So, you have a great idea for a business and you’re ready to go online and start making money working for yourself. Before you start counting your millions, ask yourself one important question: have you tested your market? Online marketing and website promotion are the keys to creating a profitable home-based business. Test marketing your product or service before you launch can help you hone your online marketing strategy and ensure your advertising budget is well spent. When it comes to website promotion, there are two ways to test the marketing waters. You can hire an online marketing firm (for hundreds or thousands of dollars) to research your market for you—or you can invest a few hours of your time and do it yourself for a fraction of the cost. There are even some online marketing test methods you can perform free! Here are five simple strategies for test marketing that pave the way for stellar website promotion:

• Mini sites: A mini-site is a one page website that outlines your product or service using a single online marketing approach. You can set up multiple mini-sites with any of the hundreds of free web hosting services out there and feature different methods of website promotion on each one, then figure out which approach receives the most traffic. To track hits, you can use a website counter, or click tracking.
• Click tracking: This is another service that can be free. Click tracking is integral to your online marketing strategy, as click tracking programs tell you not only how many hits your website received, but where they came from—whether it was an ad you placed, a search engine, or another website linking to yours. For test market purposes, you can find many click tracking programs that offer a free thirty-day trial. There are also a few that are completely free.
• Pay-per-click marketing: Perhaps the most effective means of website promotion available, pay-per-click (PPC) marketing allows you to place small ads on search engines based on your keywords, and pay only when someone actually clicks on your link and visits your site. The most popular online marketing PPC program, Google AdSense, has no minimum account balance and costs just pennies per hit.
• Free giveaways: Before you fully launch your business, offer free giveaways of your product or service (or a scaled-down version of your product or service) to help spread the word and gain valuable feedback. Free giveaways are a powerful online marketing tool that helps spread the word about your business fast. For even better results from your free giveaways, use a time limit to instill urgency.
• Contests: Holding a contest is a great way to introduce your product or service to your market. Contests are proven tools for website promotion, especially when you give away something of value.