Well I have set up the website for my business idea (it is currently on the DL so I am not saying what the website or business is) and I have started microtesting.
In case you don’t know what microtesting is, it is basically setting up the sales funnel and marketing for a product without actually making or selling the product. For me I have set up a sales pages to which I am sending potential customers. I have a registration form almost exactly the same as a real registration form. Only when they register they are send to a page that tells them the product is not in stock at the moment. Obviously we don’t charge them or keep any of their payment details.
This way you can see how many people buy your product and whether or not it will be profitable before you spend a lot of time and/or money on making the product.
One of the best ways to microtest (apparently) is through PayPerClick (PPC) marketing. When you search in Google often there are search terms highlighted in yellow, or ads on the sides of the page. These are PPC ads. Whenever someone clicks on your ad you pay Google a certain amount of money.
The reason microtesting is proving more difficult than I first imagined is that it is quite difficult to get a lot of traffic for a small cost. I want to spend about $0.05-$0.10 per click. So for around $150 I will get about 1500-3000 hits to my site. Some of the keywords in Google cost $3.00 per click in order to place your ad under that keyword. That means for $150 you would get 50 people visiting your site, not nearly as many as the 1,500-3,000 I want to achieve.
So far the hardest part about the microtesting is finding cheap traffic to come to my site. I have been running my ads for 2 days and my ads have had 33 impressions and absolutely zero clicks. I really don’t want to spend more than 10c per click so I think I will be working this week adding more keywords to my marketing campaign.
I was thinking about maybe doing some article marketing in order to get more traffic, but I don’t really want to be spending ridiculous amounts of time writing articles that might not even get any traffic or make me any money. So I will keep trying to refine my PPC marketing campaign and see if I can start getting some decent traffic to my site.
I want to microtest my site for about a month. Then if it turns out it has a good chance of being profitable it will probably take me another month to get it up to the standard I want to start actually charging people (I won’t actually do any of the work myself I will completely outsource it using Virtual Assistants on oDesk for just $1-$1.50/hour). Then once that is done I can launch it and hopefully take a small profit as I continue to build it up, or at least break even. Breaking even or making a small profit will then give me the time I need to build up my product without it costing me any money (because I don’t have money to burn). So that is what I am aiming for. If it turns out no one is interested I will either can the project completely or sell the idea to someone else who could make it profitable.
If I can work out PPC and get cheap clicks then I can test a whole bunch of different products and business ideas, that I have floating around in my head, without taking a lot of time and effort making the product. This could change my life.