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.