I’ve been in hardcore “video mode” lately as I’m in the middle of creating content for a new product, so I thought I’d bring some of that energy to the blog and mix things up a bit by posting a video instead of a normal post or podcast.

I had a ton of fun shooting this (you get a glimpse of some stuff I’ve done to increase conversions on my LEED AP Exam website and Security Guard Training Niche site), and seriously all of that work and practice I did preparing for my public speaking appearances have definitely helped with my delivery in my videos.

If you compare this video to my first one about how to setup a blog in less than 4 minutes, it’s like night and day.

Experience is definitely the best teacher.

Speaking of experience, here are my thoughts on traffic, conversions and click-through rates:

(Click here to watch Traffic Isn’t Everything – What You Need to Know About Conversions and Click-Through Rates on YouTube)

Click Here to Read the Transcript

Podcast Awards!

Lastly, as I mention at the end of the video, voting for the PodcastAwards is now open!

If you’ve listened to the SPI podcast and have enjoyed listening to the show, it would mean a lot to me if you took 1 minute to vote.

I’m nominated for two categories and you can vote for me in both if you wish:

• People’s Choice; and
• Business

It would be totally amazing to win an award, especially because the award ceremony is at Blog World Expo this year in Los Angeles, which is exactly where I’ll be.

Here is the link to leave your vote.

Again, please only vote if you feel the show is worthy of your vote. There are a lot of other amazing podcasts nominated in all of the categories, so please vote for whoever you wish.

Thank you so much!

I hope you’ve enjoyed the video, and please enjoy the rest of your week. Comments and constructive criticism is always welcome because I know there is always room for improvement.

Cheers, and all the best to you!

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If you would like to leave a comment on this post, please click the link below:

Traffic Isn’t Everything – What You Need to Know About Conversions and Click-Through Rates
Join the community of over 10,000 fans of SPI on Facebook!

Related posts:

1. The Secret of Cutting Through the Noise and Getting More People to Click on Your Links
2. March Traffic Report and Real Time Analytics
3. An In-Depth Traffic Stats and Analysis Report
4. Niche Site Duel – One Year Later (Earnings and Traffic Update)
5. SPI 008 : How to Get More Traffic with Corbett Barr from ThinkTraffic.net

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…

If you do begin to see people opt-ing in to your email list, awesome. People are interested. You now have a couple of options:

1. You can begin to create the product. You now have something that tells you that your product idea matches some people’s interest, and also that you’re able to reach your target market too. Use the motivation you’ve gained by people opt-ing into your list to crank it out as soon as you can. Furthermore, you may want to utilize some of the people on your email list to help create the product itself to ensure that you’re building it in a way the appeals to your target market. Make sure you somehow reward the people that do help you out.
2. You can continue by testing Phase 2. More on this below…

Step 4: The Sales Page Test

For some of you, a converting email list will be enough proof for you to pull the trigger and begin creating your product. However, for others, it may not be enough. As I previously mentioned in part 2:

“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.”

For those of you who want more…

In conversion test #2, we’re going to take our traffic through the exact same process they would be going through if they were actually buying a product us, via a sales page. By tracking to see how many people end up clicking the “buy now” or “add to cart” buttons, we can see exactly how many people would of taken out their wallets and paid.

When you do end up with conversions at this stage, you’d better get your product created NOW, because there are people waiting to pay you for it. All the more motivation to get it done

So, how does it work?

Here’s the trick:

When people click the “buy now” button, or “add to cart” button, it doesn’t send them to a page where they fill out their billing information. We don’t have an actual product yet, so why would we?

Rather, it sends them to a page that tells them that the product is currently unavailable. We can track how many people reach this page through a conversion funnel in Google Analytics, or any other website tracking tool that you’re used to. If you’re using Google Optimizer to test different versions of your sales page (as you should be), then that will keep track of the conversions for you as well.

This is the best way to test if people would actually pay you for a product without actually having a product.

But, that’s not cool!

