Getting Lots of Other People to Sell Your New Product
The secret to a successful online product launch is no secret at all: It’s to extend your reach well beyond your own network, by recruiting other people to get behind the launch and spread your offer around. This is the keystone of most Internet-millionaire fortunes, and a very different way of thinking from what’s typically found in the off-line world.
Experts who run these campaigns or who sell how-to packages charge many thousands of dollars. I charge a whole lot less than that to tell you step by step the 10 steps I’m incorporating into my own launch campaign for my just-released eighth book, Guerrilla Marketing Goes Green: Winning Strategies to Improve Your Profits and Your Planet (co-authored with Jay Conrad Levinson) , which I’m hoping will reach five million people. Here we go:
When you hire an expert, you typically buy two things: the expertise in setting up an infrastructure to build out your network (which is actually something you can hire out fairly easily once you know what to do)—and the “golden Rolodex”: the network of key partners who will bring your message to the masses.
You get the first five steps this month, the next five in February, and then in March, I’ll tell you the results.
1. Make an Irrevocable Commitment In the proposal I sold to John Wiley & Sons, I outlined my strategy to inform millions of people about the launch. This, I believe, is a key reason why this big New York publisher bought the book.
2. Increase Your Product’s Appeal Then I brought in a celebrity co-author, which approximately doubled the advance Wiley was willing to pay, and moved me out of the routine business book category into the realm of special treatment—and which gave me access to my co-author’s huge marketing machine (he has 86,000 people on his e-mail list!) and terrific reputation in the marketing community.
3. Expand Your Influence With Influential People Years ago, I started a deliberate policy of building friendships with influential people online. I drop a quick comment note about articles I like (or even, staying polite of course, those I disagree with) in their newsletters. I occasionally send them links or other material that I think will interest them/help them, even if that link has nothing to do with me. I engage in dialogue with them in various public arenas. I offer to speak at their conferences (and then go out for coffee with them). I supply content to their newsletters. I run their articles on my webzines. I follow them on Twitter and retweet them. Etcetera, etcetera. In short, I find ways to get into their consciousness. The result? Going through my contacts, I compiled 443 email addresses for potential partners! These are people who already know me and are predisposed to participate if I make them an offer worth their time.
If you’re not already doing this, start NOW. In a year or two, you’ll have at least something of a network that will be very helpful in your next product launch, and you won’t need to pay thousands of dollars for access to someone else’s contacts. (I did my last cooperative launch, in 2003, with a much smaller network—only about 40 participants—and it still accomplished my somewhat limited objective of breaking the Amazon Top 100.)
4. Make an Irresistible Offer! Prominent, influential people are deluged by people who want to tap into their networks. the most in-demand are very fussy about what they’ll promote. They are all-too-aware that if they promote too often, people will unsubscribe, and thus every promotion slot has to count. Which means that a twenty-cent Amazon commission on the sale of a single book “ain’t gonna cut it.” I have been planning to launch a membership program for two years, but held off so I could launch it in conjunction with the book launch. My publicity partners can earn commissions of several hundred dollars per sale by selling the membership along with the book. Of course, they have the usual opportunity to submit a bonus that makes the purchase an even better deal, while building their own subscription numbers.
5. Appeal to the Higher Self Despite what the “experts” say, I have long approached marketing from the point of view that people actually want to do good in the world, and that appealing to this “higher self” is at least as effective as appealing to greed. I think in many cases, it actually works better than a purely self-interest-based offer. For this particular launch, not only is the book itself very much focused on making the world better, but we’ve also arranged to donate a portion of the profits to a charity whose goals are very closely aligned with the message of the book, and this offer is prominently featured on our partner page. (You can use that same link if you’d like to participate as a partner in the launch.)
Tune in next month for the next five steps.
