by Jeff Walker
This is where a well-constructed Launch Sequence shines. Since a Launch Sequence is such an incredible conversion machine, you’re going to be generating some outsized results. And that generally means outsized commissions for your JV partners. One of the ways this is measured online is in EPC—or “earnings per click”—which is the amount of commissions someone gets for everyone who clicks through to a promotion. So if someone sends 100 clicks, and those clicks generate commissions of $450 for the partner, then that’s an EPC of 450/100, or a $4.50 EPC.
I often get the question “What’s a good EPC?” There is no single answer to that question because an EPC will vary depending on the market and offer. What’s important is that if your launch can generate a strong EPC relative to the other offers in your market, then it’s going to be a lot easier to convince partners to mail for you. And again, a solid PLF-style launch is an EPC-generating monster.
Don’t Test with Your Partners’ Lists
If you’re going to have any success in the JV game, you need to build long-term relationships with your partners. I see plenty of people approaching this like a “one and done” type of relationship, but that makes it really tough to have any type of longevity in your business.
The reality is that when your partners promote your offer, they’re going to be watching their numbers, meaning they’re going to be watching their EPC. And they’re also going to be watching what type of experience you provide for the people they referred to you, because that experience will reflect on them. If they tell the people on their list to go watch your videos, and your videos are boring and content-free, it will negatively impact what those visitors think about your partner. So your partner has real skin in the game. Mailing for your launch has real costs and substantial risks to your partner. And if the results from their promotion aren’t good, then they probably won’t be promoting for you again in the future. Before you ask someone to mail for you, you need to be sure you have an offer that converts.
Fortunately, there’s an easy way to make sure your launch will perform for your partner, and that’s to do an Internal Launch first. In other words, first run the launch for just your list (even if you have a very small list). That way you get to test your Launch Sequences and your offer. That’s how you can be sure you have a winner before you ask your JV partners to take a chance on promoting your offer to their list.
When I tell my students to do an Internal Launch first, many of them want to skip over that little bit of coaching. They want to jump directly to the excitement and glory (and big dollars) of the JV Launch. There are several reasons to avoid doing that. When you do an Internal Launch, it gives you the opportunity to test out all your systems and get some experience under your belt. That’s really important, but what’s truly critical is that you have the opportunity to test your offer and your Prelaunch Sequence to make sure you’ve got a winner. This is the deal—you never want to test an offer with a partner’s list. You don’t want your partners being your guinea pig. If you have an offer that isn’t going to convert, you want to be the one taking that bullet.
Remember, your relationships with your JV partners should be treated like gold. You need to nurture and cherish them so they turn into long-term relationships. I said this above, but it’s so critical that it bears repeating: If you ask a JV partner to mail an offer and it doesn’t convert, then there’s a good chance they’re not going to mail for your next offer. On the other hand, if you’ve got a tested and proven offer (i.e., an offer that you ran an Internal Launch for), and you can show them your results, then they’re going to be a lot more interested in mailing. And they’re going to be a lot more likely to get some great results. And the better their results, the more likely they’ll mail for you in the future.
Getting JV Partners
It’s obvious that the JV Launch has some really huge benefits, so how do you go about getting great JV partners? This is a big topic, and I’ve spent entire days teaching about finding and nurturing JV relationships. But I’m going to do my best to break it down for you in a few pages.
First of all, you have to realize that you don’t need thousands, or hundreds, or even tens of JV partners. You’ve undoubtedly heard of the 80/20 rule, which says that 80% of your results come from 20% of your effort. Well, when it comes to affiliates and JV partners, it’s generally more like the 99/1 rule, where 99% of your results come from 1% of your partners. In my business, we’re extremely selective about who we take on as partners—we take on only top tier partners. And even so, the vast majority of our sales in any given launch will be generated by our top ten partners. It gets even more selective at the top, where the top three affiliates might generate a quarter of our sales. The way these numbers split out in any given launch will vary widely, but my point is that your top affiliates will generate the majority of your sales. And that means you don’t need a lot of affiliate partners; you need only a few good ones. I often have students ask me how they can get a hundred or a thousand affiliates. I always tell them to not worry about getting a lot of affiliates but to get three to five high-quality partners that will really support them.
Finding potential partners is easy. They are the other people who are publishing in your market. Just type the top keyword search for your market into Google. For example, if your site is about teaching people to play guitar, just do a search for “learn guitar.” Go to each of the top 50 listings and look around their site for a way to opt in. If they have an opt-in box, then they’re building an email list, and they are a potential JV partner. At this point you should go ahead and join their list. Of course, if you join 50 lists (and you should), you’re going to be getting a lot of email. You might want to set up a special email address for this so that your regular inbox won’t be flooded with all that email.
