How to Launch Your Own Product

Readers who are subscribed to my newsletter will know that I have been working on “The Beginner’s Guide to Twitter” for some time. Not subscribed? Please do so now, the form is to your right! I have decided that it’s a perfect opportunity to post about the process I have gone through, and to continue to post about how it all goes once the product is launched. We can all use it as a template, and learn from the inevitable mistakes.

Background

One of my objectives for the second half of this year was to launch an E book as part of my own suite of products for sale on this site. I already have Blogging for Beginners, which is a free E Book which is given to everyone who subscribes, and I have my three month course The Beginnner’s Guide to Blogging, which is currently full and will run again in September. As my blog is aimed at new and learning bloggers, I wanted to create a product for them.

Twitter has been an enormous help to this blog in terms of traffic, and also in terms of networking with some amazing people. Although it’s growing incredibly fast, there are many, many people out there who don’t use it, or have tried and given up. The Beginner’s Guide to Twitter will be for them.

The Product

I decided to create an E Book which would take people through all the basic steps to creating a Twitter account and beginning to establish a decent Twitter presence. It would cover everything from signing up to choosing a Twitter name, and then go into detail about how to Tweet, add followers, use various Twitter tools and mistakes to avoid.

I underestimated how long it would take! My target was to get it completed in about 10 days, in between other work. In the event it has been nearly three weeks. The longest part of the process was putting all the screenshots in, and then sorting out all the formatting. The finished product is 26 pages long and is full of detail. As I write this, I have just finished the process of converting it to PDF and my wife is reading it for the first time.

Here are the chapter headings to give you a feel for the content:

• Introduction

• Getting your head around Twitter – It’s like CB radio

• Deciding on your objectives with Twitter

• Choosing a Twitter name

• Signing up to twitter

• Understanding the Twitter web interface

• Downloading Tweetdeck

• Understanding what each column means

• Setting up searches

• Twitpic

• Using your mobile phone

• Following people

• Checking your new followers

• What to Tweet about

• Mistakes to avoid

• How to become and authority

• Celebrities on Twitter

• Other Twitter tools

• Some URLs for Twitter Tools

Affiliate Sales

Regular readers will know I have always eschewed using affiliates to sell my products. My view is that many internet marketers simply put up the price of products to allow for a commission (which is always expected to be around 50%). Therefore, stuff that should be $20 ends up costing €47 dollars, so that the commission is attractive.

My original plan, therefore, was not to offer the book to affiliates. But I have been persuaded by a couple of readers who have asked me directly, so I am going to offer it via Clickbank, but with the proviso that the price will remain as originally planned, therefore the commission low. But my whole philosophy is about pricing stuff at a level people can actually afford, and by doing so, achieving significant volume, or leveraging the power of the internet.

Pricing

The Beginner’s Guide to Twitter will be priced at $10. As always, I want it to be a no-brainer for customers. Am I already on Twitter? No! Should I be there? Yes! Am I prepared to invest $10 to learn and understand it quickly? Yes! This means that affiliates selling it will earn $5 per sale, which may well put many off. My view is that you’ll sell more than twice as many copies than you would have at double the price.

The Launch Process

I’ll be launching the guide on this blog tomorrow, and emailing my subscriber list about it at the same time. I don’t see this as a product that needs any hype. It will be one of those that will continue to sell month after month for years, as more and more new people hear about Twitter and want to learn how to use it.

The affiliate program will launch in about a week – it takes some time to get Clickbank set up to run the program. I’ve decided to use them despite their $49 set up fee, because they offer security to affiliates in controlling all the payments.

I’ll be providing suggested copy for affiliates, banner adverts and lots of good ideas to promote The Beginner’s Guide to Twitter. It won’t be a get rich scheme for you, but should provide you with a steady income for a long time. It’s also an ideal product to cut your affiliate teeth on, because it’s low priced and easy to sell. Even if your blog only has 50 visitors a day and you only have 100 Twitter followers, this may be the opportunity to make a dozen sales a month, which will earn you an additional $60 a month. If you’ve been waiting to monetize your blog, this is the perfect way to start, and I’ll take you carefully through every step you need to take.

Start off by registering your interest in becoming an affiliate by putting your first name and email address into the form below. I’ll get back to you with more information.

You may also enjoy:

1/ How I use Twitter

2/ Eight things I hate about Twitter

3/ Eight things I love about Twitter