Building a Website? Here’s How You Can Test a Business Idea

In this digital age, there are more business ideas or product ideas than ever before.

That’s just it, more ideas.

How many of these ideas are actually successfully executed upon is a separate matter.  Not so much successes or failures, just a boat load of ideas.

Worst yet, a lot of ideas are built up, then the person realizes that nobody wants to buy his/her product.  What a waste of time.

Why Hesitate?

There are a lot of reasons why ideas are not acted upon.

Some people are innately afraid of failure.  Some people are lazy.  And a lot of people just don’t know how to action upon ideas.

The reality is that it is not easy to take an idea from a conceptual stage, to production, to transaction, before you even know if the product will succeed, just stay afloat, or flat out fail.

The unknown is pretty daunting for most people, especially if you have to commit time and financial resources to just “see” what might happen.

But does it have to be so hard?

In the digital age nowadays, there are actually ways to test your ideas before committing serious time and capital to your concepts.

Get a Website Set Up

Here’s one method to prove out whether your idea has a chance to take flight.

Take your product concept and quickly build a website for it.

There are a lot of free website builders in the market right now, such as Weebly, Jimdo, Wix, etc that can allow you to create a website.

It doesn’t have to be super good looking.  We’re looking to test an idea quick, not submit a website for a beauty contest.

Create a simple product description page, create a few simple diagrams or pictures of what you want to sell, and add in a “add to cart” button which leads to another page.

This other page is what you will track to see if people are actually clicking on the “add to cart” button.

Or you could solicit potential customers to submit their email addresses in the website, in order to receive further information on the products.  This email function could be a simple contact form, which is included in the website builders I mentioned above.

Track Your Data

After you have the simple website up and running, don’t forget to insert Google Analytics or some sort of website tracking to it.

Google Analytics is an excellent way to see how many people are visiting your website and where they are clicking.  It’s free, and all it takes is that you have a Gmail account.

Advertise Your Idea

Next, place some advertisements with Google using their Adwords function.  This is the easiest and fastest way to get your idea out into the internet to gauge how people may react.

Adwords will show up in Google’s search results page when people are searching for keywords that are relevant to your idea.  In any case, you are the one that select which keywords visitors have to type in before you advertisement will show.

This is a very simple test method and you can often yield good insights and information very quickly in a matter of days.

Google Analytics will track what your visitors are viewing on your website and how long they are on each page for, amongst many other useful information.

Ideally, what you would like to see is if the visitors are clicking through to the “add to cart” page which suggests that they have some intention of purchasing, or if they are emailing you to ask you for more product information.

Test Budget and Commitment

Your total test budget and commitment could look something like this:

• Website cost = Free
• Time to set up website = 1 day
• Google Analytics = Free
• Google Adwords = US$50 (depends on how competitive the search terms are and how much data you would like to collect)
• Analyzing of data = a few hours

For sure, you can use your own creativity and execute variations of this test, but the test concept in itself is quite simple and it will provide you with clues and indications of whether you business or product ideas have any potential.  Keep it simple, and your potential rewards could be limitless! Looking to sell software? Have a look at our guide.

See our Expert Reviews on Website Builders