Study Of Excellence
Let’s imagine that you want to start a business. You just finished reading a book on NLP. In this book on NLP said that NLP is the study of excellence. So all you needed to do to be successful is to find something that is excellent, study it, and you can be excellent yourself.
You go down the mall. You talk to some of the shop owner to interview them. You’d ask them about their beliefs and what they did every day. You might even ask a few of the customers that come back over and over why they come to that store what they like about it. You think you’re on the path to success.
Bombing Raids
During World War II the American sent a bunch of planes over Germany on a bombing run. Only about 20% of them came back. Because this was unacceptable because if the kept having such heavy losses they would eventually run out of pilots and run out of planes.
They needed to find out how to fix this situation. They hired the American version of Alan Turing. If you’ve seen the movie, “The Imitation Game,” that was about this mathematician Alan Turing who cracked the Nazi enigma code.
The Americans had their own version of Turing. He was a statistician and that generals asked the statistician how can we improve our bombing runs because it we keep suffering such heavy losses will eventually lose and
they figured this mathematician genius could figure out what to do.
Secrets Of Split Testing
Imagine that you had a webpage. A landing page, sales page, say you sold shoes. For every hundred visitors to your website, you had a 2% conversion rate. Meeaning for every hundred visitors you had two sales and you thought I’d like to increase my sales.
I’d like to make more money. So you did some research online and you found out that if you want to increase your sales on your website you have to do split testing.
Split testing is a very simple idea. It’s been around for a long time before the Internet. Essentially it involves taking what works, making a slight change and then splitting your traffic and seeing which one performs better.
Check Out These Amazing Shoes
For example, if you have your original webpage that sold shoes and your headline said, Check Out These Amazing Shoes maybe on your new augmented landing page you change your headline to say Check Out These Fantastic Shoes.
You would change one thing. You would change the word amazing to the word fantastic and you would see which one converted better.
Let’s say you let each test last for one week and let’s say that only 50% of your tests improved your conversions. So half the tests you got less conversions, half the tests got more conversions.
Each test lasted a week that means every two weeks you would improve your conversion slightly because you get rid of the stuff it didn’t work and you would keep the stuff that does.
Massive Conversion Improvement
Let’s assume that every two weeks you improve your conversions by half a percentage point. This means that over the course of one year you improve your conversions by 13%.
Every two weeks you improve by half percent there is 26 two week periods in a year. Half of 26 is 13 and so every two weeks over one year you improve by half percent so the end of the year you gone from 2% to 15%.
Essentially split testing is what evolution is. Once upon a time there is no life on earth and then something happened and we had life. Maybe there was lighting, maybe there were aliens. Maybe God said let there be life.
Long Evolutionary Split Test
Essentially what evolution is as a split test. Every time any type of animal or plant or amoeba has an offspring, they’re slight genetic mistakes and that offspring is a chance of selection and mistakes. In the case of life forms a split test is to see who can make the most copies of themselves.
The split test on a website is to see how many conversions you get. The winners the website to get the most conversions. In a life form, split test contests, or natural selection, whichever offspring makes the most copies of itself will eventually out populate the previous versions.
For example, imagine had two groups of animals and one group of animals had kids and those kids had a replication rate of 1.2 animals for every animal that existed.
Replication Contests
But the second group of animals has some kind of genetic mistake.
Maybe it let them avoid predators better, maybe let them find food better. And this genetic mistake allowed them to have a replication rate of 1.3 new animals per person.
Over the long period of time the second group of animals would out populate the first group of animals.
They would win the evolutionary split test. This is essentially what has been happening ever since life was created. We humans are the winners of this long kajillian your split test.
Genes Can’t Predict The Future
One of the common mistakes about evolution is we look at our human traits and we say things like we have these traits so that we can do XYZ in the future. We have our eyes so that we can see and avoid predators. We have eyes so that we can see them go get food.
But in reality that’s incorrect. The scientifically and grammatically correct way to describe our human traits is to say we have these traits because our ancestors who had these traits were able to replicate at a higher rate than those other existing humanoids that didn’t have these traits.
What Humans Came Before Us?
That’s all we can say so we don’t even really know what those previously humanoids were that didn’t have the traits that we have. We just know that our traits were better because we were able to replicate more, and we exist and those other people don’t.
Imagine after one year your website your webpage or landing page or sales page is now converting at 15%. Every hundred visitors you get 15 sales is pretty high.
Why Are Your Conversions So High?
That can attract a lot of attention, and so a lot of business professionals will come to you and say wow how do you have such a highly converting webpage?
Your honest answer is you have no idea because every single time you did a split test you didn’t know which one was going to win. Even if you study the failures every single week, the successes every single week, you still really wouldn’t know why the winners won and why the losers lost.
The honest answer after a year of split testing of why you have such a high conversion rate that while I did a bunch of split testing initially, you don’t really know what it is about a website that makes convert so high.
Your honest answer is I have no idea why I am so successful other than that I just did split testing.
We’re Gonna Need More Planes
This is exactly what the American mathematician said. He said there’s two ways we can improve your bombing raids. One, to just try a bunch of stuff a random and see what works. But that would make us run out of place and people a lot quicker.
Or we can find all of the planes that were shot down and find out what they did wrong because it’s only in studying what we did wrong they can help us to not do that so we can do better in the future.
But because all we have are the planes that succeeded we really don’t know why they succeeded. More important than the planes than didn’t get shot down the planes that did get shot down we can study those but because all those planes were shot down in Germany.
They didn’t have those. The statisticians said there’s not much we can do.
What About The Stores That Went Out Of Business
If you were to walk through the mall and try to study all the successful stores you would be missing most of the data.
Because it’s kind of a common idea that most businesses fail which means of all the businesses that were tried the only ones that are successful or very small percentage. Even the ones that are successful, they’ve probably been doing split testing as long as it been successful.
Even every time they have a bunch of new products some of them sell better some of them don’t sell better and so they keep their products that sells.
They get rid of the products that don’t. Also to and they keep trying making new products and some of the work. Some don’t work. They really don’t keep track of what didn’t work and why it didn’t work.
Split Test Required For Survival
They justkeep trying different things and keep doing what works and not doing what doesn’t work.
You’re missing out probably 99% of the data if you’re to walk through the mall and try to study excellence. Studying excellence is a good idea but if you really want to be successful, the only way to be successful is to go through several iterations of trial and error.
Secret Of Life Is Split Testing
Every single split test is trial and error to try something and you see what works. If it doesn’t work you do something different. If it works you do more of the same.
You have to do that several hundred thousand times to be successful.
The secret of success is actually very simple. Do a split test on whatever you want to be successful at. Keep going towards better success. Try things. If they don’t work, don’t do them. If they do work try something slightly different.
Do Something – See What Happens
If you’re not willing to do that, it’s very hard to be successful. But if you really do want to be successful, it’s very very easy just start doing split tests and never stop. Every time you do a split test you’ll get better.
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