After you’re on those lists, watch what they send to their subscribers. Track who and what they’re promoting. Watch to see if they promote only their products or if they promote products from other businesses. Evaluate the quality of their marketing as well as the quality of the relationship they’re building with their list. Follow them in social media. Try to reverse-engineer their marketing and their offers.
What you’re trying to do is create a target list of potential partners. Remember, you need only three to five high-quality partners, although you might need to approach 50 potential partners to find those few who are really going to rock for you.
As you go through this process, remember that good JV partners always have more people who are trying to get them to promote than they could possibly support. That’s a reality of business. Their JV support is truly a scarce resource. So when you ask them to promote, you’re just another hungry mouth looking for a meal. That means you need to create some value for them if you want to stand out.
One of the best ways to build value for potential partners is to have a great Launch Sequence that generates a lot of commissions for them. But even before you get there, you need to find other ways to create value just to get on their radar. One of the very best ways to build value for them is to promote their product first—if you generate a bunch of sales for them, then they will definitely take notice. Another easy thing you can do is buy their product, put it to use, and then give some constructive feedback and/or a positive testimonial. You can also give them regular feedback on their blog and in social media. The bottom line is that there are a hundred ways to create value for a potential partner—and the more value you create, the more you’ll get back.
A Million Dollars in 53 Minutes
There are few things that can make as big an impact on your business (and your financial life) in as short a period of time as a successful JV Launch. And the impact goes far beyond the sales you generate in the launch. The long-term effect of the increased positioning in the market and the rapid list growth will reverberate in your business for years to come.
But if you’re going to have success with JV Launches and JV relationships, then you absolutely must reme
mber the two things I’ve hammered on throughout this chapter. First, you need to build long-term relationships with your JV partners. And second, you need to create real, long-term value for those partners. That doesn’t mean it’s going to take you years to build those relationships or that you are years away from doing a JV Launch. This can all happen surprisingly quickly, but it takes effort, and you should be thinking long-term.
When I did my first JV Launch, it literally created a business for me. That was the launch I mentioned at the start of this chapter, when I first rolled out Product Launch Formula in 2005 and the launch generated just over $600,000. I was instantly in business with sales, and I had a bunch of happy partners to whom I paid some big commissions. It also generated a list of more than 15,000 people. And it gave me huge positioning in the market. After that launch I was seen as one of the leaders in the industry, and Product Launch Formula was a recognized brand in the market. Sales continued to come in, and in my first year I did over a million dollars of sales. Those results all traced back to that initial JV Launch.
However, that was just setting the scene for what was to come next. In early 2008 I started working on an all new version: Product Launch Formula 2.0. I remade the product from the ground up based on everything I had learned since I first released PLF. In fact, it was going to be an entirely new offer, with greatly expanded content, over-the-top bonuses, and live coaching calls with me and my coaches. With this new offer, I increased the price to $1,997, and naturally it was time for another big JV Launch.
After two-plus years of supporting and nurturing my JV relationships, I had a lot of support to call on. During prelaunch, we generated over 34,000 optins—a truly amazing number to get over a matter of days. As I reviewed all the data coming in during the prelaunch, it sure looked like it was going to be a great launch. But you just never know exactly what’s going to happen, and as usual I had plenty of nerves going into launch day. It seemed like every possible JV in the known world was promoting my launch, and PLF had been a proven seller for years. But this was a new offer and a new price point, so I was plenty anxious.
Launch day was March 27, 2008. As usual, the days leading into launch day had been a blur. There’s always a lot to be done, especially during a JV Launch. And the morning of launch day found me with my usual set of launch nerves, but I didn’t have much chance to dwell on them; there were too many last-minute details to tend to. I remember that the minutes leading into the launch were complete chaos as we touched up the sales letter and the order form. And then it was time. All systems were go, and I hit the “send” button on the email.
I didn’t have long to wait. The orders started coming in within seconds. They would pile in as fast as I could refresh the stats on my page. Later on, when I went back and analyzed the data, I found one single second where we had more than $12,000 in sales. $12K in one second! We hit a million dollars in sales in 53 minutes. And the sales didn’t stop there. By the time I closed down the launch, after being open for only 34 hours, we were at $3.73 million in sales.
Of course, that wasn’t all profit. By that time I had a small team of three contractors (although I was still working out of my home office and my team was all “virtual”). And I had affiliate commissions to pay. And there were other costs. Since I’ve always offered a generous money-back guarantee, I knew we would have some returns. But the numbers were still completely staggering. I clearly remembered how, just a few short years earlier, my ultimate dream for my business was to make an extra $10,000 a year to help support my family. Or even more recently, when I had to start over again after my first business imploded following that fateful call from my business partner. And now here I was sitting with a launch that did nearly $4 million in just 34 hours. Unreal.