You may be thinking that it’s kind of mischievous to offer a product to someone and then tell them it’s unavailable. Well, don’t worry because this happens all of the time. Have you ever tried to buy something, only to see that it’s on back-order or sold out? I have, but I don’t remember when and where that happened.

Now, have you ever been offered a special bonus or discount on the product because it wasn’t available? Probably not, but that’s exactly what we’re going to do. Here’s why:

• We should give the people that reach this point something because they were kind enough to be a part of our little test. We don’t tell them that, but they’ll be happy to receive a discount on the product in the future once it’s created.
• These people are highly targeted customers. They already proved to us that they want to pay, so we better make sure we get them back here once our product is ready.
• It will decrease the chances of people changing their minds when your product does become available.
• It may also help to gather some buzz for your product. Traffic that reaches this point may inform others about the special bonus or discount offer for trying to get the product early.

We can offer a discount by showing them a coupon code that they will need to enter into the shopping cart once the product does become available, but there’s an even better way:

We can have an opt-in form for a separate email list on this page that you can use to contact these people directly. Aside from being a way to ensure the people who reach your “deal page” get the discount code, you can use your email list to let them know exactly when your product is available.

The Sales Page

Unfortunately, the topic of the sales page is far too big to include in this post. I plan to write a blog post in the near future about the sales page, but I definitely recommend hiring a copywriter, or using the sample sales page from Yanik Silver’s Moonlighting on the Internet book, which I did have some success with myself.

That being said, I hope you understand the objective of using this method, and how it can really show us how successful a product idea can be without actually having the product created.

No Conversions?

If you’ve setup your sales page, sending traffic to it from your blog, from social media, and your existing email list, but you aren’t converting, there may be a few things going on:

1. Your sales page isn’t structured properly. You may want to ask people to read it for you and give you feedback, or look into hiring someone to optimize it for you if you haven’t yet.
2. Your tracking may not be setup correctly. It’s a fairly common issue, which I’ve actually experienced myself. Double and triple check your tracking codes and tools to make sure the data your getting is accurate. You may want to ask a couple friends to go through the process for you so you can see if your tools are picking them up.
3. You just may not have a good enough offer. You know people are interested (based on conversion test #1), but maybe your price is too high, or your bonuses aren’t convincing, or your product just doesn’t have enough value. At this point, you may want to hit your existing email list with a survey. You know you’ve sent them to your sales page already, so you can use a survey service like SurveyMonkey.com to conduct an anonymous survey with your list to see exactly where you’re going wrong. (In the settings in Aweber, you can set it up so that people who do reach your “deal page” and opt-in for the discount code get automatically taken off this original list. You don’t want to ask the people who did click on the “buy now” buttons why they weren’t interested, when in fact they were).

In my opinion, if you’re got interest on your squeeze page, you should be able to convert them into sales. What’s nice is that if you do see conversions on your sales page, you not only have some crazy motivation to start and finish creating your product, but your squeeze page and sales page are already finished and proven to work!

Cheers!

I hope you have enjoyed this series. I know there are a few holes, such as the sales page itself, which I do plan to address later, but I hope you can now see that it is possible to test your product ideas before you actually invest a significant amount of time to it.

Thank you all for your wonderful comments and inspiration, as well as the birthday wishes! I just turned 27 yesterday, but wanted to make sure I finished this post for you today.

Lastly, if you have yet to subscribe to the blog, you can do so by clicking here.

I wish you nothing less than success,

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If you would like to leave a comment on this post, please click the link below:

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

1. How To Test Your Online Product Before It’s Even Made – Part 3 | Lead Capture
2. How To Test Your Online Product Before It’s Even Made – Part 2 | The Two Phase Process
3. How To Test Your Online Product Before It’s Even Made – Part 1 | Making Sure a Market Exists
4. A Little Known Way To Increase Your Product Sales
5. How to Publish an Ebook Series – Part 6 – 10 Steps to a Great Sales / Landing Page

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.

So Why Email for Our Test?

