Test Small, Then Scale (How I lost hundreds last week)

by Mike on October 16, 2009

in Internet Marketing, Mindset

Have you ever heard a story of someone who lost $100k, $200k, $500k on a business opportunity that went wrong?

Imagine if they had not blown all that money what they could be doing instead…

This brings me to my story, last week I ran a few test buying traffic from a few different new sources to see if it was profitable and after the first day it was, lets say a 2:1 ratio or $2 return for every $1 spent, so happy as can be I started looking for more sources of traffic, bigger and bolder than before thinking I had run across a gold mine so bought another ad that was over twice as expensive as the one before thinking “what a winner” happy as can be.

The next day I looked at my stats and what I saw shocked me, my winning ad had converted not 1x, not 2x but 10x WORSE than my other ad leaving me with a SERIOUS net loss of 1:5 which means $1 back for every $5 spent. NOT COOL!

I then asked myself painfully, “What did I learn?” and the answer was Test Small, Then Scale. Although this lesson completely wiped out my profits in this example which was luckily for me only in the 3 digit range it could have just as easily been in the 4,5 or even 6 digits.

I let one days positive return make me over-confident to the point where I made a stupid amature mistake.

Now learn from this and in your own future ventures take a bit size piece before eating the whole cake and you will be one step closer to your goals.

Go forth and conquer

Mike McMahon

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