The Russell Brunson Show - Tested Advertising Methods: The Blueprint for Higher Conversions | #Success - Ep. 113

Episode Date: February 11, 2026

Most entrepreneurs think their funnel is broken when it doesn’t convert. But after building funnels for over two decades, I can tell you the truth… ninety-nine percent of the time, the funnel isn���t the problem. The problem is we haven’t done the work of testing. The difference between a funnel that struggles and one that scales to millions usually comes down to a few small changes - tested intentionally and consistently. In this episode of The Russell Brunson Show, I pull a classic out of my vault: Tested Advertising Methods by John Caples. This is one of the foundational books that shaped modern advertising and completely transformed how I look at marketing. I share the story of my very first split test - changing nothing but the color of a headline - and how that simple tweak increased conversions by nearly 27%, instantly giving me a “raise” without more traffic, more ad spend, or more work. If you’ve ever wanted to know how to systematically grow your business instead of gambling on guesses, this episode is your blueprint. Key Highlights: ◼️Why 80% of your ad’s success depends on the headline - and how to structure it so it pulls people into the first paragraph ◼️The exact split-testing framework I use inside ClickFunnels to “give myself a raise” every single day ◼️The biggest mistake entrepreneurs make when testing (and why testing more than one variable at a time kills your data) ◼️Why specifics dramatically out-convert generalities - and how one precise headline 3X’d our results ◼️How old-school advertisers risked tens of thousands of dollars per test - and what their discipline can teach us today Testing isn’t just a tactic… it’s a philosophy. It’s the difference between hoping your funnel works and knowing it works. When you understand how to test headlines, offers, and pages the right way, you stop guessing and start engineering growth. John Caples mastered this decades ago, and when you adopt that same mindset, you’ll realize you’re just one split test away from your next breakthrough. ◼️⁠⁠⁠https://russellbrunson.com/notes⁠⁠ ◼️If you’ve got a product, offer, service… or idea… I’ll show you how to sell it (the RIGHT way) Register for my next event →⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ https://sellingonline.com/podcast⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ◼️Still don’t have a funnel? ClickFunnels gives you the exact tools (and templates) to launch TODAY → ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://clickfunnels.com/podcast Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Do you have a funnel, but it's not converting? The problem 99.9% of the time is that your funnel is good, but you suck at selling. If you want to learn how to sell so your funnels will actually convert, then get a ticket to my next selling online event by going to sellingonline.com slash podcast. That's selling online.com slash podcast. This is the Russell Brunson Show. I remember the time my very first product I created, this is even before my potato gun DVD, for those who've heard that story. But this was my actual first product ever. was a software I created called Zip Brander.

And I remember creating the site, it was up there. I was driving ads to it. I was making a couple sales of the day. And I remember hearing about split testing. And then I was an event in this guy named Michael Fortin was speaking. He was talking about copyrighting, talking about split testing. He showed tons of results. I remember one of the results he had, I think it was a red headline versus a blue headline or something.

I can't remember exactly what it was. This is, man, 20 years ago. At the time, I had the headline that had lost, like the color of mine. I think mine was red and he said the blue one one or vice versa, whatever. But I remember I was like, I heard Alex Medosians and say, give yourself a raise every day. I heard him say that he split tests to two different headline colors and one out beat the other one. So I remember going back that day to my little website.

So I set up the two different versions of the page, one with the blue headline, one with the red headline. But the rest of the page was like identical. I started my first little split test. Person number one would see, see headline blue. First number two, see headline red and blue and red. It would just go back and forth and back and forth. And sure enough, just like he had told me, the other color headline won. And it was crazy because it increased my conversions.

If I remember right, 27, 28 percent increase in conversions. Now to put that in perspective, that means, I made 27% more money every single day. I was still in college at the time. I was thinking, I was like traditional, like most people, let's say you're a doctor, right? And you go to college, and then you go to medical school and you graduate with like a million dollars in debt, right?

