Take Action!

Here’s something to think about:

Someone with decent knowledge and takes action will make more money than someone with fantastic knowledge but doesn’t moves his ass at all.

I always fascinate at people who are obsessed about learning all they can. But doing nothing about it at all.

They say knowledge is power. I agree – in part.

Application of knowledge is power.

Look. Education is important. I always support learning. It’s a lifelong process. But learning doesn’t end with just learning.

You learn a hell lot too when you actually do.

In fact, doing and applying what you learnt takes your learning to a whole new level.

You will meet with circumstances that you have never thought about before. You will meet unforeseen problems and obstacles no one has ever told you about.

You still have to get on with it…and deal with it, isn’t it?

There’s where a lot of real learning takes place.

Learning also comes when you review the process you have just done.

What mistakes did you do? How can you learn from it so that you will become much more efficient and effective?

Procrastination Is Good

Say what? Procrastination? Good?
Isn’t procrastination supposed to be THE big evil?

Didn’t all the gurus proclaimed that the key to success is speed of implementation?

So why procrastinate?

Here’s why…

If you remember, I used to talk about the Pareto’s rule.

And that is 80% of what you do will give you only 20% of your results.

While the other 20% will lead to 80% of your results.

So…procrastinating is good…if you do that to 80% of the stuff that gives you little results.

In another words, procrastinate on low value stuff.

Work fast, hard and smart on high value activities.

Make sense?

Love to hear your thoughts.

Jag Foo

Multivariate Testing – Taguchi Method

In the earlier post, we talk about multivariate testing.

Here’s a more advanced of multivariate testing that I prefer – the Taguchi testing.

Let me explain what’s Taguchi testing is all about.

Taguchi testing is a statistical testing method devised by a Japanese engineer, Dr Genichi Taguchi.

It uses the orthogonal array model instead of the traditional full fractional model (used by Google Website Optimizer). Now that’s all math geek speak, so I’m not going to elaborate on that.

What’s most important is that with Taguchi testing, you can reduce the number of combinations needed for testing.

For example, if you have 4 elements with 2 variations each, you will need to test 16 (2 x 2 x 2 x 2) combinations using the traditional multivariate method.

With the Taguchi method, the number of combinations needed is reduced to only 8.

That means, you can reach a reasonable conclusion in a much faster time. And with that, you also save more on advertising fees because you only need a smaller sample size.

Let’s not forget, the faster you find a successful combination, the faster you get profitable. It’s all about time and money!

Introduction To Multivariate Testing

In split testing, we test one element of your sales page or website. For example, we can test headline A vs headline B (or vs C, D and so on), and we see which is the winner.

Split testing is pretty easy and straightforward to set up and implement.

But there are several drawbacks.

It’s very time consuming and costly. That’s because you can only test 1 element at a time.

Say we want to also test different images, location of image, sub headlines and so on…we can only do so one element at a time – one after another.

Because of this, by the time you are finished with all the elements, it could be weeks or months later!

You waste more time. And money as well as you incur more cost when the duration of the test drags.

There is another important point to consider. With split testing, it doesn’t tell us how each elements affect one another.

You might independently test the headline, and find one that performs really badly – so you don’t use it. Then you test your image, and find one that does really bad – so again, you don’t use it.

Google Advertising Videos

Some useful videos from the BIG G on:

1. Gmail advertising via placement targeting on content network

2. Optimizing your conversion automatically with Conversion Optimizer

3. Optimizing your conversion through multivariance testing

Get Targeted Ads On The Cheap

If you notice, there is increasing competition in advertising. More and more companies are getting in on the online space.

Just take a look at Google Adwords. A keyword like “window cleaning company” can cost an average of $4.44 per click!

You better have a good ad that can give you a high click through rate (CTR) as well as a solid landing page/sales pitch to have any kind of ROI.

Thankfully…there is an alternative traffic that you can get such clicks at almost half the cost…sometimes less…and still retain the quality of the traffic.

The answer – content network. Specifically the placement targeting.

If you don’t know yet, Google has a HUGE network of sites that carry their contextual ads. These sites will show ads that are relevant to the pages’ content.

It’s amazing that most people are focused on the search network and are completely forgoing the content network. And the content network can be a source of huge volume of traffic.

Now for advertisers who are using content network, most are targeting via keywords.

But keyword targeting can be pretty untargeted considering that the default matching is set to “broad”.