by Jeff Walker
A quick note on prices and sales: I’ve seen Seed Launches for products between $50 and $3,000 (depending on the market and offer), so your financial results are going to vary dramatically from person to person and from offer to offer. But remember, this is more about building a great product and getting you in the game than it is about the money.
Now, as you deliver your product, remember that feedback and surveys are your friend. I survey people before each call. I ask them what their top questions about the next topic are. So back to that “learn guitar” example. If the first call is about “how to strum the guitar,” I would briefly explain the topic in one sentence, then ask, “What are your top two questions about strumming the guitar?”
Your job isn’t to get on the phone and answer every question. You want to go through the responses, group them into themes, and rewrite them into good questions that you can expand into teaching points. Then put them in a logical and compelling order. Once you’ve done that, you’re ready to get on the phone and give a great presentation.
After that first call, you send out another survey. First you ask if there are any additional questions about the topic of the first call (e.g., “How to Strum Your Guitar”). Then you ask for the top questions on your next topic. Repeat this process before and after every call. The happy result is that you’re building a product to perfectly match what your market wants. And along the way, you’re getting deep insight into your market and how to talk to your market . . . and that’s going to pay off in a big way when it comes time for you to do your first big launch. It might seem almost criminal, but you’re getting paid to gather all this market research.
Of course, you’re going to be recording these calls—something most bridge lines will do for you automatically. If you do five calls, and then add in your bonus Q&A call, you’ve now created six audio recordings. And you can get those audio recordings transcribed. Each hour of audio will equal about 15 to 20 printed pages, so you’ll have the makings of a book (or ebook) that’s 90 to 120 pages long. Now you’ve got audio and a book and there’s your multimedia product. BOOM! You just got paid to create a product!
You will also want to focus on getting your new clients some strong results, because they’re going to be great candidates for Case Studies as you move forward and get ready to launch your product in a bigger way.
So that’s the essence of the Seed Launch—simple, fast, flexible. And it sets the stage for much bigger launches to come in your business. It’s the perfect way to dip your toe in the water, learn how to teach your topic, learn about the hopes, dreams, and fears of your target market, and create a great product without much effort.
From Seed Launch to Empire
And just to show you where a Seed Launch can go, there’s a postscript to the story of my Product Launch Workshop Seed Launch. Even though I was able to convince only six people to buy my Product Launch Workshop, I felt like I had a winner on my hands. The people who went through the training loved it. And once they started to put my teachings to work in their businesses, the results started to roll in. It was the beginning of the huge tide of Product Launch Formula success stories from nearly every market and niche you could imagine.
Now, being the perfectionist that I am, I took all the material I had delivered in that first workshop, and I re-created it in a more polished version. I used all the lessons I had learned about teaching the material, and I added in some of my students’ Case Studies. A few months later I finished the creation of the first ever Product Launch Formula course.
And, of course, I had to put together a product launch for it. That was October, 2005. In the one-week launch that followed I did more than $600,000 in sales. Since that time I’ve done over $20 million in sales of PLF, and I now have over ten thousand PLF Owners. And you’re part of this story as well, because you would not be holding this book in your hand if it weren’t for that first very modest Seed Launch that I did. That just shows what can happen when you start with a Seed Launch and continue to leverage up your launches.
One thing to remember about those numbers: Even though I had previously run a successful business, I was starting over again. I had entered a completely new market with a completely new product. The big list I had from my prior business was of no use to me. I was starting from scratch again, and the Seed Launch is how I started out.
However, I had one more “secret weapon” in my arsenal to help build my new business, and that weapon let me come out of the gate with that $600,000 launch—the biggest launch I had ever done. So how did I do it in a brand-new market? In a market where I had no presence and almost no list?
My secret was the enormous power of the “JV Launch,” and that’s what the next chapter is all about . . .
How I Made a Million Dollars in a Single Hour: The JV Launch
Chapter 10
So exactly where is the line between fear and panic?
The minutes were counting down toward the open cart time much too quickly, and I was far too stressed and sleep-deprived. It had been more than 48 hours since I had gotten anything more substantial than a catnap. I was getting bombarded with emails and instant messages with questions, comments, suggestions. The traffic to my site was like nothing I had ever experienced. This wasn’t my first rodeo—I had already done dozens of launches. But the stakes were a lot higher this time, and I was playing on a much bigger stage.
The clock was ticking down, and I still had lots to do. I needed a headline. I needed to test the order process. I needed to mail my list. I needed to communicate with my partners. Arrrrrgggghhhh . . . The minutes kept ticking away toward the open at 10AM Mountain Standard Time.
It had been a little more than six months since my prior business had imploded due to a partnership breakup, and it was time for a “revenue event”—meaning time to make some money. I was ready to be back in business. But this time I wanted a business where I had complete control, where I didn’t have a partner to consult every time I had a new idea or plan.
