How to launch your first digital product - part 4

If you didn’t catch the start of this series, you can do so here: How to launch your first digital product

We’re in the final phase now, and today, in this last part, we’re going to cover:

• The Launch
• Post launch follow up
• Keeping the momentum going

The Launch

You may wonder why you need to do a “launch” if you’re simply going to be offering an E Book, which will continue to be on sale for some time. The simple answer is because internet sales thrive on “traction” and getting a number of people to talk about your product at the same time will mean you are “punching above your weight” for a few days.

One great strategy is to get your affiliates to add one of their own products to the package – it will persuade people to use their affiliate link, and offer people even more of an inducement to buy.

Make sure you’ve devised a way to capture the email addresses of all your buyers as well – we’ll come back to that later.

Ideally, you want all of your affiliates to post and email at around the same time, and also to be talking about your product on other social media channels as well. You should set up Google alerts using your product’s name, so you pick up each post as it goes live, and be around for comments and questions. Make sure you’re around and visible on social media while the launch is taking place and set up a Twitter search in the same way.

Dave Doolin posted in comments yesterday and said: “You CANNOT test enough. And no matter how much you test, something will be messed up almost for sure. It's just a matter of it being something you can fix really fast.”

And he’s absolutely right! There are so many variables, that something is bound to go wrong, and you need to be around to sort it out. At the very least, it’s likely that your server will be tested like never before!

The initial launch period is fun, exciting and tiring! But it can also be extremely rewarding. Normally this period will last from 3 to 5 days, depending on how many people you have promoting it for you. Enjoy it, and have fun!

Post Launch follow up

Once the craziness eases, you’ll need to take stock, and try to “sweep up” all the fence sitters. You should be posting testimonials on your site, and reminding your affiliates to have one more push to gather up any stragglers.

During this period you’ll need to sort your paperwork out, plan commission payments (unless you use Clickbank) and deal with any refund requests. You and your affiliates should have some gentle reminder emails queued to go out for a couple of weeks.

Make your self available to anyone who wants to interview you, produce a press release on your product and get that out, and look into buying some advertising on blogs or using paid tweets or reviews. Your focus here should be to keep the launch phase where everyone is talking about you and your product going as long as possible.

Keeping the momentum going

And now the real work begins! After a few days of massive traffic and lots of interest, things will fall back to normal levels. And your product will suddenly become yet another one out there that people might stumble across, but have probably never heard of. And this is when you need to start applying some SEO – focus on getting your product to rank well in search. Write some guest posts, and instead of linking to your blog URL, link to the product and describe yourself as “The Author of XXX”.

This is the phase where most bloggers crash and burn. We’re adrenalin junkies, and once the hype of the launch is over we stop applying basic blogging tactics for our new product – the temptation is to move on to the next idea. It took 8 months for my Beginner’s Guide to Twitter to really start earning me any money. Here are some tips:

• Target yourself to get three links a day to your product on the web
• Send a review copy to any blogger who you discover that might promote it for you
• Write some E Zine articles, using excerpts and link back to it
• Change your about page to reflect you as the author
• Add the details of the book to your Twitter background
• Buy some Adwords or Yahoo advertising
• Add some promo to each post for a period, so that it goes out in your RSS feed – see below :)

Basically revert back to all the things you did when you launched your blog, to get noticed and to get some attention to your product!

Remember I mentioned capturing buyer’s email addresses before? This list is your future! Every person on there has chosen to spend their hard earned money on something that you have produced. They are to be loved and nurtured as customers, and be aware that they are many, many more times likely to buy again from you than anybody else is. Over time, build that list, and each time you launch something new, they will be your most likely buyers. Don’t forget them, and keep feeding them great, interesting and free content until you’re ready to offer them something again.

I’ve really enjoyed writing this series, and the comments have been fascinating. Thanks for your participation. What are your thoughts on these final phases? Are you planning to launch something in 2010?

John Luffa on Beyond Blogging:

“I am VERY inspired and charged up by it. I spent all night reading it – I just couldn’t put it down…

So far, it has shifted my focus and approach towards blogging.”