Hey James, thanks for the reply! Well, it's not exactly easy. I've been doing design optimization for years. You should see the stuff we tried at Highrise that never got to see an article because it didn't move the needle.

As for proof, there's not much else I can give you because I'm not going to share at this time my Google Analytics screenshots. That might be a great idea though. I'm just not ready to give our competitors everything about our business. But one bit of proof hopefully is my track record of sharing the wins and the losses over my career. For example, I've shared the wins of marketing I've had with Highrise like this 35% bump

https://m.signalvnoise.com/marketing-design-how-we-got-a-35-bump-in-our-conversion-rate-at-highrise-96abe6d91818

And the things I screwed up:

https://m.signalvnoise.com/choking-under-pressure-what-we-can-learn-from-those-who-have-and-how-to-avoid-it-9234916dd1fb

And funny enough I have an article coming soon about screwing up our conversion rate just recently with another experiment.

As for the common design methods, they sure are! But of course, no one seems to do them. I also have a series of landing page design videos on YouTube (https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLoU-PFauVXDYyzRz2bUMHj2JbuR8M6cWn) and it's funny how often I repeat myself. Just because it's "common" for you and me, doesn't mean all the folks looking to learn how to design their businesses better know this. I think that's a big problem for a lot of us. We think everyone knows all this stuff we know, so it's not worth teaching or blogging. "Everything goods already been said" Right? Sure seems that way to me too sometimes. But I still go out there showing my own examples, and it proves to reach a pretty large audience who hasn't seen this stuff before about social proof or testing or designing forms.

Hope you stay tuned for more. And thanks again for reading through it all!