And I was ready to leave the stock market niche behind. I had loved the stock market when I started that business, but I had come to realize that I loved marketing even more, and I was really good at it. I knew I didn’t want to be a marketing consultant. After years of being an information entrepreneur, I was in love with publishing and teaching. I was in love with the inherently leveraged nature of the business; my income wasn’t tied to the number of hours I worked but to how well I could sell my products. And I was also in love with the impact I could make. Instead of helping a few dozen people as a consultant, I could impact thousands as a publisher. And I was clearly legit—I’d been making a living with a marketing-driven business on the Internet for longer than most people had access to the Internet.
I had only one issue. It was a crowded market. There were thousands of people who were trying to make a living as an Internet marketing expert. Some of them were wildly successful, but the majority of them could barely afford their business cards. And it was a market in which I had no positioning or traction. Even though I had long been doing business online, even though I had a completely revolutionary new way to sell online, even though I had been making more money online than most of the so-called Internet marketing gurus . . . well, none of that mattered because I didn’t have a presence in the niche. All my email lists and web sites were about the stock market. My tens of thousands of email subscribers in the stock market niche wouldn’t do me any good starting a business in the Internet marketing niche.
However, I did have an ace in the hole. It was only one card, but it was a powerful one, and I was going to play that card with everything I had.
A couple years earlier, in February 2003, I had attended an Internet marketing seminar. When I walked into that seminar, I felt like I had found my tribe.
Doing business online back in those days could be lonely. I fought the good fight every day out of my home office, but almost no one understood what I was doing. The idea of an online business was complet
ely foreign to almost everyone.
But at that seminar, I was suddenly among a couple of hundred other people who did the same thing I did—they all had the same hopes, dreams, challenges, and frustrations. And at the back of that conference room a small group of us forged a bond that would last for years and change an entire industry. But that was all in the distant future.
In the short term, I learned one important fact—that the product launches I had quietly been doing in my stock market business were truly unique. No one else was doing anything like them. Before that seminar, I didn’t realize how unusual my product launches were. I had recently done the launch that brought in $106,000 in seven days and helped me buy my house. But I didn’t realize just how unusual that result was, and I didn’t realize how unusual my strategies were. I had assumed that I couldn’t be the only person doing these types of launches. I had figured it out on my own, so I assumed others must have done the same. But I was wrong. Each time I mentioned one of the launches I had done in my business, everyone listening would go silent and their ears would perk up. My launches seemed to defy the normal laws of marketing and business.
I left that seminar with lots of new friendships—some of them with people who were leaders in the Internet marketing industry. These were people with lists and connections. At that time I was still publishing about the stock market and years away from thinking about publishing in the Internet marketing niche. But I loved talking to my new friends because of our shared passion for marketing and business-building. At some point, I started helping a few of them put together product launches, and they enjoyed some spectacular successes with those launches. Word slowly filtered throughout many of the major players in the nascent Internet marketing industry that this guy Jeff Walker had a brand-new technique that could bring in crazy profits in a very short period of time. I didn’t know it at the time, but I was sowing the seeds for my next business.
My First JV Launch
One of the critical components of any launch is your list of prospects. As I showed you in the Seed Launch chapter, it’s entirely possible to do a smaller-scale launch when you’re first starting out without a list (or with just a tiny micro-list). But if you’re going to make a big impression in the market, you need a list. Now there are lots of ways to build a list, but the single fastest way to do it is by using the lists that other people have already built and curated. That’s the essence of a Joint Venture Launch (also known as a JV Launch).
In a JV Launch you have partners mail their lists and tell their people about your launch. If you make a sale to one of the people your partner sends your way, you pay your partner a commission.
The way this generally works is that your JV partners will mail their list and encourage their readers to visit your Prelaunch Content. In most JV Launches, the JV partners actually send their list to your squeeze page, so that the visitors have to join your list before they get to your PLC. Throughout your launch, you follow up with your new prospects. You use special affiliate tracking software (see the Resource Page at http://thelaunchbook.com/resources) on your web site to track which JV partner referred each prospect. Then when you Open Cart and start making sales, your software automatically tracks who referred each new client to you so you can pay commissions to the right partner.
One of the most powerful byproducts of doing a JV Launch like this is that you end up building a serious “launch list” out of all those leads. And after you do the launch, you get to keep that list. This is the single fastest way there is to grow a list. Of course, list size is completely dependent on your niche, who your partners are, and the size of their list, but it’s possible to add thousands of people to your list in just a few days during a JV Launch.
And that’s exactly what happened to me. Because I had built relationships with the leaders in the Internet marketing industry—and often gave them lots of help with their launches—these experts were ready and willing to help me out. So when I came out with my first piece of Prelaunch Content, I had many of the major players on board and mailing their lists about my PLC. Within a couple of days, I had 8,000 people join my list. And it didn’t stop there. My JV partners kept mailing throughout my prelaunch, and I built a list of more than 15,000 email subscribers during the launch. That was a breathtaking number. In my old stock market business, where I was operating in a much bigger niche, it took me years to build a list that size. And now I had done it in a matter of days in my new business—all through the power of my JV partners.
