How to Make Your Product Launch 6 to 11 Times More Successful

The Internet has given everyone the chance to become an instant publisher, turning the old model upside-down. With that power has come the opportunity to inject a huge amount of profits and momentum into your business… and you can do it with almost zero budget.

I’ve developed a formula that has helped thousands of people launch new products – and my clients and students have done well over $100 million in sales using it. You can read more about this formula in my article “5 Ways to Make Your First Product Launch a Resounding Success.”

Today, I want to go deeper into one of the advanced parts of my Product Launch Formula: working with joint venture partners.

Simply put, this is a way to truly amplify the results of your launch. The typical increase in sales we see when using joint venture partners is six to 11 times what you would do without a partner.

Now there’s a little more behind the math… but we’ll get to that in a minute.

First, let’s define what we’re talking about.

Getting Joint Venture Partners On Board

You find a business owner who has a list of prospects and/or customers. And you get him on board as your joint venture partner with what I call the “Golden Combination.”

The first part of the Golden Combination is to put together some great material for them to e-mail to their list – material that links to a website where you convert those prospective customers into buyers of your product. (I create fantastic case studies and tutorials for my partners to send to their lists. One example is my “Food Stamps to Six Figures” case study video.)

And here’s the second part of the “Golden Combination”: You track the traffic you get as a result of your partner’s mailing – and then you pay your partner a commission on the sales that are generated.

See how that works? Your partners direct their lists to great material, and they end up making money by doing so. That’s why I call it the Golden Combination.

Here’s an example…

For a recent product launch aimed at the massage therapy market, one of my students released a series of content-rich downloadable PDF reports. These reports not only had solid information that would appeal to massage therapists, they were designed to get people excited about the launch itself. His joint venture partners were encouraged to send their lists to a page where they could download these reports… and join my pre-launch priority notification list to get more information.

Joint Venture Math

As I said, when you start to use joint venture partners to help promote your product launches, you can see your revenue increase by six to 11 times. Now those are very rough numbers, but they’re based on a lot of experience.

Of course, those numbers are for revenue only. Since you’re going to be giving your joint venture partners a portion of each sale, that will take a chunk out of the profits. (The typical commission for information products and many services is 30 percent to 60 percent. For physical products, it is generally much lower.)

For instance, an internal launch might do $10,000 in a week. With a handful of strong joint venture partners, the same launch might do $70,000 in a week. If you pay a 50 percent commission, that leaves you with $35,000. Your costs will probably go up some with the expanded launch… but you still come out way ahead.

Even More Important Than Sales…

Everyone likes to make bunches of sales. However, there is another factor here that is probably even more important… and that’s the positioning you get from a joint venture launch.

When your partners are mailing their lists to tell them about your product, their endorsement instantly positions you as an expert in your field. That long-term positioning is almost always more significant than the revenue you will get from the launch.

Do NOT underestimate this factor. It’s hugely important.

Your Next Steps

I don’t have enough space here to walk you through every step of the joint venture process. However, I can take you through the first step… and this is where you want to “dig your well before you’re thirsty.” You need to start identifying potential joint venture partners now. (This is about relationship building, and you want to give yourself time to build those relationships.)

Here’s how to find them:

1. Consider other publishers in your market – folks you might even think of as competitors. Personally, I don’t think I’ve ever found a “competitor” I wasn’t able to work out a joint venture deal with. Try that approach and see if it works for you.

2. Do a search for your top keyword phrase on Google. Click on the top listings and see if they’re collecting names to build an e-mail list. If so, they’re potential partners.

3. Go to live events in your industry – conferences and workshops.

When you come up with 50-100 potential partners, this is your “hit list.” Now you’ve got to work on creating relationships with as many of them as possible.

There will be gold in that list. You won’t get all of them as joint venture partners… but the ones you do get will help you grow your business faster than any other method.

[Ed. Note: Jeff Walker is the creator of the Product Launch Formula. You can get lots of real-life Case Studies of successful product launches (and learn more about how to put together your own powerful launch) at Jeff’s site.]

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