Aloha, Tom here!

This is the third part in a series about my signature strategy to turn your product, skill, or idea into a huge cash cow. I call it the M.I.L.K. It Method. You can find the original guide here.

Last week, we talked about the “I” which stands for “Idea.” We discussed how to develop a viable product for your target market, which mostly comes down to building an audience and performing research. At this point in the journey, you have a minimum viable product (MVP) that you can’t wait to share with your audience.

This leads us to the launch, my absolute favorite part of online business. This is where the rubber meets the road. This is where your hard work begins turning into dollar signs before your very eyes. It’s also the final push, requiring more energy than any of the other stages. 

I love having a work/life balance as much as the next guy, but when a launch comes around, I clear my schedule. I usually keep the week before and after free so I can take care of last-minute changes, market the product, and help customers with any issues that arise. Oftentimes my office gets turned into a command center for a while. But if all goes well, I emerge on the other side with six figures in revenue to show for it.

For the next couple of months, I will share everything I know about making your product launches successful. Today, let’s focus on the basics.

By the way, I have an entire season’s worth of podcasts dedicated to high-ticket launches. You can find it here.

Why Big Launches?

As you can tell, I prefer to make launches as large and impactful as possible. My products don’t have a continuous release cycle. Usually, my business partner and I release three or four major products a year, and we turn them into major events. We do this not just to build hype, but also to validate our ideas. We have clearly demarcated launch windows so we can track what works and what doesn’t.

Sometimes we work hard on a product and think it will sell like hotcakes… but when we launch it, almost nobody buys it. Other times, we have low confidence in a new product and find it gaining traction. Having big launches allows us to take better notes about our market, ideal buyer, and their pain points. In this way, we never stop learning about our customers. 

Second, launches bring in cash. Seems obvious, doesn’t it? You would think so, but the more time I spend in online business the less I see people prioritizing profit. Sometimes people wait forever to launch their first product because they want to get it perfect. Others build a fantastic product but fail to understand their buyers, thus attracting no interest when they put their product out there.

Instead, we want to lay the groundwork by understanding our market and then hyping our launch up to epic proportions. If you believe in the product, you will have no trouble going big during launch time.

Then when profit comes in, we use it to upgrade our products, hire administrative support, and take ourselves on a nice vacation. We’ve earned it.

By the way, it’s STILL a good time to start an online business, for those of you on the fence.

Your Key Launch Ingredients

When you know your buyer, understand their pain points, and have an MVP addressing them, it’s time to put together your first launch. Here are the basic steps:

1. Sales Page

Once you have an MVP, you need a place to sell it. Some entrepreneurs create a web page dedicated to their product. Others make a blog post announcing its release or a webinar about it.

If this all sounds intimidating, you can use ClickFunnels or a service like it to make your first sales page. Best of all, most of them offer a free trial for you to test things out before committing.

Once your sales page is up and running, get ready to send that link through all of your communication channels: email list, Facebook group, YouTube channel, podcast, you name it.

2. Payment and Delivery Method

On your sales page, integrate a payment method. This will depend largely on your business setup. Most people I know use PayPal or Stripe. Go with a platform that makes it as easy as possible for people to make the purchase.

The delivery method will depend on your product. If you built an online course or masterclass, you could host it through quite a few different platforms. I recommend checking out Kajabi or Thinkific to start. If you went with ClickFunnels from the previous step, you could experiment with hosting everything through them. Long story short, you have options.

If your product is something more tactile, the delivery method will change. My first product was a set of mass mailers, on which businesses could buy ad space. In that case, the delivery method involved showing the finished ads to my new clients and dropping them off at the post office.

3. Marketing

Once the practical pieces are in place, get ready for the biggest marketing campaign of your life. Maybe I’m aging myself, but it should feel like the premiere of Titanic.

Run paid advertisements through Facebook and Google. As I said before, mention your new product in all your content in the weeks leading up to it. Find strategic partners and affiliates to promote your product. You can even put your product on an affiliate marketplace like Clickbank, but be warned that there’s often a quid pro quo to anything a stranger does for your business.

If it feels like all this is going a little bit fast, good. Mario Andretti, the world-class racer said, “If everything seems under control, you’re just not going fast enough.” Money loves speed. You will generate more profit the faster you can get to launch, improve your product, and launch again. It’s going to be a wild ride, but you’ve got this.

Next week we’ll talk about how to supercharge your profits and prepare for round two.

For more secrets the so-called gurus won’t tell you about succeeding in online business, check out my podcast!