Jeff Walker has a huge passion for the Internet publishing business and loves sharing it with others who are interested in putting together their own very profitable websites. You'll love Jeff's zero-hype, uncensored step-by-step approach to Internet publishing success. Discover exactly how Jeff started his own business with no money, no experience and made six figures in seven days.
RIC THOMPSON: I think all of us who have been in the Internet marketing field for any length of time have seen these. To turn this around, Jeff-you mentioned objections from the marketplace-one of the things that comes to my mind is for those of us hearing about doing these things, the only examples that we see are the big-name people doing them, like Rich Schefren and Yanik Silver.
You talk about normal people, and yet what we typically see are big names. Talk to us about that. Do you have to be a big name? Do you have to have a lot of resources to do this? At what level can you be at to utilize the Product Launch?
JEFF WALKER: That's a great question. By the time we get off this call, people will understand just how passionate I am about helping entrepreneurs build their businesses, and about product launches, the power, and how it changes businesses and changes the paradigm. I'm really passionate about this. I sell a product on how to do this, so I'm naturally a cheerleader for it.
Selling the actual Product Launch Formula is really easy for me because I just show people who have had success. What I do is publish case studies. The case studies are just people who bought my product and did it. I know a lot of people are worried that they're not a big guru and so they're not going to be able to do a launch. None of my case studies have anything to do with big gurus because I'd rather show the regular people.
For example, one of my favorites is John Gallagher. John Gallagher publishes the website, www.LearningHerbs.com. It's about using plants and herbs for eating and medicinal purposes; such as how you eat stinging nettle without stinging your mouth and how you use sage. It's about going out in the forest and foraging for plants and herbs. It's as far from making money online as you can possibly get.
John is definitely not a guru. He's a great guy. I've met him several times. He's a fellow Bruce Springsteen fan. We spend more time sending text back and forth about what show we're going to try to go to. John is far from a guru. He's just a regular, goofy guy. When John bought the Product Launch Formula, he was actually on food stamps. He wasn't a bum or anything. He had a wife and a family.
He was going to school fulltime. He was also volunteering nearly fulltime. He had so many demands that he was actually getting assistance via food stamps. He borrowed money to buy the Product Launch Formula. This was, of course, before I knew him at all. He actually created a board game about learning about herbs. He borrowed money to create that board game. This isn't, obviously a 'how to make money' product.
It's not even an information product. It's a board game. When he originally released it I think he sold 12 of them. I didn't know this, but this is how a board game works. He had it made in China. He had to buy $30,000 worth. He borrowed $30,000 from his parents or his in-laws. He had boxes and boxes of thousands of them that he had made. They sold 12 of them. He went online and typed 'product launch' into Google.
He found my site and my product. He bought the product. He did a Product Launch Formula for this board game. I'm trying to remember the exact numbers. I think he sold 600 or 700 of these games at about $30 a piece. Initially, when he rolled it out and released it with the hope-marketing, he sold 12 of them. When he did the Product Launch Formula, he sold 600 or 700.
He's now gone on and sold out of that game, built a membership site and is actually doing a nice six-figure business. It's a membership site about herbal education. He's a regular guy. If you go to www.LearningHerbs.com you can see a video of John. He's the most regular guy you could imagine. He's the most non-guru guy you could ever imagine. He's just one example.
James Avoy, who had a product about dressage. I had no idea what it was, but it's basically a type of horse riding. They call it 'horse ballet'. He had a product about horse ballet. He's not a guru. I could go on and on. Frederic Patenaude has a product about raw food. One after another after another; just regular people who had great success doing this. If you want to be a guru or an expert, certainly John Gallagher is now an expert.
He is viewed as one of the top experts in the herbal education market because he did this launch. You see that over and over. If you ever want to become an expert or guru, which is a good thing-a lot of people have a negative feeling for that word 'guru', but it just means you're a leader or authority in your market-it's a fantastic way to achieve great influence, sell a lot more product, make a lot more money, attract joint venture partners and on and on. There are an incredible number of benefits to being an expert or guru. The easiest way to do that is with a big launch.
RIC THOMPSON: Very true. You'll get a lot of attention at one big time. One of the things I want to go back and touch on, Jeff, is the nuts and bolts of how this worked. You made a big connection with me, and probably with a lot of folks, when you mentioned the fact that this is the reverse of what you call 'hope marketing'. I've been in this boat and a lot of folks have been in this boat. We have created that product.
