We all know conversion is important in internet business. The better your website converts, the better you can afford to pay for your traffic. However, if you focus too much on split testing -- you are missing the BIG picture. There're 2 more things that dictate how much you can spend on customer acquisition which I believe is more important than sales letter conversion - Branding & backend sales. A lot of internet business owners I know despise the concept of branding. They think its a stupid game big companies do with tones of cash to burn. Have it occured to you these big companies don't get big just by being stupid? Maybe they know a thing or two you don't know. Branding IS important! For example, if John Reese publishes the same info as I do with the same sales letter as I use (everything hold constant except the name), and we both use same PPC campaign to promote them. Who's do you think sell better? Of course John Reese's! This is because of the brand name he built for himself over all these times by his marketing effort. As for backend, that allows you to increase the value of each customer and thus you will be able to afford more to acquire a new customer. Warriors, my suggestion is spend less time split testing, spend more time branding and setting up your backend system. This will serve you well. Please share your opinions on this, feel free to disagree.
Agree branding is very important, there's no doubt about that. Anyone who doesn't think so just doesn't think long term but is in it for the quick money making dream.
There is something called the Principal-agent problem that explains why stupid things happen in big companies. People will blow advertising budgets so that they can have the budget again next year. People will do things to build personal empires while sub-optimizing the corporation. I've seen millions spent without Marketing Analytics, split testing or design of experiment. Branding is important but it needs to be measured and tested.