In another post, I described how to market test your online business ideas in 6 easy steps. This is a pretty reliable method for anyone creating a website designed to sell AdWords or to promote affiliate products.  But if you are planning to invest time and money in creating an information product of your own that you plan to sell, then you really should do additional testing.  While you might think your proposed information product is exactly what the world needs, the world may think otherwise.

Do yourself a huge favor.  Run all the tests I described in that earlier post, but also run an experiment with Google AdWords.  An experiment, as described below, will give you very reliable data on whether anyone is actually ready to purchase your product or not.  If people are ready to buy, then go and create the product.  If people do not want to buy, then you probably want to look for something else.

The biggest mistake that most online entrepreneurs make is to NOT test their ideas.  Rather, they jump straight into product development, spending weeks or months creating a product, only to find out that no one wants to buy it.  I know this first hand because I’ve been there.

The good news, however, is that you don’t need to make the same mistakes that I made because testing your business ideas is now easier than ever.  In this post, I am going to give you a simple and quick formula for doing your market testing, using tools that are freely available on the internet.

Before I explain that process, however, I want to emphasize one important starting point: 

IN ANY PROFITABLE MARKET WORTH ENTERING, THERE WILL ALREADY BE PEOPLE MAKING MONEY.

There are a lot of ways you can make money online, but I want to focus on 3 ways that are easy to understand.  Almost anyone should be able to find something that they can do within these 3 opportunities.  In later posts, I’ll go into these in much more detail.  I’ll also talk about how you can test whether  any particular area is likely to be profitable along with different tools that you can use to be successful.  For now, however,  I simply want to explain the different options.

I’ll present these 3 options from easiest to hardest.

Last year, I decided to start an online business.  Inspired by the book by Tim Ferriss, The 4-Hour Workweek, and driven by a desire to see technology used to its full potential as a way to better manage our houses, I launched Digital Homes – a website that provides instructional guides to help people build their own affordable smart homes.

My goal, again inspired by The 4-Hour Workweek, was to create an ONLINE business that would create a passive income stream. In other words, create the product once but sell it many times.  (If you aren’t familiar with this book yet, do yourself a favour and read it from start to finish.  A lot of people, particularly anyone unhappy or unfulfilled in their job, have found that it changed their lives.)

In creating an online business, it becomes pretty clear pretty quickly that you need to master online marketing. You need to get people coming to your website.