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Two Six-figure Strategies to Help You with Your Next Product Launch

Posted By Darren Rowse 27th of February 2011 Blogging for Dollars 0 Comments

Earlier in the week I wrote a post about two factors that played a significant part in the growing of my own blogging business over the last two years.

  1. making a mind shift away from just relying upon advertising and affiliate revenue to starting to build my own products
  2. investing in training and starting to learn from others who had experience in marketing and launching products online.

I mentioned Jeff Walker’s Product Launch Formula (PLF) in that previous post and recommended you check out some videos that he’s recently released (as well as a free report that gives a great blueprint overview of how to release products).

Today I want to share a couple of strategies that I learned from Jeff’s PLF, and which have been a part of my own recent success. I’d estimate that together they’ve been well over six-figure lessons.

1. Using events to launch products

One of the key elements of Jeff’s teaching is that he gets you to think about the launches of your products as events. This concepts has become increasingly important to me in my own product launches, as well as in some of the affiliate marketing that I’ve done.

One of the best examples of this from my own last 12 months as the 12 Days of Christmas promotion we ran on my photography blog. Simply thinking about it as a 12-day event helped a lot, both in terms of my own planning and execution of the event, but also in terms of how it was received by readers.

I was very nervous at the start of the promotion that readers would become sick of it, but framing it as a 12-day event connected with people. We even had readers emailing us asking where our daily promotional emails were if we ran a little behind schedule.

Effectively what we try to do now with our ebook launches is take people on a journey, rather than send them a series of “buy my ebook” type emails.

2. Perpetual product launches

Launching a product (whether it’s an ebook, a course, a piece of software, or something else) is a big effort. Typically now when we release an ebook at dPS, we do so over a two- to three-week period (one week of prelaunch stuff, then two weeks for the launch event).

However, once the initial launch is over, many bloggers then move onto developing their next product and preparing for that launch. Business tends to revolve around a series of events, spiking revenue along the way.

This is how things were for me for a while, but in the Product Launch Formula teaching I came across the idea of the Perpetual Product Launch. This is where you effectively launch a product to a segment of your readers every single day.

An example of this is my first photography ebook, The Essential Guide to Portrait Photography, which I initially launched almost two years ago with a big launch.

After that initial launch, sales dried up to a trickle. So I decided to experiment with a perpetual launch and added to the auto responder sequence that I’d already developed for the site a new email. It would mail to new subscribers about seven days after they subscribed, and offer them the same discount that we offered during the initial launch of the ebook.

The email is not very salsey—it simply thanks the person for subscribing, introduces the ebook and tells the story of its initial launch at 25% discount. It then passes that same discount on to readers with a limited-time offer.

Every day this email goes out to a segment of new readers automatically, and every day it generates sales. While the daily sales are nothing like our initial product launch, over time they’ll exceed that product launch’s total sales many times over.

So without the concept of perpetual product launches, I’d have been leaving significant money on the table.

Grab the Product Launch Formula Blueprint today

These are just two of many strategies that Jeff teaches. There are many more (so many that I’ve not even implementing them all yet).

To get an overview of his launch strategy Jeff’s put together the Product Launch Blueprint—a PDF report accompanied by a 45-minute video that walks you through the material. It walks you through many of the strategies that Jeff teaches in the full PLF course and, whether you go on to do the course or not, it’s going to give you ideas that will translate into increased success for your own product launches.

The cost of this report is simply your email address, which will put you onto Jeff’s list to receive further teaching videos (and which you can unsubscribe from an any time). Grab the report today.

About Darren Rowse
Darren Rowse is the founder and editor of ProBlogger Blog Tips and Digital Photography School. Learn more about him here and connect with him on Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn.
Comments
  1. I want to know that launching a product in the initial stage of my blog is preferable or not??

    • JavaESchool – obviously the more traffic you have the better, but a product early on can’t really hurt. I know of a few bloggers who are in their early days with ebooks that sell a few copies a day – all income is good income and you’ll learn a lot by doing it.

  2. Thanks for helping me with some extra secret sauce on this one Darren!

    I’m thinking of a product possibly end of this year/early next year on my graphic design blog. I’ll definitely check this out.

