Blog Tips to Help You Make Money Blogging - ProBlogger

Blog Tips to Help You Make Money Blogging - ProBlogger

The 3 Emails You Must Send During a Launch … and a Fresh Alternative for Bloggers

 

 

Not an affiliate product, but something you created with your own flesh and blood?
After many late nights spent honing that ebook, ecourse, or coaching program?
Whatever it is, if you’re ready to release that puppy, then it’s time to commit to it and launch it.
Launching is going to disrupt your normal blogging lifestyle. Heck—it disrupts everything, including you and your happy audience’s normally scheduled (and expected) activities.
But I’m here today to give you some good news and the lowdown on what you need to do to keep this disruption to a minimum.
In this blogging primer for launches, you’ll learn:

• how to warm your readers up to the idea of you launching a product
• ways to keep the communication non-spammy
• when and how to offer pre-launch content
• easy-to-remember basics on “email” marketing during your launch.

You’ll get to see this topic through the lens of known bloggers and marketers, but I’ll also reveal my own use of each one of these strategies and concepts.
So, if you’re ready to turn your blog into a product-launching, money-making, name-taking machine, keep reading!

1. Blogger to launcher basics

Many bloggers who have never created and sold their own products wonder how to make the leap and start offering something for sale. Even after you’ve created a product, it can still feel somehow taboo to offer something for sale.
I thought I’d done plenty to warn the world that I was open for business. I wrote an ebook, told some people about it, and then I just let it sit there.
When I was ready to launch for real—with a real program—I had to start over again. Not just because I’d been dormant since my last launch, but because I’d even shifted the focus of my site—drastically.
I went from talking about general personal development and productivity to writing primarily about launching—especially for the first-timers who didn’t feel like they could compete with so called gurus.
There’s really no graceful way to do it. The only rule I’ve seen others follow and that I also practice is this: treat your mailing list, your readers, and your followers as friends coming along the journey with you.
So that’s exactly what I did.

• I did a brief relaunch of my blog to get a boost of traffic.
• I ran one month of focused articles on launching.
• I promoted a promo webinar at the bottom of every single blog post.
• Launch of my first online training program—Fearless Launching.

I probably could have made my product sales page a blog post too, but I’ll save that test for another day!
Using this approach, I turned my perpetually inactive blog to an active one and then was able to pull off a moderately successful launch that gave a major boost to my mailing list.
The moral of the story (yes, I’m saying it again!) is: include your list during the first and every launch—and they will come along for the ride.
But what’s really happening behind the scenes? Is it as easy as just those four blog posts and a sales page?
Yes—it is that it easy, but it’s important to include a few other key actions to make sure those posts hit the hardest, and do their job to promote your launch.

Here’s how to make the switch from blogger to blogger with a business:

1. Give plenty of lead time. You must warn and inform your audience. Tell them how to interact with you, and how long they can expect the launch to last. Be friendly, honest, and ask for their support. Don’t tell them to buy, buy, buy.
2. Start an interest list early. Segmenting your list is a great way to make sure that if you are emailing your audience, the only people you do email are ones that have clearly said, “I am interested.”
3. “Teach” your readers to take action when you prompt them. Make sure you always ask for people to hit Reply with questions about your emails, leave comments, do some homework based on your latest post, or click to read the post. Think about every communication and every post as a chance to call your readers to take some direct action—click this, comment below, share if you like, answer this question.
4. If you aren’t doing this already, respond to every single comment and email you get. It’s easier to do this with a small list, but even making that effort with a larger list goes a long way.

Imagine you’re about to do a big life project. Would you keep it to yourself until the day before? Or would you tell your friends, family, or partner? Most likely, you would not be able to hold your excitement in that long.
Take the same approach with your readers and you’re likely to get a much warmer response come launch day.

2. Handling the irregular communication glitch

So what happens if you’ve warned people and they still don’t warm up to your exciting pre-launch news?
Your readers are comfortable with how often you show up in their inbox. And every single person who launches a product online deals with some kind of negative reaction or complaints about irregular communication.
People are used to hearing from you once a week. That’s it. That’s all. Then, all of the sudden, you’re sending out emails every day, reminders to grab the ebook for an introductory price, to sign up for the webinar before the spaces are filled.
It’s a little overwhelming, and it can be hard for your readers to switch gears.
The good news is there’s a super-easy way to transition your readers into the messaging and offers you are about to start making (on a regular basis, hopefully).
Here are just a few ways to transition readers and avoid communication complaints.

If you send out a formatted newsletter…

Add a section that says, “coming soon,” or simply add your free and paid offers to the bottom of the newsletter.
This way, people will always expect that you offer something. You can also add a “coming soon” section to your blog sidebar to make sure the RSS subscribers who click through see what you’ve got.
Here, you can see social media marketing trainer and consultant Alicia Cowan added two of her offerings to the bottom of her very simple newsletter template.