The Authentic Eccentric

For those interested in developing products but unsure about their marketability, consider the “invest and test” method to check market demand first, before you develop it.

To do this, build a landing or sales page for your product or service (without pops) and throw a hundred visitors at it using a Google Ad Words campaign. Since you won’t have actually created the product yet, use an announcement list subscription box to collect email addresses.

Make sure to create an effective sales piece for your product as you envision it; if you’ve created an outline or basic framework of what information is covered, use this to generate a list of product benefits for the end user. Be clear about how your product or service solves their burning, scratching or itching - people buy solutions, not benefits.

Then, once you know what the demand is, developing the product should be easy. For an even more effective twist on this technique, add in a survey asking visitors what their biggest problems are (problems that your product will ideally fix) so that you have a list of what they’d like in addition to follow up information to announce you’re ready to sell.

This will cost you somewhere between $75 - $150 to do properly, but it can be a huge time and money saver, especially when you consider that the average cost to bring a product to market runs between $1k - 5k depending on how you cost your time. By gauging market interest first, you don’t get sucked into producing something no one will pay for, and you build your own targeted mailing list as you go, so the funds aren’t wasted.

Happy Creating!

For more information on this technique, I highly recommend Perry Marshall’s Google Ad Words course. At $49 it’s a cheap education on leveraging the power of Google traffic to build business. He also has a good sales letter for the product that you can model your own on, though I admit it’s a touch sales-y.