Case Study: How to Succeed With Your First Product Launch

The story of my very first product launch and how I managed to make it a success, even though I lacked experience, a large audience, a reputation... or really anything you might think one needs for a successful launch.

In this article:

1. Interview Video: In this video, Paul grills Shane about everything that happened in his first product launch. How could a beginner pull it off? How did he get traffic? And much more...
2. Is This Legit?: Did I really start from scratch? Is this really something you can replicate, or did I just get lucky? Let's address these questions first...
3. Make or Break: Market Research: How to find out what product to create, to set yourself up for success.
4. Creating the Product: My process for creating the course content and getting it ready for release.
5. Marketing the Product: Everything I did to get traffic and generate sales, coming form a "I don't get traffic yet" and "I have no idea what I'm doing" position.
6. The 3 Keys to Success: What I believe are the 3 most important factors that helped make my first product launch a success (despite my lack of experience).

Interview Video

Let's start off with an in depth talk about what exactly this case study is about and how a totally green behind the ears Shane managed to pull it off:

The video contains a lot of information and I encourage you to watch it. But I also understand that a video like this isn't the ideal way to reference information for your own product launch. So, to help you do that, we've broken down the system into a series of lessons.

Is This Legit?

I believe that the best, most long term and most-likely-to-succeed business model is to create and sell your own digital product. And I believe you can do this faster than you probably think.

For inspiration and instruction, I present you with the story of my very own first product launch.

I choose my first product as an example for two reasons:

First, because at the time I was inexperienced. Anything I did for my first launch, you can do too.

Second, because it was a success, but not an unattainably huge one.

Million dollar launches and billion dollar buyouts make for good stories, but you can't expect results like that from your first attempt. My own first product brought in over $100,000, in total. Not all at once, but over time. I believe this kind of scale is achievable, if you are strategic in your approach.

But maybe even that makes you skeptical. Maybe you think you can't do this, or that I'm not telling you the whole story.

So, let's address that right away:

I've Been Cheating All Along...

I'm Shane Melaugh, a half-Irish guy from Switzerland. I've had entrepreneurial aspirations since my late teens and a few years ago, after many failed attempts, I finally managed to make this business building thing work.

But is it all just smoke and mirrors?

On the ActiveGrowth blog, I've been creating content about my online marketing experiments and business strategies for many years.

My idea has always been to simply share what I'm experiencing myself and what works for me. And I'm thinking that what works for me will probably work for you, too.

BUT...

If some of my readers are to be believed, that's just not true. See, one of the most common objections I hear goes something like this:

"I can see that this worked for you and it makes sense. But I'm not you and this would never work for me."

As supporting evidence, I might hear:

• ...because I don't have a successful blog like you.
• ...because I don't have the connections I need, in the industry.
• ...because you're extra specially talented and I'm not.
  

I think skepticism is healthy, but not when it's used to make excuses.

Listen, hard as it is to believe, I didn't get some magical entrepreneurial talent from a unicorn-riding Leprechaun. I'm not the chosen one. In fact, if you would have met a younger version of me, you would have rated my chances of success as very poor.

The "From Scratch" Part

This entire case study is about the very first product launch I ever did. I've chosen to write about this instead of my more recent businesses, to make it relateable and relevant to you, if you're just starting out.

Of course I've got many advantages and a lot of experience now, but when I launched my first product, I didn't.

I didn't have a large audience for my blog. I didn't have a huge mailing list. I didn't have any connections to anyone in my industry. I didn't have a team of designers, developers and assistants to help me out. And I didn't have a large budget, either.

My first product launch serves as a good example of what you can do, starting from scratch.

This product was called Backlink Battleplan. It was an online course that taught a specific method of building links for SEO purposes. At the time, I was heavily involved in SEO and niche site marketing, so I made a product teaching what I knew.

However, the details of the product's content don't matter. What follows applies to any kind of product you can create and sell online.

With that said, let's get into the nuts and bolts of how I created and launched this product.

