This post is a little raw and more rapidly written than most here. Okay so now we have an idea we’ve preliminarily qualified as worth some effort. What now? I’ve taken the steps outlined in the last post and had a few conversations with other bloggers and people in the space. I’ve qualified the backup guide as something to dig more into, now to see where it leads…but first a confession.
Honestly…
I’ve been slacking the last couple weeks. I don’t have much of an excuse other then life has been getting the best of me. I attempt to stay objective and not really personal here, but I’ve noticed that several of the great articles I read continually bring a personal note into their conversation. I don’t think you’ll see an outpour of subjective “this is how I feel” posts, but I’d like to attempt to bring my life progressively to this project. So, having said that….man have I struggled to find the motivation on making things happen this past week!
How to Bounce Back
Schedule other people: I called into a conference call from Greg Rollett’s business series for some inspiration, I also scheduled a call with Sam Carpenter author of Work the System to chat with him about what I’m doing. Inspiration to press on ensued.
Talk about it: Keep it in your conversation, and your future.
Take a break and mean it: Instead of constantly feeling you have to do more, purposely stop and enjoy your life. Remember, that’s the whole point of becoming financially free.
Mock Testing (tools and process)
Ok, now on to progress. A majority of the testing to qualify actually creating our freedom business product deals with our mock page. I haven’t actually created the product yet (although I’ve started a rough outline) but I have created a pitch page (otherwise known as the sales page or squeeze page), and it’s purpose at this point in the game is to get some initial numerical feedback on whether people will be interested in buying my product. The goal is to quantify hits to the page and clicks on a buy now button, or an e-mail sign up to be notified about the product. Depending on results, I’ll tweak the pitch (which probably means tailoring the product and key terms a little differently), cancel the product idea because it sucks, or move to building out the idea. The process below can be done on various levels of ideas, products, services and so on. If you recall this is how Tim Ferriss coined the name for his book. He ran a few weeks of testing on various book titles, the “4 Hour Work Week” came back with the best results, and indeed it’s done him well. I’ll be mock testing and reviewing results after a 2 week period.
Set-Up
Out of order page and e-mail capture. Your exact set up may vary, but the point of our mock is to find out who is ready to lay down some money. Since the product isn’t finished, we’ll set up an “out of order” page when a buy now link is pressed. I don’t exactly love the idea of presenting someone a sales page and not being able to deliver so I plan to position the “out of order” page with a %10 off coupon and e-mail sign up. I really am not a master at this, but I imagine if the buyer is sincerely interested they’ll be glad about the %10 off, and you’ll capture an e-mail in the process for when you’re really ready to launch.
E-mail campaigns are not new. These services work by a snippet of code inserted into your website. I’m going to using MailChimp because they offer completely free campaigns for up to 500 address’s which because I’m cheap and because we are only testing, is perfect. Other popular ones include constant contact, icontact, and vertical response. I believe there is another winner several people use, but it escapes me.
How can I give them %10 off already!? Don’t fret about this yet, when we get to building a store, you’ll see that any modern store front we use will have an easy coupon code we can push out to everyone who gave us their e-mail.
Tracking
You’ll need to count how many people find your business and where they came from. Tracking is vital as it’s where most of our data comes from. Luckily the tool and method is clear cut, unlike some of the techniques in advertising and search engine optimization. Google Analytics is the “go to” and tutorials on how to use it are bountiful. You simply need a Google account, and to insert some code into the bottom of every page you’d like to track. Google Analytics will provide you easy to absorb stats and if and when you are ready, the platform to really dig into your website traffic. Right now, we just want to know how many people, and from where.
Bonus: Free heat maps. Check out Clickheat for another small snippet of code (needs to be uploaded to your FTP site also) you can throw onto your website for a visual heat map of where people click. I’m not positive on on how useful the data is yet, but more data is better than less. If you find everyone keeps clicking on your privacy policy or some image on your site, you’ll realize this is a trouble area that you would not have otherwise.
Getting Hits
Now that we have a page that we can track, lets try to get people there. We’re still in the testing phase need I remind you so we want to find traffic as cheaply and quickly as possible and stop there. I’d be interested in others initial efforts on this front, but here’s what I plan to do in my initial 2 week testing phase. I’d love to hear from those more experienced in the comments.
Naming. The name of your product can be a make or break decision on two levels, organic search and advertising. It sounds worse than it is. We’re testing right now so take the vibe you got from your preliminary Google searches and come up with a 4-5 keywords that hit on your audience. The name of the product should be related to those keywords but doesn’t always have to be. The goal here is to find keywords that people look for often, but are not already capitalized on by several other businesses. It also should have a nice ring to it. Finding that string of words is somewhat magical and so I’m purposely being vague here as this can be a process to agonize over. We don’t want to halt progress so don’t go crazy here, just keep it in the back of your mind as you tweak your mock up. I searched for “backup guide” found very little competition and simply came up with “Backup Informer” to test. We can change things in two weeks if anything proves horribly wrong.
SEO: Keyword theme your site so that two to three keywords are meaningfully sprinkled throughout your site, specifically in titles and headers. Take care to make sure your website loads quickly, google pays specific attention to this. Stop there. It takes time for sites to be picked up organically and so it’s not really our focus (yet), but we lay the base ground work for the future. I’m using keywords and strings of words that play off of the word backup, such as “easy backup, backup for everyone, backup guide, backup anyone can use.”
Advertising/Promotion (soft launch): The soft launch is very different than a hard launch sales campaign that I’ll cover in the future. Google Adwords, friendly reviews, and forums are all I can think to use here. It’s tricky to get personal in any shape or form when you don’t have an actual product. What I mean by this is it’s hard to send out e-mails, facebook messages, or anything similar for people to check out your product when you don’t have anything and just want to test if people will buy it. The fact I’ve come to is that for initial testing purposes you’re going to have to play the Adwords game. You’ll have to ask your friends what they think and throw some money at it to get hits. I don’t like this, but I’m going to try it and give my results over the next few weeks.
Writing
Another key element of the mock up is writing. There is simply a more appealing way to write. Words, their arrangement, and placement make a big impact on how likely someone is to buy or consider buying a product. I’m not magical with words, in fact, I think I’ve very mechanical with them, and long winded. I had this resource recommended to me from a friend who’s had success with his information product, 007 Lifestyle. The resource is called Make Your Words Sell. I’ve thumbed through it and plan to rework my existing text after I’ve educated myself on selling with my words.
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Obviously the mock testing isn’t finished yet. I have to push through being stagnant and get to work on the details listed above. The holidays are hard to work around. It seems like a lot, but the time requirements really aren’t that heavy. An hour a day for a week should have me in place to run the soft launch. I’ll be continually keeping my eyes out for backup products, and working on my outline of the actual product during this time as well. It’s no surprise that the key to any product is not its actual content, which is still important, but how it’s marketed, what light it’s painted in. The mock testings most valuable data will tell us in what direction to go as a whole and shed light on what’s working or if our idea is shot. Once you know you have an idea you’re going to bring to reality, actions turn into two core efforts, creating a good product, and campaign launching it. The ability to know how to launch it, and to whom beforehand ensures a good idea on how it will sell. I’ll find that out soon, and perhaps join those who are already onto the next stages, managing the campaign, tying in community, and driving sales.