Improving Websites: Split Testing Vs. Analyzing Other Sites

Here is an interesting article that sums up James Brausch's approach to improving his websites.

Instead of split-testing a variable (ex: price ending in "7"), he describes the idea of compiling a list of profitable and unprofitable websites (based on longevity of adwords or other paid ads).

Once you have a statistically significant collection, you can then use this data over and over to test different ideas and claims.