What Baseball Has Taught Me About Internet Marketing

I’ve been a huge baseball fan my whole life.  I follow the Chicago Cubs religiously and play Fantasy Baseball in my free time.

Baseball is the most highly staticized sport (possibly the most staticized anything), and the teams, players and coaches rely on and trust their stats completely.  If the game is on the line and your history and stats tell you that your best bet is to use Pitcher C vs. Batter A, then you put that pitcher out there and let him get to work!

The same goes for your internet marketing.

Your website, and every change you make to it, should be staticized.  You should know how many visitors you get, and much more importantly, how many conversions or clients you get from it.  You should be testing new things and constantly striving to improve the effectiveness of your site.  If you are using a blue button and change it to purple, you had better know exactly what the blue button had done statistically so you know if the purple button is better.  If your red headline gets 14% conversions and your green headline gets you 12% conversions, you know exactly which pitcher to send out there!

Continually try out new changes, keep a log of what changes were made and the statistics that go along with it.  But don’t just store the records, USE them!  Take a look back and see what was successful and what wasn’t.  If you are getting less conversions, you had better find out what changed and undo it.  And if you are getting more conversions, you had better find out what changed so that you can ensure it continues.  Then reinforce that change to improve your statistics even further.