The following excerpt is from Perry Marshall, Mike Rhodes and Bryan Todd’s book Ultimate Guide to Google AdWords. Buy it now from Amazon | Barnes & Noble | iTunes | IndieBound
Next time you roll out a new product, you can have a 75 percent or better chance of success by using Google to measure your traffic. You can know exactly how much demand there is for your idea. You can test your headlines and copy and have your potential customers tell you exactly what kind of product they’re looking for.
And Google makes this far less expensive and far less risky than ever before.
How can you be sure there’s a more profitable marketing for your idea? Develop a product after your customers tell you what they want.
Let’s say you’re thinking about writing a software program for doing automotive repairs. It’s for do-it-yourself car enthusiasts, and it does engine diagnostics that help increase your fuel efficiency by five miles per gallon.
If a guy bought your software (which you haven’t written yet), he could buy a cable at Radio Shack, take his computer into his garage, hook it up to his car and your software would collect a load of data and display it on the screen. Your program would then tell the guy what to tweak in his engine.
Sounds like a great idea. But, how do you know there’s a market for this?
Fortunately, there’s a way to find out if there’s water in the swimming pool before you dive in. You certainly don’t want to spend weeks writing software if nobody’s going to buy it. So here’s what you do:
1. Write an ebook, white paper or guide. Call it “How to Use Engine Diagnostics to Improve Your Car’s Fuel Efficiency by Five Miles per Gallon.” In it, you tell people how to do it the hard way. The whole routine that takes you three days,…
