JV Notify Pro

It’s fairly obvious to anyone who’s been around online marketing for a while that “product launches” are a successful method for maximising sales and profits.

If you can organise and execute a good product launch, especially in the Internet marketing niche, you can expect a quick windfall of sales, profits AND build a list of customers at the same time. 

Interestingly, all online product launches use roughly the same “recipe” to generate sales. Contrary to what most people believe, selling products online is a difficult task… people can’t touch the product, they may not know or trust the merchant to deliver the product, they may be concerned about security etc etc. Just looking at the shopping cart abandonment stats (anything from 55% to 71% depending on which survey you read) gives you an idea of how hard it is to convert prospects to sales. To generate the most possible sales, a product launch recipe uses…

New Product: Newest = Best
Coming Soon: Anticipation
Limited Quantities: Act Now!
Offer Deadline: Act Now!
Testimonials: Everyone Loves The Seller / Previous Products!

But, I’ve left out a specific “ingredient” of online product launches. Do you know what it is?

Email promotions from affiliates and JV partners: Sales Amplification

There are many ingredients for a successful product launch, but one of the most important ones is an army of affiliates ready to promote your offer. If you’ve ever seen a product launch from the point of view of a “JV partner”, you’ll have seen how much effort goes into marshalling the efforts of the partners, from personal emails containing product review access, to “copy and paste” email content, to JV competitions and prizes, to offers of “reciprocal mailouts”… all on top of high commissions.

Unfortunately, for a newbie marketer, it can be difficult finding those affiliates and JV partners.

One of the best shortcuts to take is to advertise your product launch a few months in advance on a JV broker site.

[Note, people use "affiliate" and "joint venture partner" interchangeably online. The only difference is that a JV partner is more likely, on average, to be able to generate sales than an affiliate]

One of the best, longest-running JV-broker sites is run by my friend, Mike Merz who I’ve known since about the dawn of the Internet!

You can join his “JV Notify Pro” website for free, but there’s also a “Partner Upgrade” offer which is discounted if you join in the next few days…

Why should you upgrade?

1: to get your launch mentioned in JVNP mailouts
2: to get complimentary review access to products you’re interested in promoting
3: to access VIP areas of the forums

So, grab the free account, or a “partner upgrade” and start networking! Then, when you’re ready to do a product launch, people will know you from the forums and be willing to be an affiliate or JV partner for you!

I would guess that most successful Internet marketers have used Mike’s JV Notify Pro service to help get them started.

Alex Poole over at his blog has made an excellent post about how to keep a server up during a product launch.

Some people think the “whoops my server went down during launch” is a trick to get people back to their site, but any marketer who’s had a server go down during a launch will know it’s a harrowing process, and not something you’d want to pretend had happened. If a server goes down during a top marketer’s product launch they could be losing tens of thousands of dollars in sales per hour!

So, hat tip to Alex. Hopefully we’ll see a few less emails along the lines of, “whoops, my server died”.

On his weekly webcast, Joel released some news about his forthcoming book, “Click Here To Order” and the marketing he’ll be doing to promote it.

With regards to the book itself, which will be available on Amazon, Joel said he interviewed 28 big names in Internet marketing, especially those whom he considered had the most impact on the Internet marketing niche and were instrumental in its development (think John Reese and his “million dollar day” in 2004). Joel said that there has never been a biography of the development of the Internet marketing niche… and “Click Here To Order” fills that hole in the market.

With regards to the marketing, Joel said that there would be a blog competition where blog visitors could leave comments answering the two questions, “Why would you want to win a copy of Click Here To Order?”, and “How would a day with Joel and his team in Loveland, Colorado change your life?” The winners of the competition will be announced on July 31st, the day before the book launch. The runners-up prizes will be two 30-minute phone consultations with Joel, and the grand prize will be an all-expenses paid trip to Loveland, Colorado to spend the day with Joel and his team seeing how they run their business.

Pretty cool.

I hope you enjoyed that “breaking news”.

I’m not promoting Traffic Secrets 2.0.

Why?

Because I haven’t seen it.

I suggest you read a review by someone who has reviewed the product such as Alice’s PDF or Lynn’s blog post. Andy Jenkins also reviewed TS 2.0 in a looong audio podcast.

I’ve no doubt Traffic Secrets 2.0 will be a great product… but because I haven’t seen it, I’m not promoting it.

As a prelude to his new Instant Resale Templates, Joel Comm has released a movie showing the countdown to launch of his previous product, Instant Adsense Templates. You can sense the high levels of stress and anticipation during the countdown to launch, and see the relief and excitement as the orders start to flood in post-launch.

As someone with experience of big launches, I can easily relate to the stress of hoping the server stays up and the order process goes smoothly. It’s quite nice to watch someone else going through the same sky-high adrenaline rush. Check it out for yourself here.

For anyone who’s interested in MMORPG’s (massive, multiplayer online role-playing games), the launch of Lord Of The Rings Online is a big event. LOTRO (as it’s known to its players) is a highly anticipated MMORPG set in Tolkien’s fantasy world.

What’s interesting, from an Internet marketing point of view, is how the marketing rollout of LOTRO has been handled. It’s been a multi-stage process… which can easily be adapted to selling your own products online.

Instead of just saying, “here’s the game, come and play”, the phases of launch have been…

1: Stress testing. (a few players who had to apply to help test the server load)
2: Pre-Order Beta (more players, but only those who had pre-ordered the game)
3: Open Beta (a few weeks free play, available to anyone.. starts today I believe.)
4: Game launch (the retail pack ships and is available in stores)

If you paid $10 for the Pre-Order pack, you get a special “Founder Offer” including unique in-game items (Enchanted Cloak of Regeneration, Ring of Agility), the chance to explore the world before everyone else and the chance to “lock in” early pricing of either $9.95 per month or $199 lifetime play… plus your character will “roll over” into the full launch… so you won’t have to start afresh. You still need to purchase the full retail box ($50 approximately) to redeem the Founder Offer, but I can imagine that early game access and discounts on pricing is an enticing proposition for many people.

If that sounds like “early bird discounts” or “first come first served bonuses” to you, then you are probably already aware of Internet marketing tactics used during the launch of new products. It’s interesting, to me, to see a MMORPG launch using similar tactics… rewards for being one of the first customers.

Of course, this ties in very nicely with my Insider Rollout Secrets product where I describe making sales of $250,000 from an ebook launch.

Michael Cheney said, referring to Insider Rollout Secrets, “I’ll be honest with you – I studied it word for word over and over and applied everything from it to my own launch.”

And what did Michael do? Yes, make $250,000 in sales within seven days during his Adsense Videos launch.