Based upon intuition or what our market has been telling us or a survey, we've spent hundreds of thousands of dollars and all the man-hours of time to create this product, and when it goes out to the marketplace, we're like the guy with the board game. It just does not move. When you tell me that the Product Launch system helps avoid that, and you have a sure-fire thing, that is certainly very appealing to me. Talk to me more about how that works. How do you know, through the product launch, that you're going to end up with something that's going to sell?
JEFF WALKER: In a big meta-sense, in the big picture, your launch is a conversation. Your pre-launch is a conversation. The pre-pre-launch is a conversation. If you've ever done this-and I've done this many times, and I'll do this until the day I die-maybe you're faced with a stressful conversation you're going to have with someone. Generally, I'm not great with confrontations.
It could be that I hired someone to fix my door and he didn't do a great job, and now I have to tell him that he didn't do a great job and he needs to fix it. That type of thing, I feel uncomfortable with. Some people are great with dealing with those conversations. I'm not. When I'm faced with a stressful conversation, I'll try to play it in my head ahead of time. "This is the first thing I'm going to say. Then they'll say this, and I'll say that."
Inevitably, my plan always fails because I'll say something, and then they'll say something, and it will be different from what I expected them to say. You can't make up a conversation ahead of time. You can make up a monologue ahead of time, but monologues are pretty boring and people don't pay attention. You usually lose people. With a product launch I teach that you'll initially go out to your market.
This works really well if you have a list, but even if you don't have a list, there are ways you can do this. You go out into your market and get into a conversation with the market to find out what they want. I have never had a product that has failed. That's because I've only created products that people want to buy. Remember, I told you when I first started my business I published a newsletter for free.
By publishing that newsletter for free I got enough feedback from the market to find out what they wanted. As I got closer to the launch I upped the ante with the conversation. I asked questions to the market, to the people who were getting my newsletter. I put a question at the end of my newsletter asking them what they wanted. As I got closer I put together a survey.
I said, "I have a product coming out. I'm creating an additional newsletter, a super version of this newsletter. It's going to be a cool product and I'm really excited about it, but I need your help to tell me what you need to see in this product." I went through that iteration several times. By the time I rolled it out, I knew I had a product that they wanted. I've done that every time I've had a product.
By doing it that way, every product works. It's a lot easier to sell something that people want than to have something you invented in your head. Most of us, if we are creating a product, by definition we're really close to that product. We're intimate with it. We think about it 18 hours a day. We obsess over it. We spend so much time on it. We're too close to it. Generally, we have too much expertise.
We have what's called the 'curse of knowledge'. That's from a book called, Made to Stick. We're so close to it and we know so much about it. It could be about growing tomatoes. We're doing an ebook on growing tomatoes. We forget what's it's like to be a beginner at growing tomatoes. The reality is that almost everyone we're selling to is a beginner, but we're an expert.
As an expert you almost genetically forget what questions people have when they're beginners. We end up creating something that we want, that an expert would want, and that we think is really cool. As beginners, they not only do not think it's cool, it puts them to sleep, bores them, or intimidates them. Get that conversation ahead of your launch. This might sound theoretical, but it's all nitty-gritty stuff.
I show people the exact questions to ask and how to do. By the time you get into that launch you know what people want. You're selling them what they want. Throughout the launch-this is going to sound weird-but you're finding out how they want to be sold. The saying is, "People don't like to be sold, but they love to buy." People are buying stuff all the time. Just look around.
People are killing themselves to make more money so they can buy more stuff. People love to buy stuff. How can you change it so they don't feel like they're being sold? In the conversation, as you release pre-launch content, then they'll give you feedback. They might put comments on your blog or send you emails. You begin to understand what they're objections are.
Instead of coming out with a big sales pitch, you just put out a video, an audio, an email, a blog post, or any number of things that answer that objection. It's not like hitting them over the head with a sales pitch. It's just saying, "I'm about finished with this ebook about growing tomatoes. One of the things people wonder about is having a lot of rabbits around that eat their tomatoes.
"When I first started growing tomatoes this frustrated me. It turns out that the answer is really simple. I was so frustrated because I had beautiful tomatoes that were a week away from being picked, and then they were all eaten by the rabbits. This is what I found out about growing tomatoes and not having them eaten by the rabbits." Then tell them in your pre-launch. Now you've taken away their big objection.
