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How To Test New Products First Before Blowing Your Bankroll
By Tim Gross - Internet Business Blog |
Don’t waste your time and money creating a product and then trying to sell it… Here’s now to find out if it sells FIRST.
I just responded to someone asking whether they should spend $5,000 to complete a new product they’re not sure is really what their target niche is looking for. He believed his alternative was to spend a few hundred dollars setting up a “squeeze page” to build up a subscriber/prospect list with the remaining $4,700 first.
My response was that neither of those choices are very good:
“I’ve done a lot of product roll outs, and especially assuming that the $5,000 will deplete your financial resources for FUTURE products etc, I highly discourage you from spending the $$ upfront like you originally planned.
I’d also discourage you from spending the $4,700 in advertising to build a list… Because if you wait till after you’ve built the list before actually trying to sell the product, you’re still possibly throwing the money away.
There are legalities about doing “dry runs” of taking orders upfront without having the product in hand to ship, but there are ways around it (disclaimer: I’m not a lawyer and don’t even play one on TV), but you should pretend your product is ready to go and write the sales letter and order page for it NOW.
Send initial traffic to the squeeze page first or directly to the sales letter (squeeze pages don’t always work better, don’t let anyone tell you differently), and see how may people click through to the order page.
On the order page, you can reveal that it’s not ready yet and ask them to get on the announcement list, (don’t assume everyone who clicked through to the order page would have actually purchased), etc.
By doing this you can find out ahead of time whether there’s interest in the product, you’ll spend some money on advertising/promotion, but not the whole bundle.
Hope this helps, and good luck - Tim
P.S. -If the $5,000 is to go towards a large amount of copies for DVD or CD development or etc, step back and burn/bundle/package by hand in small amounts first. If there’s ANY way to get small amounts of a test product even if it costs way more apiece, it’s way better than large quantities of something that hasn’t been proven to sell yet.”
As an entrepreneur or start-up company, investing too much money in an unproven product can be disastrous. If you spend a solid month or two creating a product before finding out if anyone will buy it, that’s 30-60 days you may have thrown away that you could have been working on something more profitable.
Test early, test often. (Plus, the side benefit of writing and testing a sales letter for a product before you’ve even created yet is that it forces you to look at what will be attractive to the buyer (as you write the sales letter) which can help you actually create a better product when you finally create it. Find out what sells first.
I’m going to have a new video training series next week on how virtually anyone can create an in-demand product, and actually create it and have it available for purchase on the same day.
Stay tuned for more details… The trick is to not make things harder than they need to be.
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