You might be wondering why we’re so interested in capturing email leads at this point more than anything else. Why don’t we just track to see if people reach a certain page, or click a certain button?

There are two specific reasons:

Reason #1 is because clicking a button and reaching a certain page is too easy. It’s almost second nature for most of us. When we see a dark blue underlined piece of text like this, we automatically want to click on it. Did you just try?

So, if it’s second nature for most people, then it’s not a great indicator for people’s interest and the possibility of buying from us. It may be a small indicator, but not really.

Reason #2 is because if we do capture an email lead, which takes a certain amount of thinking and processing of information from the person filling in their name and email address, we can follow up with that person if we do end up creating a sales page and a product in the future. You can’t go back to those who clicked a certain button or went to a certain page, but you can always contact people on your email list. No waste.

How Do We Capture Email Addresses?

There are several email marketing software companies available to choose from, but the email service from AWeber is by far the best. If you’re going to begin capturing email addresses for whatever reason, AWeber has my top recommendation. That is an affiliate link, by the way

For this post, we’re more concerned with getting people to take that first small action and signing up for our email list. Consequently, I won’t be covering what you should be writing in your follow up emails, but I will definitely cover that in a later blog post.

As far as setup and creating your opt-in forms for your website, AWeber does a fantastic job of walking you through the process.

Step 3: Setting Up The Lead Capture Process

The rest of this post is dedicated to illustrating how we can setup a “squeeze page” to properly test and capture email addresses for our product. To me, the page gets it’s name because we’re taking traffic to a certain page, and “squeezing” them into an email list.

If you have a blog or website where you can place an opt-in form in your sidebar, that’s great. Your sidebar is a perfect place for an opt-in form, but for the sake of this test, we’re going to leave it out.

The reason for this decision is because we want to see results and numbers that come directly from the features and benefits of our product, not just because there’s an opt-in form that shows up in the sidebar. For this same reason, we will not be offering a freebie, or “lead magnet”, because many times people will only sign up to get a free gift. Remember, we want to see raw results from the product we’re going to offer. Once we know the product will sell, we can introduce the sidebar opt-in form and lead magnets to get as many people into the sales funnel as possible. We don’t want any false data.

I love how this is starting to sound like a science experiment. In a way, it actually is.

Squeeze Page Theory

There are said to be “proven” methods and tactics to optimize squeeze pages. I will cover most of these next, but realize that the only way you’ll know what works best for you is to literally test different strategies against each other. We’ll talk more about that in a bit.

Here are some basic “squeeze page” theories:

1. No Choices

The primary function of a squeeze page is to get people to opt-in – that’s it. Because of this, we want to remove any other action that the visitor could possibly take. Advertisements, links, and navigation items should be taken out. We’re basically leaving them no choice but to either opt-in, or leave.

2. Nothing Fancy

This is one of those cases where less is definitely more. The more graphics, dazzle and glitz we put on our squeeze page, the more distractions there will be. The focus should be on the content of the page and the opt-in area.

3. Continuity

Many people say that a squeeze page should have absolutely no graphics at all, but I think that’s a mistake. At least for me, I think a squeeze page with a simple header that has graphics similar to our other pages will help keep a sense of continuity throughout the entire process. I’d like for them to know that they are still on our website.

4. What Goes Where

Since most people read from left to right, we want our content on the left hand side of the page. Our opt-in area should be in the upper right hand corner, and everything should be above the fold.

(Remember, “above the fold” means the reader can see everything without having to scroll down).

If for some reason you cannot place everything above the fold, it’s wise to place a second opt-in form (for the same list), below the fold as well. This way, you can make it easier for the people who do scroll down.

5. Your Content

The content of your squeeze page is the most important element of this phase of testing, and probably the hardest thing to figure out. For help, we can use the list of features and benefits that we created in the previous post.

If you have the resources, I definitely recommend finding a copywriter or hiring one for this quick project. He or she will definitely use the list you created to write you some killer content for your squeeze page.