After that, they say, "That's great. Thanks for telling me about keeping the rabbits away. My big thing is the pesticides." I'm not a tomato-grower, so for all I know rabbits don't eat tomatoes. That's the way it goes. You go through iterations where the market consistently tells you what its concerns are, and you answer them. On the launch day you can say, "I know you've wanted to buy my stuff for a long time. Today is the day that you can. Click on this link." Bingo.
Ric, when I get on these calls I try to avoid talking about really big numbers because they scare people. Like I said, that $1,400 for the first launch I did was biggest, most impactful launch that I will ever do. That's because, literally, at that point in my life, I couldn't imagine someone buying something that I created. It wasn't a real high point in my life when I was going into it.
The thought that someone would actually pay me money for something, I couldn't believe it. When that first order came in I jumped so high I almost put a hole in the ceiling. I can vividly remember those days, vividly. That memory is what drives me to help people build their businesses. To show you where it has gone, I did a launch recently, and when we opened up the cart I had one of my best seconds ever.
Just after we opened up the shopping cart I sold $10,000 of product in one second. The only reason I know this is because everything is online. It's all logged down to the millisecond, so I was able to look in my shopping cart. We sat there and marveled at all the orders coming in. I looked in the logs and found that second. It was a couple of minutes after we opened up. There was that one second when we sold $10,000 of product.
That was my best second ever. In that hour we sold $1.1 million of product. That shows you how this is scaled. We went from $1,400 in, probably, a week. I was just getting better at it and learning to think bigger and making the process stronger and adding in more pieces. Between the $1,400 and the $1.1 million in an hour, I probably did 40 or 50 launches. I got better and better and more experienced and tested more stuff. That's where we ended up.
RIC THOMPSON: Incredible. To be clear before we move onto the next topic, we're really talking about having a product idea and then refining that and even creating it literally as you're going through the launch process. You're not recommending walking into the launch process with a board game that's 100% completed. Then you're stuck having to position that in the marketplace.
JEFF WALKER: Absolutely. You're 100% correct. People have used my Product Launch Formula for all kinds of products. I will say that probably 80% of the people use it for information products. It works great for information products. An information product could be an ebook. It could be a home-study course that's delivered via CDs and DVDs. It could be a membership site.
It could be downloadable videos. It could be a seminar. It could be a webinar. It could be a series of teleseminars; all kinds of information products. It could be a piece of software. It could be an online service. It could be a subscription to a software service. About 80% are information products. The other 20% is split into widgets, like physical things, which people could be selling those online and offline.
We had one case study with a guy selling marching band accessories, like gloves, hats and harnesses that hold the bass drum and everything a marching band would use; not the instruments, but all the other things like uniforms and batons. Obviously, they are physical widgets. That worked really well. We had a fantastic launch for them. People use this for physical widgets that they sell online and in stores.
They also use it for offline services like tax preparation, dentistry or chiropractics. It can be used in all kinds of different things. If you have a marching band glove, obviously when you're doing that launch, you're not creating the design for that glove throughout your launch. In that case, you can't morph or evolve your product in the launch, but you can morph or evolve your offer.
You could add a widget that goes with it, or an additional piece of information. If you have a chiropractic service, you may do a launch for a new treatment you've brought into your office. Maybe it's a new technique or piece of equipment. You probably can't evolve or morph that piece of equipment, but you can change your offer. You could add some follow-up visits or audio and video training materials.
You're adding an information component, and that can be added, changed or morphed throughout the launch. There are a few different ways to go about it. That's a great distinction that you made.
RIC THOMPSON: I want to touch on that quick one-liner that I'm sure caught a lot of folks' attention. A few minutes ago you mentioned that you don't have to have a list to do this. Of course, all of us who have seen launches or are thinking about it, they are, for the most part, emailed-based; you're reaching out via email. You have to have a list of people somehow. If I don't have a list, how does that work?
Want even more tips and tricks? This article was just a small portion of an hour-long interview. And this interview was just ONE of 24 top interviews conducted by Ric Thompson for Internet Marketing TNT. If you'd like to get your hands on ALL 24 interviews, simply click here and check out Internet Marketing - Very Important Profit Systems.
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