Make or Break: Market Research

"Market research" doesn't sound very exciting, I know. But this is the first step in the process. It's foundational. Get this wrong, and everything else you do is going to be a waste of time.

Your objectives for the market research phase are:

• Find out exactly what your audience wants.
• Find out about the problems they need to solve.
• Find out (roughly) how much they're willing to pay for a solution.
• Find out where you can reach people in your audience.
  

If you know whom you're selling to, know where they hang out and know that they're willing to pay for something you can offer, you've got a winner on your hands.

If, on the other hand, you don't know any of those things, your chances of success are minimal.

That's why market research is so important.

Paying Close Attention

At first, I tried to learn more about my target market by simply paying attention. I was looking through forums, discussion groups and blog comments (on other people's blogs). My goal was to understand what people were talking about, how they described their problems and what they needed help with.

This "passive" research can be useful, but I noticed that to get a better picture of my market, I needed to take a more active approach.

Asking Questions

As part of my market research, there were a few questions that I tried to ask anyone I could reach, in my target market. For example:

"What's your business model? How do you make money?"

"What's the biggest obstacle you have to deal with, related to building your business?"

"Which aspect of online marketing do you struggle with the most?"

"What is one thing to learn or skill to acquire that you think would make a huge difference to your success?"

But wait a minute... how exactly did I ask these questions? Whom did I get answers from?

Forums

I was active in several Internet marketing related forums and I'd create threads there, asking for feedback and starting discussions.

Sometimes, I'd open a poll in a forum and I'd provide multiple options to choose from.

I asked what people's biggest problem in running their business was and offered the choices:

• Productivity - I procrastinate too much.
• Information overload - I don't know where to start.
• Lack of information - I need to learn more.
• Lack of a clear plan - it all seems too chaotic.
  

The general discussions and paying close attention I'd done before helped me here. I already had an idea of what areas people's problems were in and the polls helped me narrow in on the biggest problems.

Another poll I ran asked: "What's your biggest challenge with online marketing?" And the answer options were:

• Traffic generation - getting more visitors to my site.
• Technical difficulties - setting up my site in the first place.
• Conversions - turning visitors into customers.
• Content - creating blog posts, videos etc.
  

On the one hand, I got some quantitative data from the polls. But a great advantage was also that these polls always sparked a discussion which was rich with insights as well.

Free Products

As part of my market research, I created two products that I gave away for free. This had several advantages for me:

• The free products helped me build a small mailing list.
• How people respond to the free products serves as an indicator of how important that topic is to them.
• It gave me a way to practice creating products, so that my premium product wouldn't be my very first attempt at it.
  

I didn't do anything especially creative with these freebies. I simply offered them in return for people's email addresses.

In my follow-up emails, I asked more questions. My main goal was to engage my subscribers in a conversation, to get to know more about what they do, what they want and what they need.

I promoted these free products on my blog (which got almost no traffic at the time, but you gotta work with what you got). I also linked to them in my user profile within discussion groups where I was active and participated in discussions on blogs in my niche, linking back to my blog from the URL field.

None of this sent floods of traffic to my site, but it was enough to get to a list of over 100 people by the time I published my second free product.

Surveys

As soon as I had a few subscribers, I sent out a survey. I used an open source tool called LimeSurvey at the time, but I wouldn't do that anymore. It's simpler to just use Google Forms, now.

I was surprised at how many responses I got. My first survey was sent out to only about 50 people, but I got 24 responses.

To reach more people, I also contacted someone who ran a membership site, teaching online marketing. I offered to create a course for his members, for free. He agreed and that got my foot in the door.

After I had delivered the course, I suggested he should send a survey to his mailing list and we could both share the data and insights gained. I set everything up for him, so all he had to do was copy, past, send.

Again, he agreed and this gave me the chance to get data from a much larger audience than I myself had access to.

1 on 1 Calls

I reached out to people in discussion groups and on my mailing list, asking them to get on a Skype call with me.

One way I did this was by looking out for people who described a problem I knew I could help them with. I'd send them a message offering to give them a quick, free coaching session, in return for answering some questions.

