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My partner and I are launching a website for widgets you can put on your website. We design a few nice looking ones and make it really easy to grab your own version. We want to end the pain of adding useful functionality to your website when you don't really know how to do it yourself. We are in a crowded space but we have some unique twists on the old widget idea to hopefully differentiate ourselves. It took us a month of nights to get a prototype and we have just started ramping up the business development side of everything.

I want to do some testing and research into a good niche and good keywords for us to find users. I want to do this through some advertising that would lead to a landing page where you can add an email to sign up for our early launch.

I was hoping to get some advice into good methods of conducting an early test like this. Am I doing the right thing? Should I wait on the advertising? Are there any other good ways of guiding our market focus that I should look into? Any other advice?

I've currently looked into adwords and a bunch of other sites such as "webmaster" forums that serve the aspiring website maker niche but some of them have big minimum spends so I'm not sure we are ready for that.

Thanks!

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LinkedIn has worked for me for this in the past. I will just post a question asking specifics about my product or site and then add a link to either the real site or just a landing page where I collect email addresses of people willing to do beta testing and the like.

It is a start and it costs you nothing (but some time) to do it.

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Good idea! Using your network as input correct? Which method of "spamming" your network do you use? – Max Jan 5 '11 at 5:09
I wouldn't call it spamming... it is asking for feedback and that is one of the many benefits of being part of a network of people with similar interests... correct? I would do it exactly as you are doing it here, just ask the question and provide a link for those who might be interested in helping, it works! – Ricardo Jan 5 '11 at 5:13
Sorry, that's not what I meant. I meant spam as in message your whole network. I'm just not familiar with how to message or contact all of my network. – Max Jan 5 '11 at 5:18

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