Launching a digital product

M:
All right, so this is basically a digital product launch. You've got your digital products here, okay?

J:
Okay.

M:
Basically the big problem is that we can't go straight in at 997. Now, what I'm just going to do is I'm going to take you through what I've done, all right?

J:
Okay.

M:
Or am doing, or what I've seen other people do, and what we've built for them. It kind of follows two big gulfs, so right over here, you've got no audience, and at the same time, you have customers who are in their before status. Over here, you have them in their after status. When we do a before and after grid, obviously, this is their sides that there are, with all those characteristics, and this is after.

We need to try to get them from here to there, but the problem is unless they trust you implicitly, they're not just going to drop a grand, or 1,400, or whatever it is to get to that stage. They need to be built up to that. Assuming, then, that we've written our sales copy ... In fact, let's do this in stages. Right over here is ... You are physically not ready to just do a launch right now.

First we do our before and after, then we write our sales copy. Our sales copy is just the sales letter that we can split out into other sections: problem, results, solution, that kind of stuff. Along the way, then, if this other typed pieces of content are being turned into things like blog posts, and lead magnets, and whatever, this is free content, basically. Then we put our lead magnets as well. We're slowly beginning to move people to this after stage, but it's bit by bit.

However, this section here, again, going straight from lead magnet straight to sale. It's just not going to happen. I say it wouldn't happen. You'd have to spend so much money on getting people there in the first place, that it just wouldn't be economic. That's when we try to do something like a launch [inaudible 00:02:51]. There's a bunch of different ways that we can cut this up, and this is what we're going to be doing. This is how I'm going to be pushing this forward, okay?

J:
Okay.

M:
If I'm building up an audience, so bit by bit, let's say I have 1,000 leads in my database. It's not impossible to get. If you try and got three subscribers a day, within a year you kind of have ... You just need to drive traffic to a blog, write decent blog posts, even if it's not millions. If you just had like five really, really good pieces of content that help people do something.

There's a guy called "The Launch Coach," I think it's like thelaunchcoach.com or something, and all he does is give away ebooks, and free guides, and templates, and stuff. We build up that database of people. We then ask them, and this is again, this is from Jeff Walker's book, "Launch," I think it's called. This is his PLF formula, so the product launch formula.

J:
It's a person named Jeff Walker?

M:
Jeff Walker. J-E-F-F, which is a fantastic book, very, very practical, down-to-earth, just goes through the guides on how you launch a product. From experience, we've taken a few other bits and pieces, and kind of cut it up into something else.

We've got our 1,000 leads, now throughout that, if you're doing automation through to like splinter products, which are kind of like lead magnets, but you pay for them basically, just little chunks of value that people buy. If you want them to then go to high-ticket item, this is basically the process that you need to follow.

First of all, we do something called "a shot across the bow." What that is, is an email or a bunch of emails to that list, saying, "Hey, we're putting the finishing touches on our course, or content, or whatever. What is it that you guys want to see?" Again, this is assuming that throughout this process you've been nurturing these guys with value-stack emails, and extra content, and splinter products, and maybe a couple of hundred dollar products or so along the way, so they're still engaged. You can't build a list of people and then just launch to them. There's nurtured all along the way, which is why newsletter are so important, weekly newsletters, because it reminds them that you're alive.

People forget the lists that they've signed up to within minutes. You have to be really, really hammer into them who you are. That there will give you a bunch of ideas on what people want to see. Now, assuming you've done your market research and you already know the customer, you probably won't see anything new there, but what it also gives you is a couple of messages, like how people talk about stuff. For instance, this thing on building marketing funnels that we're doing, with so the service, the big thing that came back was we want to know how to project manage building a funnel with a customer. I hadn't called it that, I'd been calling it sales, but that sentence kept coming up over and over and over.

I'm thinking there, "Okay, what I'm going to do is create my sales letter to three webinars, and I'm going to give them access to that for 497 bucks." They get access to the live webinars, and that's only using the content that they've given me, all those content ideas. That's relatively easy to set up. You can do that over Skype, that's crazy easy to set up. You just need a sales page and constantly email people saying, "There's been a close-off, but you'll get lifetime access to it." A lot of that will probably become your course content as well. Now, you're lucky because you haven't done a lot of your course content, so that can then be cut up and be sold at a later date, if you then did weekly coaching course or monthly coaching course, and stuff, but don't worry about that yet.

We're also beginning to help people get to this after state by going through it, but it's not a huge investment. Also, assume that people have bought splinter products and a few of the $100 products. More and more people are going to be okay to do it. Even if you just got 10 people to do that, that's $5,000. From 100 people to get 1% to sign up, sorry, 1,000 people to get 1% to sign up, you would hope that that is a pretty reasonable number to get that many to sign up.

