After 20+ Years Online, I Think We Quit Too Soon

Hello!

One thing I’ve noticed after more than 20 years online is that marketers are really good at starting things.

Sticking with them?

That’s a little harder.

There’s always something new competing for our attention.

A new program. A new traffic source. A new page. A new strategy.

And lately, of course, a new AI tool every five minutes.

I’m certainly not immune to it.

But the longer I do this, the more I think constantly moving on to the next thing can keep us from learning what actually works.

There’s a Difference Between Testing and Starting Over

I test things all the time.

But testing only teaches you something if you give the test a chance to produce useful information.

Let’s say you send an email and don’t get the response you hoped for.

Next time you change the subject line, rewrite the email, promote a different page, and use a different traffic source.

Maybe the next mailing does better.

Great.

But what did you learn?

Was it the subject line?

The email?

The page?

The audience?

You really don’t know.

Sometimes the boring approach—doing something consistently and paying attention—is where the useful information comes from.

My Safelist Experiment Reminded Me of This

My Safelist Attention Project started with a pretty simple question:

Are people actually paying attention to the pages they’re clicking?

I could have run the experiment for a few days, looked at the first batch of numbers, and moved on.

Instead, I kept going.

That’s when it got interesting.

I started seeing differences between traffic volume and attention.

Some smaller traffic sources produced surprisingly strong engagement.

Repeated exposure started showing patterns of its own.

And eventually I was looking at things I hadn’t even thought to measure when I started.

None of that would have happened if I had looked at the first few hundred visits and decided I already had my answer.

Sometimes People Need to See Something Again

That experiment also changed the way I think about advertising.

It’s easy to assume that if somebody sees an ad and doesn’t click, the ad failed.

But people don’t always respond the first time.

Or the second.

Sometimes something has to become familiar before it becomes interesting.

I explored that more in How Many Times Do People See an Ad Before They Actually Click?.

That doesn’t mean you should run a bad ad forever.

It just means that replacing something because it didn’t produce an immediate result may be a little premature.

Persistence Isn’t the Same as Being Stubborn

Of course, some things really don’t work.

Some programs die.

Some traffic sources stop producing.

Some offers just aren’t very good.

There’s nothing wrong with walking away when the evidence tells you to.

But I think there’s a big difference between quitting because something isn’t working…

…and quitting because something newer caught your attention.

I’ve probably done plenty of both over the years.

These days, I try to know which one I’m doing.

Give It Enough Time to Teach You Something

When I try something now, I’m less interested in whether it immediately hits a home run.

I want to know what happened.

Who responded?

What didn’t happen?

Did anything surprise me?

Would the result look different if I kept going?

You can’t answer many of those questions if you keep changing everything.

That may be one of the biggest differences between how I approached Internet marketing when I started and how I approach it today.

I don’t feel nearly as much pressure to chase every new thing.

Sometimes the better move is to keep doing what you’re already doing…

and pay closer attention.

Thanks for reading,

Jerry

P.S. Before you abandon something you’re working on, ask yourself one question:

Has it really failed, or have I just not given it enough time to teach me anything yet?