Hey folks,
Now, I've been studying and implementing product launch techniques for some time now and I've also learned a lot of stuff -- thanks to people like Brandon Fredrickson (a member of this forum), Jeff Walker and Mike Filsaime.
I've done several launches and I recently managed a "mini" launch for one of my niche sites in the health and wellness niche and together with my business partner -- we have $500 to spend for our launch.
We spent about $200 in designs, videos and some technical stuff and I spent the rest of the $300 to pay for a great copywriter to write EMAIL autoresponder sequence for us instead of paying him to write a complete sales copy for us.
Now, we know that people are spending thousands of dollars upfront to top copywriters to write their sales copies -- but I don't find it necessary with a product launch. When we launched the health site, we've over 230 blog comments on our launch blog.
Almost all 200 of this people who left a comment are excited with our launch and guess what? We screwed up our sales copy.
Apparently, my business partner did not like the idea of overspending the initial budget of $500 -- so he wrote his own copy and I helped him to fix it. Now, both of us are not from native English countries -- so we speak and write our English differently.
To cut things short -- we screwed up our sales copy.
Our initial sales target is just 200 sales. And one day before launch day, we said to ourselves that 50 sales will just do us fine because again, WE SCREWED up our sales copy. I couldn't sleep that night because I felt like I disappointed my business partner. (It was my idea to spend $300 on an EMAIL autoresponder copywriter)
The next day, my business partner phoned me up and told me we had 189 sales on our first day.
A few of my fellow marketer friends who also jumped into the pre-launch actually told me that they agreed that we screwed up the sales copy...BADLY. But they also told me that they love our emails (that I hired someone for $300 to write) and those emails totally persuasive.
And so, after realizing this, I ran another mini re-launch -- this time, in the online dating niche. We didn't put on a sales copy and just the order button on the web page with no text, no nothing -- just the "Add to Cart" button.
From our AWeber stat, we found out that an average of 200 people are reading our emails -- and on the launch day -- we made 101 sales.
Lessons learned: Don't worry if you screwed up your sales copy. Just don't screw up your emails.