Author: Steven Aitchison (399 Articles)
The owner of this blog. Proud father, doting husband, blogger, hire me as freelance writer, and addiction worker
This article will look at how we can use a method that internet marketers use to test and make changes to their online campaigns to get better results. We can use the same methods to improve our lives and it’s one which can have a huge impact which I have discovered over the last few months.
What is split testing?
Putting it simply, imagine you have a page where you are selling a product you are promoting. You promote using adwords and social media. Okay, so have the sales page and there is traffic coming to it, you are using this as the base sales page to measure against. You then make another sales page which is exactly the same except this time you change the headline on that sales page. You then drive traffic to the two sales pages and find out which one performs better i.e. which brings in the most sales or the most signups to your newsletter. You then take the best performing sales page and use that as your base sales page. You then make another sales page and make it exactly the same except you change a graphic and then find out which ones performs better. You keep doing this until you have optimised your sales page. Yes it takes time but you will see your sales gradually going up over time.
How you can apply this principle to your life
This is a very powerful way to change your life for the better and sometimes you can often see results within a few days. The truth is if you keep doing what you’ve always been doing you will always get the same results. So if you are getting crappy results from something in your life it’s time to change something that you’re doing in that particular area.
This might not make much sense to a lot of people so I will give you an example from my own split testing.
Example 1:
Rich Schefren has found a statistic that states that a lot of people spend more time on their emails than they do with their kids. This is a quite sad, but in people’s quest to become independent and start their own business it’s very true in a lot of cases. I know I spend a lot of time with emails, I have around 20 websites, only about 5 that I really work on and I check my emails as they come in and deal with them there and then. The first thing I did was check how much time I spend on my emails each day, I don’t mean opening them and reading them I mean opening, reading and acting on them i.e. check out a website someone has sent me a link to.
The results for 1 week astounded me. I spent, in 1 week, 12 hours dealing and acting on emails – 12 hours! I found that a disgusting statistic. For that same week I spent 9 hours purely with my children, that is going out with them alone, or sitting down with them at dinner, taking them to school, sitting with them for their homework, fooling around and watching TV. I have my laptop downstairs and work all night so my wife and children always have access to me but that’s not what I am talking about here I am talking spending time away from the computer and with my children. Only 9 hours with my children as opposed to 12 hours on my emails. I did spend more hours with my wife but not that much.
So, split testing this. The next week I checked my emails midday and at 4pm. I deleted all the emails that would not drive me forward on my online business quest or bring in more money. I kept the personal ones and dealt with them there and then but all the other ones, if they did not drive my business forward or did not bring in more money I deleted them. This meant deleting the next big marketing ebook promotion, deleting the cool link to a youtube video, deleting the cool website link that someone sent me, deleting the newsletters I am subscribed to and deleting the ones that promise me an extra 2 inches.
The end result:
You’ll see from the chart that I spent a lot more time with my children and I certainly was a lot happier and felt a lot better by being away from the computer. My children, I hope, were a lot happier at spending more time with me.
Now, I have a base measurement I can work with. The best result was spending 5 hours on email and 14 hours with my children. I now work with this and try and find ways to spend even less time on email, this could be done by hiring a virtual assistant to screen my emails but I am not at that stage yet but you get what I mean.
Example 2:
I used to have a terrible time getting my children up for school in the morning. I would wake them up to 7am, wake them up again at 7.05am and then start shouting at 07.10am at 07.15am we had fell out, my children might be in a bad mood, I would be pissed off and by the time everybody was ready we might be late for leaving for school at 08.10am.
This went on for months before I tried waking them up at 06.45am. I would wake them up gently, give them a hug and ask if they wanted an extra 5 minutes, I would wait until they confirmed that they wanted an extra 5 minutes. I would then give them 10 minutes and wake them up again. The second time I told them that they had had an extra ten minutes and it was time to get up. The transformation was amazing, no more shouting in the mornings, no more rushing about and we always get to school on time. That extra 15 minutes made a huge difference to me and my children in the morning.
With split testing your life you constantly tweak until you get to a result you are happy with. Another thing you’ll notice with split testing your life is that it’s got to be measurable, if it’s not measurable it’s going to be hard to test and change.
Other areas of your life you can split test
- Your work productivity: Take an area of your work practice and think about how you might improve it and then start your own split test and measure the results.
- The amount of time with your partner: I personally want to spend more time with my wife but I know a lot of people where that will not a goal.
- Your relationships: Is spending less time with a particular friend going to make you feel happier and more energetic or does it sadden you when you don’t see them – split test it.
