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Before you launch a product, it’s extremely important to launch with the confidence that comes from testing your sales process before you do a launch.

JV partners and affiliates are much more responsive to an invitation to join a launch if they can see evidence that you’ve at least worked out the kinks in your sales process and at best optimized your sales process for maximum conversion.

I would say that no one likes to be a guinea pig, but that’s not true. If you ask close partners and friends to help you test, they will. But they like to know that it’s a test.

If your promotional partners feel that you are attempting to launch a ‘green’ untested system, they will shy away from your launch or they won’t get behind it with the gusto that you would like.

There are ways to test in *any* niche, but since I do my testing in the IM niche, let me share with you some ideas that will help you do effective beta testing.

After you build and do functional testing on your sales system, you will want to put some controlled traffic through it to see how things work.

So beta testing your sales process should come after you’ve created your sales page, back end offers, autoresponder series, download pages, etc. and after you have tested the complete process to make sure everything works.

I usually like to create a special deal for beta customers — this allows me to be up-front with them and let them know that we are in the process of testing the sales process and collecting testimonials from real customers (as opposed to reviewers who got a free product).

When your system and offer are ready to go, you can now bring some traffic into your system.

For me, I (at a minimum) do three things:

1) Promote to ‘inner circle’ customers with the best possible deal.

If I’m going to make anyone a great deal for beta access, it’s going to be people who have purchased from me in the past. This allows me to test the offer with my ‘warm’ market — if it doesn’t convert with my customers, it won’t with anyone elses.

2) Promote in the Warrior Forum with a WSO (Warrior Special Offer).

For $20 I can get my offer right in front of my target market because a large percentage of them hang out in the Warrior Forum.

3) Promote through one or more close JV partners.

This varies by the project, but I like to include at least one close marketing partner in my beta testing. This allows me to get a feel for how the offer might convert for other JV partners and affiliates.

I can do all three of those things within the course of 2 weeks, maximum.

After the test, I just log in to my VisiOlo account (see the Recommendations section of this site) and collect the statistics I need to measure my results.

I’ll evaluate a few key conversion metrics for each traffic source.

• Impressions to Clicks conversion
• Clicks to Sale conversion

Then I’ll lay out an optimization plan for improving the results and plan my next test.

Ideally, I would cycle through this process three times before a major launch, but frequently I only do it once because I’m usually under time pressure to get the project launched on schedule.

It’s a simple process, and imperfectly implemented, but it still gives me a lot of very valuable information and helps build buzz and the confidence level of promotional partners.

This post was submitted by Doug Hudiburg.