This post was written by the Web Marketing Ninja—a professional online marketer for a major web brand, who’s sharing his tips undercover here at ProBlogger. Curious? So are we!
While I write blog posts, I don’t really refer to myself as a blogger. I’m just someone who likes sharing my experience to those who want to listen (or read), hoping it will help you in some way. My real passion is in sales and marketing, online and offline, and in all honest.y I’d prefer working with a designer to craft a set of optimized landing pages, or spending an entire morning massaging some email copy, than figuring out how to best communicate the result to the world.
I know that it’s a bit of a contradiction, but I write because I like helping people, and more than that, I like helping people I trust and respect. I don’t get paid for these posts; I post under a veil of secrecy so there’s no impact to my personal brand; and, most importantly, I don’t expect anything in return. And as a result of my willingness to help, I discovered something last week:
When it comes to launches, two heads are so much better than one.
Two heads…
A friend of mine—let’s call him Bob—was preparing to launch his first product of the year: an ebook. He’d reached out a couple of times to get my feedback on things like the title, cover, and interior design. A long time ago, I’d offered to help out where I could, to help him build a framework for his product launches. So as the launch loomed, we caught up one evening and went through the plans. We were able to cover a fair bit of ground in a short period, and we didn’t change the entire approach—just tweaked things here and there.
Instead of describing the what, I thought I’d share my thoughts on the why. Why did this collaboration help shape something good into something better?
I was able to take a first-impression viewpoint of the product and promotional messages.
I was able to read at the copy as someone who might buy the product, not someone who’s intimately involved in it.
I was able to add layers from my own experience to the launch, from a foundation that was already strong.
Collaboration on thoughts and ideas resulted in progressive, actionable outcomes.
We were able to validate or question each others’ unsubstantiated opinions.
We were accountable to actually put things into a documented plan.
I hope the launch goes well for Bob, and that in some way, my contributions will help him achieve his goals.
Break the isolation
One thing I’ve learned from being closer to bloggers than ever before is that while you’re a well-connected group, when it comes to launches, product development, and money, a lot of bloggers work in isolation. I’d like to see that change.
To me, launching a product is a critical step in your blogging journey—one that turns all your hard work into your reward. Having a buddy who not only brings objectivity to your approach, brings fresh ideas so something you’ve been probably obsessing over for months (or years)!
It doesn’t need to be a money thing—it’s a favor thing. You help them, they help you.
Finding a launch buddy
Finding your launch buddy is not about finding the most experienced marketer or product launch expert you can. It’s about finding someone you trust, and are happy to open up to.
All your challenges, your strengths, your weaknesses, all your commercial agreements, targets, traffic, audience, your ability to pay expenses—you need to be able to share them all. You also need to find someone who’ll respect that as the product owner, you get the final say, and someone who, when your opinions differ, will let you both move on quickly.
My anti-technology Mum, given the full picture, would be able to help you more than the best product launch expert in the world if you only gave them half the story.
So if you don’t have one already, for your next launch—or perhaps your first—consider adding a launch buddy to your team. Or have you already used a launch buddy to help perfect and finesse a product launch? I’d love to hear about your experiences in the comments.
Stay tuned for more posts by the secretive Web Marketing Ninja—a professional online marketer for a major web brand, who’s sharing his tips undercover here at ProBlogger.
Many bloggers develop products as a way to monetize their blogging, but one problem that more bloggers are running into is that they become very dependent upon product launches.
A product launch can bring a lot of profitability to your blog, but what happens when things die down after that launch? For many bloggers, the income dries up after a launch, so they’re forced to start thinking about the next one. Once things die down after a spike of traffic from that next product, they’re again forced to starting thinking of another … and another…
Not only can this be an exhausting process (developing products takes a lot of energy), but it can actually give your readers launch fatigue: they become frustrated with all your promotion and less responsive to your offers.
While there’s nothing wrong with offering multiple products, perhaps it’s worth considering some strategies to maximize the profitability of the products you already have. In this video, I share one tactic that has enabled me to increase sales of products over the long term, rather than just live off the spikes in profit that come after launch. In the video, I also mention an article that explains the topic in detail: it’s How to Extend the Profitability of an Ebook Beyond Launch Week.
Transcription: Extending the Life of Products After Launch
Today I want to talk today about products. A lot of bloggers have released products, whether they be ebooks, courses, membership sites, software, t-shirts—whatever it might be. A lot of bloggers have been releasing products in 2010. But what I’m seeing is some bloggers getting trapped into this cycle of launching products, and to stay profitable they feel like they need to be launching product after product after product after product. It’s understandable that they do that—and by “they” I mean “we,” really, because this is something that I’ve fallen into and have been challenged about recently.
The reason we do it is that when you launch a product, a good product launch should be a profitable thing, and it will see a spike in your revenue. I’ve posted my income trends over the last six or so months, and you see these months when I launch an ebook, there’s a spike in revenue. It can be an exciting thing, an exhilarating thing, and it can be quite addictive to see the dollars roll in when you launch a product. So if we want to see our income remain high, one of the things that we automatically think of is, well, if I had great income in July, and that spiked my revenue, maybe I need to launch another product to match it.