From those webinars, you do three of them, you do one week after the other, and you say, "Look, you get lifetime access to the recordings." We use something called Zoom, which basically does all our webinars, it does all the links, it does everything. If I just click the record button, it records it and turns it into an MP4. That's how we do it.

Then, I take all of that, and first of all, I know that the concept is what people want, and so I'm now going to go into what they call a launch funnel. Very basically, if we have a sales letter, typical old school sales letter that goes down like this, with all our copy, what Jeff Walker has suggested is we're going to change that and make the sales letter go across three days. We have problem, we have demo, and we have solution.

In a sales letter, obviously we started up with the problem that they're facing, the environment they're in, the myths, what's changing, all this kind of stuff. They recognize where they are now, they recognize their before status. That's what the problem there is, and there's a formula that we follow for creating some kind of video content giveaway that follows. It's kind of like a pitch video or something, but it focuses specifically on agitating the problem. That might be where they are at the moment, why you can empathize with them, what the big problem is that businesses like them are facing, and you talk them through that. The idea is that they recognize that more and more and more. I have got the notes on how this is done, somewhere, but we won't go into that.

The main point with this one here, is that you get them to do some kind of exercise. You give them some kind of template, and you kind of walk them through it. For example, what the guys at WP Elevation did was a proposal, they'll teach you how to write a proposal really, really quickly. We're doing how to plan out a marketing funnel really, really quickly. We've seen both how to write diet plans, how to write marathon schedules, all this kind of stuff. You do that kind of exercise with them, and there's a bunch of stuff like getting them involved in Facebook comments and stuff. The core of it, ultimately, is just agitating that problem, really, really going for it, and then saying, "Hey, we're going to show you how to fix it."

What we do is we say, the next day, "Come back tomorrow and we're going to show you ...." This is more something that they can actually use, it's just more valuable information. Although this is useful, they're not going to particularly get anywhere with that, because, well you can fill out a proposal, but what you need is actually more leads. This is how you solve that initial problem of, it could be a list of where to find the best ideas for logos, or how to write a brand brief, or how to write a mission statement or something. It doesn't have to be long. It can be really, really easily put together. It's kind of like a lead magnet on steroids, because you're going though it with them, you can spend a bit more time on it.

In the demonstration one, is not that dissimilar. You do a really quick wrap-up of the problem video. You talk to them about, again we've got all these notes so I can share with you, you talk about your previous things like oh, where we were, and what I had to do in my story, and this is the problem. Then this is where you teach them something seriously valuable. This is something that's genuinely, genuinely useful that typically they probably would have to pay for somewhere else. That is like a demonstration of what they're doing and sort of what you're doing.

Finally, we say the next day, "Oh, come back tomorrow, because we're going to show you how to," again, " .... " Now remember, first of all, you've built up a bunch of trust already with them, and they can see that you're legit, and the real deal, and whatever. Afterwards, we're going to say, "We're going to show you how to seriously, if you're serious about this, or this is something that you actually really want to focus on."

This basically, here, is a sales video, and that is essentially a pitch of the product. This is where we take all of this sales copy, all the before-after grid, all of this stuff here, and pile it into a video. This is just a pitch video, basically, but they come back, but because of the way that we're writing sales letters and pitch videos, they don't come across as us like a second-hand car salesman, second-car hand salesman.

J:
Second-hand car salesman.

M:
It's not second-car hand salesman. It's second-hand car salesman. The idea is after that, you launch for a specific time, and you say it's open for, two weeks or something, or a week. You do nothing but try and drive people through this bit here. You can, what they call, greenfield this, which means you can just keep this running, you can automate it so it just keeps running. Some people say that really works, some people say launching it over a specific week works. I haven't seen evidence to support either way really going mental.

Let's dive into the product launch, proof product launch, but that makes sense?

J:
Yeah.

M:
You didn't feel you don't have to write that much content, because a lot of it's going to be coming from here? That can then be split, that's 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6. Even if they're an hour long, you do three hours, that's a lot. That's a lot of content there, so let's do ... Again, Jeff Walker, goes into way more detail than this.

J:
I've got a little reading [inaudible 00:13:07]

M:
It's really good. It's quite short, I read it on the flight back from London.

J:
Oh really?

M:
Yeah.

J:
Okay.

M:
Problem, demo, and then sales. Actually, I don't know if I can remember this off the top of my head. Want to get leads though. Have I written [inaudible 00:13:57] out?

J:
Nice. Go with coolness.

M:
Yeah. It's good, eh? [inaudible 00:14:04] Kind of need to whiteboard this.