Why do some products launch spectacularly good while others launch tocrickets?

Creating a digital product from scratch is already tricky. Creating a product thatsells is even harder.

Building your product after work or school, spending countless nights to makesure everything is as perfect as possible.. is only part of the story.

It’s how you launch and promote the product that will determine if you willearn a living selling it. So in this playbook we will look at five pillars of asuccessful product launch.

The Five Pillars of a Successful Product Launch

1. Building an Audience That Wants to Buy From You

2. Setting a Proper Price for Your New Product

3. Writing a Compelling Product Description

4. Making a Product Image That Captures Viewer’s Attention

5. Using The Formula for a Highly Successful Product Launch

Do you want to become a better seller, earn more dollars without working moreand delight your customers at the very same time? Then let’s get started!

Building an AudienceBefore you ever start working on anything you think of selling, you have to be perfectly clear on who you’re going to sell it to.

Your audience.

Make no mistake, audience won’t just magically find you, even if you have the perfect product. You have to hustle and build your audience, one person at a time. 1

Who Are You Making The Product For?

Think about it. Are you building a product with an idea that virtually everyonemight buy it? Or even worse, do you think that you will figure out who will buy itlater on?

WRONG. Figuring out who you are making the product for should be the veryfirst thing you do. Seriously, don’t even think about creating something withoutdoing this first.

Who would benefit the most from your product? Are these people ready andwilling to buy from you? How do you organise them in a group and keep themengaged? These are the questions you should ask before committing yourself tocreating any product.

Now think of one thing that unites all these people. Doesn’t matter whatindustry you and they are in or the type of product you are selling. What’s theone thing that your potential customers have that you want?

If you’re thinking about money, you’re jumping the gun here. Money comeslater. There’s one more thing that’s easier to get, yet arguably more importantfor you in this initial stage. Their email. And you need to get it.

The Power of Selling Through Email

The most valuable piece of information one person can give another on theInternet is his email address. This hasn’t changed much in the last 10 years,despite the emergence of Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and whatnot.

Focusing on these tools as your main sales channel doesn’t even come near toproducing the value that building an authentic email list does. From my ownexperience - when sending a tweet to 1000 followers, 4 of them clicked on thelink. When sending an email to 1000 subscribers, 92 of them clicked on the link.That’s why building an email list should really be your focus when building aaudience.

You might think that building an email list is harder than attracting newfollowers or fans. But that’s actually not the case. Once you utilise all the tools atyour disposal, collecting emails is even easier. You just have to blog..

Blog, blog, blog

Of course, you can start with Twitter and build your audience there. It’s easy tofollow 100 users per day and expect a part of them to follow back. But how manyof these users will really be engaged with your content? Did your know that yourtweet only has about 18 minutes to make an impact? That’s right.

Why bother with blogging at all? Consider this. Would you rather buy fromsomeone you know is an expert in the field or a guy you just heard of? That’swhat I thought. Blogging enables you to become one of those experts.

You can be a video editor, blogger, fitness guru or a designer. If you’re seriousabout your craft, you learn something new every day from practicing your skills.Share what you find out with your audience, even if it’s a small thing.

Let them know what works and what doesn’t. Don’t be afraid to teach otherswhat you have just learned. If you’re consistent in your efforts, great things willhappen.

Tools to Help You Build an Audience

Sellfy - the easiest way to sell digital goods online. Our unique socialdiscounts feature will help you capture buyers emails, even if yourproduct is free!

Buffer - helps you schedule posts for publishing on social media. You canwrite all your posts on Monday and Buffer will spread them outthroughout the week.

CoScheduled - blog editorial calendar for WordPress. It makes planningyour blog post publication schedule and social media updates 10x easier.

SumoMe - tools to grow your website’s traffic and collect more emailsfrom your blog or website. Must have for all beginners.

Setting a Proper Price for Your New ProductPrices go up, sales go down, everybody knows that, right? Not so fast. While true for most of the product categories, it is not always the case.

Cigarette sales aren’t very affected by price changes because they’re addictive.

Similarly, iPhone lovers won’t be very sensitive to change in price because of brand loyalty and the perceived value of the product.

Ok.. How does this help you sell more digital products again? Read on to find out…

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Using Anchoring And Contrast to Earn More

Remember the last time you went to a restaurant? Picture it. You walk in, go toyour table. Sit down. Next thing you know the waiter brings you the wine menu.