Whilst there’s nothing wrong with launching product after product after product, one of the things I’ve been challenged about lately is actually maximizing the profitability of the products that I already have. It can be easy to get trapped into this mindset of “I need to launch another product to increase my revenue,” but really there are ways of increasing your revenue by better promoting the products you already have. Rather than just seeing a spike in sales, and then seeing it dropping back to normal, what would happen if you could drive sales every day from your ebook?
Now one of the most logical ways to extend the profitability of a product is to do another promotion, and we’re seeing a lot of bloggers do that at the moment: Black Friday sales, where you can get discounts on products, and Christmas sales are coming up. We’ll see a lot of this sort of promotion at this time of year. That’s great—that’s one way of extending the profitability of a product. But again, it just leads to another spike in sales, and then things drop back to normal. So how can you actually increase the volume of sales of your products on a day-to-day basis?
The most obvious way to do this is to simply be promoting it in your sidebar, or in your navigation area, to be promoting the products that you’ve already released. That’s a great way to do it, and if you’re not doing that already, you really should be. Advertise your products where other advertisers would be advertising theirs, or instead of other advertisers advertising theirs. That’s a no-brainer.
Another great way to do it is to go back through the archives of your blog to old posts. Your old posts are still being read by people: people will be arriving at them from Google, they’ll be arriving at them from other blogs that link to them. They’ll be arriving at them from all kinds of places. So if there are relevant topics covered in your archives—they’re relevant to the products that you have—you really should be promoting those products on those particular pages, too.
So if you go to Digital Photography School and you look at a lot of the portrait articles that I’ve got there—free articles on the blog—you also see alongside them promotions of the portrait ebook that we produced. Now it’s a bit painstaking to go back through all your archives like that. You may want to find a way to do it by automatically inserting them into a category.
But even if you do go through them all manually, it’s well worth doing. Because, over the long haul, even if those links just bring you one or two sales extra per day, that can be hundreds over a year, and that can really prove to be a very profitable exercise.
Another way of doing it is to write future posts, and when you write about topics that are relevant to your products, again you should promote those products. Just have that mindset as you’re writing things, is this relevant, is this an opportunity to promote one of my products?
Another thing that some bloggers do is run advertising campaigns. I know of one blogger in particular who’s using Facebook ads and Google AdWords to promote their products. They’re not just relying upon the organic traffic coming into their blog—they actually know that those particular pages on their site where they’re selling products convert very well. They’ve fine-tuned their sales pages, they’ve worked out how much it costs them to get people to view those pages, and they’ve worked out that it can be quite profitable to pay for traffic to come to their site, and then sell their products there.
So there are some of the ways that you can do it. The most profitable thing that I’ve done is to actually be doing what Jeff Walker calls a perpetual promotion, or perpetual launch of products to your email list. If you have an email list where you have maybe a newsletter that goes out on a weekly basis, like I do on Digital Photography School, you can build a promotion into the sequence of emails that people get. Using an autoresponder, you can introduce an email that promotes one of your products.
So when you sign up for my photography newsletter, about nine days into the sequence you get an email thanking you again for signing up for the newsletter, reminding you that you’ve already had one of our weekly email updates, and offering you a 25% discount on one of our ebooks.
Then at the six month mark (so I’ve spaced them right out), six months after you’ve joined our list you get another similar email, just saying again thanks for sticking with us for six months now, we hope you’ve had some value out of our newsletters, and again, as another thank you for subscribing, here’s another discount code that you can use to get a discount on another one of our ebooks.
Those emails have converted really well for us. They’re very low sales-y, they’re not high, you know, high pressure—they’re simply, “here’s an offer, if you’d like to take it, please do, if you don’t want to take it, then no hard feelings at all. It’s just a simple thank you for being a subscriber to our list.”
So every day we get several hundred people sign up to our newsletter list, and so nine days after they do, those several hundred people get an email offering them a product, and then six months later, they get another one. So every day, not only do two or three hundred people get an email, five or six hundred people get an email, with those two products. Then we’ll add another one a few months later, and then there’ll be close to a thousand people getting an email every day, being reminded about our products.
Now you may not have that volume of subscribers subscribing every day, but even if it’s just ten every day, that’s 3,600 people over a year that will be getting those promotions, and that can really boost your sales. And in the long run, you can see more sales from that type of approach than the initial spike that you get from a launch of a product.
Now I’m going to link to a post below this video, which gives you more and will show you how I’ve actually done that. It’s an older post on ProBlogger but it’s really relevant to this topic, and I’ll show you how I have set up those emails in my own sequence. So if you’ve got another way of promoting a product that you might have for the long tail, not just for the spike, but to maximise sales over the long tail, if you’ve got a tactic along those lines I’d love to hear about that in comments below.
