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.
- making a mind shift away from just relying upon advertising and affiliate revenue to starting to build my own products
- 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.