You look at the first item and see a $3,000 price tag. Ouch! You start scanningthe page to find something more affordable. Couple of rows down you find a $60bottle that seems ok and you order it.

Consider an alternative scenario of this dinner. Waiter brings you the same winemenu, only this time the prices are aligned from the cheaper to more expensiveoptions. You immediately notice that cheap wine for $14 that has a 4 star ratingon Vivino. You order it.

Now let’s think for a moment about what happened. When a high priced‘anchor’ was present, you were more compelled to buy that $60 bottle of wine.Compared to $3,000 bottle, the one for $60 doesn’t seem so expensive.

Why am I telling you this? Simple. It doesn’t matter if you’re selling wine, fonts,video intros or ebooks. The best way to sell always stay the same. To sell aproduct priced $39, you just need to put it next to one priced $79 or $169.

Even if you don’t end up selling any of the premium priced goods, it will stillhelp to drive sales of the cheaper version, which really is your goal.

Price For Dear or Price For Free but Never Price For Cheap

People who buy your product will value it more if they have spent top dollar onit. Not only do we perceive higher-priced items to be more valuable, but we alsobehave accordingly once we have that product in our possession. A $2.99 digitaldownload probably won’t be something that you blog or tweet about.

However, if you spent $39 on that product, you’d treasure it more. Thus higherpriced products not only help the seller earn more in the long term, they alsoact as recruiters of loyal evangelists for your products.

Sell Something Truly Valuable

All of this advice for pricing high is completely meaningless if you’re sellingsomething worthless. If you’re selling your product for a lot of money, you havean ethical obligation to provide real value.

If you offer a slipshod, half-baked piece of garbage, you might as well price it at$0.99. In order to be successful, you have to create value, and believe in thatvalue enough to sell it at a premium.

Writing a Compelling Product DescriptionAre you still writing product descriptions that simply describe your products? You’re doing it WRONG. Stop treating your product description like it’s a TV operating instructions.

You need to SELL your product in description.

Here’s how to do it. 3

Speak The Customer’s Language

There’s this trick a lot of copywriters use when writing descriptions for theirproducts. It’s simple. All you have to do is imagine that you’re explaining theproduct to your friend. Not just any friend of course, someone who would beinterested in this type of product.

It will make your product description sound less like it’s something from a TVremote operations manual and more like you’re actually having a real face-to-face conversation with a person.

Even with this advice, creators often don’t even know where to start. Or asdescribed by Marshall Bruce Mathers III, are having a “I don’t know what wordsto use” moment.

Luckily, there’s an easy solution to this problem. Search online for specificsentences, words and word combinations that people buying similar items use.More specifically, search for product reviews on Amazon or see what people aretweeting about similar products on Twitter.

There are two important reasons to do this. Firstly, you might be using someunnecessary jargon in your product description. If your target audience isunfamiliar with the terms you use, you’re going to lose their attention.Secondly, using the exact words that your potential customers use to describesimilar products will make your product more relatable, easy to understand andwill probably help you uncover ways to describe product benefits in ways younever thought about.

Sell The Experience by Focusing on The Benefits

Remember the first iPod? It was kind of cool, wasn’t it? And smartly marketedtoo. While competitors were focused on memory size, advertising things like1GB of storage space, Apple took a different approach and said that iPod canstore 1,000 songs.

The best part about this story? You can do this too. All you need to do is lookthrough the “what is the coolest thing the buyer can do with this product?” lenswhen re-writing your product features as benefits. Like for the iPod, what was

the coolest thing you could do with 1GB of storage space? Listen to 1,000 songs,of course!

Compose Mini-stories

I bet that you’ve heard the saying - stories sell. It’s true. Since pre-historic timesour ancestors have been communicating through telling stories. By now arebrains are wired to relate to the heroes of these stories. Clever marketers can usethis to their advantage and make buyers forget that they’re actually readingsales copy or a product description.

So how do you write the kind of mini-story that sells?

By using the “as heard on the street” formula. Imagine something wacky youheard on the street, that would make your head turn ‘Eggghh?’. Add the productyou’re selling into the mix and there you have it - a mini-story to tell in yourproduct description.

For example, “I stole an image from Google” + “photo pack you’re selling” couldmake something like “I stole an image from the Internet once, got caught andpaid a $700 fine. Now I’m shooting all photos myself. Here are best 100 photos Ishot this summer.” Sounds better than “100+ high quality photo pack 2015”,doesn’t it?

