So you have a business idea that you believe will solve pressing issues for your business clients. Maybe it will even end world hunger and rid the world of AIDS? Congratulations are in order! Now what?

How can you find out if the idea you dreamed up will make it in the real world? You can follow the conventional route of hiring consultants to do market research if you have enough money to bankroll a project and are confident the risk is worth the possible payoff. But are there other options? Thankfully, the path to exploratory market research has been shortened by the advent of pay-per-click advertising tools like Yahoo! Search Marketing and Google Adwords.

You can get started with exploratory market research online in 5 easy steps!

1. Digest your business idea and the benefits it will offer your target market for a few days. Do conventional research in your area of specialty by reading industry periodicals and blogs from industry leaders. Then write a short article or white paper that offers some key tidbits of information about the benefits of your new business idea or product without compromising any of your intellectual property.

2. Use keyword research tools like Google Adwords Keyword Tool (https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal) and Yahoo's Keyword Selector Tool (http://searchmarketing.yahoo.com/rc/srch/) along with search engines like Google and Ask. The latter has a useful "Narrow Your Search" prompt in the right hand sidebar that will speed up your task considerably. If you want to get serious, subscribe to Wordtracker and do some research based on the past behavior of search engine users - this is an effective way to find key phrases that will work.

3. Learn the editorial rules for Yahoo! Search Marketing (http://searchmarketing.yahoo.com/rc/srch/htgla_con.php) and Google Adwords (https://adwords.google.com/select/guidelines.html) and write your first Ads using the keywords you discovered during step 2. These ads should accurately reflect the content your article or white paper will provide.

4. Either learn enough HTML to create a basic HTML landing page with your selling points picking up the thread from your pay-per-click ads, or hire a designer to set up a simple landing page for you.

The landing page should require a minimum of customer information, such as name and email address. Remember, you can start a dialog and learn more from your site visitors once they decide to trust you with their email address. Include a brief privacy policy that states your intention to protect the security of your site visitors' information.

When submitted, the form should send you an email notifying you of the name and email address of the site visitor who wants to read your valuable article or white paper. If the site takes off, you'll want to automate this step, but this simple form will be enough to get you started.

5. Set up accounts and campaigns with Yahoo! Search Marketing and Google Adwords keeping your cost-per-click as low as possible. If your keyword research was effective, you should be able to get traffic for a free product like your article for between .15 and .25/click. Once you have traffic coming to your site, you will want to learn about conversion rates - (the number of visitors who sign up for your article)/(the number of total visitors to your site or page) - and tweak your landing page to improve your conversion rate as much as possible.