I spent most of the day building a mini-site to do this.

Only after I finished did I decided to actually test how a visitor would complete their application form. Usually I’d only check that the site works and that perhaps the first page of the submissions worked correctly.

I tested the site three times.

The first time I was directed to an acai berry promotion which was NOT what I was planning to market.

The second time the first page submission worked fine but instead of taking me to page two of the offer I was taken to page 2 of an acai better promotion instead.

The third time, the offer worked fine.

I noticed that the website also changed slightly too. By the end of the day a ‘money back guarantee’ image was pasted onto the bottom of the site so obviously the webmaster was playing around.

I’d have been very upset had I began a PPC campaign on this site yesterday as, without going through these three checks I’d have had no idea why my traffic wasn’t converting.

I’m going to make sure every time I’m getting fewer conversions that expected I’ll go through the site myself and get as far as the order button.

As you can see, their site is currently experiencing some technical issues that are likely to discourage or prevent members signing up.

I discovered this problem early and there was no harm done, but what would have happened if I’d have launched a campaign and paid money to send people here?

Some of the affiliate networks I’m working with make it hard, if not impossible to view our own landing pages. Sometimes we need to use a VPN or proxy.

This error above is worrying because it’s not a site-critical problem. It may take hours for the site admin to even notice there’s a problem. I’ve therefore decided that the first step to take before un-pausing or beginning any campaign is to double-check the landing page.

I also plan on adding my site links to the fantastic free website monitoring service UptimeDog to be alerted if my links ever go down.