Tested Advertising Methods: The Blueprint for Higher Conversions | #Success - Ep. 113

Do you have a funnel but it's not converting? The problem 99.9% of the time is that your funnel is good, but you suck at selling. If you wanna learn how to sell so your funnels will actually convert, then get a ticket to my next selling online event by going to sellingonline.com/podcast. That's sellingonline.com/podcast. This is The Russell Brunson Show. I remember the time my very first product I created, this is even before my Potato Gun DVD for those who've heard that story, but this was my actual first product ever, was a software I created called ZipBrander. And I remember creating the site, it was up there. I was driving ads to it. I was making a couple sales a day. And I remember hearing about split testing. And then I was at an event and this guy named Michael Fortin was speaking. He was talking about copywriting, talking about split testing. And he showed tons of results. And I remember one of the results he had, I think it was a red headline versus a blue headline or something. I can't remember exactly what it was. This is, man, 20 years ago. At the time I had the headline that had lost, like the color of mine. I think mine was red and he said the blue one won or vice versa, whatever. But I remember I was like, I heard Alex Mendoza say, give yourself a raise every day. I heard him say that he split tests two different headline colors and one out, beat the other one. So I remember going back that day to my little website. So I set up the two different versions of the page, one with the blue headline, one with the red headline, but the rest of the page was like identical. I started my first little split test. Person number one would see headline blue, person number two see headline red, and blue and red, it would just go back and forth and back and forth. And sure enough, just like he had told me, the other color headline won. And it was crazy because it increased my conversions, if I remember right, 27, 28% increase in conversions. Now to put that in perspective, that means I made 27% more money every single day. So I was still in college at the time. I was thinking, I was like, traditional, like most people, let's say you're a doctor, right? And you go to college and then you go to medical school and you graduate with like $1 million in debt, right? And let's say you're making, who knows, $500,000 a year, right? But then if you wanna give yourself a raise, it's like, okay, we have to go back to college for 2 years to specialize in the thing. And you come back, now you're a specialist, you're another like, you know, $500,000 in debt, but now you can specialize. Now you can charge $750,000 a year instead of $500,000, right? You gave yourself a raise, but took 2 years and half a million dollars in debt. I'm like, I just gave myself a raise by changing the color of a headline. And I remember I was just like, this is the most insane thing ever. And so for me, this is like the science of funnel building for me began, was me literally just testing this versus this, this versus this, this versus this. And from that, we invented the 2-step order form. Like all these things came from us just coming down and just thinking through this process. Like what are the little tests we can make every single day to make our business better? What's up everybody, welcome back to my vault. Today I'm bringing out another book and we're going into some advertising today with one of the legends Legends of Advertising, John Caples. He's written a lot of really cool books, but my favorite of them all is called Tested Advertising Methods. This is a first edition in its original dust cover. I spent $373.12. I'm not sure why that's where they posted on eBay, but that's what I got it for. And this book is again one of the books that most advertising students, when they get into advertising, internet marketing, it's one of the staples that people read to really understand The science about advertising, how the whole industry started. Caples is one of the best and Tested Advertising Methods is one of my favorite because we are big testers in our business. A lot of people, they put up ads, they drive funnels, they create them, they kinda walk away and they hope for the best. In our company, we are constantly always testing. In fact, I remember when I first got into this business, one of my early mentors, Alex Mendoza, and I remember he told me something one time. He said, he's like, you need to set up your business where you can give yourself a raise every day. And I was like, what does that even mean? And he was talking at the time about split testing. He was like, if you split test a different headline every day, let's say every day you spend a day or two split testing headline and you increase your conversion from, you know, say from 12% to 15%, you literally just gave yourself a raise. Like, you're getting the exact same amount of traffic, exact same ad spend, exact same everything, but you increase the conversion by 3%, you're now making more money than you were before. And he's like, you literally just gave yourself a raise today. And then the next day you come back and you find something new to test and you split test and you get increased by 30% or by 12%, like, he's, every time you do that, you're giving yourself a raise. And so this book right here, I feel like John Caples would've been like my marketing uncle or grandpa or something because we were cut from the same thread. This whole book is about these different ways, these methods of testing. 