10 Steps to Launch Your Own Infoproduct
Everyone, it seems, has a product or products to offer these days. It’s a race to the customer’s shopping cart – virtual or made of stainless steel. Here’s a direct-to-the-point, bare-essentials mini guide to successfully launching an information product, or infoproduct. An infoproduct can be an ebook, PDF report, video course, newsletter, webinar, or workshop.
The idea is – if you think you have something you know is worthwhile to show to the world – launch it! To be poetic, a pearl is next to useless if it remains inside the shell.
Is there any proven steps to launch successful infoproducts? This blog will give you some answers.
There are many hurdles to overcome when launching your own product. Here is to name a few:
Developing a quality product (obviously)
Writing effective sales copy
Developing a members area (optional but recommended)
Getting super affiliates on board to promote your product
Providing customer service
I am going to cover the essential steps on how to make money with your own infoproduct.
1. Develop a Great Infoproduct Concept
A great product concept can be synonymous with sales, but it’s not everything. It’s something you know a great deal about or something you CAN learn (to expert level). But I’d rather choose the first if I were you.
Nowadays, people are looking for concrete solutions, and they want solutions NOW (this doesn’t give anyone the license to sell a misleading, get-rich-quick scheme). Just to give you an idea, aside from having good health and looking good, people nowadays want to be rich and to achieve financial freedom (a no-brainer, really).
Start with a product that you know has a strong market demand or something people want to buy. You can add “unique” and “interesting.”
Teaching people how to earn money at home
Teaching people how to drive traffic to their websites
Teaching people how to lose weight naturally
You can use keyword research tools such as Google Keyword Planner and/or Aaron Wall’s SEOBook to research for the market demand for a certain product concept.
2. Decide Product Format
Do you want your product to be an e-book? E-book with videos? DVDs? Printed book? The trend is e-books with videos and webinars. You can also have people sign up and log on to a secure website to access your information.
3. Develop Your Infoproduct
It takes a lot of effort to develop a quality infoproduct whether it being an ebook, video course, or webinar. The idea may have come from you, but you don’t have to be a one-man or one-woman workforce. For instance, you can hire someone who can write copy for you. Talents you can hire:
Writer or Editor to fine-tune your writing
Graphic Artist (it helps to have interesting images to go with walls of text)
Video Producer to product videos for you
Video Editor to edit your video courses
If you have a limited budget, I highly recommend that you outsource on Upwork.com, Frelancer.com, or Guru.com. To give you an idea, you can hire a very good writer, graphic designer, and video editor on Upwork.com between $4.44 to $15 per hour.
If possible, develop at least one upsell product with a high price. It can have more features, advanced techniques, premium customer support, etc. To give you an idea, here are the 3 packages I offer in my Easy TV Money 2.0 Course:
Basic Package Cost: $27. Members have access to the 2.0 Course, which consists of 11 training videos
Gold Package Cost: $97: Members have access to the list of 100+ affiliate networks you can join AND over 10,000+ affiliate products they can promote. My team has spent over 1,000 hours researching over a half million offers across 600+ affiliate networks and identified the good offers you should promote. That's a $20,000 value for you for only $97.
Platinum Package Turnkey, done-for-you PPC campaigns created by Nick Chou that can make you money right away. $200 to $250 per campaign depending on the number of campaigns ordered. Minimum 5 campaigns.
Upsells are a great way to maximize your profit with your product launch.
You may also need to develop a members only site so paid members can log in to access your infoproduct. If it is too challenging for you, you can hire a freelancer on Upwork to help you.
Fun fact. For Easy TV Money 1.0, I actually didn't set up a members area at all. Paid members were just emailed a link to a web page. They didn't need to log in to access the course. The upside was I didn't have to spend time or money to build the membership area. The downside was people were posting the link to the members area on some black hat forums the same day I launched the product.
4. Develop Your Sales Copy or Video
Up until 5 years ago, most infoproducts were sold through long sales copies. Today, sales videos are all the rage. (Just go to ClickBank and check out their top selling infoproducts and you will know what I mean.) No matter if it is a sales copy or video, you will need to write a great sales copy. For a sales video, you just need to product a video based on the written sales copy.
If writing sales copies isn't your forte, you can hire a pro to do it for you. However, great copywriters aren't cheap. You can expect to pay $2,000 to $50,000 for a decent to amazing sales copy. Hiring someone to product a sales video can cost an extra $1,000 to $5,000.
Again, to reduce your cost, you can consider hiring talents on Upwork, Guru.com, or Freelancer.com. You can also ask top infoproduct publishers in ClickBank, WarriorForum, and JVZoo who they hired to make their sales copies/videos.
5. Pick Your Launch Platform
There are three popular platforms to launch your infoproduct: ClickBank, WarriorForum, and JVZoo. Here is a 5-minute comparison of the big three:
JVZoo is the most popular platform to launch internet marketing infoproducts. That is, most of its products are about online marketing, mobile marketing, and online business.
ClickBank is the most popular platform to launch infoproducts overall. It is not just limited to internet marketing products. There are products in pretty much every niche: art and entertainment, education, health and fitness, beauty, etc.
Warrior Forum, as its name implies, is essentially an online forum. However their product launch platform WarriorPlus allows publishers to sell their infoproducts. The biggest advantage is the large number of visitors on the forum. The downside is that after you launch your product, you will need to spend a lot of time answering others' questions on the forum. I heard there are a lot of trolls on the forum currently but I cannot verify that.