And let's say you're making, you know, it's half a million dollars a year, right? But then if you want to give yourself a raise, it's like, okay, we have to go back to college for two years to specialize in the thing. And you come back, now you're a specialist. You're another like, you know, half a million dollars in debt. But now you can specialize.

So now you can charge $750,000 a year instead of $500,000, right? You gave yourself a raise, but took two years. and half million dollars in debt. I'm like, I just gave myself a raise by changing the color of a headline. And I remember I was just like,

this is the most insane thing ever. And so for me, this is like the science of funnel building for me began. Was me literally just testing this versus this, this versus this, this versus this. And from that we invented the two-step order for. Like, all these things came from us just coming down and just thinking through this process.

Like, what are the little tests we can make every single day to make our business better? What's up everybody? Welcome back to my vault. Today I'm bringing out another book. And we're going to some advertising today. today with one of the legends of advertising John Capels. He's written a lot of really cool books, but my favorite of them all is called

Tested Advertising Methods. This is the first edition in its original dust cover. I spent $373.12. I'm not sure why that's where they posted on eBay, but that's what I got it for. And this book is, again, one of the books that most advertising students, when they get into advertising, internet marketing, it's one of the staples that people read to really understand the science about advertising how the whole the whole industry started. Capels is one the best and tested advertising methods one of my favorite because we are big testers in our

business. A lot of people, they put up ads, they drive funnels, they create them. They kind of walk away and they hope for the best. In our company, we are constantly always testing. In fact, I remember when I first got into this business, one of my early mentors, Alex Mendoza, I remember he told me something one time. He said, he's like, you need to set up your business where you can give yourself a raise every day. And I was like, what does that even mean? And he was talking at the time about split testing. He was like, if you split test a different headline every day,

say every day you spend a day or two, split testing headline and you increase your conversion from, say from 12% to 15%. You literally just gave yourself a raise. Like you're getting the exact same amount of traffic, exact same ads, exact same everything, but you increase the conversion by 3%. You're not making more money than you were before.

He's like, you literally just gave yourself a raise today. And next day you come back and you find something new to test, you split testing, and you get increased by 30% or by 12%. Like every time you do that, you're giving yourself a raise. And so this book right here, like I feel like John Capels would have been like

my marketing uncle or grandpa or something because we were cut from the same thread. This whole book is about these different ways, these methods of testing. Because back then and the day, it was so much harder to test. It's so much more expensive to test. Think about this.

They would go and they would have to run a newspaper article, right? And it's like, you or a magazine article, let's say it's a magazine arc, right? So they'd have to like write the article, get approved by the magazine. They'd put it in there. And they'd put it in there. And they'd put it in there.

And then they would go, to split test. So it might take them a year to get a good split test or direct mail. It's like they said they rented a list of 20,000 people that were going to mail this physical sales letter to. And so they would have 10,000 with one headline, 10,000 different headline. They'd send them all out and they'd have to wait, you know, a week to print them, then a week to ship them, then a week or two for them to get the person's house,

then people actually to open the letter. And then would sit on the person's kitchen counter for three days before they'd actually make the or, so they'd have to go, you know, five, six months before they could get the results back from a test to know, okay, red headline's winning. Let's do this again, right? So it was so long and arduous for them to do these things back and they. So the tests that are coming out of this world, the mindset of John Capels and the people from this era are so much better than what we do

because they had every test, they were gambling tens of thousands and oftentimes hundreds of thousands of dollars of their own money just to find out where it would win. We're in us nowadays, it's so simple. You can split test ads, run a couple hundred bucks, and you know the winner and you can double down, and you know the winner, you can double down and you can test it rate so fast where most people they put up a page they drive some ads it works it doesn't and they just walk away if it doesn't um and so i i just i love this stuff because this is the foundation of how to build

a successful business and most people are missing learning how to test your processes and by doing that you can literally give yourself a raise every single day so i'm going to walk you through if you're a brand new beginner maybe you're at your one your first funnel up or you're just starting drive traffic how do you start doing this because again the nice thing about today is it doesn't cost you a lot of money But every time you're driving traffic, there should be an active test happening. If there's not an active test happening, you're literally losing money, right? So the easiest way to do inside of ClickFunnels, obviously I am biased, but it is the greatest software platform on the world for running funnels and split tests.