'Cause back then in the day, it was so much harder to test and so much more expensive to test. Think about this. They would go and they would have to run a newspaper article, right? Or a magazine article, let's say. Let's say it's a magazine article, right? So they'd have to like write the article, get it approved by the magazine, they'd put it in there, and then 3 months later, they'd print that issue and they'd put it out there and you'd see what happened, and then they would go to split test. So it might take them a year to get a good split test. Split test, or direct mail. It's like, say they rented a list of 20,000 people they were gonna mail this physical sales letter to, and so they would have 10,000 with one headline, 10,000 different headline. They'd send them all out, and they'd have to wait a week to print 'em, then a week to ship 'em, then a week or two for them to get to the person's house, and people actually to open the letter, and then it would sit on the person's kitchen counter for 3 days before they'd actually make the order. So they would have to go 5, 6 months before they could get the results back from a test to know, okay, red headline's winning. Let's do this again, right? So it was so long and arduous for them to do these things back in the day. So the tests that are coming out of this world, the mindset of John Caples and the people from this era are so much better than what we do, 'cause they had, like, every test they were gambling tens of thousands and oftentimes hundreds of thousands of dollars of their own money just to find out where to win. Where us nowadays, it's so simple. You can split test ads, run a couple hundred bucks, and you know the winner, and you can double down, and you know the winner, you can double down, and you can, You can test and iterate so fast, where most people, they put up a page, they drive some ads, it works, it doesn't, and they just walk away if it doesn't. And so I just, I love this stuff because this is the foundation of how to build a successful business that most people are missing. Learning how to test your processes, and by doing that, you can literally give yourself a raise every single day. So I'm gonna walk you through, if you're a brand new beginner, maybe you got your first funnel up, or you're just starting to drive traffic, how do you start doing this? Again, the nice thing about today is it doesn't cost you a lot of money, but every time you're driving traffic, there should be an active test happening. If there's not an active test happening, you're literally losing money, right? So the easiest way to do it inside of ClickFunnels, obviously I am biased, but it is the greatest software platform in the world for running funnels and split tests. So if you're using ClickFunnels, congratulations, I'll show you the easy way. If you're doing it the hard way, there's software you can spend a ton of money, or you can do it for free inside of ClickFunnels, either way. Alright, so here at the top, we have, this is, we'll call traffic, okay? Obviously you're driving traffic from a lot of different places. Maybe you're sending paid ads from Facebook, maybe it's paid ads from YouTube, or maybe you're doing free organic social, or you got reels coming, but whatever it is, you're driving traffic, right? And the traffic is all coming to a landing page traditionally, right? And so what most people do is they create one landing page, they put it in their headline, they put it in a video, they put in their opt-in, whatever it is, and they just try to make the best version possible and they just cross their fingers and hope for the best, okay? Instead, what you do to make this very simple, Instead of creating one page, is after you finish the first page, inside of ClickFunnels, you can very quickly and very easily set up a split test where you take that page and you clone it, now you got two versions of it, right? So you got one version like this, and one version like this, and initially they both look identical, right? 'Cause you just cloned the page. And so you start looking at like, what are you gonna test? And one thing that's interesting that Jon Caples talked about here inside Tested Advertising Methods, he said that 80% of an ad's success depends on the headline. Okay, so the headline is literally the most important part. And so when we're first doing tests, all we're doing the very first couple versions is trying to figure out what's the correct headline that's gonna get somebody to click, or get somebody to opt in, or do whatever step it is you want, right? So what we're gonna do is we're gonna have headline number 1, and headline number 2, and then the rest of the page is gonna look identical, right? There's a video here and a block, whatever. I'm not gonna change anything else. And this is one of the mistakes people make. A lot of times people try to test like 5 different things. Like, well, I tested headlines and offer and price points and whatever. Which one won? They're like, well, this version won, or whatever. But you don't know, did it win 'cause of the headline, or 'cause of the offer, 'cause you never wanna split test more than one thing at a time. And you may hear some people brag about, we have multivariate split testing software. I'm not a huge fan of that unless you're getting insane amounts of traffic. For most people, simple A/B split test is the way you win. It's the way to give yourself a raise every single day, right? So then what happens, you have two different headlines. Now, I told you guys my first test was a red headline versus a blue headline. For you initially, that's not the first test I'm gonna do. For me, the first test is gonna be two radically different headlines, okay? Looking at which version of the headline is one's gonna be most likely to get people to actually give me money, right? And so I'm gonna try two different versions. If you don't know what to do, go to ChatGPT, or if you're in ClickFunnels, ask the AI inside ClickFunnels, right? Write me 10 different versions of this headline. And from that, pick the two you think are most likely to win. Which two get you most excited to actually read the rest of what you're doing, okay? Again, if you study Caples and everything else, one of the things they talk about a lot is like, When someone comes to a page, the only goal of the page is to get somebody to read the headline. And then the goal of the headline is to get somebody to read the first paragraph. And the goal of the first paragraph, the only goal is to get someone to read the second paragraph. And the goal of the second paragraph is to get someone to read the third paragraph. That's how you have to start structuring these things, right? It's not like a book where, when you're writing a book, you're reading it and you're in the storyline and things are going all over the place, right? And people will give you more mercy and more leniency inside of a book because they know this is a story and hopefully it's going somewhere. In copy, you don't have that, right? In copy, every single thing is, the job of it is to sell the next thing, which sells the next thing. 