At this point I must refer to some of my own testing. Interested if the wording immediately prior to my opt in form was extremely important, I ran a test using my auto responder service, where I used 4 different opt in scripts, and had the auto responder rotate between the 4, and report to me the results of my test.

The script I was testing was the following:

1) Simply enter your name and email address in the form below, and I will send you your first lesson immediately. As an added bonus, I will also give you a free copy of my ebook "15 Steps to Internet Success" immediately after you subscribe. And you have my word: I hate SPAM, and give you my word that I will never sell, give away, lease, or rent your email, nor will you ever receive any SPAM from this list.

2) Simply enter your name and email address in the form below, and I will send you your first lesson immediately. As an added bonus, I will also give you a free copy of my ebook "15 Steps to Internet Success" immediately after you subscribe:

3) Simply enter your name and email address in the form below, and I will send you your first lesson immediately. And you have my word: I hate SPAM, and give you my word that I will never sell, give away, lease, or rent your email, nor will you ever receive any SPAM from this list.

4) Simply enter your name and email address in the form below, and I will send you your first lesson immediately:

Do you see what I was testing? Which of the 4 scripts do you think was the most effective? The least effective? If you are like me, you think that people will be more likely to opt in if I give them a guarantee that I will not sell their name, etc. You would also think that by offering a free ebook in addition to the ecourse, that more people would opt in.

These are my results: 1) 15.4%

2) 28.3%

3) 28.0%

4) 35.3%

Now if you look back at what those percentages were for, you will see that the lowest percentage of opt ins was from the form that promised the most--no SPAM and an ebook. The highest percentage of response was that script that promised nothing---I don't promise not to mail them SPAM, I don't offer any extra incentive, nothing.

Now, what does that mean? Let me just say that at the very least, it means that if you do not test, then you can not make adjustments to your campaigns that will bring you more subscribers and make you more effective.

Imagine if I had simply built the first squeeze page, sent traffic to it, and gotten a miserable 15% opt in rate. I could have blamed the traffic, my headline, my bullets, myself, anything. But by testing I realized that I can get a 35% opt in rate without making any other changes.

Think about this another way. Imagine you are getting 100 visitors a day. With the worst pulling script you would be receiving 15 subscribers a day. That is 5,475 over the course of one year. But if you did the testing and came up with a script that pulls 35%, you would have 12775 subscribers at the end of one year. Now, that is the difference between fulltime online and burning the midnight oil. Just with one change to the script. Now what? Now that I have a control that pulls 35%, now I can start changing other parts of the page and maybe get that page pulling 50% or more. But that is not the point here. The point here is that you have to test to know what is happening and why. Just because a campaign is performing lousily does not mean that it is the traffic. Or your script. Or your headline. Etc. But you don't know unless you test.