Your content should include:

• An Attention Grabbing Headline: The headline is usually placed in large red text at the top of the page, and is used to “hook them in.”
• 1 or 2 Questions Directed to the Reader: These questions should address the top concerns that your target audience has in your niche. These are usually placed below the header on the left hand side of the page.
• 3 or 4 Things Your Product Can Do For Them: Usually in bullet form, underneath the questions, you’re going to answer the questions you just asked using the benefits from your list. Don’t worry about the features – your readers don’t care about them. Remember, all they care about is “What’s in it for me?”
• A Call To Action: This is really important. You’re going to ask them to sign up for your email list to get more information about your product. If you don’t ask, they will not sign up.

Things to remember:

• You don’t want to mention any specifics or features about your product just yet. All we’re doing is creating excitement about your product, and making them want more.
• Don’t mention the name of your product, if you even have one yet. The name is probably the last thing you should worry about, but for some reason it’s what we all want to figure out first. There’s really no need to mention it here.
• Again, less is more. If it looks like an essay, they’re not going to read it, which is why the bullet points work so well. They’re easy to read and straight to the point.

6. Your Opt-In Form

The opt-in form, which is located on the right hand side of the page, doesn’t have to be fancy either. As long as there is a call to action, a name field and an email field, you have exactly what you need. However, I wouldn’t use the generic button that AWeber provides. I’d go with a larger one that also includes a call to action inside the button itself.

Lastly, you should somehow mention that you won’t be selling, distributing, or spamming their email addresses.

Other Options for Content

The content piece of your squeeze page does not have to be just text. In fact, many people are using audio and video in their squeeze pages now because it adds a little more personality to the page.

If possible, I would recommend testing all three forms of content at the same time. You can use Google Optimizer to send equal amounts of traffic to each and see which one performs better for your audience. This way, we can make sure we’ve covered all of our bases so we don’t assume that we have a dead product when people would actually respond better to a video instead of text.

You could also test different headlines, font sizes, and bullet points – anything you want!

A Final Word About the Squeeze Page

These theories for the design and content of your squeeze pages should give you the best chance to determine whether or not your product will be something that your audience will be interested in, in the least amount of time. Remember though, that these are theories (although they have been tested on several sites and mentioned by a lot of other internet marketers). The only true way to know if a certain setup for a squeeze page works for you is to tweak and test your ideas for yourself.

Sending Traffic To Your Squeeze Page

Once you setup your squeeze page, your job is to send traffic to it and let your page do all the work. You can use the features on Google Optimizer, Google Analytics, or even a url shortener like bit.ly to track the numbers for you. I prefer Optimizer or Analytics because you can set it up to see the exact percentage of how many people signed up for your list, vs. how many people viewed the page. If you’re testing different versions, as you should be, then all you need is Optimizer.

Here is a list of some of the ways that you can send traffic to your squeeze page:

• Links via Twitter.
• Links in your sidebar. (This is ok here, because they still opt-in on a separate page after reading your content)
• Links after your blog posts (in a highlighted box!)
• Links on your Facebook page.
• Place a link in an existing email list.
• Ask a friend to tweet or blast a link for you.
• Paid Advertising via Google Adwords and Facebook

Regarding the paid advertising, think about this: it’s a lot cheaper to spend $250 for traffic now, than to work on a project for 3-6 months that doesn’t sell as expected.

If you get a lot of signups, that’s a great sign! Plus, your email list will continue to grow. If you don’t see very many sign-ups, then you either need to tweak something on your page, and if that doesn’t work, you may have to dump your product idea and move on to the next. Better to know now, than later.

The lead generation factor is a good indicator of customer interest in the product that you want to sell. Some may even suggest to stop here, and get your product created at this point.

In the next step, for those of you who want to be absolutely sure about your product, we’re basically going to setup a real live sales page. I’ll show you how that works in the next post.

Thanks again everyone, you have no idea how much I appreciate your time, attention, and your comments. Cheers!

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Thanks for reading!
If you would like to leave a comment on this post, please click the link below:

How To Test Your Online Product Before It’s Even Made – Part 3 | Lead Capture
Join the community of over 10,000 fans of SPI on Facebook!

