Linkbacks and SEO

Whether it’s your first product, your fiftieth, or your hundredth, knowing just how the market will respond is something that you can never tell by intuition alone regardless of the product. The most stressful and difficult times for any entrepreneur is when they are launching a new product. Although the most popular and successful entrepreneurs are said to have the ‘magic touch’ that can predict a product’s success, they’re more often than not hard wired to critical data when making major decisions. In the past, focus groups and beta testers were utilized by internet entrepreneurs and marketers to test products; now it’s possible to use the massive search traffic of Google as an effective replacement for traditional marketing test groups.

The information that an AdWords campaign brings you is priceless, whether you’re looking to sell 20 copies or 200, put up a series of ads that will test for the main factors of your product. It could be price, the name you are using, and/or the description of your product; just allow the results to speak for themselves. By running an AdWords campaign specifically targeted to your market, you can gain some extraordinarily valuable insights into performance, consumer preferences, and general price for any product.

Here’s a simple example, using an eBook as a demo product, if you need some guidelines:

With five potential product names, 10 potential product descriptions, and no idea of the price, you need to gather as much information as quickly and cheaply as possible to market an eBook that you’ve written yourself.

To see which one performs the best, without mentioning price or cost associated with it, run five different Google AdWords campaigns. All 5 ads need to have the same exact information with the exception of the book’s potential titles in the ad text or headline. Only keep the best performing and drop the rest.

Now, run your ads with ten different product descriptions. The titles and headlines should be consistent and identical, with only the advertising copy changing. Find out which product description works the best for your audience, and lose the others.

Now determine your price point. Run the same tests again, but with ten different prices, to see which one continually leads to most people to both click on your advertisement and read through your product description and sales copy. Create a form to place at the end of the page to collect the names and email addresses for your potential customers.

By using this simple strategy, you’ve determined the best name, description, and price for your online product, created a marketing database, an email list, and best of all, once you launch your product, you have the opportunity to market to people directly. Not bad for a little AdWords spending, and certainly more cost effective than the traditional methods of gathering market information.