So if you're using ClickFunnels, congratulations, I'll show you the easy way. You don't do it a hard way. There's software you can spend a ton of money or you can do it for free inside of ClickFunnels. Either way. All right, so here at the top we have, this is, we'll call traffic. Okay. Obviously you're driving traffic from a lot of different places. Maybe you're sending paid ads from Facebook.

or maybe it's paid ads from YouTube, or maybe you're doing free organic social or you've got reals coming. Whatever is you're driving traffic, right? And the traffic is all coming to a landing page traditionally, right? And so what most people do is they create one landing page, they put it in their headline,

they put it in a video, they put in their opt-in, whatever it is, and they just try to make the best version possible and they just cross their fingers and hope for the best, okay? Instead, what you do, that makes it very simple. Instead of creating one page

is after you finish the first page inside of ClickFunnels, you can very quickly and very easily set a split test. You take that page and you clone it, and now you've got two versions of it, So you've got one version like this and one version like this. And initially they both look identical, right?

Because you just clone the page. And so you start looking at like, what are you going to test? And one thing is interesting that John Capels talked about here. And so I tested advertising methods. He said that 80% of an ad success depends on the headline. Okay. So the headline is literally the most important part. And so when we're first doing tests, all we're doing the very first couple versions is trying to figure out what's the correct headline that's getting it's somebody to click or get somebody to opt in or do whatever step it is you want.

Right. So what we're going to do is we're going to have. headline number one and headline number two and then the rest of the page is gonna look identical right there's a video here and a block whatever I'm not gonna change anything else and this is one of the mistakes people make a lot times people try to test like five different things like why tested headlines and offer and price points and whatever like which one won they're like well this version one or whatever and they're like but you don't know like did it win because of the

headline or because the offer because like you never want to split test more than one thing at a time and you may hear like some people like brag about we have multi-variant split testing software. I'm not a huge fan of that unless you're getting insane amounts of traffic. For most people, simple A-B split test is the way you win. It's the way to give yourself a raise every single day, right? So then what happens, you have two different headlines. Now, I told you guys my first test was a red headline versus the blue headline. For you initially, that's not the first test I'm going to do. For me, the first test is going to be two radically different headlines, okay? Looking at which version of the headline is the one that's going to be

most likely to get people to actually give me money, right? And so I'm going to try two different versions. If you don't know what to do, go to chat, GPT, or if you're in ClickFunnels, ask the AI inside ClickFunnels, write me 10 different versions of headline. And from that, pick the two you think are most likely to win, which two get you most excited to actually read the rest of what you're doing, okay? Again, if you study cables and everything else, one of the things they talk about a lot is like, when someone comes to a page, the only goal of the page is to get somebody to read the headline. And the goal of the headline is to get somebody to read the first paragraph. And the goal of the first paragraph, the only goal is to get someone

to read the second paragraph. And the goal of the second paragraph is like someone to read the third paragraph. Like, that's safe to start structuring these things, right? It's not like a book where when you're writing a book, you're reading it and you're in a storyline and things are going all over the place, right? And people will give you more mercy and more leniency inside of a book because they know this is the story

and hopefully it's going somewhere. In copy, you don't have that, right? In copy, every single thing is the job of it is to sell the next thing, which sells the next thing. Because as soon as there's a spot where there's a lull and they lose interest or desire, they're gone. They bounce, pages closed and they lost them, right? And so the first thing I'm doing is just split testing

two different versions of the headlines. In Clickphones, you set this up, and then you make all your traffic come to the top of the funnel, and then what it'll do automatically for you, it's really cool. It'll say, all right, human number one, we're gonna send to this page.

