Farideh Ceaser joins me today to talk all things launching and shares simple launch strategies that will help you improve sales because no one likes launching to crickets, right?
We talked about the work you need to do *before* you put up your sales page, the importance of creating connection with your audience through blogs, newsletters, 1-1s and being able to tell stories, the importance of being an extreme version of yourself and being able to stand out online and how ensuring a successful launch has a lot to do with what you do before you launch.
Key Takeaways:
Create a connection with your audience
Research what your audience wants through surveys, 1 on 1 calls
Ensuring a successful launch has a lot to do with what you do before you launch
Farideh (fair-a-day) Ceaser has spent her life in creative entrepreneurship. As a musician, she has toured the world making a personal connection with various audiences through her voice, storytelling and humour. Professionally, Farideh has worked on the marketing teams of multi-million dollar corporations. Farideh is passionate about all things launching and stays up late hatching brilliant plans for her genius clients. Learn more about her at http://www.farideh.ca/
In today’s episode, I chat with Pat Romain, digital strategist and e-commerce enthusiast, where we talk all about launching products online and why you should have something to sell online.
We go through the steps from creating your content to having it up for sale on your website. How to integrate your shopping cart with your email marketing system without having to get too techy. When to choose a 3rd party site to sell vs having the ecommerce solution end to end on your site. We also talk about marketing and getting the word out about your product launch.
Key Takeaways:
When picking a tech solution for your launch consider what you want your customer experience to be
Your first launch won’t necessarily be your biggest launch..get the word out and reach out to everyone you know (you never know who they know!)
Be prepared for something to go wrong 🙂 Test all your links!
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About Pat Romain
Patouchka Romain, Pat for short, helps small business owners launch their products online by laying out the perfect strategy for their products and implementing that strategy for maximum results. She also support businesses with setting up their e-commerce platforms and email marketing systems. You can find her on Twitter as @patouchkaromain or on the web at patromain.com
In part 2, we looked at figuring out who has the problem you are trying to solve with your product (or service) by talking or surveying your ideal client.
Use the feedback to validate your assumptions and identify the core problem.
Prioritize features. You don’t need everything in your first product. We’re at iPhone 5 (5S, 5C?..I can’t keep up) aren’t we? And I’m pretty sure they cut out a lot of features in the first version!
Stick to solving the core problem and save the bells and whistles for later.
Creating and Packaging Your Product
Product Idea: Member-Only Content
You may decide that you want to offer a membership component to your product or service.
Some options are:
4. Password-Protected Page: You can create a password protected page on your website and only give access to paying members. This is what a Password Protected Page would look like on a WordPress site (password: test). Note: branding, pages, widgets are all still visible!
5. Create a Secret/Closed Facebook group where members only get added after they have paid for access. Pretty simple, eh? Cost: Free!
6. Ning is pretty much as out of the box as it gets. I’ve used this platform for several years problem-free and found it easy to get started. It’s easy to customize and has all the familiar social network features. They offer the mini- plan at $19.99/year for up to 150 members. At this level, domain mapping is not included so you would have a url with yourbizname.ning.com. I don’t see that as a negative though, considering you could link to your Ning network from within your site or share the link to members after they sign up and pay.
WordPress Specific
7. Optimize Press: Optimize Press provides a lot of value. You can easily setup your membership site using the templates and divide the content into sections, modules etc. and display a navigation menu and/or side bar that makes it easy to access the content and understand how it is organized. Bonus: You can but choose from many templates and create sales pages as well! You can also install OptimizePress on multiple sites that you own.
I haven’t personally used the next two but they come with rave reviews as well:
8. Buddy-Press: Everything you need to start your own self-hosted and WordPress-powered social network. (Opensource)
9. Wishlist: Easy enough to use that you really don’t need to be a techie to build a great membership site with it. The plugin allows you to build a high quality membership site that looks sleek and is easy to manage as an admin. (single site license: $97)
As you can see there are several to choose from depending on what is you need to do!