At the time, I didn't know this, but doing this is called customer development and we've written a detailed post here, about how to do it.

My approach at the time was not nearly as sophisticated as yours will be, after you read that post. But I still got a lot of insight from these chats I had with various people.

The Result

As you can see, I was ravenous for information and insight. For a few weeks, all I cared about was to learn more about my target market, to understand what people struggled with and to figure out how I could best help them. I was doing zero selling at this point.

Here's what I found:

• Almost everyone reported that generating traffic was a huge problem for them.
• The majority of people said that SEO was an important part of their business model.
• Specifically within the field of SEO, the thing that people felt most overwhelmed with was building backlinks.
  

I knew that I wanted to create a topic with a very narrow focus. This is why I was on the hunt for all this information. It didn't take long to learn that people struggled with traffic generation, but I didn't want to create a general "traffic generation course" or something like that. That's too broad of a topic. It would take too long to research and create a product about this and it would be more difficult to market.

I kept drilling down until I reached the specific topic: how to build backlinks (ideally for free).

Gaining Expertise

Once I had narrowed down to the topic of "building backlinks for free", I spent some time building up my own expertise in this area.

I already had a decent amount of experience in SEO. I was running several niche sites at the time and my main source of traffic was organic search. But before I started building my product, I wanted to dive further into this topic.

I did this in part through reading up on SEO blogs, but mostly through experimentation.

I tried every backlink building technique I could think of. I tested different techniques on different sites and watched what happened. The experimentation allowed me to separate myth from fact (something you don't get from just reading).

I also asked myself how I could make backlink building easier and less time consuming.

I took everything I already knew about building backlinks and refined my own process until I had a clear, neat system that worked.

My goal was to create a single, clear, step-by-step plan that anyone could follow.

Why?

Because my market research showed me that a major problem my prospects had was confusion and information overload.

The last thing they needed was yet another long list of link building methods. They already had more information and tips than they knew what to do with, but what they lacked was a clear system.

That was a void I intended to fill, with my product.

Creating the Product

Creating a product might seem like a daunting task, but it really isn't that difficult. Here are two things you need to know:

1) Practice

Remember how I mentioned that I created a couple of free products, before I even started building my backlinking course?

Apart from the value these free products had for building my audience, it really helped me in terms of practice, as well. Creating a small, simple free product is a low pressure kind of thing. It got me comfortable with the idea of creating a product as well as some of the technical aspects involved.

2) Technical Stuff

Backlink Battleplan was a fairly extensive product. It included a member's area with video and text content, as well as downloadable PDF guides and checklists.

However, I didn't struggle with the technical stuff.

To be clear: I'm not a very techy guy. I've run a software company for the last few years, so these days, I have a bit of a grasp on the tech. But back then, I was clueless.

But I didn't let that stop me.

I used a WordPress website, a membership plugin and PayPal. That covered all of the tech stuff that needed covering.

I also used a simple video player, so that I could have video content in my member's area without hosting the videos publicly.

I won't list the exact tools I used, since it's many years ago and the recommendations wouldn't be relevant anymore. Also, they wouldn't really be recommendations. I wasn't using the best possible tools. I was using tools that were available and cheap.

My point is this: yes, there are technical hurdles to overcome when creating a product. But you're never more than a search or two away from finding a solution.

You can find a plugin, an open source tool or a service for anything. And you can find helpful tutorials, just as easily. Don't let the tech stuff get in the way and don't search for the perfect setup. Instead, focus on getting the tech stuff out of the way as quickly as possible.

Quality & Scope

I'll let you in on a secret: in this very course that you're reading through, I'm guilty of a marketing sin. I'm not giving people what they want.

The most attractive proposition about creating products or online courses sounds something like this: "how you can create a course that makes millions, in less than 2 hours, with zero skills!!"

Instant gratification always gets the best response.

And here I am, talking about spending weeks or even months developing your skills and creating a product.

