How to launch a product
How to launch a product
One of the subjects I spend the most time writing about is the process I use to launch a product. That’s partly because it’s a subject I enjoy writing about, and partly because “How do I launch a product that sells as many as you do?” is the question I’m most asked.
I’ve put together this page to collect the most important of those resources together in one place. This isn’t everything I’ve written on the subject, but it’s a great place to get started. Once you’ve worked your way through these you’ll be ready to dig in to the more detailed articles and guides.
Contents
How to launch a product
Building products and selling them is, in my experience, by far the easiest way to make a living online.
I’ve worked places where we tried to make the money from ads, I’ve worked places where we did client work. Both are soul destroying and both are incredibly hard to make money from.
“The time when you could build a business and support it with ads has gone. A few big organisations will manage it, but the rest of us with normal traffic volumes need to find better ways to monetise.”
My businesses make hundreds of thousands of dollars every year, and they do that with no ad spend, no marketing budget, and no staff. It’s just me and a laptop. I’ve built the lifestyle business I always dreamed of, and I did it in a way that nobody told me was possible. Here’s how…
Building an audience
The most important thing to remember when launching a product is that nobody cares about it. It’s your job to go out and find them, then convince them that they *should* care.
It doesn’t matter if you’re launching on Kickstarter, on Amazon, or on your own website. People aren’t going to come looking for you, you need to go to them.
Spending a year building an audience before starting to sell anything is the best year I ever spent. Starting a couple of months before launch is too late, you should start today even if you don’t have a product to tell them about yet.
- Using a blog to build an audience
- Using landing pages to grow an audience
- How to grow an email list
- Keeping an email list fresh and engaged
- Launch a 6-figure product in a year
- Using guest posts to increase your influence
- Running contests to grow your audience
- When is your email list big enough?
- Automating Instagram for rapid growth
Prototyping a product
If you’re going to sell a physical product you need to make sure that you can actually make it, and just as importantly you need to be sure you can make it at a sensible price.
Sites like Alibaba.com have made it much, much easier to find factories around the world (but especially China) that will have the skills to make you a prototype of most things at a very fair price.
You do not want to launch for orders (even pre-orders) until you’re completely confident that you will be able to deliver.
Preparing for orders
When you’ve got an audience and you’ve got a product, you’re finally ready to start selling! Preparing for a Kickstarter project usually takes me around 3 months in campaign design, videography and photography, so don’t underestimate how long this stage will take.
- Don’t launch until you’re ready
- How to know when it’s time to launch
- The advantages of Kickstarter
- The advantages of Indiegogo
- Affiliate schemes for crowdfunding
Roundup
Selling a physical product is a great way of making money online, and thanks to the internet it’s easier now than it’s ever been. You only need to find a few thousand customers out of the billions of potential ones out there.
Make sure you’re ready to launch, don’t rush. In the scheme of things, spending a year building an audience is a small amount of time and it’ll pay off in the years to come.