Do you close your eyes and hope for the best when it comes to online returns?

Your website is built, launched and live. You can sit back and wait for the online returns to roll in. Right? Wrong. Once your website is up the real work of online marketing begins.

Far from being daunting, the internet offers exciting and unprecedented opportunities for businesses to find out exactly how consumers are responding to messages, what's working, what's not - and make immediate changes that will directly impact online returns.

Marketing risks can bring great rewards

Marketing genius often flies in the face of traditional knowledge. When logical marketing flops, it can seem too risky to take the plunge into something radical. But look at messages such as: 'hello hello' the nursery and Big Kev - I'm Excited! It really is surprising what consumers will respond to.

Your online marketing can boldly go

The internet allows your business to enter unchartered marketing areas, without putting too much at stake. And all with the safety net of testing that means you don't jeopardise your existing online returns.

It is super important to trial, test and push boundaries online. It really is the new frontier in terms of how we communicate, research, inform, share, decide, shop and do business. And (unlike more traditional forms of media) it is a completely democratic space. You don't need a massive budget or the best advertising agency on your side to make significant breakthroughs in online marketing and online returns.

Just say you want to test the headlines on your content pages. With split testing and multivariate testing you can keep presenting what is working solidly to the majority of visitors to your site, while testing different variations to small test groups and tracking the results.

Read more about both of these methods here

Fail to test and you will lower your online returns

It isn't just that testing messages can increase your online returns. Failure to test will stagnate growth and start to send your online returns heading in a backward direction.

The online world changes very rapidly. It is an evolving space that consumers dictate and your online marketing must evolve constantly in response.

Google gives you free tools to help you test and measure

Google web optimiser allows split testing or multivariate testing - and as usual with loads of Google tools it is free.

The other very important tool that will help your testing, measuring and assessment is Google analytics a free tool within Google adwords.