How To Test Your Online Product Before It’s Even Made – Part 4 | The Sales Page Test

This is the final part of the 4 part “How to Test Your Online Product Before It’s Even Made” series. In part 1, we discovered how to know if a market even exists for our product idea. In part 2, we learned how to figure out the benefits of our product and learned about the two-phase sales process. In part 3, we learned about how to setup a squeeze page to capture leads to test our product, and here in part 4 we’ll be tackling how we can use a sales page to get even more defined results from our tests, all before we have a product actually made.

To recap, here’s an illustration that shows exactly what we’re up to:

I love my pen and tablet

Anyways, as you can see, we’re basically conducting two tests based on the two-phase sales process. If we don’t see a notable conversion rate for conversion test #1 (people entering the squeeze page vs. opting in to our email list), then we have a good indicator that we may not have a winning product. Of course, several versions of the squeeze page should be tested, but if we end up with a dead idea at this point, we’ve at least saved a lot of time by not spending months creating a product that may have never sold.

And If You Do See Some Conversions…

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How To Test Your Online Product Before It’s Even Made – Part 3 | Lead Capture

This is part 3 of 4 of the “How To Test Your Online Product Before It’s Even Made” series. In part 1, we made sure a market exists for our product. In part 2, we discovered the features and benefits of our future product and deconstructed the philosophy behind the “two-phase” sales process. Here in part 3, we’re going to take a closer look at the first phase of the sales process, which is all about lead capture.

In order to convince a person to take a big action, it’s easier if we get them to take a smaller action first. We know this already. This is why we get free samples, why we are encouraged to test drive, and why we want to capture email leads.

For the purpose of testing our ideas for future online products, if we can’t get people to be interested in what we have to offer and simply sign up for an email list (the small action), then there’s no point in creating the sales page and/or the product itself. If they don’t want to test drive the car, they are not going to buy it.

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How To Test Your Online Product Before It’s Even Made – Part 2 | The Two Phase Process

This is part 2 of the “How to Test Your Online Product Before It’s Even Made” series. In part 1, we discussed how we can make sure a market exists for our product. Here in part 2, we’re going to dissect the nature of our product, and prepare it in a way so that we’ll be able to gauge exactly how it will be accepted once it enters the market.

Your market can tell you exactly what they want. Your market can go even further to tell you that they would give you money for something you plan to offer. The brutal reality is that when the time comes to actually pay you, when it’s time for your market to pull out their wallets and enter their credit card information online, your market’s word means nothing.

People backing out of their word online is a fairly common occurrence. In person, it’s much harder to go against your word because – well, it’s done in person. But online, people seem to throw around words a lot more without actually following through.

Therefore, simply asking your email list, your twitter followers, or your blog subscribers if they would pay for a product that you are going to create simply will not work. Many people are too nice and say they will pay, but they don’t.

So instead, you have to take some of them through a very specific funnel, which mimics the real buying process, to actually get some tangible numbers and proof that your product will actually sell. I’d like to give credit to Tim Ferriss for writing about a similar “tester” sales funnel in his book, although I’ve taken it much further and have broken it down into a two-phase process. You’ll see why…

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