Product Idea: Video or Audio Recording
If you want to offer an interview-based product you can use Skype combined with a call recorder to record the audio or video.
12. Camtasia I’ve been a long time user of this software, first on PC and now on Mac. There are a lot of tutorial videos and you’ll be up and running in no time.
13. ScreenFlow (Mac) I hear great things about ScreenFlow and had I not already invested in Camtasia I would have used it.
14. Jing Is a great free alternative to both Camtasia and ScreenFlow by the folks at TechSmith (who make Camtasia) and you can record up to to 5 minutes.
15. iMovie (Mac) Got a Mac? Well this comes with and is easy to edit video.
16. Audacity: Edit your audio recordings- a wealth of tutorials available online if you get stuck.
18. Windows Movie Maker (PC) If you’re on PC you can download it for free, if you don’t have it already. While it doesn’t have all the bells and whistles of the higher end products like Camtasia, it gets the job done.
Upload Your Audio/Video
19. After you’ve created your video or audio content, you can upload it to your site directly or use a site Dropbox and then share/embed a link. I love Dropbox and the fact that I can seamlessly share and access files from anywhere.
20. For video you can upload your content and make it private on Vimeo and then embed on your site.
Product Idea: Email Course
21. Mailchimp: Want to create an email course (for example a 7 day challenge?) Sign up for Mailchimp and use the autoresponder series. I tell you that Mailchimp monkey has a special place in my heart..an email marketing that has a sense of humor and easy to use? Win in my books!
Outsourcing
Don’t have a creative or techy bone in your body? Or need help formatting and putting together your ebook (or anything for that matter?) Outsource, baby! You can use sites like
22. Elance Submit your project needs and sit back while the proposals flood your inbox.
Warning: You can potentially get a lot of bids and probably don’t need to look at them all before you make a selection. If it’s a one-off project be sure to look at past work, references, portfolio. If it’s for an ongoing project, I recommend starting with a small test project to get a feel for how you work together.
24. Fiverr As the name implies, five bucks will get you pretty much anything. It can be hit or miss but there are a lot of things you can get done at this price that can save you tons of time (and headache).
Graphics
Need graphics for your product? Stockphotos to the rescue!
29. PicMonkey: Seriously, LOVE this site. You can jazz up pretty much anything and have fun while doing it. I did a post that walks you through a few different sites that help you create image posts.
Selling Your Digital Goods And Services
30. Show me the money!
Fortunately, sites like Paypal,make it super-easy for you to start offering your services and get paid for them! Paypal is widely used and pretty straight-forward to setup. Once you’ve created your account, add your products/services and choose the type of buttons you want to create (e.g Buy Now or Add to Cart). Paypal will generate the code you need to embed on your webpage. You can also take recurring monthly payments using Paypal.
Now that you’ve created that ebook but need a way to deliver it? While Paypal is the go-to site for sending/receiving money, they don’t offer product delivery. So unless you want to manually email each person that buys your product, you’ll need to use a site like E-junkie to deliver your product. E-Junkie integrates with Paypal and provides the code necessary to add to your webpage.
Create An Interest List
Start building an interest list before your product is ready. Use out of the box landing page apps and drive people to sign up to your early-bird list. This should be done in parallel to your product creation. You don’t have to wait for it to be on sale to get the word out and start promoting it.
Recommend Tools:
32. SeedProd: Lets you collect email address and work in maintenance mode on your website. WordPress plugin. (one time fee).
33. LaunchRock: Set up landing pages in minutes, either on your own self-hosted website or directly on Launchrock.
Farideh (fair-a-day) Ceaser has spent her life in creative entrepreneurship. As a musician, she has toured the world making a personal connection with various audiences through her voice, storytelling and humour. Professionally, Farideh has worked on the marketing teams of multi-million dollar corporations. Farideh is passionate about all things launching and stays up late hatching brilliant plans for her genius clients. Learn more about her at http://www.farideh.ca/
And there you have it. The tools you need to take that idea to launch. Let’s do it!