And I thank him for his geekness because Glenn Livingston, on average, will produce more useful and actionable information about market research and internet marketing per pixel than just about anybody else on the net who writes about such topics.

Here is his latest bon mot “I’m at The System seminar and I just heard Trevo Claiborne from the Google Website Optimizer team speak. He casually mentioned they recommend ONE HUNDRED conversions/action PER OPTION you are testing.” Here is the link to his blog post Conversion Testing – How Many Actions? where you can read the entire article and the comments.

What I got out of Glenn’s observation is a reinforcement of a lesson that has been slow to learn for me – Do more market and keyword research before committing any substantial time to a new project. If what the Google guy says is true, that you need to test for three times more occurrences than the usual 30, then testing is going to cost three times as much too – whether in time or money or both. That means test the things that are most important first and put the less important elements of affiliate marketing on the back burner. And what can be more important than knowing (for 99.9% sure) the money keywords for your niche? If you haven’t seen it yet I encourage you to see the videos “How To Find the Money Keywords for Your Niche”

When you’re a one man band time is the most important asset that you have. All the time that you spend running into dead ends is time that could have been spent on projects that actually generated cash. There will still be failures, even with better research, but overall the bottom line should benefit. Maybe in time there will be enough to hire a staff to chase down those brilliant whimsies.