Related posts:

1. How To Test Your Online Product Before It’s Even Made – Part 4 | The Sales Page Test
2. How To Test Your Online Product Before It’s Even Made – Part 2 | The Two Phase Process
3. How To Test Your Online Product Before It’s Even Made – Part 1 | Making Sure a Market Exists
4. Do You Pass the Test? An Online Entrepreneur Mindset Exercise
5. A Little Known Way To Increase Your Product Sales

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…

Step 2: Make a List of Your Product’s Features and Benefits

Even though this series is about how to test your product before it’s even made, you still have to have a good understanding about the product you want to create. Don’t waste your time on the name, what font you’re going to use, or what the cover will look like. That’s not important right now. The only thing you should worry about are the product’s features, and the product’s benefits.

Features vs. Benefits

No, they are not the same thing. I think every entrepreneur struggles at one point in their lives trying to make sense of the difference between the two. Here is my attempt.

A feature is a special fact about something. A benefit is what that fact can do for someone.

A feature: my house has solar panels.

The benefit: I save money on my electricity bill.

A feature: A home gym folds up and fits under the bed.

The benefit: You don’t have to waste space in your room with ugly gym equipment while you’re not using it.

A feature: My blog has a step-by-step series about how to test your online product before it’s even made.

The benefit: So you don’t have to waste your time and money completing a project that may produce less than expected results.

Which do you think is more important: the feature, or the benefit?

Have you ever heard of the expression, “What’s in it for me?” It’s basically what any customer in any niche wants to know. The features really don’t matter – it’s the benefits that they provide that do.

If you’re still struggling trying to figure out what the benefits of your product would be, here’s a super cool trick. Take any feature of your future product, and add the words “which helps you…” on the end of it, and finish the sentence. You now have your benefit. Examples:

The house has solar panels, which helps you save money on your electricity bill.

A home gym folds up and fits under the bed, which helps you save space in your room when you’re not using it.

My product has X, which helps you Y and Z.

Make a list of as many features and benefits as you can. We’ll be using this list in our later steps. I just wanted you to start thinking about it now if you haven’t already.

A Two-Phase Process

It’s fairly common to break down a sales funnel into a two phase process. In phase one, we engage with potential customers, seeking out those who would be interested in learning more. In phase two, we present the solution and our product to those people.

The reason this works so well is because by engaging with potential customers we establish a relationship with those people first, which is necessary before any type of selling should occur. Like I’ve mentioned in previous posts, you can’t just go up to someone you just met and expect them to buy whatever it is your trying to sell.

A relevant story:

About a year ago, once I started making some good money online, I decided to invest about $800 into affiliate marketing. Affiliate marketing is neat because you’re selling someone else’s product and earning a nice commission for each sale. You don’t even need a website to begin. All you need to do is send someone to a product through your own special link, and if they buy that product, you get money. Sounds good, right?

So, I signed up for ClickBank and found a number of interesting, high-commission items that I wanted to promote. I also signed up for a Google Adwords account, which would allow me to place the “hoplink” into an ad. If that ad was clicked, it would send the customer to an already prepared sales page. With Adwords, you pay only each time your ads are clicked. I was so ready to earn some easy cash.

I spent an initial $400, which was about 600-650 actual clicks on my ads (over thousands and thousands of impressions), and I didn’t even get one sale. Not even one.

Terrible.

Pathetically, I emailed Clickbank because I thought there was some kind of mistake. Hah! How lame is that? Of course, there was no mistake…except for the fact that I didn’t know anything about how to be a good affiliate marketer.

Since I had $400 left in my affiliate marketing budget, I decided to spend half of that on learning more about affiliate marketing. I bought some books, and even a couple months in a membership website, and I learned one very valuable strategy:

First, setup a “squeeze page” to capture email addresses, and THEN send those people on your email list to your sales page.