My recommendation is that if you have an internet marketing product, launch it on JVZoo. Otherwise ClickBank is probably your best choice. However WarriorForum is still a very solid choice.
6. Get Super Affiliates/JVs to Promote Your Products
If you are new to launching infoproducts, then most likely you don't know how affiliates and JVs (experienced super affiliates who promote other people's products) will be involved in your product launch. The 30-second pitch is that it is extremely difficult to generate a large volume of sales on your own. You will need the help the so-called super affiliates/JVs. They will promote your product and in return, they will earn a very high percentage of commission from each sale.
In the infoproduct industry, it is very common for affiliates and JVs to earn 50% of each sale. In fact, when I launched Easy TV Money 1.0 on the Warrior Forum, I offered 100% for the Gold Membership, which is the basic level product, and affiliates earn 50% of the Platinum Membership, which is an upsell.
You have two ways to get affiliates/JVs on board to promote your product:
(1) You do it yourself by reaching out to super affiliates and JVs on your own
This is difficult because first, you have to find out who the super affiliates/JVs are. You will need to do a lot of research to get the list. Second, you will need to reach out to them and convince them to promote your product. Having a great product is the only way you can convince them.
It's going to be very time consuming if you take this approach. But there are some tricks you can use to speed up the process. To identify top affiliates/JVs, you can Google for affiliate leaderboards for ClickBank, Warrior Forum and JVZoo. Check out one of such leaderboards:
As you can see, Martin Crumlish, Neil Bosley, and Jack Scanlan are the top three affiliates promoting the MobiLead Method.
To reach out to top affiliates/TVs, you can hire someone on Upwork to help you so you can focus on the more critical tasks.
(2) You can team up with a super affiliate liaison
A super affiliate/JV liaison is someone who has long working relationships with super affiliates/JVs. He or she probably has those super affiliates' phone numbers on speed dial and/or their Skype IDs as favorites. It will be a lot easier for this liaison to convince super affiliates to get on board to promote your infoproduct.
But like everything in life, there is a catch for such a huge benefit: the liaison is going to take a 20% to 50% profit cut. So do your best to negotiate down your liaison's cut.
At the time of writing this post, I haven't decided whether to get a liaison or not to launch the Easy TV Money 2.0 Course. However, I have been negotiating with a liaison named Robert. He initially wanted 50% for all three packages after affiliates/JVs take their cut but I managed to negotiate his cut for the Basic and Gold Packages down to 30%, and his cut for the Platinum Package down to 11.11%. (Please note that these percentages are AFTER affiliates/JVs take their cuts.)
Here is how the math would work:
Let's assume affiliates/JVs earn 50% commission for the Basic and Gold Packages, and 10% for the Platinum Package.
For the Basic and Gold Packages, after affiliates/JVs take their 50%, the rest of the 50% will be passed down to me and the liaison Robert. If Robert takes another 50% of the 50% left, it means he and I will each earn 25% of the initial sale. By negotiating his cut down to 30%, Robert will learn 15% of the initial sale, and I will earn 35% of the initial sale. (Affiliates/JVs will still earn 50%.)
For the Platinum Package, after affiliates/JVs take their 10%, 90% of the sales will be passed down to Robert and me. Had I agreed to his original request of 50% profit cut, he and I would each earn 45% of the original sale. By negotiating his price cut down to 11.11%, Robert will earn 10% for the Platinum Package, and I will earn 40%.
7. Launch Your Infoproduct
Now it's time for you to pick a launch date. Find out if there is a launch calendar in the launch platform you choose. Try not to launch your product on the same day another solid product launches.
Go through the process to set up your product in the product launch platform. When everything is ready, make your product LIVE!
8. Handle Customer Service
If your infoproduct is a hit, you will receive hundreds of comments and/or emails. I highly recommend that you hire at least one Customer Service Representative on Upwork to help you. Make sure your representative is courteous, well-informed, and well-versed on your product.
Email templates are of great help so you or your Customer Service Rep can copy and paste most of the answers.
9. Count the Checks
Now comes the fun part. It's time for you to check our earnings every five minutes and start banking your hard work. All joking aside, please enjoy your months of work. I can only attest how challenging it is to launch a quality infoproduct. It took me over a full year to prepare and launch Easy TV Money. It was such a proud moment when it became the WSO of the Day on the Warrior Forum. (WarriorForum calls products launched on their platform WSOs, or Warrior Special Offers.) In fact, it was one of the all-time bestsellers, and one of the most commented and reviewed WSOs ever.
10. Reflect
Don't forget to reflect upon your infoproduct launch experience and think about how to do a better product launch. I certainly made a few mistakes or two. Now this is not to bad mouth my partners in the Easy TV Money 1.0 launch, but I should have negotiated down their profit cut. (I launched the product with 2 other partners Hitesh and Robert.) At the end, although I sold over 5,000 copies of the product, I only made $50,000 at the end. Was it worth a full year of developing the product, 3 months of answering customer emails and comments, and another full year of providing continuous support for existing members? For the earnings, no. For the experience, yes.
So my advice is, don't rush into launching your infoproduct. Conduct extensive research. Talk to people who have done successful launches. Be smart about negotiating a profit cut and stand your ground if you believe you have a winning product.
Need Help Launching Your Infoproduct?
I can help! Contact me on this website and leave your contact information and let's talk! I can help you with all aspects of launching an infoproduct:
Product conception
Product development
Sales copy/video
Getting super affiliates/JVs on board
Hiring the right people through outsourcing
Thank you for reading and wish you every success in your upcoming product launch!