Living in the Triangle area of North Carolina with respected collegiate athletic programs in schools like Duke, UNC and NC State (I’m a Wolfpack Girl), I can’t help but draw parallels between testing and March Madness at Brooks Bell. Our testing behavior is oddly similar to our March Madness behavior. There’s office chatter, favored challengers, constant stat checks and (I’m not going to lie) a little smack talk.

Recently I was driving around my neighborhood and noticing how many homes were for sale. Given that the low-end price of a house in my hood is around $700K (I assure you, I’m a renter), I considered the challenge of standing out and getting your house noticed in this glutted buyer’s market. And then I realized that real estate could actually teach us some important lessons about landing page optimization.

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By now you know I have a habit of associating every day annoyances with topics on conversion. I just can't help myself. The world is filled with annoyances and Twitter and blogging has taught me to be more observant of my surroundings. Of course, being a blogger for over 10 years now has trained me to always be thinking about blog topics and not to worry about how much of a curmudgeon my words make me out to be. I really am a positive, happy person!

In preparation for the Apple iPhone announcement, Apple has updated their store on Apple.com with the infamous “We’ll Be Back Soon” post-it note block page. As a fanboy, nothing whets my appetite for new excuses to spend money than this visual. As a marketer, it brings up a very important fact. For as much as we spend time trying to make sense of results, create order in testing plans, and achieve best practices, there will always be exceptions.