When I first heard about this, it seemed to contradict what I learned when I first started doing business online: the more pages, clicks and time it takes for a potential customer to get to your end product, the more chance there is of that person leaving during the process. So, it was weird to me that people were adding on this additional step in the process, but after some more research and discussion with others about it, it makes perfect sense.

Like I said before, it’s a way to engage customers upfront without hard-selling them anything right away. Also, when a potential customer fills out the email opt-in form, it’s like a mini-transaction that takes place, which sort of prepares that person for more information and more transactions in the future.

So, I went on the hunt for a few affiliate products that had their own squeeze pages setup already. I spent my last $200 sending clicks to the squeeze page, and wouldn’t you know, I got 6 sales. Yes, it’s only 6 sales, but at around $30 each, I nearly made up the $200 I spent on Google Adwords.

Needless to say, pay per click affiliate marketing is not for me, however, I’m really glad I spent that money to learn some valuable lessons about internet marketing along the way.

A squeeze page for an offer isn’t necessary in order to do well at affiliate marketing. As Ian mentions below in the first comment, there are people out there doing extremely well the old-fashioned way.

So how does this help us?

First, it shows that we should be using a two-phase process in our sales funnel. Secondly, in our test, we can separate each part, and not move on to the next until it’s proven that we should.

In other words, we’ll test the lead capture phase first. If that doesn’t go so well, there’s no point in continuing, and we’d save a ton of time, frustration, and disappointment.

If it does go well, we know we have people who are interested in what we have to offer. We’ll then take them through the second phase, and using analytics and tracking, determine if they would actually reach the point of paying for your product. I know it sounds confusing now, but I’ll show you how it’s done in the next post.

Of course, we’ll have to test several versions of the lead capture process, (which I’ll talk about in the next post as well), so we don’t base our decision off of one “bad egg”.

I know this particular post doesn’t have as many “go here” and “click this” and “try that” as the others in the series, but I feel it was necessary to give you this background information before we actually put this stuff into action. I hope you agree.

As always, thank you for your attention. Cheers!

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Thanks for reading!
If you would like to leave a comment on this post, please click the link below:

How To Test Your Online Product Before It’s Even Made – Part 2 | The Two Phase Process
Join the community of over 10,000 fans of SPI on Facebook!

Related posts:

1. How To Test Your Online Product Before It’s Even Made – Part 4 | The Sales Page Test
2. How To Test Your Online Product Before It’s Even Made – Part 3 | Lead Capture
3. How To Test Your Online Product Before It’s Even Made – Part 1 | Making Sure a Market Exists
4. Do You Pass the Test? An Online Entrepreneur Mindset Exercise
5. Niche Site Duel 002 – Finding a Profitable Niche: My Process Revealed

The purpose of this 3 or 4 post series is to save you time and money. I’ll take you though the steps you can use to determine if your new idea or product that you want to create will be worth your time and effort.

Which guy would you rather be?

Jim, who spends a year creating a membership website for a certain niche that he believes would love his product;

Or Jeff, who spends a month testing his niche market, only to find out his idea for a product would have totally bombed.

I choose Jeff. Why?

Because when doing any kind of business, there’s a HUGE difference between what you believe, and what you know. And here’s the ugly truth – what you believe means nothing. Your gut feeling can only take you so far. Jim’s beliefs may or may not turn out to be profitable for him. Jeff knows his idea is not going to work, so he’ll move on to the next until he finds one that does.

So how do you know for sure if your idea will be successful or not, before you begin investing a significant amount of time creating your product?

Step 1: Make Sure a Market Exists

The first thing you have to do is make sure a market for your product exists. That means there are people who are interested in what you have to say, and on top of that, willing to pay for the kind of information you have to offer. If you end up finding out that a market does not exist, you’ve already saved yourself a lot of time.

“But Pat! My idea is totally revolutionary, and nothing like it has ever been done before!!!”

Here’s my two-part response to that:

1) Is that what you know, or just what you believe? And,

2) Are you sure you want to create the first kind of something?  As Seth Godin says in Free Prize Inside, “version 1.0″ of most things end up failing. Think about Napster, Friendster, and even the Segway. Innovate and be remarkable in a proven niche, and you’ll be more predictably successful.

