In this post, we’ll talk about How You Can Test a Business Idea?
Building a website is expensive and time-consuming.
It’s hard to know if your idea will work before you invest in it. You could be building the wrong thing, or not even have an audience for what you’re trying to build.
We’ve created this guide that walks through how to test your business idea with Google Analytics, Facebook Ads, and other tools before investing in a website design. This way you can see if people are interested in what you’re selling before spending thousands of dollars on something that might not work!
If you’re not interested in learning how to give your website visitors what they want, and instead, would rather spend money on a website designer who might get it wrong the first time -then this guide isn’t for you.
I’m sure there are people out there (who probably don’t read articles like this) that actually make millions of dollars from a website they built without doing any validation first.
If that’s you, awesome!
Also, I’m sure there are people out there that have no idea how to build a website and can’t afford to hire anyone. If your 14-year-old neighbor solves this problem for you with his free WordPress blog -you’re welcome.
This guide is for everyone else.
In the real world, you don’t build a house without digging a hole or laying some concrete first. You would never fly to New York City and ask someone to build you a skyscraper before making sure there was someone in NYC who wanted to live in your skyscraper (or paying to build it without knowing if anyone will even show up to live in it).
This is how most people think about their business idea. They hear of some success story of someone who built something with no validation and decides that’s the right way to go about things too. This couldn’t be further from the truth! Building a website, app, or business without validating the idea first is a shortcut that very few people can actually take.
Let’s get into some specifics on this topic. We’ll provide you with a step-by-step process of how to make sure your idea is worth pursuing before bringing it to life!
First, let’s talk about how to test your idea before you build something.
Contents
2 Steps to Making Sure Your Business Idea is Worth Pursuing
1) Brainstorming for business ideas
Brainstorming for business ideas -before you start testing them with Google Analytics, Facebook Ads, etc.
This process of brainstorming ideas can be overwhelming if you don’t know where to start. It’s like starting a 700 piece jigsaw puzzle without the picture on the box. The good news is that there are a few tips and tricks you can use to generate specific ideas in order to fill in your business idea box with a nice, pretty picture.
When most people think of brainstorming, they usually think of writing down an endless list of business ideas. While this can be helpful with some strategies (like the next step with Google Analytics), if you’re looking to test a specific idea for free -you don’t want to waste your time thinking about every possibility out there!
2) Converting visitors into customers
Converting visitors into customers -with Google Analytics and Facebook Ads
Once you have an idea of what you want to sell, the next step is to convince your website visitors that they actually want to buy it.
This is where Google Analytics and Facebook Ads come into play.
Google Analytics will teach you how to track people who are visiting your site so you can split test changes to your website against the original version to see which one converts better.
(You can just discount the original one and go with that!) After you’ve decided on layout, colors, etc., it’s time to set up Facebook Ads. This is where you advertise your product for real! You bring in traffic from Facebook (or another social media website) with ads that link your website.
This is where you find out if there’s actually an interest in what you’re selling before spending thousands of dollars on something that might not work.
While it’s important to test your idea before building a website, it’s also worth noting that the people who will buy your product may not be the people who find you on Google. Without going into a lot of detail, there is a little thing called referral marketing which is an alternate way to advertise your product without using ads.
Referral marketing is usually more effective than Facebook Ads because you’re attracting people who are already interested in what you’re selling as opposed to just anyone that clicks on your ad.
For example, if you’re selling t-shirts with cat pictures on them and someone posts a picture of their cat on Facebook, they might be more likely to buy your product than if you put an ad up for it. They already like cats so they’ll probably buy the shirt!
The point of this process is to make sure that people actually want your product. Using Google Analytics and Facebook Ads to track the amount of interest in what you’re selling will help you determine whether or not a business idea is worth pursuing.
Once you’ve run a test with Google Analytics and Facebook Ads, it’s time to start building out your website! Hopefully it’s been validated and your website will be a success!
Now that you know how to validate your business idea, go out there (after brushing up on startup development skills!) and make something happen! If you’re not into that sort of thing then check out our How to start an ecommerce business guide for more information on starting Ebay, Amazon or Etsy stores.
Conclusion
We hope we’ve imparted some wisdom on you and that you’ll be able to use our ideas to come up with some great business ideas of your own! Let us know if you have any other suggestions on how to find good startup ideas.
By the way, there aren’t any affiliate links anywhere in this article so it’s completely unbiased. We’re not saying you should go out and buy Google Analytics or Facebook Ads. There are free alternatives to these tools if you want to try them out before investing any money into your business idea!
