How to launch your first digital product - Part Three

Continuing our series on launching your first digital product, you can start at the beginning here: Part one – How to launch your first digital product.

Today, we’re going to cover:

Designing a sales page
Choosing a launch date
The Pre launch process

Designing a sales page

This is a really tough one to tackle. I’m sure we’ve all moved beyond the tacky highlighter ridden, multiple PS style sales pages of the past, but which way to go now? You could have a standard “long form” sales page, a simple short one, or even, as some people are doing now, a mini-site, which has a sales page with links to more specific information like testimonials.

Here are some examples of each:

Here’s Yaro’s long form page for Blog Mastermind

This is A nice short form sales page: Problogger Community

And this is a great example of a mini site: To Do List

Which style you use is a judgment only you can make, based on your knowledge of your niche and readers. I would urge you to try two or three designs and split test them (easy to so with most sales processes) to see which one converts the best.

I like to apply four simple rules to sales pages, and I’m slowly converting all of mine to reflect this:

Pose a question
Offer the product as a solution
Tell them why you’re qualified to have created it
Ask them to buy it and explain how the process will work

To see this in action, have a look at my new sales page for The Beginner’s Guide to Twitter.

It’s clear, simple, and there are no links off or distractions on the page at all.

As part of your pre launch checklist, have a variety of pages available and set up for a split test. Then monitor them and be ruthless in taking out the weakest ones.

Pricing

While we’re talking about sales pages, we need to talk about pricing. It’s such a tough area. Unless you have a huge list of your own, you need to accept that most of your sales will come through affiliates. And they will only give it a real push if there’s good money in it for them. The convention with a digital product is that they earn at least 50% commission, so your pricing needs to take that into account. Only you can value the information you are selling and you need to factor in commissions and your net income as part of that process.

One benefit of it being a digital product is that it’s easy to change the price, or to offer discounts, so you can react if you need to.

Choosing a launch date

If you do your pre launch work well, you should be able to generate real buzz around the first 24 to 48 hours. It’s the period when everyone seems to be talking about your product, and the reviews and tweets are all over the place.

The worst thing that can happen is that your launch ends up clashing with another big one on the internet. The way to avoid this is to set your launch date 6 or even 8 weeks ahead of schedule, then tell everyone about it, via your site, your affiliates and any way you can think of. I know of two that have recently been delayed because the bloggers talked to each other!

Think about holiday periods and weekends, when the net is generally quieter, and also consider the time zone of most of your readers when planning the date and time.

We deliberately went against the grain with Beyond Blogging, by launching over a holiday period and at midnight in our primary market. It was a gamble, and one that paid off, but it was risky.

The pre-launch process

I’m assuming now that your product is uploaded to where you want to sell it, your sales pages are all working, you’ve tested the full sales process by buying one yourself and everything else is ready to go.

You should also by now have created a “pre-order” email subscription list for people really keen to be the first to buy. You can increase this dramatically by offering a discount or a free report to entice them to sign up. Another good way to build the list is to have some kind of competition – perhaps using Twitter as the medium, with some quality prizes for people spreading the word.

We’re now going to consider the pre launch period, or “soft launch” as it’s sometimes called. The main thing is to make sure your affiliates are all ready for the big moment, that they have all their posts written and emails queued to go. There’s a fine line between annoying them and reminding them, and you have to tread carefully here.

Consider giving your own readers and subscribers a chance to buy early at a discount, as a reward for their loyalty, and plan that into the process. Be sure to tell your affiliates that’s what you’re doing.

All of your focus in these days before the launch should be about creating interest, adding more people to the pre buy list, and generating interest and hype wherever you can. This is really, really hard work, and you’ll need to dedicate yourself to many hours of being persistent without being annoying!

Use a calendar to record each stage of the pre launch so that you know when reminder emails are going out to delegates and when teasers are due to go to people on your own list.

We’re all ready to rock and roll! Tomorrow we’ll cover the actual launch.

Please join the Mike’s Life community top right to make sure you don’t miss the continuing story.

Here are the first two parts of this story, and another interesting post you may enjoy:

1/ How to launch your first digital product – part one

2/ How to launch your first digital product – part two

3/ Giving great service to your blog readers

Drew Bennett from Ben Spark.com said of Beyond Blogging:

“Nathan and Mike have put together a collection of some of the most inspiring case studies on blogging ever assembled. Being motivated to action is inevitable after reading how these industry leaders made their starts”