Then human number two will go this page. Human number three over here, human number four, and starts rotating, it's split testing, okay? And then you'll see, as it'll show you then, based on people that come through this version of the funnel versus this version of the funnel, you can see which one gets the highest percentage of people who give you their email address,

which one gives you the highest percentage of people who buy on the next page, and so on and so forth. And so you run some traffic, some tests back and forth for a while, okay? People, the next question I get a lot is like, well, how much traffic should I send? How much money should I spend? And there's a couple of things to think about, especially when you first are driving traffic.

There's going to be different conversion rates based on different traffic sources. So let's say you're doing, you're doing reels on Instagram to drive traffic. But you're also doing Facebook ads and YouTube ads. And then you have somebody who's sending emails to their list. Now, when I'm doing a test, I'm not going to drive all this to the page because somebody who comes free from reels versus somebody who came from a customer list, it's going to be different traffic. And so what happens if you drive it all the same page and the first person comes over here, right?

They came from, let's say came from Reels and they bought. And person over here comes from email and they don't buy. It's going to mess with the whole algorithm. I want to send traffic that's the same when I'm testing something, right? And as much similarity as possible. It's the reason why we don't do, let's test. And this is one of the big mistakes people make. It's like, well, I'm going to test this landing page for a week and I'll switch and

I'll test this landing page for a week. They think that that's what split testing is. Split testing has to be A, B, which means person number one sees this, person number two sees this based on the same traffic source. You're going to pick one traffic source to focus on and you're going to split test it. Okay, the reason why this is important to do it both together, think about this. Let's say you were running a landing page. Again, we'll go back in time 20 years ago, whatever, right? And you were running it 20, was it, 2001, and you ran this from September 1st and September 10th.

And you ran this version of landing page. You were driving traffic. And you're like, okay, it's converted. I know exactly this converting it now. you know, 22%, you have the numbers. And then September 11th, December 15th, then you switch to traffic this page, you're running it, and the numbers come back

as like 0% conversion rate. You're like, oh, this page one, then beat this page, right? The answer is no, because September 11th, what happened? World Trade Center, tragedy, everyone's off the news, everyone's watching, and all of a sudden, like, the entire country's in different state of mind,

and they're going to buy differently, right? And so you mess up the whole, like, it's not a true split test. Okay, and split test, everything's got to be as close to the same as humanly possible. So one traffic source, same time period is essentially A, B, A, B, A, B. Otherwise, none of the testing metrics actually matter.

Does that make sense? And so that's kind of what we're looking for here when you're doing a split test. And so that's the first phase, right? And I'm going to figure out by doing that, like either headline one's going to win or headline two's going to win. And after one of them wins, okay,

you'll see inside ClickFun. It's like, okay, headline number one, one, you know, this one, one. Then literally inside ClickFunnels. Okay, you click a button and it archives this version of the page, and it's dead, right? And then you click clone, and then what happened, it'll clone the next page.

It'll clone the page again. Now you have headline one here and the page will look identical over here the same. It'll have headline number one and then you're going to change headline number one and you're going to go back to chat GPT, find a new headline and now you're going to test this page versus this page, this page versus this page. Okay, and that's how you give yourself arrays every day. It's very simple. It's very easy. And then what happens over time, you start getting better and better and better to figure out, okay, this is like this one I can't be.

I've tried 20 headlines. I can't beat this. This becomes the control. And then that's you start rolling that out to other traffic sources. And then you can test different elements right. Now maybe we'll come back. Now we're going to test the price point. Maybe now we're going to test a video versus text.