'Cause as soon as there's a spot where there's a lull and they lose interest or desire, they're gone, they bounce. Page is closed and you lost 'em, right? And so the first thing I'm doing is just split testing two different versions of headlines. In ClickFunnels, you set this up and then you make all your traffic come to the top of the funnel, and then what it'll do automatically for you, it's really cool, it'll say, alright, human number 1, we're gonna send to this page. And then human number 2 will go to this page. Human number 3 over here, human number 4, and it starts rotating, it's split testing, okay? And then you'll see, it'll show you It's gonna show you then, based on people that come through this version of the funnel versus this version of the funnel, you can see which one gets the highest percentage of people who give you their email address. Which one gets you the highest percentage of people who buy on the next page, and so on and so forth. And so you run some traffic, some tests back and forth for a while, okay? Now people, the next question I get a lot is like, well how much traffic should I send? How much money should I spend? And there's a couple of things to think about, especially when you first are driving traffic. There's gonna be different conversion rates based on different traffic sources. So let's say you're doing, you're doing Reels on Instagram to drive traffic, but you're also doing Facebook ads and YouTube ads, and then you have somebody who's sending emails to their list, okay? Now when I'm doing a test, I'm not gonna drive all this to the page because somebody who comes free from Reels versus somebody who came from a customer list, it's gonna be different traffic. And so what happens if you drive it all the same page and the first person comes over here, right? They came from, let's say came from Reels and they bought, and person over here comes from email and they don't buy, it's gonna mess up the whole algorithm. I wanna send traffic that's the same when I'm testing something, right? I want as much similarity as possible. It's the reason why we don't do, let's test, and this is one of the big mistakes people make, it's like, well, I'm gonna test this landing page for a week and I'll switch and I'll test this landing page for a week. They think that that's what split testing is. Split testing has to be A/B, which means person number 1 sees this, person number 2 sees this, based on the same traffic source. You're gonna pick one traffic source to focus on and you're gonna split test it. 'Kay, the reason why this is important to do it both together, think about this, let's say you were running a landing page, again, we'll go back in time, 20 years ago, whatever, right, and you were running it, was it 2001, and you ran this from September 1st to September 10th, and you ran this version of landing page, and you were driving traffic, and you're like, okay, it's converting, I know exactly, it's converting now at, you know, 22%, you have the numbers, and then September 11th through September 15th, and you switch the traffic to this page you're running it, and the numbers come back as like 0% conversion rate. You're like, oh, this page won, it beat this page, right? The answer's no, 'cause September 11th, what happened? World Trade Center tragedy, everyone's off the news, everyone's watching, and all of a sudden like the entire country's in a different state of mind, and they're gonna buy differently, right? And so you messed up the whole, like it's not a true split test, okay? In a split test, everything's gotta be as close to the same as humanly possible. So one traffic source, same time period, essentially A/B, A/B, A/B, Otherwise, none of the testing metrics actually matter. Does that make sense? And so that's kinda what we're looking for here when you're doing a split test. And so that's the first phase, right? I'm gonna figure out by doing that, like either headline 1's gonna win or headline 2's gonna win. And after one of them wins, okay, you'll see inside ClickFunnels, like hey, headline number 1 won, you know, this one won. Then literally inside ClickFunnels, you're like okay, click a button and it archives this version of the page and it's dead, right? Then you click clone and then what happens, it'll clone the next page, it'll clone the page again. Now you have headline 1 here and the page will look identical over here, the same. It'll have headline number 1, and then you're gonna change headline number 1, and you're gonna go back to ChatGPT, find a new headline, and now you're gonna test this page versus this page, this page versus this page, okay? And that's how you give yourself a raise every day. It's very simple, it's very easy. And then what happens over time, you start getting better and better and better to figure out, okay, this one I can't beat. I've tried 20 headlines, I can't beat this. This becomes the control. And then that's when you start rolling that out to other traffic sources. And then you can test different elements, right? Now maybe we'll come back, now we're gonna test, the price point, maybe now we're gonna test a video versus text, now we're gonna test, and so you can start adding more tests, but whenever doing split testing, it's