We all want successful products, but the key to success might be in learning when to cut your losses. We’re going to go over a strategy today that has you testing your offer with a simple landing page to see if there’s a market for it. If the modest landing page and our product shows promise, we scale it up with confidence. If no one bites, then we know we’ve got more work to do before really going all in and launching our product.
Visit Sites to See if There’s Interest
You may have a great idea for a product, but you need to first validate that idea. Some places to visit to make sure you have an audience include:
Build & Sell Digital Products
It couldn’t be easier to produce eBooks and videos for the modern entrepreneur.
- ScreenFlow for writing content and making PDF eBooks. If you want to make a PDF file, you can either write the document in Google Docs (or upload it) and click “Save as PDF” to make an instant eBook. The same option is available on mac computers (select “Print”, then “Save as PDF”).
- Camtasia (Mac & PC) or ScreenFlow (Mac) for making video and recording your screen.
More information on Selling Video Courses
If you’re interested in hosting a video course, Udemy.com and Skillshare.com make it simple to sell your course on their marketplaces. GumRoad.com is another easy option to sell any of your video files,
You can make your own course and post it on Udemy.com, Skillshare.com, or use GumRoad.com to sell it yourself. GumRoad is great in that it gives you even more freedom to sell whatever digital goods you want: eBooks, mp3’s, csv spreadsheets, movie files, and anything else digital. These digital content platforms make it simple to sell (and most importantly) distribute your digital content. Distribution is important – this is where PayPal has somewhat dropped the ball. Although PayPal makes it easy to pay, managing digital rights and subscriptions on their platform leaves much to be desired.
How to Validate Your Business Idea Quickly
It’s important to make a mockup of your product or service even as you’re advertising it. That means that you might not even have a fully complete product: the mantra is to fail fast if you’ve got a losing product. Most people spend months slaving over a product, then find out in a matter of days that their product isn’t wanted by the market. What a waste of time and energy! Come up with the scaffolding for the product / service, get it 80% done and slap up a landing page. If it’s viable, then ship it but let people know that “updates” are coming. If it’s not viable, you’ve just saved yourself lots of time.
The easiest way to validate an app, product or website service is to whip up a quick landing page.
The following is how 520or90 mocked up a quick a one page website and an email capture form to test their idea:
Get Traffic to Your Offer
Ultimately you’ll want to leverage your social networks to get traffic to your offer. If you’re offering a video course, post teasers of it on your YouTube channel. Make postings on your Facebook wall advertising your product or service, or visit some forums you frequent and post there about it. But you don’t want to do this at the beginning – you don’t want to use your social networks until you know you’re offering a viable product.
The best way to test your offer’s landing page is to send paid traffic to it. Some people like Facebook PPC, I prefer Adwords. Many times new customers can get $100 Adwords vouchers as an enticement so that’s always an incentive.
Head over to https://adwords.google.com/ko/KeywordPlanner where you’ll have a chance to check out the cost and traffic estimates for your keywords.
As you move from left to right, the graph increases to reflect the more traffic you’ll get by bidding more.
So this is where the rubber meets the road: no more talk, all action from here on out. Let’s break down your Adwords strategy for getting eyeballs in front of your test landing page:
- Target keywords with at least a few thousand searches a month. We want keywords that get traffic.
- Select your basket of keywords. For example, let’s say I select 10 keywords that together get 10,000 searches per month. In 1 week’s time, that would be approximately 2,500 searches X 6% CTR on my ad (estimate) = 150 clicks over to my site.
- Figure out the maximum price you are willing to pay for a customer. For example, if my product is $50, I might be willing to pay up to $45 at the beginning in hopes of that cost going down over time.
- Let your campaign run for 3-4 times what you are willing to pay per customer.
- Did you get at least two customers? If yes, then you are on your way. Tweak your landing page and ad copy, as well as branching out to other traffic sources like social networks.
- Didn’t get at least two customers? Back to the drawing board tweaking landing page and keywords, but maybe also it’s just not a strong offer.