(First published at The Conversion Academy)

Have you ever had a campaign fail?

Have you ever spent days, weeks, even months getting together the moving parts?

You’ve got your landing pages, videos, copy and email follow-ups. You’ve spent weeks getting the whole process on point. You’ve followed one of your guru blueprints to the absolute letter, and then the thing flops.

It makes you want to chuck your laptop out the window and go get a job. Only for a minute though.

It’s even more frustrating if you’re watching somebody in your own market making millions. …

Ask a question in any digital marketing group and somewhere in the list of somewhat unhelpful answers you’ll get this one:

“Test it”

Now, for a long time I considered testing in marketing to be a fairly high level skill, and one that wasn’t worth troubling yourself with until you had some significant levels of traffic, usually from your own email list.

I considered myself lucky. …

We have a modern-day version of this same quote from Steve Jobs.

“Simple can be harder than complex: You have to work hard to get your thinking clean to make it simple. But it’s worth it in the end because once you get there, you can move mountains.”

The iPod, simplicity itself, just a single disc, compared to all the knobs buttons and dials of the Sony Walkman.

It’s hard. Hard to keep “feature creep” at bay. It’s hard to resist the idea that bigger is better. It’s hard to resist the one-off requests from customers for “essential” items.

It’s…