One of the "rules" of the direct marketing world, whether it's an internet business or an offline business, is that you should always be testing to try and improve your results.

Almost anything can be tested, but one of the most widely tested things is the sales page. Some of the things that you can test include:

• Headlines
• Formatting
• Call to action
• Price
• PS
• etc.

Simple A/B testing (comparing two variations to find the one that converts best) is pretty easy to do, but the real power is when you can test multiple things at the same time to find the best combination.

This is known as multivariate testing. The gains you can see by doing it this way can be much better and much faster than A/B testing.

I use a piece of software called Muvar for testing my sales pages. It works amazingly well and once you've got it set up, it takes little or no effort on your part - it just tweaks your sales page automatically with the highest performing options.

Like most products from James Brausch, it's not flashy - the interface is very plain and there's no fancy reports or anything. It just spits out the data you need, with no bells & whistles.

Some people might see this as a bad thing. I'll admit that when I first looked at it I thought "Man, this looks like crap".

But it didn't take me long to get past that and see the power it has.

Now I've got a number of infoproduct sites that are running tests pretty much automatically. All I have to do (or have someone do for me) is add new alternatives for the various things being tested every so often.

You see, as Muvar gets more data from sales that are made, it optimizes the page according to the factors that get the best results. And it amazes me sometimes which particular option works best for different parts of the page. In a lot of cases, having nothing display will outperform the copy I laboured over for hours…

If you've looked at any of James Brausch's products, you've probably noticed his sales pages look pretty plain. No header image, a plain "piece of paper" web template and no fancy stuff in the sales letter. (Just check out the Muvar sales page to see what I'm talking about.)

The pages don't have to be that way though. It's actually pretty easy to get a more detailed layout set up in Muvar so if you have a theme that you'd like to use on your site, or if you want to test different templates entirely to see which one converts the best, you can do it.

Muvar is not cheap but it's well worth the cost if you sell something through your website. The improvement you can get in conversion by using it will more than pay for it, and you can use it on as many sites as you want.

I don't recommend a lot of things, but this is one of the few products that I use a LOT and really believe is worth adding to your toolkit.

You can read more about it at www.Muvar.com. That page explains a little more about multivariate testing as well as the software itself.