So, let's get something out of the way: is it possible to create a simple product in an afternoon and sell it successfully?

Well, it's not impossible, but it's highly improbable. Every once in a while, you come across a story of such a minimal-product-overnight-success, but there's usually one of two things involved:

1. Outliers: someone got incredibly lucky (a.k.a. they stumbled ass-backwards into success).
2. Liars: someone's telling a fantastical story about success that didn't happen.
   

To me, the quick and dirty approach was never appealing. Even if I could make money selling something I threw together in an afternoon, I still wouldn't want to.

I don't just want to make money. I want to make excellent things. I want to make valuable things. And I believe that anything worth doing is worth doing well.

Primary Goal: Value

In practice, that means that I always ask myself: how do I bring more value to my customers?

This is why I put extra work into my products, making them clearer, more actionable, better presented, easier to navigate.

Everything I do in the product creation process serves one goal: to make the product as useful as possible for my customers.

I want my product to be good and I also want it to feel good. I want customers to have a positive experience, from start to finish, with my product.

Secondary Goal: Beat the Competition (in Customer Experience)

There's a secondary goal as well, which is to make my product significantly better than competing products in my market.

For this goal, I paid close attention to what other people in the online marketing space were selling. How do they present their products? How are other SEO courses being taught and sold?

I wanted to create a product that had a wow-factor to it. Something that stood out from the crowd.

I noticed that my competitors were often focused purely on information and not on presentation or structure. You'd buy an ebook about SEO or link building and it would be a poorly formatted PDF, which just word-vomited information at you.

Sure, the information may have been good, but it was difficult to make use of. There was no clear structure and nothing to help you learn or put what you learnt into action.

This is why I decided that I'd do the opposite. I wanted a well-structured member's area, step-by-step tutorial videos, checklists to help customers implement what they learnt and so on.

A wonderful side effect of all this is that it creates a better brand image for the product, it makes people take it more seriously and as a result, it becomes easier to sell.

The Minimum Viable Product

It's funny to think back on this: when I created Backlink Battleplan, I had no idea what a Minimum Viable Product (MVP) was.

But luckily, I implemented this idea anyway. I realized that a common mistake people make is to finish a product before they start selling it.

Hold on... am I suggesting you should sell an unfinished product?!

Yes, that's exactly what I'm suggesting.

I know it seems logical to finish your product first and then start selling it. But this is a dangerous trap that has claimed many an entrepreneur's career.

As the product creator, you'll probably never feel like your product is truly finished. You'll always think of something more you could add. Something more that's missing. Some small detail that needs just a little more polish before it's ready...

This puts you in an endless cycle of procrastination.

Instead of getting stuck in this cycle, ask yourself: what's the smallest, useful version of the product I can start selling?

Aim to release a minimum version of the product at a low price. This makes it easier to actually release the product and it comes with two other huge advantages:

1. Customers: you get an initial group of customers who will provide you with feedback. Based on what they tell you, you'll be able to make the finished product much better.
2. Commitment: when you have an audience (however small), tell them that you're working on a product and tell them a date by which they'll be able to purchase a beta version of it at a low price. You've now made a commitment to deliver a product and there are people eagerly waiting for it. This provides a real deadline and social pressure, which both do wonders for busting procrastination.
   

For Backlink Battleplan, I actually did this in two stages. The first was to release a free guide called "Backlinks Quick-Start". It was a very basic link building guide. I gave it away as an opt-in incentive, so it helped get a few more people on my mailing list. And anyone who signed up for this was a super hot lead for a backlink building course.

I also did a "pre launch" of my product to my mailing list, when it was about 60% complete. I charged only $9 for this early access version and I sold about 40 copies of it, to a list of under 300 people.

If you do the math on that, you'll notice that this didn't make me rich. But it was very good for me, because it gave me a real proof of concept. I could clearly see that people were willing to pay for my product and that they enjoyed the product very much.

Although I didn't make much money from my pre launch, it gave me the confidence to really invest in finishing and launching the product.