And there I was on October 21, 2005, just a few minutes before it was time to Open Cart on my launch, and yes . . . I was scared. And there was an important reason for that fear.
It wasn’t that I doubted my capabilities. I knew I could put together a great launch, and I knew I had a great product. And the feedback I had gotten during the prelaunch told me that everything about my offer was resonating with my prospects. So it was clear that my launch was hitting on all cylinders.
But since it was a JV Launch, I felt an extra layer of responsibility. My partners had trusted me with their support, and it was my job to make that trust pay off. I’ll cover this in more detail a little later, but you have to treat your JV relationships like gold. And that’s why I was extra nervous as the minutes ticked away before my open.
Of course, if my partners had any doubt about the result, they were blown away in the opening minutes of the launch. Within the first hour, I had already done more than $70,000 in sales. By the end of the first day, after only 14 hours, the sales were over $200,000. When I closed down the launch a week later, the final sales total was just over $600,000. Not a bad way to start a new business—especially since it was in a brand new market, with a brand new product, and I had spent zero dollars on advertising. And I did all this from my home office out in the mountains of Colorado, and my only staff was my wife, Mary, helping me with customer service. No, not a bad way to start a new business.
Of course, the devil is always in the details, and as is true with any business venture I certainly had costs. All those sales didn’t flow directly into my wallet. One of the biggest costs in a JV Launch is your affiliate commissions. Your JV partners are not going to mail their lists about your launch out of the goodness of their heart. The core part of the JV Launch, which makes it work for everyone, is that you track who the leads and sales came from, and you pay commissions on the sales you make to those leads. In this case, I was paying 50% of the sale to my referring partner. Back with that very first launch of Product Launch Formula, the price was $997, so I paid a commission of $498.50 for every sale that a partner referred to me.
I often have students ask me what’s a typical commission to pay JV partners. My answer is always the same: There is no “typical.” A commission varies by launch, by market, by niche, and even by partner. What you pay, and exactly how you structure your JV compensation, is a business decision. I was able to pay a 50% commission because the margin on my product is relatively large. In my business, the costs are all involved with actually generating the lead and making the sale. But other businesses will be different. If you’re selling physical goods (computers, barbeque grills, humidors, etc.), then the commissions you pay are going to be a lot lower. There are even some markets where the initial commissions are a lot higher than 50%. Such can be the case where there is a lot more revenue in the “back end” sales—that is, the follow-up sales after the original sale.
No matter how you structure your JV compensation, one big advantage of this type of promotion is that you pay your commission AFTER the sale is made. Compare that to standard advertising, where you spend a bunch of money before you even know if the advertising is going to work. No matter if it’s TV, radio, newspaper, online, direct mail, yellow pages, or some other medium, your money is spent and you’re left hoping to get a return on that upfront investment. With JV or affiliate relationships, you pay based only on the results, and you pay after the sale is made.
Affiliate or JV Partner: What’s the Dif
ference?
So exactly what is the difference between a JV partner and an affiliate? They’re actually pretty much the same. In each case, you’re talking about someone who is going to promote your product and get paid a commission if one of the prospects they refer to you buys something. So if Affiliate John sends Prospect Alice to your web site to look at your product, and Prospect Alice buys your product, then you’ll pay Affiliate John a commission. You set the level of the commission (as either a percentage of the sale or a fixed dollar amount per sale), and that commission level is part of your agreement with Affiliate John.
The mechanics of this arrangement are the same whether we’re talking about JV partners or affiliates, and you can really use the terms interchangeably. However, the terms “JV” or “JV partner” generally imply a closer relationship. I know almost all of my JV partners personally, and during a launch I’m communicating with them closely—always via email and often on the phone or via text. Many of them are close friends of mine.
Why JV Launches Work When you look at all the advantages of a JV Launch (far bigger sales, crazy fast list building, huge positioning in your market), this might sound like the answer to everyone’s problems. However, there are some core elements you need to have in place before you even think about a JV Launch, and there are many mistakes to be avoided. So let’s walk through this one step at a time.
The first thing you have to remember is that, just like you, your potential JV partners are in business to make a profit. If they’ve built up a substantial, responsive list, that is a considerable asset they’ve put a lot of time and investment into. The odds are very high that they understand just how powerful an asset their list is, and they’re not going to be interested in mailing their list about any old launch that comes wandering down the lane. In other words, just because you put together a Launch Sequence and an offer, don’t expect them to be falling all over themselves to promote your launch. The fact is, if they have a strong list they probably have more opportunities to promote offers than they can possibly accommodate. That’s reality. (And if they don’t have a strong list, they’re not going to be a very good partner, so you shouldn’t be bothering with them.) A list can be mailed to only so many times, and anyone with a substantial list most likely gets requests every day to promote someone else’s product. To have a good list is to possess a scarce resource.