The Entrepreneur Forum | Financial Freedom | Starting a Business | Motivation | Money | Success

Welcome to the only entrepreneur forum dedicated to building life-changing wealth.

Build a Fastlane business. Earn real financial freedom. Join free.

Join over 80,000 entrepreneurs who have rejected the paradigm of mediocrity and said "NO!" to underpaid jobs, ascetic frugality, and suffocating savings rituals— learn how to build a Fastlane business that pays both freedom and lifestyle affluence.

Free registration at the forum removes this block.

A Quick & Inexpensive Way To Find Out If There Is A Market For Your Products/Services

Andy Black

Help people. Get paid. Help more people.
Staff member
FASTLANE INSIDER
EPIC CONTRIBUTOR
Read Fastlane!
Speedway Pass
User Power
Value/Post Ratio
370%
May 20, 2014
18,568
68,703
Ireland
Ha. Some dude wrote these steps back in 2009.

You can find them here:




EDIT: The link seems broken for some people.

Here's where you'll end up:
tDynGt3.png



And here's the rest of the post:
Fail Fast & Fail Cheap
Your aim is to get real market info as quickly and cheaply as possible.​
If your business idea is going to fail because of lack of demand then you want to FAIL FAST and move onto another idea.​
Spending longer than you need to on an idea that isn't going to work is a huge waste of your time, energy, money, self confidence, and potential.​
Be Found By The People Looking For You
You can put people into different categories:​
  1. People who need your products/services, but don't know it.
  2. People who know they need your products/services, but still don't want them.
  3. People who want your products/service, but aren't actively looking for them at this moment in time.
  4. People who are actively looking for your products/services, right now!
By far the easiest people to sell to are the ones who are actively looking for your products or services. If you can pick this low hanging fruit and get profitable from this category then you can look at selling to the other categories later on.​
It would be criminal to start a costly exercise to educate those people who need your products/services but don't know about them, when there could be a lot of people actually searching for you that no-one else is serving!​
Your Plan In A Nutshell
  1. Find out what people are looking for.
  2. Find out how to give it to them.
  3. Find out if you can make a profit doing it.
  4. Create and implement a plan to act upon this knowledge.
A Quick & Inexpensive Way To Get Started On The Right Foot
1) Got to the Google Keyword Tool (EDIT for 2016: Now the Google Keyword Planner.)​
2) Make sure the region is set to Ireland.​
3) Enter a phrase that someone might use to find your services/products ("dog grooming" for instance).​
4) Google will tell you how many searches there were in Ireland that had those words in the search query phrase, and for similar phrases.​
I've just done it and the results for Sep-09 are:​
dog grooming 9900​
grooming dog 9900​
dog groomers 1000​
dog grooming courses 1000​
dog groomer 720​
dog grooming ireland 590​
dogs grooming 590​
mobile dog grooming 480​
dog grooming equipment 260​
dog grooming course 210​
dog grooming supplies 210​
dog grooming in ireland 140​
a dog grooming 110​
dog grooming jobs 110​
grooming a dog 110​
dog grooming clippers 91​
dog grooming services 91​
mobile dog groomers 91​
professional dog grooming 91​
dog grooming business 73​
dog grooming parlour 73​
dog grooming salon 73​
dog grooming table 73​
dog grooming kit 58​
grooming for dogs 58​
mobile dog groomer 58​
pet dog grooming 58​
dog groomed 46​
dog grooming classes 46​
dog grooming prices 46​
dog grooming products 46​
dog grooming tables 46​
dog grooming tips 46​
dog grooming training 46​
dog grooming vans 46​
paws dog grooming 46​
dog grooming books 36​
dog grooming salons 36​
dog grooming school 36​
dog grooming scissors 36​
dog grooming career 28​
dog grooming kits 28​
dog grooming service 28​
cheap dog grooming 22​
dog grooming schools 22​
dog grooming suppliers 22​
dog grooming tools 22​
top dog grooming 22​
all breed dog grooming 16​
christies dog grooming 16​
dog grooming parlours 16​
dog grooming shop 16​
dog grooming brushes 12​
dog grooming tool 12​
5) Determine which are the best phrases to indicate people are actually looking for you, and have a reasonable volume of searches (don't get too excited about volumes... remember it's for the whole of Ireland).​
6) Put those search phrases into Google yourself and see what pops up. Are there lots of Sponsored Links (on the right hand side)? If there are then people are probably making money from those Ads. If there isn't but there is a high search volume then maybe it's ripe for you to go in there and be the first to have Ads up.​
7) Check out your main competition (the ones with Ads in the top positions over a few weeks). Reverse engineer their sales funnels for free by pretending you're a shopper and visit their website and see how they lead you into becoming a customer.​
8) If you think there is enough traffic out there and you can compete with (or better) the competition create a simple 4-5 page website such as [YourCounty]DogGrooming.com.​
The 5 pages would be: Home | Services | Testimonials (optional) | About Us | Contact Us​
(EDIT for 2016: It's even simpler than this - throw up a simple landing page.)​
9) Create a Google Adwords campaign to run only for people who type in the search phrases you identified within the geographic region you cover (with Google Adwords you could set it to being your county or within, say, 75km of your location). Don't forget that people travel to work during the day and could be searching during their lunch break, so factor that into the geography you want your Ads to be displayed in.​
10) Analyse the traffic stats over a month and see how many times your Ads are triggered. Hopefully you'll also be getting a few sales leads from a few visitors to your website.​
11) After a month use this info to help decide whether you have a viable business idea.​
Note that being found by people actively looking for you is the way to pick the low hanging fruit, but not everyone searches actively online. If no-one is searching for your products/services online then it doesn't mean your business idea won't work, you maybe just have to find out where all your fish eat, and go cast your bait there.​
 
Dislike ads? Remove them and support the forum: Subscribe to Fastlane Insiders.
Last edited:

G-Man

Cantankerous Contributor
FASTLANE INSIDER
EPIC CONTRIBUTOR
Read Fastlane!
Read Unscripted!
Summit Attendee
Speedway Pass
User Power
Value/Post Ratio
544%
Jan 13, 2014
1,992
10,838
Ha. Some dude wrote some steps back in 2009.

