Sunday, February 5, 2012

Product Launch – Lessons Learned

Bloggers Market WordPress Install E-Book

NOW AVAILABLE!!! 

Well the Bloggers Market WordPress Secrets has been launched! I’m glad it’s over. Still plenty of work left to be done. My Aweber book is off to the editors, and I’ve got projects lined up like planes on a runway.

This isn’t my first launch, really. I’ve had two other E-Books that I have released. “Blogging 2010 – The Beginners Guide Manual 1 – The Essential Foundation”. And “Linux Squared Gimp – E-Book Design Instructions”.

With the release of the above two titles I really just wanted to test the waters and get my feet wet. I never really made a major effort to promote those titles. In the coming months I will be doing re-launches of those E-Books.

With the release of “Bloggers Market WordPress Secrets – Set-up And Installation” I have gone all out with the launch.

Quality E-Book, Separate Product Page (I’m always a little reluctant to say Landing Page), Affiliate and Product Art, Affiliate Network, Auto-Responder Campaign, Broadcast and Opt-In Forms, great bonus themes for my buyers. I’ve done it all.

As a computer thing, the project was challenging; but the real killer was the product itself, as you well know if you have read any of my pre-launch material. The E-Book had a real intensity that I was just not prepared to deal with. It took about two months to write on a part-time basis, and it took a month of full-time effort to edit and refine. As the E-Book is for the beginner, it had to be crystal clear.

They say time is money, and I would guess that the E-Book has cost about $15,000.00 to bring to market. Whether or not I can recover the cost and profit remains to be seen. I wish I could say it was fun, and indeed there were light moments. But for the most part, it was a lot of work.

3-2-1 Product Launch Lesson – 22

Once you have your first E-Book written, you have to design a cover for your product and then you have to launch that product. This lesson deals with the launch.

E-Book Material: A good launch begins with how good your product looks and the quality of the advertising material behind it. Make sure you spend time producing your marketing material to the highest standards, including high quality photos, a well written catch-line or slogan, concise but informative product text and above all make sure your prices are neither too low or too high. If your initial product material or information looks poor, this reflects on you and your product and you could end up losing customers due to your lack of attention to these details.

Update Your Website: This is truly critical! Selling your products on your own website should be something you should do right from the start to give the item a little bit of history before you go live to the Internet with it. Try to give your product sometime on your own website before you go with the launch, as this will give your item more of an impact when you do go live as hopefully the search engines will have already indexed your product and it will start ranking in the SERPs.

Create A Press Release: A well written and effectively submitted press release can not only send you instant traffic but can also be picked up by local journalists and people within your niche looking to write about what is happening and the latest news. Press releases can help to increase exposure of your brand, Blog and product, so make sure you spend some time writing a good press release, or seek a company to write one for you and also take care of the submission process as well.

Affiliate Sales: There are thousands of people on the Internet looking to sell products, so why not offer them a commission and let them help you to increase sales and spread the word about your new item. You can join ClickBank or Commission Junction and instantly have access to thousands of affiliates who have an interest in what you do and would like to make money from it. Most of the Pros do their own Affiliate Program, however this is not recommended for your first launch.

CPC Campaign: Cost Per Click or Pay Per Click will deliver you instant traffic and therefore hopefully instant sales. An effective and well planned cost per click management campaign can literally bring you in lots of sales whilst helping you to keep a tight grip on your advertising budget. Don’t just go bidding for the obvious keywords; try to think outside of the box a little to try to save yourself money.

Beyond Installing WordPress – Lesson 6

Now that you have your WordPress software and WordPress premium template downloaded to a separate folder on your hard drive,  it is now time for you to install WordPress first and your theme second.

I am going to give you a list of all the tools and how to place them where you need them,  however I am not going to be able to provide you with