Free Money: Adding an Upsell

I finished my course content and then I created an upsell offer, before starting my launch.

An upsell is simply a product you immediately offer to anyone who becomes a customer. Think of it as "since you bought X, you might also be interested in Y".

Upsells are a great way to add revenue in a product business, but they need to be handled with care. Far too often, I've seen upsells done terribly.

For Backlink Battleplan, I made sure that my upsell offer was complimentary to the main product, but not overlapping with it.

In other words, I wasn't going to do the thing where my front end product says "learn everything about building backlinks" and my upsell offer says "to learn the real secrets to backlink building, you also gotta buy this".

With this in mind, I did two important things for my upsell product:

First, I made the product about on-page SEO, website optimization and effective copywriting. These are all relevant topics that go hand-in-hand with building backlinks, but it left me free to really teach everything I know about backlink building in the main product.

Secondly, the upsell product was delivered as a series of live webinar events, for some of which I'd invited experts to speak. I contacted these experts in advance, asking them if they'd be interested in presenting a webinar to my customers. I also offered them a small speaking fee, but this offer was rejected by every presenter. I found that they were all happy to do the webinar for free, just for the exposure they got from it.

The webinar format also meant that I didn't have to do a lot of up-front work to create my upsell.

Adding this upsell to my product resulted in a 30% increase in revenue. This also made my product more interesting for affiliates to promote.

Marketing the Product

Marketing is more important than your product.

Does that sound like the opposite of everything I just went on about, regarding high quality products?

Fair enough.

The reason I say marketing is more important is a pragmatic one: even a fantastic product will rarely sell all by itself. But even a crap product can be sold with good enough marketing.

Personally, I have no interest in selling crappy products. And certainly, it's much easier to sell a good product than a crappy one.

But it's important that you don't fall for the "build it and they will come" fallacy.

Just because you've worked hard to create a great product doesn't mean anyone will ever hear about it or want to buy it. You have to put in some more work for that.

Here are the components of my newbie marketing campaign I put together at the time:

Launch Sequence

For my product launch, I created 4 videos. In 3 of those videos I shared some information about SEO and link building. The fourth was a sales video for Backlink Battleplan.

If that seems familiar it's because I blatantly copied the "Product Launch Formula" many marketers were using at the time.

Where did I get the content for my 3 content videos from? From all the research and experimentation I'd done, I actually found it quite easy to put together these videos. Also, out of a total of 21 steps in the original Backlink Battleplan, I picked two that I taught in one of the free videos.

In each of the content videos, I asked people to share and comment, in a bid to get more traffic and get people engaged.

If I had to create landing pages for a launch sequence now, I'd use Thrive Landing Pages, but that didn't exist at the time. And as you can see here, it's not even necessary to use a special landing page tool or service. I just used a simple blog for my launch sequence.

Opt-In Landing Pages

For each of the 3 content videos, I created an opt-in page. Each landing page explained the benefits of what you'd learn in the content video and after opting in, people would be sent straight to that video.

Again, I'd use Thrive Landing Pages now, but for lack of a better option, I purchased a simple HTML template and used that, for my Backlink Battleplan launch.

The main point here is that I did some extra work to create a launch sequence and opt-in pages, instead of just creating a sales page and calling it a day.

There are two advantages to doing this:

1. The free launch content can generate traffic, buzz and momentum around your product, leading to more sales once you release the final video.
2. This whole setup makes the product and product launch look a lot more serious and professional. This made it easier to get affiliates to promote for me (more on that later).
   

The Sales Page

What's the secret to creating a compelling sales page that captures people's attention and and turns them into customers?

At the time, I had no idea.

Seriously, I felt completely out of my depth, when trying to create a sales page for my product. To this day, I don't consider myself a particularly good copywriter, but at the time, I was just clueless.

All I knew was:

• You should make sure to focus on the benefits your product will bring to a customer's life, not just list the product's features.
• You should break your content into easily digestible chunks and add headlines and sub-headings, to make it more skimmable.
  

That's it. The sum total of copywriting knowledge I brought to my first sales page.