- The amount of time spent watching TV (this is a biggy, you can dramatically change your life by spending less time in front of the TV)
- How you walk: It’s true I tried this a few weeks ago. For 1 day I walked around with my shoulders slumped, I looked at the ground as I walked, I was slightly stooped over and didn’t smile a lot. A little hard to measure but people’s reactions to me were a lot different, they didn’t speak as much, they asked me what was wrong, I found myself complaining more and bad things seemed to happen to me that day. The next day I walked head high, chest out, I smiled more. The result was that people were more receptive, bad things that happened didn’t phase me and I was a lot more happier.
- Your diet: you’ll know I have done this over the last few months. The biggest difference to me was cutting out chips (French fries) from my diet altogether aside from the very occasional MacD’. Cutting out one thing at a time from your diet will show you what a difference it could make on your overall weight and health. If you do this, cut out just one thing at a time so you will know if it really is making a difference.
I have found this is a great way to self improvement and can be done on almost any area of your life. I have found that I am much more conscious about how I can improve my life and where it can be improved whereas before I might moan about certain areas of my life and how bad it was. Now, if I am unhappy about something I try and find a way to improve it. The more I split test the more I think about ways to improve my life and my families life.
A word of warning, I would only do a few split tests to get you into the swing of things. Some tests might take a few weeks whilst others might take a few days or even a few hours depending on what it is. Once you get into the swing of it you will be able to do a lot more and your self improvement will take huge leaps.
Some people do this unconsciously but I hope now that you will see that split testing can be a fantastic self improvement tool. If you decide to try it or already do it let me know your results, it would be good to know how you get on with this self improvement tool.
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Thanks for sharing this article. I am a huge fan of cross-pollination and have take “best practices” or tricks of one trade and applied them to others. This was a clever new adaptation.
This is such an awesome idea — I am super impressed!
I’d like to see this expanded upon into a small 5 part series, using different examples for each after 1 week of testing – so one per week… love it!
Thanks for your comments C, I appreciate you visiting here.
Alex, we are on the same wavelength. I thought about turning this into a 30 page ebook as I thought it was such a good idea to let people know different ways of split testing their lives. nice to see you back here.
That is an unusual idea. I think it is great. I have a hard time managing my time. I think I’ll try it and hopefully it will help manage my time some.
I would be more interested in finding out how your results turned out, though Steven. You briefly mentioned some of your results, but there must have been problems adapting this and difficulties along the way.
Hi Jerry
There’s always problems at first until you can get a system going, then you get to certain stage where it becomes easy to implement a new plan for another area.
when i first had the idea a few months ago i thought it was one of those ideas that would just flit away. However the more I thought it the more the idea grew and I started implementing it into various parts of my life.
For productivity it’s easy as everything is measurable. Putting it into practice with things such as diet, and the example I gave about waking the boys up early it’s a little harder to measure as emotions and feelings cannot be measured.
I have done it at work, again for productivity, and started implementing it into my online business.
I will write another post showing some of the successes I’ve had with this system.
I fully agree that doing the same thing everytime will give us the same old results. Thus we have to change in order to improve the current. Your article here is impressive with many ideas that trigger me. Thanks for the sharing.
Hey Steven
Great minds think alike!
Split Testing For Personal Growth
Love the detail you’ve given in this, even down to graphs!
Ed
Hi Ed
Here’s me thinking I had an original thought and you have gone and done it over a year ago
I have read your post and it’s great for what i have been doing over the last few months.
Are you still split testing?
I think someone said that doing the same thing, but expecting different results is the definition of insanity! This is a very practical guide to improving the circumstances of one’s life.
Great job!
Great share! Thanks a lot and good luck to you.
I think this ideea it will really catch in the future even if it is not the exact context to apply it
I am an affiliate marketer and I am totally into split testing. The problem is this really is not applicable in life because the point of split testing is running both parts AT THE SAME TIME
Nice effort though
I would love to split test parts of my life and then be able to choose the better result, that would be great! I know it’s not
possible, but it’s a fun idea. The concept can be applied to other things and could be very useful. Great post!
Using the scientific method to test and evaluate what works best is a great idea. Doing so does require some discipline but it can be well worth the effort.
Thank you for the good advice. I did learned a lot from your site. I know most people are not good when it comes to management.. like me.
Excellent article! I’ve used split testing on my sites as it does work, but never thought of applying it elsewhere. Like you with your emails, I spend far too long on them too.
Excellent ways for split testing our lives.It’s a key for self improvement.
That is really a very nice article to read. It is very helpful for us to improve more.
Nice one! Its nice to know that there are ways to improve our selves.
I also own and operate several web sites and I know the problem of spending too much time behind the screen, mostly for a lack of productivity. Although I absolutely hate split testing for work, I found your article doing research on the subject. This is an eyeopener for me! So I’ll just forget about split testing my sites, and start split testing my live so as to be more efficient and have more time to enjoy live.