The Power of Social Proof

People want to buy things that are popular. If it’s popular it must be good, right?When it comes to your digital products, there are a couple of ways to transmitthat sense of popularity of your product.

Inserting quotes from press or bloggers about your product is one way to do it. Asimple testimonial from a delighted customer can be used too.

One other thing you can do is insert a note like “Sold over 1,000 copies”. Justdon’t lie about the number of copies you sold. It’s easy to spot that kind of lie. Aproduct with 1,000 sales and zero social shares and no mentions online is kindof suspicious to say the least. This can damage your reputation beyond repair.Don’t say I didn’t warn you.

Other types of social proof include number of positive reviews from existingcustomers, the average rating for your product and number of social shares - allof which are already included on your Sellfy product page.

Making a Product Image That Captures Viewer’s AttentionMost of the people who see your designs will spend less than 5 seconds deciding whether they are interested in it or not.

You spent months brainstorming what your next design project should be, weeks making the project come to life, days on SEO for your product page and then the same amount of time on promoting your designs. And yet it all comes down to these 5 seconds.

Why not spend a little more time and effort on making a good first impression? Especially when it’s so easy once you know where to look.

4

Five Second Test

Ask a friend to look at your product page for five seconds. Then ask him whatare you selling. If he can’t tell you - there’s a problem. And not with your friend -with your product image, description or both. Fix it.

Show What The Product Can Do For The Customer

How can your product help potential customers? What can your product do forthem, that other products can’t? How will it solve their pain?

One technique that can be used to show the benefits of your product is beforeand after images. Obviously this technique can’t be used for all products, soproceed with caution.

Think of all the ads of skincare products you see in magazines (do you still buythose? really? it must be damn good). Why have they been consistentlydisplaying the before/after images for years now? Because it works.

The Instagram girls who post their fitness progress and sell gym (or diet) planshave picked up on this a long time ago.

Tell Exactly What Your Customers Will Be Getting

Imagine you’re selling digital hand-drawn patterns. The question you potentialcustomers will be asking about this type of product is - will it work both forPhotoshop? What about Sketch. And so the lesson here is to always tell yourcustomers what they’ll be getting.

For instance, one of the questions could be how many files or items areincluded? What systems are supported? Don’t think that if you have includedthis info in description people will read it. Strike twice. Mention any critical infoon both the product image and in product description.

Use Short Sentences, No More Than 10 Words Per Image

There are a lot of creators out there who just can’t keep it short when it comes towriting text on their product images. This results in a wall of text that spoils any

chance of good first impression you and your product might have. Don’t be oneof those creators. Limit yourself to 10 words at most.

Product Images Should Have Value On Their Own

Imagine that someone stumbles upon your image by searching for images onGoogle. There’s no other information available and the viewer doesn’t knowwhat is it that you’re selling and who is the author. The chances that he willclick on the product link to find out more information are so low, they almostdon’t exist. You need to FIX IT.

Be Aware Of The Context

Make sure you properly account for the environment where you image will bedisplayed. A good example of this is designing cover images in Twitter – theyhave this ‘blind spot’ where the user avatar will go. If you don’t remember thisdetail when designing your cover image, some of your image text or othercrucial elements of your design may be not visible to the viewers.

Look at the way your goods are displayed on your product page or on themarketplace. Notice how your images are resized, what is the colour of thebackground, are there any elements like badges, or info about discounts, thatcan block parts of your image?

Details Always Matter

Attention to details is not something you can just add later on. If your image hasspelling errors or poorly cropped images, how can the customer trust you todeliver a high quality product? Check if everything looks OK once you’re readyto upload your product. Maybe even double-check it the next day. Just to besure that late night submission didn’t negatively affect your vision (orjudgement).

The Power of Search Engine Optimisation

Keep in mind that the file name you use for your product image will be used byGoogle as image title. This title will the be used by Google’s algorithms todetermine whether your image is relevant to what people are searching for. Ifyour selling “retro steam punk pirate font“ it may be a good idea to rename your

file name from “project_scr_12_23_2022_final.png” to something moreappropriate. Otherwise both search engines and potential customers might notbe able to find your work when searching for relevant keywords.

Consistency And Brand Identity

Do you have a consistent style in the way you present your products? Is it easilyrecognisable? Can people guess that this product was designed by you, only bylooking at your product image?

If the answer to any of these question is no, you KNOW that you have some workto do.

