What They Don’t Tell You About Successful Product Launches

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!

Notes

• Watch the full sized version at What they Don’t Tell You About Successful Product Launches
• Video shot on a Panasonic Lumix DMC GF1 (aff) – here’s why I use that camera to shoot my videos.

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.

I recently had a big launch on digital photography school, we launched a travel photography book, I’ve talked it about a couple of times on ProBlogger.

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.