Business: Test Marketing: Fast, Cheap and Easy

Test Marketing: Fast, Cheap and Easy

Written by Stephanie Yeh

If you’re a sole proprietor or small business owner, marketing can seem like a headache that just won’t go away. You might have lots of good ideas, but you’re not sure which ones to pursue. And, if you’re like most small business owners, you only have a limited budget to invest in marketing, so which marketing options should you pursue?

A really quick and dirty way to check out your ideas is to use test marketing. When you test market an idea, you implement repparttar idea on a very small scale to a limited portion of your customers or “audience.” For instance, if you’re in repparttar 104921 dry cleaning business and you want to try out a volume discount idea, you might test repparttar 104922 idea by offering it selectively to people who regularly bring orders of $50 or more for dry cleaning. The people in this test market obviously do high volume and are probably interested in saving money.

Set a time limit for your experiment and keep track of repparttar 104923 results carefully. Look back through your records and see how many orders these people brought in, how often they came in and how large repparttar 104924 orders were. Then, see what changes, if any, your promotional discount created. See if you get an overall increase in revenue and profit. If there are no changes, talk to those high volume people and find out what’s on their mind. It may be that they already bring all of their dry cleaning to you and have no more volume.

A Professional Image

Written by Bob Osgoodby

A Professional Image by Bob Osgoodby

First impressions are extremely important if you hope to do business on repparttar Web. After you refine your ads, and if you make your pitch to a targeted group, you will start to get visitors to your web site. Here is where many would be entrepreneurs drop repparttar 104920 ball.

Putting up a web site is not a difficult task, but designing a good one is, and if you don't pay attention, it might be working against you. Think about it, repparttar 104921 web site is not only repparttar 104922 first impression of you and your business, it is crucial to your success or failure.

People don't waste a whole lot of time when visiting a site. If it isn't professional looking, they may just "click away". While looks are important, you must spend time on developing good copy. Copy written by affiliate programs has been seen over and over, and while it may have been effective at one time, it is so overused that people immediately recognize it for what it is.

In addition to good copy, which of course has no spelling, grammatical or punctuation errors, it clearly states what you are offering. Many web sites offer a real challenge to try to figure out what they are trying to sell. The offer should be repparttar 104923 first thing they see. The information must also flow logically, and not leave a lot of questions unanswered.

In addition to complete information on your offer, it must have a call to action, which entices repparttar 104924 visitor to purchase from you. It must also have an order form, or instructions that are easy to follow. It is also a real plus to let repparttar 104925 prospect know a little bit about you. Your picture on repparttar 104926 site can go a long way to help instill confidence.

There is some confusion on repparttar 104927 value of links. Some advocate that a good web site should be divided into separate sections connected by links. Others feel that a single long web page will score higher in repparttar 104928 search engine rankings.

There are basically two types of links. One goes to a completely separate web page, and is considered an external link. Another type is referred to as an internal link. These point to different "parts" within repparttar 104929 same web page. Both have value, however internal links are a little friendlier. If someone clicks on one and repparttar 104930 next "part" logically flows from repparttar 104931 previous one, people will be more inclined to read on.

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