Testing just might be the small business marketers greatest tool – and yet, so few take the time to do it at all. The arguments against robust testing are all but gone – cost is not a factor, lack of tools is not a factor and certainly the Internet has made information about testing readily available.

Bryan Eisenberg, author of Always Be Testing, visited with me about this very thing for a recent episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast.

Testing does not have to be an arduous task. You can easily use a free tool like Google Website Optimizer to test the effectiveness of one headline or offer from another. You can add Google Analytics to your web pages to get a better feel for how people view your pages. You can access the workforce of Amazon’s Mechanical Turk or UserTesting.com and get usability testing done on your web pages.

There are more advanced tools such as Omniture’s SiteCatalyst, but as Bryan points out and I agree, figure out a bit about testing and what works with the free tools and then move up to more advanced power tools – it’s likely they will pay for themselves.

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This episode of the Duct Tape Marketing podcast is brought to you by att.com/onwardsmallbiz. Resources for the small business owner.