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Website Product Testing for a New Online Business

Providing a set of guidelines about how to go about building an

online business can provide you with some insight about what

actually is involved. You may be absorbed in the excitement of

launching your lifelong product or invention to the millions of

online users and have not given much thought to the mechanics of

setting up an online presence.

Before you set up the mechanical infrastructure for your business,

first convince your critical thinking part of your brain by doing

some research. On the other hand, don't spend months and months

researching this point.

Is your product or service something people need or want and not

just you? Be very careful here. Just because you think Klingons

from Star Trek are the coolest race of beings ever conceived, does

not mean you will sell millions and millions of "Go Klingon!"

T-shirts and coffee mugs online.

Your idea or concept should be tested first by setting up a test

website. You are testing to see how many people are out there who

may be interested in your product or service. Before you build a

website that has lots of time and effort involved, build a simple

one page website that is designed only to capture someone's name

and email. This is known as a capture page or landing page.

In order to set up any website, whether it's a permanent functional

website with your products and other content or just a test site,

you will need the following:

1)Purchase a domain name.

2)Hosting account where your domain name is hosted

3)A website that is designed to capture your prospects name and

email address tied to your domain name

4)An autoresponder system (so that you can set up automatic

deliver y of pre-written messages to prospects). Some hosting

accounts have auto responder systems, but not all. You will need to

find one that you can insert a lead capture form into your website

so that the form captures names and stores them on the

autoresponder system server.

Once you have these 4 components, you can test your product or

concept by driving traffic to the website. First, you must get them

to visit your website. Once there, they must find it compelling

enough to give you their name and email. This is called a

conversion. The point of the landing page is to get their name and

email, no more, no less. Once you have their name, you can then

begin your sales process which is set up via your autoresponder

messages.

Getting visitors to your site AND submitting their email and names

is the hardest part of the process. You must market the existence

of your site by using either free traffic sources such as article

writing, video marketing, forums, Facebook, etc. or by paid traffic

sources like PPC or Pay Per Click via Google Adwords, Yahoo or

Microsoft advertising channels.

Paying for clicks by writing small ads targeting your audience and

providing keywords that compel the searcher to click on your ad is

how you can start to test your concept/product. Place a few test

ads and monitor them over a period of days or at least to the point

where you get 1000 clicks.

You can set a daily budget for your ads so that you control costs.

Sometimes your ad will be so ineffective that you must raise your

cost per click in order for the ad to show up enough to get clicks.

A very low budget will take more time to reach 1000 clicks, but you

can see how effective your ads perform this way.

Once you get at least 1000 clicks, how many submitted their name

and email? You ideally want to expect a 1% - 5% conversion. If you

got a 10% conversion, just think how many names you could collect

if your marketing yielded 1000 clicks per day or page views (coming

from organic or natural search results). Paying for those clicks

from an ad can add up and be costly to maintain over time, but if

people ended up buying your product and your Return on Investment

was good, you would probably maintain paying for traffic.

If nobody clicks on your ad, or enters their name on your website,

you must look at the wording of the ad, the website design, layout

and copy and of course, the product you are promoting. You could

have professionally written copy boasting about the product, have

slick graphics and all, but very few people interested. Your

product may appeal only to a very small audience and just not

enough to make the whole process worthwhile. This is what you must evaluate.

Tip: Don't try to come up with the next "Pet Rock", give people

want they are already buying. Find something you know people want

and need, or find a product that is already popular, but put your

unique twist on it, and then test it.

by: John Stuart Leslie

welcome to loan (http://www.yloan.com/)