The resulting sales page was made up of the following components:

Headline & Video

At the top, I had a big headline, stating the main benefit of my product. I don't have the original page anymore, but it was something like "Discover a Step-by-Step Link Building Plan (Using Free Methods Only)".

Below the headline, I placed my sales video. The content of the sales video was pretty much the same as the written content on the sales page. I just wanted to make sure that if someone preferred to watch a video, they could do that. And if they preferred to read, they could do that, instead.

Features & Benefits

I described everything I taught in Backlink Battleplan. Along with each description of a lesson or feature in the product, I made sure to explain why this is important or valuable. To me, this was the easiest way to go from features to benefits.

Testimonials

Here comes another benefit of releasing a minimum viable product before the public product launch: from my early customers, I had gotten a few testimonials. I added those to my sales page.

FAQ

Finally, I had an extensive FAQ section on my sales page. I tried to think of every objection or question someone might have before buying and added those in the FAQ.

All the research and one-on-one calls I had done were a huge help here, because I already knew how people in my target market thought and what problems and concerns they had.

After the FAQ section, I added a second buy button and with that, my sales page was complete.

Affiliate Program

So far, we've looked at all the content that I put together for my product launch. The next part is about how I got traffic to all of this content.

Affiliates played an important role in this.

The membership plugin I used was equipped with a simple affiliate program, which I made use of. In general, I don't recommend using a self-hosted script or plugin for this, though.

There are plenty of ways to create an affiliate program for your product, though. To list just a few:

• Zaxaa
• JVzoo
• ClickBank
• SendOwl
• GumRoad

And that's just scratching the surface. The goal is simply that you have somewhere that allows you to add your product and pay a commission to affiliates who send you traffic.

Affiliate Traffic

Once you have an affiliate program set up, you have to find affiliates who will promote your product. Here, I enjoyed two advantages from all the work I'd done:

1. Because I'd built a proper launch sequence, affiliates were more willing to get on board. They saw that I put in the work and I didn't appear like a total amateur.
2. Because I had a limited time special offer with a clear deadline, it was easy to get a clear "yes" or "no" answer from affiliates. Without a launch, you'll get many more "maybe later" answers.
   

Finding potential affiliates is easy. Anyone who has an audience of your potential buyers is a potential affiliate. Look for blogs, product creators, memberships, courses, Facebook pages, Instagram accounts, YouTubers etc. in your space.

The tricky part is getting people to actually join up and promote your launch. I focused on 3 things to help me get more affiliates:

1. My product was good: some (not all) affiliates care about promoting only good stuff to their audience. Others can only be won over by the promise of lots of money, but I wasn't going after them.
2. My product was highly specific: if my product had been about "how to start an online business", it would have been unremarkable and I would have been everyone's competitor. But my product was about building backlinks for free, so people who already taught other aspects of how to build an online business could promote my product, have a clear reason for promoting it and not feel threatened by it as a potential competitor.
3. I hustled: I just looked at it as a numbers game. I knew that 90%+ of people I contacted would give me a "no". So, I contacted many, many people.
   

In the end, only a small handful of affiliates promoted my launch, but it was enough to make a huge difference to my business (and ultimately, my life).

Solo Ads

Because I had no traffic of my own, I was on the lookout for more ways to get external traffic to my product launch. One of the things I tried were solo ads.

A solo ad is basically a paid placement of a message to someone else's mailing list.

Solo ad traffic is generally low quality traffic. After all, if someone has a mailing list of highly engaged subscribers who tend to fall into a buying frenzy, they won't be selling access to that list for a handful of dollars.

I knew this going in, but I gave it a shot anyway. I paid for solo ads on 3 different lists and linked to my free content opt-in pages. Sending from a solo ad directly to a paid offer is a recipe for failure. I figured maybe I could warm some people up with my free content and convert them into customers later.

Even though I didn't have sophisticated tracking in place at the time, I could tell that this experiment didn't pay off. I didn't get enough extra sales from the solo ad traffic to make up for what I had spent on it.