    I’d be interested to know what the % difference you’ve noticed since implementing all of this??

    Thanks for all you do Darren, Hope you are getting heaps out of Africa!

    Steve

  3. Hmmm, that’s very interesting, Darren. I like the idea of the perpetual launch. Makes total sense and a smart use of internet marketing.

  4. One of the simple strategies is creating trust agents. Trust agents are people who promote your ideas, they believe in you and they know what they are doing. Use social media, affiliate marketing or whatever, if you create trust agents you’ve done it well.

  5. Thanks for the post Darren, it was really helpful. You actually brought something up that I’ve been wondering about for a long time now: How can you deliver a Limited Time offer to a customer via an auto-responder? Do you have to use cookies in order for the HTML page to disappear after a set number of days or something?

  6. Jeff Walker + free = nuff said ;)

  7. yeah nice idea Darren, your experience make you always have good ideas, thank’s for it

  8. Offers/Discounts always gives new Products a big boost up.

  9. Darren, thanks for this timely tips. But my concern is how do you lunch a product with little or no funding? Would it be successful?

  10. Thanks, Darren!

    I’ve heard a lot of good things about Jeff Walker’s Product Launch Formula (PLF). Yaro Starak – whom I have written about on my blog – also recommends PLF and talks about it as a vital component of getting membership sites and/or products “off the ground”.

  11. Hi Darren,

    I’m just launching a product nyself and am using the perpetual launch formula as a way to keep the interest and build a relationship that would convert to sales down the road.

    I decided not to to a product launch as an event, because I found it was too much for a first product launch.

    Maybe the next product.

    Thanks for sharing.

    Krizia

  12. That sounds like a lot of work, more like a group work i guess. But very usefull. Thanks a lot

  13. Hi Darren,
    I have read about the event process before. Thank you for bringing the idea back to the ‘top of my mind’.

    Always great to read what you have to say.

    David

  14. Thank you for this. The perpetual launch strategy makes sense, and it emboldens me to use it knowing that you’re using it with a niche that’s not used to “hard sell” like IM products. Also, knowing your more laid-back approach, which comes through on this blog, it’s nice to see you fit that in with a strategy that makes sales. Like so many of the posts on problogger, I’ve printed this one to stick in my “blogging binder.” :)

  15. norman says: 02/28/2011 at 2:44 pm

    Hi.

    While I appreciate this post and your blog in general, a criticism I’ve heard about The Product Launch Formula is that he repeatedly talks about your “list” and how you need to send messages to “your list”… without really teaching how to grow said list in the first place. Everything I’ve read about the reality of purchased email lists (except what’s written by those who sell them) says that they are a complete waste of money and time. This product is NOT cheap so prior to building a huge email/subscriber list I can’t see where it makes sense to buy it.

  16. Thanks for the post Darren.

    Doing a Perpetual Product Launch certainly seems like the way to go when I introduce my first eBook in the next month or so.

  17. Good reference Darren.. You have shared a good strategy. “Perpetual Product Launch” will force us to work smarter.

  18. Hey Darren, thanks for the insight!

    I’m just about to unveil my biggest product yet for my elementary music resource site – a Music Teacher Directory that will allow music teachers to create a teacher profile in order to advertise for students.

    I’ve been doing pre-launch stuff, telling my newsletter subscribers about the advantages of my new directory, but had not thought much about post-launch stuff.

    Perhaps I could send out an auto responder sequence to help new members with Search Engine Optimization ideas. I can include how to choose great keywords, adding in-bound links to their new page, and info about building page rank.

    (Wow, even as I’m typing this I’m getting more excited about my launch!)

    The advantage is that after they make an effort to optimize their page they will be less likely to cancel their membership because their work would be lost. Woo Hoo!

  19. I don’t have the time to do all the marketing. Can you recommend someone to do this for me? My forthcoming book is truly unique, doable and a MUST HAVE for anyone who is married. The title is REENERGIZE YOUR MARRIAGE IN 21 DAYS and I am almost ready to launch it, but am overwhelmed that I will have to market it myself. Any suggestions or advice on someone who can do this and take a commission? Thank you.

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