4steps to minimize risk of failure in a small business

Step 1: Analyze your competition. Duration: 1 day

Detailed market research really is a whole other post by itself and is beyond the scope of this article, but for basic purposes use SEOBook.com’s keyword suggestion tool to look for top searches. Find several key phrases that people are searching for, then head over to Ask.com and use their “expand your search” and “narrow your search” tools to find what else people are typing in. You can also use Google’s Keyword Tool for more suggestions.

Take the top 3-5 phrases and take a look at the ads that show up on Google’s Sponsored Links. Read their salesletters and note down the good parts, and figure out how you could improve on their offers.

• Can you offer more credibility with your product?
• Can you provide a better offer than they do?
• What about your pricing? (Don’t slash your prices to undercut the competition; instead, figure out how you can provide more value for the same price by giving bonuses and such)

Now is a great time to start building your swipe file as well.

Step 2: Set up the website for your product or service. Duration: 1-2 days

Step 2: Set up the website for your product or service. Duration: 1-2 days

Start writing your salesletter by using the bits and pieces you like from your competitors. Rewrite it so you’re not outright plagiarizing their work. Your salesletter should be about 300-700 words long and must be able to:

• Attract your customer’s attention
• Gain their Interest
• Build their Desire for the product
• Inspire them into Action

At this stage, you don’t need to hire a copywriter just yet. This four step process, AIDA for short, is a fundamental copywriter’s formula for a good salesletter and should do for now

Step 3: Set up your AdWords account and test your product. Duration: Less than 1 day

Once you’ve signed up for Google AdWords and put in your credit card information, set up a new campaign and create two ads to test. Write your ads so that it highlights your differentiators. Write a compelling headline, use the first 35 characters to highlight the main benefit for your customer and the second 35 characters to state your offer.

Use keywords that have high commercial intent (to determine this, use Microsoft’s AdLabs tool). It’s ideal to aim for the first or second position with your ads; however, if your keyword is the slightest bit competitive expect to pay at least a dollar per click for positions 1-3. This could get very expensive, and since we don’t know what type of ads work just yet, we’ll save this for when we’ve actually gathered enough data.

For our test purposes, set your maximum CPC at $1.00. You’ll only pay approximately half of that — that way, your $500 budget will get you around 1,000 visitors which should be sufficient data during this test period.

Step 4: Test, tweak, and then test some more. Duration: 5-7 days

Take your overall budget and spread that out over 5 days to determine your campaign’s daily budget. At the end of each day, look at your click-through rate for each of the ads. If one ad seems to be pulling much better than the other, delete the less-effective ad and use the one that gets more clicks. If you created a different campaign for search network and campaign network, switch all your ads to the one that pulls better.

If your product doesn’t seem like it’s bringing in “sales” (you’ll know through Google Analytics), don’t give up yet.

It might be that your ad is irrelevant to your product. If it’s not the ad, then maybe the salesletter is the problem and you might have to test a different offer. Maybe have a better guarantee (“we’ll refund your money and pay you an extra $50 if you don’t like it” is a great guarantee) or include more bonuses. And if it’s not the offer, maybe you need to sell a different product altogether.

It’s only once you’ve gone through your ads, your offers, and your products will you be able to determine whether that particular market will bite. If the market is the problem, then maybe your business idea isn’t all that great and you need to move on to the next one.



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