various things to increase response from their visitors, prospects or customers.

So the latter do one more boring thing than the former. But what the difference it can bring to the table? A lot. In fact, it is the key to riches when it comes to your Internet business.

Let’s start with a simple example. Marketers start the sales conversion of their product website at 1 percent. For a $100 product, the first group of marketers need to drive 100 unique visitors to the sales page just to sell one product. Great, if they can find ways to get 100 people to the page under $100 minus the cost of products (let’s keep the equation simple) then they generate some profits.

Instead of getting as much traffic to generate a low margin of profit, the second group of marketers test different kinds of components. They gradually improve their conversion by using ones that work and throwing out those who don’t work. The results might be an increase of just 10 percent but it is not uncommon to find increase from 30 percent to as high as 1000 percent or more.

This means from the same traffic, you can draw more dollars. When I first stumble upon this concept, I know I hit on something big. Testing and tracking are boring things, that’s probably why most marketers don’t document and teach them to others.

Here are some important points to highlight:
1. The best thing about Internet marketing is that unlike offline marketing, you can test a lot of things and get results sometimes overnight, on a shoestring.

2. There is nothing we can call fail in marketing, especially testing. You can only find ways not to do things and ways to improve things. You can learn from both cases.

3. Testing and tracking apply to all marketing, not just for direct response web site (which sole purpose is to sell something or generate response).

Is this concept applicable to affiliate based website? Yes, as you probably know if you own one of these sites, some of them rank higher in search engines, some of them generate more opt-ins, businesses and revenues for you.

You can test many things to come up with better, faster, and greater results with the same resources as now available.

For email marketing, you can test subject lines, using different kinds of stories, call to actions, PSes, providing two or more links instead of one, send at different times of the day and day of the week, and so on.

Website owners can use different colors, test different headlines, copy, call to actions, testimonials, stories, PSes, screen widths, fonts, spaces, and tons of other things.

Advertisers should test different ad creatives, copy, colors, placements, layouts, demographics and so on.

It may come to your surprise that just one little change can make an entirely different result than others. For example, if your headline targets the right visitors, you might see a surge increase of response almost overnight.

Knowing your numbers is really what you should pay more attention to. The good news is once you set them up, you know that you have the data that you can use to increase your bottom line. Realizing the big picture is important so you can get pass all the bells and whistles to produce better result.

As with other steps, you have to know when you must stop. It may be great to achieve more and more, but virtually you never will exceed a certain limit. Knowing when to move to the next is important. However, testing and tracking should not be skipped completely.