You can find them HERE.

It seems like familiar, albeit ancient 2009 wisdom that I've seen in other parts less remote.
 

Andy Black

Help people. Get paid. Help more people.
Staff member
FASTLANE INSIDER
EPIC CONTRIBUTOR
Read Fastlane!
Speedway Pass
User Power
Value/Post Ratio
370%
May 20, 2014
18,568
68,703
Ireland
(Added the content into the opening post as people were hitting a Captcha or something.)
 

Mosfet

Contributor
Read Fastlane!
Read Unscripted!
Speedway Pass
User Power
Value/Post Ratio
147%
Jan 30, 2016
30
44
The keyword planner doesn't generate a list of similar phrases and only shows the search volume in large bands such as "100-1k" and "1k-10k" and so forth. Am I missing something or is it just how it works these days?
 
Dislike ads? Remove them and support the forum: Subscribe to Fastlane Insiders.

TonyStark

I'm not dead yet
Read Fastlane!
Read Unscripted!
Speedway Pass
User Power
Value/Post Ratio
191%
Jul 20, 2015
2,278
4,359
31
Austin, Texas
This is gold!!

Everyone is always asking "how do I validate my idea, how do I know if there is a market for my product, or how do I test the market."

This should indubitably solve their problem!
 

PurpleMonkey

New Contributor
User Power
Value/Post Ratio
72%
Aug 17, 2016
18
13
33
The keyword planner doesn't generate a list of similar phrases and only shows the search volume in large bands such as "100-1k" and "1k-10k" and so forth. Am I missing something or is it just how it works these days?

There's a good explanation of how to get more accurate volumes at passive.marketing
 

Andy Black

Help people. Get paid. Help more people.
Staff member
FASTLANE INSIDER
EPIC CONTRIBUTOR
Read Fastlane!
Speedway Pass
User Power
Value/Post Ratio
370%
May 20, 2014
18,568
68,703
Ireland
The keyword planner doesn't generate a list of similar phrases and only shows the search volume in large bands such as "100-1k" and "1k-10k" and so forth. Am I missing something or is it just how it works these days?
Use the Keyword Planner to find out new search terms and get an *estimate* of the monthly search volume.

The only way to find out how many visitors you'll get in a month for a given CPC is to run a campaign.

Just because a search term has 1,000 estimated searches per month, doesn't mean your ad will show 1,000 times if you bid on that search term (exact match keyword - ish). You don't know what your impression share will be for your given bid price and average position.

For more details check out many of the threads linked to in the "AdWords Posts" link in my signature.

In particular:
  • Launch and learn
  • The biggest benefit of AdWords
  • Are you only buying traffic?
  • How to get profitable or fail fast with AdWords
 

Piotr

New Contributor
Read Fastlane!
User Power
Value/Post Ratio
67%
Apr 2, 2016
9
6
33
Seems that I can't acces Google Keyword Planner unless I have a website or company which I want to advertise. Is it just the way in my country? Any way around this?
 

Andy Black

Help people. Get paid. Help more people.
Staff member
FASTLANE INSIDER
EPIC CONTRIBUTOR
Read Fastlane!
Speedway Pass
User Power
Value/Post Ratio
370%
May 20, 2014
18,568
68,703
Ireland
Seems that I can't acces Google Keyword Planner unless I have a website or company which I want to advertise. Is it just the way in my country? Any way around this?
You need an AdWords account now to access the Keyword Planner. Just create one and then delete the initial campaign you create.
 
Dislike ads? Remove them and support the forum: Subscribe to Fastlane Insiders.

Andy Black

Help people. Get paid. Help more people.
Staff member
FASTLANE INSIDER
EPIC CONTRIBUTOR
Read Fastlane!
Speedway Pass
User Power
Value/Post Ratio
370%
May 20, 2014
18,568
68,703
Ireland
Ha. The original post is over 10 years old now.
 

mr-future

New Contributor
Read Fastlane!
User Power
Value/Post Ratio
33%
Feb 2, 2023
3
1
10) Analyse the traffic stats over a month and see how many times your Ads are triggered. Hopefully you'll also be getting a few sales leads from a few visitors to your website.

11) After a month use this info to help decide whether you have a viable business idea.
One challenge here is that I have never done this before and have no baseline. How many ad responses are considered good?
 
Dislike ads? Remove them and support the forum: Subscribe to Fastlane Insiders.

Andy Black

Help people. Get paid. Help more people.
Staff member
FASTLANE INSIDER
EPIC CONTRIBUTOR
Read Fastlane!
Speedway Pass
User Power
Value/Post Ratio
370%
May 20, 2014
18,568
68,703
Ireland
One challenge here is that I have never done this before and have no baseline. How many ad responses are considered good?
Getting clicks on properly setup paid search ads should show there's demand and you can get in front of it. Whether you're able to get those visitors to take action and eventually make any sales is another step.

Getting just a handful of visitors a day can be enough for some businesses. Other businesses need hundreds of visitors a day.

This thread gives more detailed steps:
 

Post New Topic

Please SEARCH before posting.
Please select the BEST category.

Post new topic

Guest post submissions offered HERE.

Latest Posts

New Topics

Fastlane Insiders

View the forum AD FREE.
Private, unindexed content
Detailed process/execution threads
Ideas needing execution, more!

Join Fastlane Insiders.

Top