Test the premise of your website sooner rather than later
I know I talked in a previous post about giving this business plenty of time to develop but I would urge everyone to get to the point of being able to test the premise of your business as soon as possible.
That great saying about getting good at failing quickly! Fail quickly and move on to your next chance of success.
I say this because I've read too many comments saying that people were shelving the site they've worked on for the last 6 months and trying something else. 6 months wasted when you could have tested within 1 month. How?
Its quite simple really.
1) Devise an offer
2) Put it out there
3) Measure the results.
So devise an offer based around your planned business. It could be a free report, a small low cost product or even an affiliate connected to your niche. You have to test the water to see if your market actually exists and to see if they are happy to have a 'value exchange' with you. They give you something such as email address of money you give them something.
Putting it out there is easier than you think. Solo ads, Bing ads, Adwords. Paid traffic is great for testing and very targeted, and before you say "oh I can't afford it" think about if you can afford to waste 6 months of your time and effort building a website that gets no traction because the only people who thought it was great was you, your family and your friends. Even if you are onto a good niche, it may take a year or more to climb up the rankings to get sufficient traffic. Your overheads are still going out in this year.
Measuring the results is easy too. What were you trying to achieve? A sale, collect an email address,. What ever it is you can measure it then tweak the offer or the ad and try again.
If you have a small product you can upsell to via the landing page or a later email you may even find yourself in profit pretty early on or at least breakeven then your testing has cost you nothing.
Just saying that if you are hell bent on setting up a website selling roller skates for dogs then you can quickly find out if there is really a market out there by doing three things
Devise an Offer
Put it out there
Measure
Most of us who have been here a month or more could do this by the end of this week!
Recent Comments
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You are right, Jack, Test, test, test our niche products rather than wasting yr precious time away, solo ad can be great if you have the budget and a great squeeze page.
Nice and simple after you have your website up for some time without any monetary results.
Ken
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I liked your blog as it was thought provoking. My question for you is have you done this yourself? How has it worked out for you? May I ask what your niche is? I actually am questioning mine, but have decided to continue with it as a learning model as I go through the rest of the WA training. I don't feel that it will be a waste of time, as I'll develop the skills necessary to change or add another niche as I go along. Your thoughts?
Hi Jan,
Yes I've done this several times and am yet to find the balance between subjects I really enjoy and those that have the potential to create a real income for me.
Each time I happen upon something I might like to develop into a business I run a test. I've focussed on physical products and one speciality UK focussed service for debt laden businesses but as of yet none have been 'the one'
I'm currently building some 'Traffic, Lead, Conversion' type resources and will try with these shortly.
Thanks for taking the time to comment and ask questions. I'm please my blog created some thoughts for those who read it.
new myself
like your writings