Look I’m no hotshot.
I’m not Tim Denning, Justin Welsh or Dickie Bush. This ain’t mega money we’re talking but it’s sizeable.
Over 4 days in Feb, I made more money than I’ve ever made in any time period. It’s called the 5–2–8 method, let me tell you all about it.
It starts with the product
The best marketing is a great product.
Don’t build an incredible launch strategy if you’re product is a pile of rubbish. You’ll end up with refunds coming out of your ears and the whole thing will be a big waste of time.
I spent a good while deciding what I was going to sell and a good while practising how to build the thing before ever making a penny.
My thing is online courses. I love to teach (I very nearly became a teacher) but I want to teach the things I’m passionate about, not a school curriculum.
I quickly decided that I would build a digital course for writers writing alongside their day job. If you want to know why I came to that decision I wrote an article all about it here.
Onwards to the launch strategy.
The launch timeline
You don’t want to publish your new thing too early.
People forget what they had for dinner yesterday if you post in October that you’re launching a course in Feb, people won’t remember.
The best bet is to tease a maximum of 3 weeks out, you can even talk about the building process a few weeks before that if you want to and take people on the journey of building your course.
But too early = forgotten.
My launch strategy was:
- 3 weeks out tease the idea
- 10-day launch series
Launch timeline: The course went live for a discounted price for 3 days, then up to full-price on the 4th day.
Content is king — articles
You need to have oodles of content if you want to build a decent launch strategy. Luckily, I’d been writing about my writing methods for a little while so I had a backlog of content.
I took old articles and reframed, reformatted and rewrote them.
It good a long while to get the feel and angle right of those articles but it was well worth it. I used those as the basis for my email series too.
- x4 articles (each describing an element of the course)
- x1 article announcing the course was live
- x1 post-live announcement
Improvement: I’d release an article the day before the price went back up to encourage people to purchase today.
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Emails
The articles formed the basis of my email content but I made the offer clearer and more compelling in the email series.
I was scared of selling to my audience. But here’s the thing, if you want people to buy, you’ve got to sell something to them and don’t dance about it. If you’ve got a great product, sell it.
I ended up with an email stack like this:
- x4 launch emails (largely based on the articles above)
- x1 to announce the course was live
- x3 post-launch discount price
Improvement: I’d segment my list so I wasn’t sending it to everyone, I ended up with quite a few unsubscribes.
Videos
I then made x2 videos that I released in the run-up to the course to give people a taste of what they could expect. It was tonnes more effort but worth it in the end.
Being able to build a deeper relationship with some folks because they learned something from me and watched one of my videos I’m sure led to more sales.
Improvement: I would have added these people who watched the video to a specific email list so I could target them better.
Then on Twitter, I shared posts that talked specifically about my knowledge of Medium and how it’s a great platform to explore.
Then over the launch weekend shared screenshots of what was going on so people could follow along.
It was pretty cool to provide daily updates and show the numbers going up and up, I suspect this is where some of the sales came from, social proof is a very powerful thing.
Improvement: I’d get more testimonials before launching so I had social proof baked in from the very beginning.
And that’s it
That was my launch strategy. It was tonnes of work and balancing that alongside full-time work wasn’t half a battle of willpower and resilience but it’s been incredible to see.
It shows me the power of the internet and what is possible when you put your mind to it.
The next product launch will be in June, so I’ll be building for that now.
I wish I took more time to build the launch series (I hadn’t quite realised how much work it was). This time I’ll launch the product at the end of June but start building the series in May.
Hopefully, that’s helpful.