Yes folks, there is a way of making absolutely certain-sure that you have developed a winning product.

Do you want to know how to do this? You do?

Well, it's quite simple: You allow punters to tell you whether or not they want your product.

I am being deadly serious here when I tell you that only certain way to be sure is to test your product in a suitable, email broadcast, newspaper ad or direct mail campaign.

The punters will pretty soon tell you whether or not they want to buy or not. Either you will get lots of orders, or you will just about break-even, or you will hardly get any orders at all. You just wont know until you test!

Now, do you want to know single most powerful piece of information in product development and/or direct marketing business? This information is worth more than everything I have previously told you, put together.

It is this: Believe punters - not yourself.

There. I never thought I'd tell anyone not to believe in themselves... But in this particular instance, you must put all of your faith in punters. It doesn't matter how much of a 'pet' your product is. It doesn't matter how much your old mum and your friends tell you it's a GREAT product. It is wholly irrelevant that you have seen scores of adverts for similar products at a higher price. - If punters don't respond to your advert, then you must drop that product and move straight on to next one.

The only exception to this is if you have a modest response, and you think you made a slight mistake... (say by going in completely wrong paper, or £5 too expensive, etc.). In this case, it might be worth testing again. If this second attempt also fails, then drop product immediately.

Every single day, more and more people upload brand new websites to Internet. I don't have any figures but there must be hundreds of thousands of new pages being added daily (if not considerably more!)

The one thing that all of these new websites need in order to make their existence worthwhile is traffic, which leads me to one of most common questions I am asked and subject of this newsletter:

'How can you generate traffic to a brand new website?'

Of course, there are a number of different answers to this question and what I would do myself is probably very different to what a completely new Internet entrepreneur would do. The reason I say this is that first thing I do when launching a new site is make use of my existing website traffic by advertising new site on my other established sites. In addition, I have luxury of a large mailing list which I can use to drive traffic to new site.

I appreciate that anyone starting out in online business won't have these options open to them (and in fairness, neither did I when I first started), so let's look at things from beginning. Day one of your first website.....

It is a fact that quickest and probably most effective way of bringing targeted traffic to your website is by paying for it. Now before you rush off and sink $50 into one of those '50,000 hits for $50' schemes, DON'T, this isn't what I mean. Those schemes are largely a complete waste of money. Even if you get traffic that you are promised (as opposed to some software script visiting your site and pretending to be a visitor), it will not be targeted and therefore there is a very low chance that traffic will generate sales. When I talk about buying traffic, I mean by using pay- per-click services offered by most of big search engines.

You probably already know sort of thing I mean - for example, Google Adwords. Pretty much any search on Google will display a list of adverts down right-hand side of page and these are all paid adverts. Every time you click on one of them, advertiser pays Google a fixed amount which could be anything from 5 cents upwards (depending upon how competitive keyword is).

Pay-per-click allows you to be very selective about which keywords your advert is shown for and this allows you to target your advertising perfectly. Other big names in pay-per-click market include Overture, Espotting and Findwhat.