Finding out demand using the internet

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I have several business ideas. Offline ideas like opening a certain restaurant and online ideas like new services.

How do I test their demand using the internet with investment of less than 100$ for each business idea?

I heard about this approach:
  1. You create a website with a buy now or similar call to action that shows financial interest
  2. Once the user clicked on this, you count this as a "interested"
  3. Once a certain amount of users are interested, let's say 100, you start delivering, before, you just tell them the product is not ready yet
  4. To get traffic to this site, you use long-tail keywords in adwords

Now the issue with this is
  1. If people didn't convert, was it the design or were they really not interested, no matter how great the design.
  2. Would I have better numbers if I paid more for adwords? When does it end? I don't want to spend thousands just on adwords/fbads.
  3. Do I have the right keywords?

So in other words, not converting does not necessarily mean no interest in buying my service or product.

How do I go about it?
#ecommerce sites, wholesaling & drop shipping #demand #finding #internet
  • Before investing a penny, you can get a pretty good idea if people are buying online by seeing how many people are entering "buying phrase" type of searches. Obvious "buying word" phrases include "buy", "discount", "sale", etc.

    You can also get a pretty good idea whether people are buying or not by seeing how many Google Shopping and/or text ads there are and the estimated bid prices of those. (Bonus Points if you check out the actual websites and see that they have been in business for awhile). Nobody is going to pay for ads over time if they are not profitable.

    Finally, it "ends" when any given ad costs more than your net profit from the ad. As long as you make more money from an ad than it costs, there is no reason at all to pull it. In some cases, however, you may be willing to lose money on a conversion if you are in the type of niche that has a high percentage of repeat customers (i.e. you sell gourmet coffee vs. selling coffee makers).
    • [ 2 ] Thanks
  • Good points dave. Please give me a link to the website I can see the bidding prices for ads at.

    PS: Would you apply this to bingads?
    • [1] reply
    • You can just go to AdWords and see what the suggested bid is. Keep in mind that this is always on the high side, but somebody out there is averaging that. Their keyword tool shows you the bid price.

      Or, you can just use Neil Patel's Ubersuggest tool and get all the answers in one shot.
  • The approach that was suggested to you seems a bit gimmicky. Throwing an offer out there and then repeatedly telling people "its not ready yet" is going to lose their interest quickly. Also your call to action should reflect well on your product. I fell like there would be some discordance between your original pitch and the actual product itself if you are creating a call to action and THEN creating a product.

    Secondly, something like opening a restaurant would be difficult to test with a website. You would need to actually go to the area where you wanted to open a restaurant and find out who lives in that area, what is already there or what is lacking and how can you fill that void. I could be wrong but I don't think the internet can tell you that the commercial space you are looking to lease is in a neighborhood that is home to a retirement community and a brand new elementary school. If that were the case your idea for a new dance bar might not be the best fit in that area.
    • [1] reply
    • sqalla414, which ideas do you have to test online ideas?
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