Testing viability of your online business

Even before you come up with business plan for a online business, its important that you find out if there is a market for your business. Marketing research is such a crucial aspect of any new business, ensuring that there is really a need for your idea. With more than a billion websites now out there for one reason or another, ensuring that there will b a place for you and that your time and energy will not be waisted, this needs to be done very early in the start-up process.

Testing your idea can easily be done through Pay Per Click advertising. You can create an ad campaign in less than 10 minutes. An entire blog could be dedicated to what you can do to optimize your PPC ads so I won’t get into that here (but here are a few good resources). The main things you need to do are make sure you target the right keywords, have a decent ad, and put up a landing page that will help you track interest.

You don’t need to put up an entire site, you just need a teaser on the page and then measure how many people respond to the teaser. When I say “respond”, I simply mean you need a way to judge how interested people actually are in what you are offering. Actually getting traffic is good, but if what you are offering is not what they want, then you can’t accurately judge the need for your business.

For example, we were thinking of selling and ebook on online reputation management. Before we spent the time to actually write the book, create a site, and everything else involved, we ran some PPC ads and got traffic for people looking for related keywords. On the landing page, we had a few tests going at different price points. We listed what would be included in the book and then listed a price. For some people we said “Click here to buy this ebook for $79″, other tests showed lower prices. When people clicked on the link, it took them to a page saying the book was not yet available and they could fill out a form if they wanted to be notified when it was released. We did not collect any information from people unless they said they wanted to be contacted when the book was released because we did not think it would be right, but more importantly, we were not interested in collecting info on them. We simply wanted to how many people would click the link so we could determine if an ebook on reputation management had much potential. In the end, we found out that it did not have as much potential as we thought so we never did anything with it.

Another time we considered pursuing a new type of lead (for our lead generation company). We created a PPC campaign, put info on the landing page and did something similar. In this instance we found out there was enough interest in this type of lead and we would likely be able to convert the visitors at a high enough rate where it would be worthwhile to pursue.
The idea of testing your business model via PPC ads is mostly related to online businesses, but most businesses now need to have some online aspect to them so it is likely applicable to you.