Brent Hodgson, Copywriter

I received a trial edition of James Brausch’s new newsletter “Testing” on Saturday, and enjoyed poking through it over the weekend.

It was the first issue, and contained 15 pages of really heavily detailed real-life multivariate testing data.

Not something for the feint hearted!

The data presented looked at each individual element tested in one of James Brausch’s most profitable salesletters. It showed everything from what elements were being tested, to how successful each variable was, to the exact visitor value each variable could be calculated to be valued at.

This was serious detail - even to someone who works with this stuff regularly.

A few of the “finer points” could have been explained better, such as the significance of the use of the sigma: what is a good sigma, what is a bad sigma, what is the minimum sigma that James Brausch’s interns look for in positive test results, etc.

Not having a mathematics bent, lists of stats, figures and numerical data are the type of thing that generally make me zone out and fall asleep.

However, I did take a few new ideas out of the newsletter.

One of the most interesting parts of the newsletter was some data on a unique way of accepting payment which turned out to be more profitable than Paypal or Credit Card Payments.

Also interesting was seeing how many variations of each element James Brausch was testing - for most elements, it was a single variation tested against “nothingness” - and in many cases “nothingness” won.

Would I recommend “Testing” to you?

If you want to take a voyeuristic peek inside a successful internet business, and see real life sales, conversion and split test data, then James Brausch’s “Testing” is for you.

Don’t expect it to be any more or less than promised - it is, in essence, split test results - statistics. Be prepared for words that come out of a University Statistics textbook - like “sigma” and “standard deviations”.

If this isn’t your style, you might better off grabbing a copy of MuVar, putting a salesletter up, and test it yourself. It’s $300 once-off for MuVar, or $300 per year for a subscription to “Testing” - so they’re both in the same price range. James Brausch’s data will give you some valuable insights, but what could be more valuable than your own test data.

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