Now we're going to test. And so you can start adding more tests. But whenever we're doing split testing, it's just one test at a time. Usually we're going to run it for a week or, you know, 500 to 1,000 visitors. And then we'll transit next one and the next one. And we're just always constantly testing, giving yourself a raise every single day. All right. Now, one of the tests that Capels talks about here in this book that was really fascinating

because we actually tested on our side. He said that when you're testing headlines, he said that specific will always out convert generalities. Okay. So for example, the example he gives the book says, losing 12 pounds and 14 days is stronger than losing weight quickly. Okay, so we had the same thing. We had a test where it said,

it's how to get 1,000 opt-ins, a thousand people to join your list, right? And then the split test was how to get 1,226 people per month to join your email list. So same basic message. One was 1,000, which was kind of generally, oh, yeah, we'll get 1,000 people versus the other one's like, how to get 1,226 people.

We're having a very specific number in a very specific number of days. And that headline, it was like three X. It wasn't like 20% increase or 30% increase. It was like 300. For every single person that came, we got three times as much. It means three times more people went through the sales funnel. We had three times as much money. Zach's same traffic, two different pages.

So this is why these little insights from some of these markers from back in the day who were literally gambling their money. They were gambling tens of thousands of dollars to figure things out. Like they didn't just throw up two headlines through chat. like we do nowadays, right? They went deep and so I love reading these books because one little concept like that you can read, like oh my gosh, I wonder if I could change my headlines.

Instead of saying, you know, how to lose 10 pounds the next 10 days, what if it's like how to lose, you know, 12.6 pounds, like something more specific, right? Whatever your version is in your business. And so I love it. That's why not only do I love reading their ideas, I love looking at their old ads.

Even to this day, I have literally, I would say, probably 10,000 swipe files. What swipe files are old ads like this. where you can see, like, here's the headline. Newly discovered, Pepsidant mouthwash, three to 11 times more powerful than other leading antiseptics. Check, check bad breath far longer.

Check for bad breath far longer, right? Look at the headline how powerful is. Like, it's very specific. Pepsidant mouthwash is three to 11 times more powerful. Okay, and you say, Pepsidine is way more powerful. We found Pepsidine is more powerful on our competitors. That's okay, but three to 11 times is very specific, right? How do you take that?

I can say, well, newly discovered, click funnels, funnels convert three to 11 times higher than our competitors, right? Because our load page speeds faster, our funnels are more simple, blah, blah, I can easily go and I can weave those things in, right? So I look at these as an idea for how can I write a headline based on that. And so, again, I love these old books, these old swipe files. In fact, one fascinating thing is Dan Kennedy, if you have a chance to ever go to Dan Kennedy's house in his basement where it's like the mecca where all markers want to go and spend a day, right? You pay down a ton of money, let you come to his basement for a day. And in his basement, there's a room.

And in the room, there's a door that's locked that he will not let anybody go into. And I know this is true because I've tried twice to go and he literally will not let me into that room. But in his room, he's told me, he will not show me, he has filing cabinets of swipe files. So when Dan gets hired to write an ad for somebody, the first thing does, he goes to the swipe file room, pulls out the filing cabinet,

finds the ads, pulls them out, reads 50 different ads, and from there articulates the headline, the split test headline, the different body copy, all kind of stuff, all based on ads inside of a swipe file. And most of his ads are from this time period, not from today.

And so it's kind of fascinating. Now, the other cool thing is when we bought Dan Kennedy's company in the contract, in the will, when Dan passes away, his entire swipe file room, which so far nobody has seen except for him in the contract, I literally get access to it. So someday in the future, I will share some of the swipe file from Dan's filing cabinet with you and you have a chance to learn the same stuff that John Capels is showing you here inside this book. All right, if you just want to get a copy of my notes as I went through this book in the description down below, there's a link, go check it out, and you get the notes.

We'll give you the highlights, the outline all the best stuff from this book. to help you guys be successful. So when you are doing the split test and you're testing your advertisements, that way you can do it in the mindset of John Capels are the greatest advertisers of all time. And other than that, appreciate you guys, hope you enjoyed this video.

So share with other people and see you guys on the next video.