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All Articles [20] NHS/PCT [3] Government [1] Online Business [4] Corporate [1] Small Business [4] Web Site [10] Urls [2] SEO [6] Marketing [10] Photography [1] Print [2]Is there an Online Demand for your Product or Service?
See all articles by: Lucas Scholten
Last updated: [ 28.07.2008 ]
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Gone are the days of taking a leap into the unknown. Back in days of old, you would come up with a business idea that you thought was good, and then simply set up and see how it goes.
Ok, so maybe I exaggerate. There were still ways to identify a demand through focus groups, polling and other methods.
But the point is, with the development of the Internet, there is absolutely no reason why you should not be able to identify an absolute demand for what you’re selling, before you go the full hog and invest more than you can afford to lose.
The Internet provides a wealth of data which is unmatched by any other research method known. You can literally know if a product or service will be successful online in matter of weeks, without investing an arm or a leg.
How?
A preliminary search on Google’s traffic estimator will show you how many people search for the product or service you offer per month. This is already extremely handy.
Which is searched for the most; Web hosts, rabbit food or Blank DVD’s?
Answering simple questions like this can help you sift through multiple ideas and allow you to choose only those that are searched for a reasonable number of times.
Once you have established that a product or service is searched for, you may still want more information.
For about £12 a month, you can search ebay’s sales history over a period of 3 months. This is especially useful if you plan on selling a branded product. Simply type in the exact name of the product you want to sell and ebay will tell you how many were sold in the past 3 months and at what average price.
But what if you aren’t selling a branded product? How can you still measure your likely success?
The best way by far, is to run a tester AdWords campaign.
Simply set up a cheap web page with some test copy, and then pay Google to advertise it on their search results.
The web page would be a dummy, so when someone clicks “buy now” or “signup” you return a message along the lines of, “sorry the product is currently out of stock. If you would like to be notified when its back in stock, please enter your email address below”.
The important thing is to record how many people clicked the “buy now” button or how many people performed an action associable with a sale of your product or service.
You can then objectively look at how much you spent on advertising, what your supposed returns would have been, and in what timeframe.
Knowing these techniques, there is no reason for simply setting up a business idea on a hunch. These techniques give you the absolute security of knowing whether an idea will work or not.
Contact us now, to find out more.