You can learn more about the do's and don'ts of solo ad traffic here.

Viral(-ish) Traffic: Contest

In my third content video, I announced a small contest: I asked the viewers to tweet a message with a link to my pre-launch content and a specific hashtag.

I would pick 3 winners randomly and they would each get free access to Backlink Battleplan.

To do this, I simply did a Twitter search for my hastag, copied all of the usernames into a spreadsheet and used a random number generator to pick the winners.

Note that I didn't use any fancy software or services to automate my contest. I also didn't give away extravagant prizes. This was a zero budget contest.

There was also a viral traffic component to this contest, because the link I asked people to tweet went to the same piece of free content in which I explained the contest.

Of course, that doesn't mean that my launch "went viral" in the sense of snowballing traffic numbers and millions of Tweets and views. But the contest did bring more traffic to my site and got a few more subscribers onto my mailing list.

More Viral(-ish) Traffic: Share for a Lower Price

Once my product was available for sale, I added another small element to generate traffic: I offered $20 off the purchase price for people who shared a link to my sales page on social media.

I used a social locker like this one, to do this. It would automatically display a button for the lower price purchase, after someone shared.

Not surprisingly, almost everyone who saw this offer shared, to unlock the lower price. This didn't lead to a traffic explosion, but I happily took the extra trickle of traffic that came in.

Sprint or Marathon?

A product launch is a great way to start selling a product, but after the launch, you're not done.

The way I see it, a product launch is a great way to create initial momentum for your product. It generates buzz. It gets the word out. But the goal for me was always to generate sales in the long term.

In practice, that meant:

• After my launch special offer, I increased the price, but I didn't remove my product from the market.
• I kept updating and improving my product, based on feedback I got from my customers.
• I kept contacting potential affiliates, looking for ways to work together. I sent out review copies of my product, I offered to teach SEO via webinars and I offered higher commission levels to affiliates who could potentially send a lot of traffic.
• I continued blogging about SEO and link building, so that I had a growing audience of people who'd be interested in my product, through the blog.
  

Like I mentioned previously, Backlink Battleplan didn't generate $100K in revenue during its launch. But it did eventually generate $100K through my continued marketing efforts. And the careful research and launch were what gave it all the initial momentum. It's what got the ball rolling.

The 3 Keys to Success

You've now heard the complete story and you've got a detailed outline of what I did to launch my first product.

In conclusion, let me summarize what I believe are the 3 most critical factors that helped my make this work, as a beginner to creating and launching products.

1) Aim First

This is really what all the market research comes down to: aim before you shoot.

Can you point out, very specifically, who the people are who need your product and where you can reach them?

If you can, you're half way to a successful product launch. If you can't, drop whatever you're doing and work on getting this information.

2) See It Through

As you can probably guess, creating a product isn't going to be the easiest thing you'll ever do. It's not going to be smooth sailing all the way from your first idea to the bank.

Be aware that there will be obstacles. There will be difficulties that you didn't plan for and sometimes, things will go a lot worse or be a lot harder than you imagined.

Whenever you encounter such obstacles, you'll feel like giving up. Sometimes, you'll question this entire thing and calling it quits will seem like the most reasonable choice you can make.

This is when you need to keep at it. You need to have the grit to see something through, past these obstacles.

For more on this, check out this post about when to give up and when to keep going.

3) Don't Make Excuses

What I hope, above all, is that you look at my story and see that I didn't do anything you can't also do. I really hope that you're not thinking: "Shane can do this, but it wouldn't work for me because XYZ".

There's really nothing extraordinary about any of the steps I laid out here. And there's no critical step I didn't tell you about. There's no secret formula to success that I'm keeping to myself.

There's nothing magical or superhuman here. It's just a bit of strategic thinking and a whole lot of hard work.

If there's some value you can and want to bring to the world as an entrepreneur, then I hope this course will help you. I want to see the value you have to offer. Me, and the rest of the world, are eagerly waiting.

All the best,