Tools to Create a Beautiful Product Image

Canva is a fantastic drag and drop tool for creating beautiful images. Ithas a set of pre-designed layouts to edit and adjust to your needs. It’s theperfect tool for a complete design novice (like me).

Befunky is the easiest collage maker tool you’ll find on the web. Make sureyou have a clear idea or a story you want to show in this collage, or you’regoing to get stuck using this for hours.

Pixlr is like a web-based Photoshop (or any other graphic designsoftware). It gives you more control than any alternative with full supportof masks, layers AND it works from your browser.

Formula for a Highly Successful Product LaunchThere are so many ways to get people interested and then excited about your launch. When the launch day comes, you want people to ALREADY be eager to give you their money! In this section we’re going to explore some of the ways to make it happen. 5

Launch For Your audience

Generate product ideas that will fit your audience needs and wants. Ignoreeverything else.

Most of the first time sellers create a product and then search for an audiencefor that product. Don’t do that. Having an audience in advance is a tremendousadvantage you can leverage. And understanding who ‘your people’ are andwhere they are is what will make your launch successful.

Start With The Objective

First, set up a simple and achievable objective for your launch. Whether it’s 10customers, 100$ in sales or 300 new emails collected. Then, work backwardsfrom that number and create a product launch strategy to help you achieve thisgoal.

Really think about who are the people you can call ‘my audience.’ Where canyou find more people like them? Take a piece of paper and pen and write thisdown.

By setting the objective and figuring out strategy for your launch you will beable to launch your product with focus. What’s more important, once youaccomplish this goal, you will get the momentum going.

Validate (and FAIL) Quickly

If you’re not sure whether customers will buy your product once you launch it,you’re doing “hope and a prayer” marketing. You’re hoping that people will likeyour product and praying that they will like it enough to actually buy it. Thingis, you can answer the “when I launch, will customers buy?“ question inadvance. Here’s how…

Does Your Audience Really Need Your Product?

When Bryan Harris started Videofruit on April 29th, 2013, he didn’t dream ofquitting his day job and supporting his family through digital product sales. Hedidn’t have a product launch plan, or even a product. All he had was an idea.

That week Bryan discovered a way to make cheap explainer videos. He decidedto test if there’s a product opportunity there, by posting the offer inside a smallFacebook group. Forty nine people responded. Bryan sent them all a privatemessage and received 25 responses.

What he learned then about his audience enabled him to spend time on productthat is guaranteed to sell. Turns out, nobody wanted to pay for the video.. theywanted to know HOW to make the videos themselves. And so the idea for theBootstrapper’s Guide to Explainer Videos course was born. Bryan had an idea,very interested prospects, but one thing was still missing.. actual customers.

So Bryan validated the idea for the course by setting a goal: attracting at least 3people to pre-order it for $29. This would prove that people were not just beingnice, or saying ‘yes’ because they wanted to jump out of the conversation withhim. Again, Bryan messaged all 25 of interested prospects and within the next 2days, 19 of them purchased.

The result? $551 from 19 early customers. That’s enough to start working on theactual course. And what’s more important - proof that his product will besuccessful once launched.

Find People With An Audience And Partner Up

When you’re only starting out - you often don’t have any sizeable audience tospeak of. No audience to launch to.

How do you get exposure in this case? One way you can do this, is by leveragingan existing audience someone else has.

All you need to do is find places where your audience hangs our and figure outways to partner up.

Product Launch Roadmap

1. Start by clearly defining your objective. One number. Number ofcustomers, sales or revenue goal. That’s what you need.

2. Find out who are the people in your audience. Where can you find morepeople like this?

3. Quickly validate your idea with pre-orders. Don’t spend time buildingsomething nobody needs.

4. Find bloggers, webmasters, entrepreneurs or group admins with the sameaudience and partner up with them.

5. Create your launch editorial calendar. Include blog posts, tweets, guestposts, and any other piece of content you’ll create to attract more people.

6. Set up an account on Sellfy to sell your product.

7. If you have an email list or a notable social networks presence - starthinting about your product launch in advance.

8. Launch that baby!

9. Make sure everyone gets what they paid for. Thank everyone who helped.

10. Think how you can build on this momentum to succeed with your long-term goals.

DID YOU ENJOY THE PRODUCT LAUNCH PLAYBOOK?

Then please share it on Twitter and Facebook. Your friends will thank you

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