Thanks for listening and we’ll see you on ProBlogger.
Many times we see successful product launches being talked about and are so dazzled by the huge sales numbers and income generated but fail to see all the hard groundwork that has been done behind the scenes for months and years before the launch.
Sometimes this is because those talking about their product launches don’t want those considering buying their ‘how to make money’ products to know its actually hard work and sometimes they do tell us but…. well we only hear what we want to and the dream of fast money makes us deaf to the reality.
The reality is that behind every successful online launch there is a lot of groundwork. It might not be as sexy as the actual launch process and it’s result – but it’s just as important. This video encourages bloggers to keep the glamorous big picture launches in mind but to also do the unglamorous daily things that take you closer to the big pay day!
What They Don’t Tell You About Successful Product Launches Transcript
I’ve had this video transcribed below for those who prefer to get it that way. The transcription provided by The Transcription People.
Have you ever seen a product launch that has done particularly well? We see it a lot in the Internet marketing circles, people selling their own information or products on how to launch a product by talking about how much they made. You know, hundreds of thousands of dollars in a launch or millions of dollars in a launch. These techniques to show what you’ve made are fairly typical in this Internet marketing space. But one of the things that I’ve noticed is that a lot of times when these big launches are being talked about, they’re not talked about in terms of the journey that has gone before the particular launch.
The book did really well. We sold 5,000 or so copies in the first week and a half over the launch period and since then have sold another five or six hundred, so it’s, it’s probably around the six figure launch mark, which for me that’s a fairly significant amount of money. As a launch event it was really quite profound, it was quite powerful and it was quite fun to be involved with. But that launch was built on the back of four and a half years of other stuff. It only succeeded and got to that six figure level because I put in four and a half years of work on that particular blog, and even before that four and a half years I’d been blogging about photography on another photography blog for two years, so six and a half years to get a six figure launch. I guess if you were to do the figures on that it probably doesn’t add up to six figures in a month, it kind of adds up to maybe five figures a month if I’m lucky (I never was good at maths).
So what are the foundational things that you need to be working on as a blogger?
You know sometimes we hear about these six and seven figure launches and think there’s no way we could ever do that, but the reality is that you can but, but you need to look it at as a journey, and there’s a whole heap of things that you can do every day to take you a little bit closer to some of these bigger launches that you might want to do one day.
Build a Content Base
Every day over the last eight years on my blogs I have put up content and I’ve tried to make that content the most useful content that I can. So that for me is probably one of the most basic things that you can do every day on your blog to take you closer to that big launch that you might have, useful content, keep adding it to your blog whether it be video, whether it be a pod cast, whether it be a post, whether it be just tweets and, and adding content into the web in different ways.
Build Relationships
Another foundation for me has always been about relationships. Every day you have the opportunity to take yourself closer to that big launch by getting to know someone else on the web, whether that be a potential reader, whether that be another blogger, whether that be just someone who’s interested in the same kind of stuff as you on Twitter, you never know where those relationships will take you. You never know whether that one reader may lead you to thousands of other readers, you never know whether that person may be someone that you can collaborate with later on a particular project. It’s about building relationships. So not only should you be adding content to your blog every day, I’d be searching out for at least one other person that you can connect with, someone that you don’t perhaps know yet that you can begin to get to know. Not with any agenda just to get to know them because who knows where that might end up.
Build Your Skill Set
Another thing that take you closer to these big launches is building your skill set. Adding to your repertoire of things that you can do, your abilities to, to patent design your blog perhaps master a different type of social media so getting, getting to the point where you understand and can use Twitter better. Maybe it’s around video, whatever it might be. There’s so many different things that you can learn, and yeah it’s great to outsource some of these things but it’s also good to learn and know them. If you can add to your own knowledge base you will be taking yourself closer to that big launch one day. You can add to your brand, just little things like, you know, tweaking your design, changing the brand that you have, thinking through what it is that you stand for as a, as a person and as a brand, all of these things can take you a little bit closer to that, that big, that big launch.
Build Your Email List
Another Foundation for me has been about building my email list. Building the number of people who are subscribing to my blog and finding new ways to do that. This is something that you kind of have to set up and let it run to some, some degree, but it’s a day by day thing. Every day as you add people to your list whether they be email subscribers or Twitter followers or RSS subscribers, as you grow that network your influence grows and the potential to have a bigger launch and to have a bigger impact upon more people grows also.
I guess the point of this video is not to come up with a conclusive list of things that you can do that will take you closer to your, your goals one day, but it’s to get you to think about what you can do today, what you can do tomorrow and to think about some of those little things that will take you closer to your ultimate goals. Set yourself some tasks this week. Just little things that you can do, posts that you can write, people that you can interact with, just features that you can add to your blog, new skills that you can learn. All of these things will take you closer to that ultimate goal. It’s great to have the idea of a big product launch in the back of your mind, but at the front of your mind needs to be these sorts of daily activities that will take you closer to that.
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