That’s the power of the JV Launch. It’s just about the most powerful weapon in the whole PLF arsenal. There’s only one thing that surpasses the JV Launch, and that’s the Business Launch Formula . . .
Creating a Business from the Ether: The Business Launch Formula
Chapter 11
How do you reinvent a business when world events throw you a great big curveball? When someone flies a plane into a building and it jeopardizes your entire business model?
Ruth Buczynski is a licensed psychologist who runs the National Institute for the Clinical Application of Behavioral Medicine (NICABM.com). NICABM is a pioneer and leader in the field of mind-body-spirit medicine, and they’ve been an accredited provider of continuing education for health and mental health care professionals for over 20 years.
Since starting the company, Ruth has helped tens of thousands of psychologists, counselors, social workers, doctors, and nurses build their skills and better help their patients, primarily through live conferences. Her conferences had up to 1,000 attendees from around the world, and she brought in top experts to provide cutting-edge training.
Ruth’s business was doing great until September 11, 2001. The terror attacks that day turned a lot of people’s lives upside down, bringing about all kinds of unforeseen consequences. One of the impacts was that a lot of people started cutting back on their business travel. That hurt many businesses, including Ruth’s. Her primary source of sales and revenue was her conferences—and it was becoming more and more difficult to convince people to get on a plane and travel to live events. While her business was still profitable, Ruth didn’t like the direction in which her sales and profits were trending.
And life had another huge challenge in store for Ruth. Around that same time she lost her long-term partner to a lengthy battle with a terminal illness.
As Ruth emerged from a period of intense grieving, she looked at her business with fresh eyes, and she knew something had to change. Profits were down, and it was getting harder to fill her events. That’s when Ruth looked to the Internet as a possible new path for her business. She decided to start creating “virtual” events instead of live, in-person events.
Ruth primarily sells to licensed practitioners. A small percentage of her clients are lay people, but most are accredited health care professionals. She offers continuing education credits for psychologists, physicians, nurses, counselors, and social workers. Her marketing needed to have a very professional look and feel but still make the sale. It was a perfect fit for the Product Launch Formula.
Surgeon General’s Warning:
You Don’t Know Who Is Watching Your Prelaunch
Ruth’s online conference was successful right from the start. In many ways she runs a classic PLF launch for each of her summits. She’ll publish three pieces of Prelaunch Content—generally videos, but occasionally a PDF report. For instance, in her recent “Brain Science” training, her first piece of PLC was a video, The Two Things You Can Do Today for Your Brain. That video generated more than 1,000 comments.
After Ruth runs a standard PLF-style prelaunch, she opens registration for her virtual event. The event is a series of webinars, and people can sign up and attend the webinars for free. Where Ruth makes her sales is at the “Gold” level, which includes the recordings of the webinars as well as transcripts and other bonuses.
It’s worth noting that while Ruth is a licensed psychologist, she is not the “expert” in her trainings. Instead, she brings in world-class experts such as Daniel Amen, Ram Daas, and Daniel Goleman.
It’s also worth noticing that Ruth actually gives away the bulk of her content—if you’re willing to be on each webinar live, then you can listen to all of them without spending a single dollar. But lots of people pay for the extra benefits and bonuses that come with the Gold level.
Because of the success of this model, Ruth has expanded. She now holds three or four different virtual events a year, including one on mindfulness, a second on brain science, and another on the treatment of trauma.
To put this all in perspective—Ruth generates enormous numbers. In one of her recent trainings, she had 9,000 people (from 70 countries) logged in to listen to one of her webinars. Those numbers take on an
even larger significance when you consider that the vast majority of listeners are licensed practitioners. Ruth is not really marketing to the general public, so she has a much smaller universe of people to sell to.
And Ruth recently saw another measure of her impact when she was invited to a meeting (along with other leaders in her field) to discuss ways to help the U.S. Army with mental health services for their troops. While Ruth was there she met the Surgeon General of the United States Army (a three-star general), who told Ruth, “I read your emails.”
In other words, the Surgeon General of the U.S. Army was watching Ruth’s Prelaunch Content!
Of course, the biggest news is that Ruth’s business not only survived her transition from live, in-person seminars to webinar-based training, but it thrived. In the last three years her business has grown by 160%, and she directly helps tens of thousands of people every year. And those health care professionals use Ruth’s training to help hundreds of thousands of their patients.
Ruth Buczynski
Ruth’s story is one of a complete reinvention of her business. The delivery of her product changed from a live conference to a virtual conference. Her marketing shifted from direct mail to an online-based launch. Along the way, she increased her profitability, expanded her reach, and lowered the risk in her business.