How To Test Your Offers In The Market

Testing your offers is one of the most often overlooked details of starting a new business, or when launching a new product in an existing business.

The Internet makes it easier than ever before to find out if people will actually buy your product or service before you invest the resources to create it. That’s right, you can and should take orders for your product before you even spend the time and money to create it.

Isn’t marketing something you don't have illegal?

Not at all, if you do it correctly.

So how do you test the market correctly for just a few hundred dollars?

Well, you create a few different sales pages that test different variations of your offer. You then place advertisements in online search engines so they will send traffic to those sales pages.

You can use search engine marketing services such as Google AdWords, Microsoft AdCenter, or Yahoo Advertising for these advertisements.

You're also able to have the person who clicks on your ad proceed all the way through to the order page, and can even have them submit their credit card information for a pre-order (do NOT store credit card details because at this stage, the product is not really available).

Then, on the page where they would normally get a confirmation message for their order, you give them a notice that the product is currently unavailable, and that you will notify them as soon as it is available (you may even want to give them the option of getting a refund right away if that sits better with you). That’s it. Anyone who makes it to the "currently unavailable" page is ready to buy your product today.

When you set up your advertising campaign, you will need to research what keywords people actually use in the search engines to search for your type of product or service. In other words, you will need to specify what keywords you want to “pay for” during your advertising, and you want it to be the keywords that people are using to search for your type of product or service. Some keyword tools you can use for your research include Word Tracker, Good Key Words, or the Google Keyword tool.

If you choose to buy domain names for your test, you can use a domain registrar like Godaddy or Domain.com. Companies that are relatively inexpensive to buy domain names through.

Get yourself inexpensive hosting as well. For simple hosting we recommend Bluehost because they make it easy to quickly set-up Wordpress to build either just landing pages or a full website for your testing.

Refining Your Offer From the Test Results And Repeat the Testing

Based on the outcomes you get from your initial tests, you can refine your product offer and conduct further testing or decide to move on to your next idea.

If you had a lot of people visit the sales page but very few who make the "test" purchase, then the problem could be that your product offering is not compelling enough. This is where you'd want to do some optimisation and work on CRO (Conversion Rate Optimization).

Typical sales conversions usually range from 2% to 4% of visitors for a well-crafted offer, but this can vary for any number of reasons. So the numbers do not have to be huge to indicate a great potential product.

In any event, you have to do the math based on how much the traffic cost you versus how much you would have made on the "sales" you made during your testing.

Refine Your Business Plan Based On Your Test Results

Take the time to really analyse the test results and see if they indicate this business idea has good potential.

If so, then refine your business numbers up or down as required.

You're now in a position to decide if your offer is worth scaling up into full-blown production.