How to launch your first digital product - Part Two

Yesterday we talked about the first three steps in the process of launching a digital product. In case you missed it: How to launch your first digital product.

Today, we’ll move on and talk about:

• Creating marketing materials
• Selecting a sales process
• Developing an affiliate program

Creating Marketing Materials

In an ideal world, you’ll hire a superstar designer like Jana from Impact Studios, who will produce a wonderful set of cool graphics that do an amazing job of promoting your product and brand. Stuff like this:

But let’s assume, as this is your first launch, that you don’t have a spare wad of cash for the project. The key here is to create something that is uniform across various types of media, and which promotes the brand. Which brand though? That’s up to you – if it’s one off project then maybe consider using your blog’s or company branding. If it’s likely to lead to more products then you should consider creating a brand for the product itself. My two Beginner’s courses are both branded like this blog, as they are very much a part of it. but Beyond Blogging has it’s own brand – as there is a lot more to come from the whole Beyond Blogging project.

What ever style of logo or design you come up with, you’ll want to create it in a variety of formats. If it’s an E Book, make a graphic that looks like a real book. Create adverts people can place on their sites in the standard sizes – skyscraper, 125 by 125 and so on. Making a variety of sizes and styles will make your life easier, and most importantly, those of your affiliates. Remember to include some on a colored background as well as a transparent one, for people with dark sites, like mine!

Whenever I think of blog product branding, I think of the Thesis theme. It’s simple, bright and everywhere, and it’s always consistent. I suspect I could show you one of their square ads without any text, and you’d pick it for what it represents.

The other thing you’ll want to do as part of this phase is to think about text links, which are normally one of the most successful ways to market on line. Come up with a few key phrases which you and others can use to represent your product, and to help you all rank well for it. Using yesterday’s example of someone selling a classic car care E Book, I’d create some standard text links using phrases like: “Classic car care” “Caring for your classic” “Classic car care tips” and so on.

Selecting a sales process

It’s time to decide how you are physically going to sell your E Book. The easiest and cheapest way is to simply put up a Paypal link on your site, and email buyers a copy every time someone buys one!

Easy, but there are two problems with that as a strategy. Firstly it becomes impossible to work with affiliates in that model, and secondly the delivery mechanism isn’t automated, which means you’ve got to be around 24 hours a day if people aren’t going to have to wait for their product.

You can solve both by using E-Junkie or Clickbank, or by using your own shopping cart system, like 1 shopping Cart. I’ve recently written a review on each, and those links will take you to the detailed reviews.

Most people starting off with a new product will elect to go for E-Junkie, simply because it’s so cheap at $5 a month, and it does everything you need it to do. It will enable you to recruit affiliates to help you sell your product, it will pay the money instantly into your Paypal account when you make a sale, it will tell you when you need to pay an affiliate, and it provides a secure download service so that once people have paid, they can instantly download your product.

E Junkie is the best option to start with, and once sales are going, I would suggest you offer it on Clickbank as well. Clickbank does the same job, but adds it’s amazing marketplace, where internet marketers will pick up your product and potentially offer it to their huge lists. The downside is that it will cost you $50 to register your product with Clickbank, their fees per transaction are quite high, and you’ll have to wait to hit a threshold before you get your money.

Developing an affiliate program

Unless you have a massive audience of your own, you’re going to need to recruit other people to help you sell your product. I divide affiliates into four groups:

• Close mates. These are people you talk to every day on the web. Unless they’re in the middle of another launch they will come to your aid. Send them a review copy.
• Acquaintances. People you “know” but not that closely. Invite them aboard and sell them the benefits of being part of your launch.
• Long shots. Put some A listers in here – it’s worth a go. You’ll read all kinds of stuff about reciprocity, but in most cases promoting or not is often down to timing. If your launch occurs in a gap, you might get lucky here.
• People you don’t know. Put a link to your affiliate program on your sales page or website. If your launch goes well, you’ll get people who join you for a piece of the action. With the Beyond Blogging launch we tripled the number of affiliates post launch in this way.

Affiliates need nurturing and reminding as much as possible. As they signup, create a new email list specifically for your affiliates in your email program. Then set up an auto responder series for them, so that you can gradually feed them information. I would recommend something like this:

• Welcome and introduction to program and timings
• “How to get the best results from affiliates sales” email
• Introduction and link to affiliate tools, graphics and links page
• Send them suggested emails than can use to their list
• Remind them 24 hours before launch
• Remind them when launch starts
• Remind them a few days after launch with a thank you
• Remind them to keep going!

As you can see, a lot of reminders there! But the key is to keep your product in their minds so they are tweeting it, blogging about it and emailing their lists about it as much as possible. If you can get them to create a real impact around the launch, then that’s fabulous. But realistically, it will be gentle for your first one, and that’s why you want to get them to keep mentioning the product and to keep revisiting it with their readers, so you gain traction over time.

Tomorrow, we’ll cover the sales page, choosing a launch date and the pre launch process.

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Here's a link to part three.

Michael Martine “Remarkarkablogger” said about Beyond Blogging: “You’d have to be completely asleep at the wheel if you couldn’t learn from Beyond Blogging and explode your online presence with it.”