just one test at a time. Usually we're gonna run it for a week or 500 to 1,000 visitors, and then we'll transition to the next one, and the next one, and we're just always constantly testing, giving yourself a raise every single day. Alright, now one of the tests that Caples talks about here in this book that was really fascinating, because we actually tested it on our side, he said that when you're testing headlines, He said that specifics will always out-convert generalities. So for example, the example he gives in the book says, losing 12 pounds in 14 days is stronger than losing weight quickly. So we had the same thing, we had a test where it said, it's how to get 1,000 opt-ins, 1,000 people to join your list, right? And then the split test was how to get 1,226 people per month to join your email list. So same basic message, one was the 1,000 which is kinda general, oh yeah, you'll get 1,000 people, versus the other one was like, "how to get 1,226 people," whatever, like a very specific number in a very specific number of days. And that headline, it was like 3x. It wasn't like 20% increase or 30% increase, it was like 300. It means for every single person that came, we got 3 times as much. It means 3 times more people went through the sales funnel, it means we had 3 times as much money, exact same traffic, 2 different pages. So this is why these little insights from some of these marketers from back in the day who were literally gambling their money. They were gambling tens of thousands of dollars to figure things out. Like, they didn't just throw up two headlines through ChatGPT like we do nowadays, right? They went deep. And so I love reading these books because one little concept like that, you can read like, oh my gosh, I wonder if I could change my headline. Instead of saying, you know, how to lose 10 pounds the next 10 days, what if it's like how to lose, you know, 12.6 pounds, right? Something more specific, right? Or whatever your version is in your business. And so, um, I love it. That's why Not only do I love reading their ideas, I love looking at their old ads. Even to this day, I have literally, I would say, probably 10,000 swipe files. And what swipe files are are old ads like this where you can see, like here's the headline, newly discovered Pepsodent mouthwash, 3 to 11 times more powerful than other leading antiseptics. Check bad breath far longer. Checks for bad breath far longer, right? Look at the headline, how powerful it is. Like it's very specific. Pepsodent mouthwash is 3 to 11 times more powerful. 'Kay, now you say, Pepsodyne's way more powerful. We found that Pepsodyne's more powerful than our competitors. That's okay, but 3 to 11 times is very specific, right? How do you take that? I could say, well, newly discovered ClickFunnels funnels convert 3 to 11 times higher than our competitors, right? Because our load page speed's faster, our funnels are more simple, blah blah blah. I can easily go and I can weave those things in, right? So I look at these as an idea for how can I write a headline based on that? And so again, I love these old books, these old swipe files. In fact, one fascinating thing is Dan Kennedy, if you have a chance to ever go to Dan Kennedy's house, in his basement where it's like the Mecca where all marketers wanna go and spend a day, right? You pay Dan a ton of money, he lets you come to his basement for a day. And in his basement there's a room, and in the room there's a door that's locked that he will not let anybody go into. And I know this is true 'cause I've tried twice to go and he literally will not let me into that room. But in his room, he's told me, he will not show me, he has filing cabinets of swipe files. So when Dan gets hired to write an ad for somebody, the first thing he does, he goes to the swipe file room, pulls out the filing cabinet, finds the ads, pulls them out, reads 50 different ads, and from there articulates the headline, the split test headline, the different body copy, all that kind of stuff, all based on ads inside of his swipe file. And most of his ads are from this time period, not from today. And so it's kind of fascinating. Now the other cool thing is when we bought Dan Kennedy's company, in the contract, in the will, when Dan passes away, his entire swipe file room, which so far nobody's seen except for him. In the contract, I literally get access to it. So someday in the future, I will share some swipe files from Dan's filing cabinet with you, and you have a chance to learn the same stuff that John Caples is showing you here inside this book. All right, if you guys want to get a copy of my notes as I went through this book, in the description down below there's a link. Go check it out and you get the notes. We'll give you the highlights, the outline, all the best stuff from this book. It'll help you guys be successful. So when you are doing the split test and you're testing your advertisings. That way you can do it with the mindset of John Caples, one of the greatest advertisers of all time. And other than that, appreciate you guys, hope you enjoyed this video. If so, share with other people. I'll see you guys on the next video.

You guys know I've written a few books and people always ask me, how do you stay focused long enough to actually finish? Because let's be honest, writing isn't hard, staying in the zone is hard. Email pops up, texts come in, you open one tab, And 45 minutes later, you're watching something random on YouTube. That's why I use Freewrite. It's a distraction-free writing device built for one purpose: to help you get words out of your head and onto the page. No notifications, no internet, no browser tabs, just you and the draft. When I sit down with my Freewrite, my brain knows it's time to create. If you've got a book in you or a sales letter or the next big idea you've been putting off, go to www.getfreewrite.com/russell and grab yours. Turn off the noise. Turn on the words. Your future bestseller is waiting.