Moving on. Here are the key indicators you should look at to determine if your ideas have a market or not:

Google Advertisements

Type in keywords related to your idea into Google Search. If you see paid advertisements on the results page (see below), then that’s a good sign there is a market for that particular niche. Read each one carefully to see exactly what they are about.

Competition

If there are other websites doing something similar to what you had in mind, then a market for your product idea obviously exists. You may have even noticed some of your potential future competitors in the paid ads that showed up in your Google Keyword Search. Don’t Worry! This is a good thing. We can later use information from the websites and products of our competitors to our advantage, but we’ll save that for a later blog post. Just remember – competition is good, both for you and for the consumer.

Amazon

Do a quick search at Amazon.com for any books or other items related to your product idea. If you end up with results in your search, again – don’t worry. Like I mentioned before, this just confirms that there is a market for your product.

Check out the top books and read the reviews. The more reviews there are, the better, because this confirms that people are actually paying money for this kind of information. After reading through the negative reviews, is there anything you should make sure you include in your product so that you don’t get the same responses from your future customers?

Forums

Here’s a cool trick.

For whatever niche you’re looking into, type into Google Search: “Forum:Niche“, where Niche is the name of your particular niche, or a related keyword. For the example below, we’re going to use “mountain biking tips”.

You’ll end up with a list of all of the most popular online forums related to that niche. Click on the first few and browse around a little. Here are a few questions to ask yourself as you do this:

• Is there a lot of conversation going on? How many posts or threads exist within the forum?
• When was the latest post? This will help you determine how active people are in the forum.
• What are people talking about? Are there any sections within the forum related to your idea or product?
  • Ninja Tip: Do a search within the forum itself for certain keywords that relate to your idea and see what you come up with. You may need to register for the forum in order to perform a search, depending on the admin’s settings.
• Is there anything you may want to add to your product or idea that you see in the forum? Please make note for future reference.

Quantcast

Here’s a cooler trick.

In the search field at Quantcast.com, type in the url of one of the forums that you visited. Here’s our result for bikeforums.net:

You now have an exact profile of the kinds of people who are interested in your niche. In less than 10 seconds, we know their:

• Gender
• Age
• Ethnicity
• Number of Children
• Income Level; and
• Education Level

Take note of the income level that comes up from your search. If most are in the $0-3ok range, you might want to think about a different market. In the mountain biking market, it’s no surprise that most are in the $60-100k range – some of those bikes are really expensive! We know these people have money to spend.

On the left hand side of your Quantcast results page, click on “Geographic” to see exactly where they are located (this feature is not available for some sites):

Would you benefit from geo-targeting your product? Are there specific things you have to learn about a certain region in order to make your product successful?

Next, on the right hand side of Quantcast, you can see what other sites these people have been to as well:

Not only does this information help us confirm that there is a number of people who may be interested in our product, but it will help us in the future when we start advertising and writing copy.

Online Commercial Intention

Lastly, I’d like to cover something called Online Commercial Intention, or OCI. According to Market Samurai, “OCI is an indicator of the chances that someone searching for a keyword is looking to buy as opposed to browsing for information.”

Market Samurai, a paid tool, is an excellent keyword research device which actually spits out the OCI as one of the results for each keyword that you analyze. You can, however, enter keywords one-by-one into the tool at the Microsoft AdCenter Labs here.

Enter your niche keywords (try as many as you’d like), and you’ll get an idea of how many people are “just looking”, vs. how many people are “looking to buy”. I wouldn’t base my decision to move ahead with a niche or not based on this tool alone, but it is a somewhat reliable indicator for commercial intent which may play a role in the later steps in this series.

Coming up…

Of course, there’s a lot more than just knowing there’s a market out there for your product. In the next post, we’ll discover how we can get closer to knowing exactly how your target audience will react to your idea or product.

Cheers!

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