Make Money from Product Launches

Another great way to make money online that you don’t see many people talk about is promoting products during their launch. The basics are the same as those of affiliate marketing – you pick a product, sign up to their affiliate program and promote it in many different ways. Promoting a product during its launch has its unique perks. If marketed well by the vendor, a new product causes a buzz in the market and everyone enters a very peculiar mind state known as the buying frenzy. This technique is used to make huge amounts of sales during the launch and you as an affiliate can benefit from it.

To illustrate the power of product launches, one just have to remember the release of iPhone. People were lining up two days before the release, setting up camps with tents and sleeping bags just to be first to get it. Even though the iPhone was continued to be sold from the release day on, and anyone could easily buy it whenever they liked, some people had to go that extra mile all because of a remarkably executed marketing campaign by Apple. That’s what effect have product launches and the buying frenzy they create.

Of course, not all products are that well marketed and there might only be one “iPhone” a year (if that), but even on a smaller scale this marketing method does wonders. Our task as affiliate marketers is just to find those products, or rather markets that regularly do these launches. We don’t have to look far – the Internet Marketing niche is one. If you take a look at JVNotifyPro, you’ll see that there are several products launched almost every week, and in every case the vendors are trying to create that buying frenzy.

So it only makes sense to somehow make use of this, because the potential is there. Granted, not all product launches are equally successful, but most of them are and as you promote more and more of them, you start seeing which products are likely to succeed and which are less likely.

With all that said, let’s dive into the practical stuff. How to get into product launches and rake in your piece of the cake?

Selecting a Product

Let’s start with choosing a product to promote:

• Go to JVNotifyPro and look for invitations for products to be launched in 10 days or more (if you’re new, you should try to give yourself more time and look for products farther ahead)
• Read the invitation and try to get an idea of what kind of product it is – the more general and the more appealing for beginners it is, the more likely it is to succeed (if you’re a beginner yourself, you may have an advantage – think if it’s something you’d buy yourself, if you find it interesting, chances are other people will too)
• Signup with the affiliate program (details will be provided in the invitation) and start promoting.

There are several ways to promote a product but the one that we’re gonna focus on (because it yields best results) is setting up a review website.

Creating a Website

Let’s move on to create your promotional website. My best recommendation is that you register a domain that would contain the product name. You can try to go the free way and post articles to EzineArticles, create Squidoo lense, or a page on HubPages, but the competition is fierce and you will have to fight the competition on those free sites as well.

To better explain the process, let’s say we’re promoting a fictional product called “The Money Making Guide”. Assuming the official site already has the domain name themoneymakingguide.com, you should find anything that is as close to it as possible. You can do that by adding hyphens to the name or adding extra letters/words/numbers – keep in mind that other affiliates are doing the same so you may not get the best names (good ones are themoneymakingguide.net, themoneymakingguide.org and other TLDs, or themoneymakingguidereview.com, etc.). But even something as themoneymakingguide7.com is perfectly fine as long as it contains the full product name. Note that even though most of the time the vendors allow you to use their trademark (because you’re promoting them anyway), you should check their affiliate terms just to make sure – we don’t want to be asked to take the site down after we do all the work

Next, you have to set up the actual site. I recommend using WordPress (not to be confused with the free WordPress blog hosting), you can usually easily install it from your hosting account’s CPanel. You can choose any free theme you can find to make it look nicer.

Then go ahead and add content. Most products give you some content and graphics, so you can use those. If they don’t provide any material, you can use the information found in the JV invitation or simply search on Google to see what your competitors are doing. The most important thing is that you don’t just copy the content (even if it’s provided by the vendor) but that you rewrite the content in your own words. The general guidelines for the content are:

• Make sure to use the product name in the title of the site (or product name and the word “review”, ex. “The Money Making Guide Review”)
• Write a few posts (of around 300 words each) about related topics. For example, if the product contains information about affiliate marketing, find a few articles about that and rewrite them in your own words to post it on your site.
• For you final (main) post, write the review of the product. This review is what ideally should convince the reader to buy. You have to realize that the people who will visit your site are the people who are yet undecided and they are looking for someone to confirm that they’re doing the right thing to buy it. Your review should highlight the benefits of the product and have a clear clickable link that stands out.

After it’s done, the real work just begins. 🙂

Getting the Traffic

Just setting up a website is of course not enough. You need traffic to make the sales. And when you have a website there’s just one way to do it – spread the word by posting content to other websites with a link back to yours. The important thing is that you use the product name (or product name plus “review” similar to the title of your website) as the anchor text (the anchor text is the clickable text that makes the link). The process is simple albeit time consuming, however it’s a lot easier when you know where you can submit your content and get the links from. Before I give you the list of these websites, note that you must not submit the same content as you have on your website, rewrite it or write new. Some of the sites (like social bookmarking sites will take just a couple of sentences, others like article directories will need articles of 300 words and more).

Here’s the list where you can promote your website:

• Social bookmarking sites (the list, you can also use onlywire and/or socialmarker)
• Article directories (ezinearticles, goarticles, use article submission helper)
• Web 2.0 sites (squidoo, hubpages, zimbio, quizilla)
• Blog hosts (wordpress.com, blogger, livejournal, other) – note that by setting up free blogs you should follow the same guidelines as for your main site with an exception that you can post less content on these.

That’s a list for you to start. In addition to that you can of course use any other ways and places to promote your website, such as Twitter, Facebook, your signature in the Forums, etc. The important thing to note is that whatever you do, please don’t spam. It’s easy to start spamming when you’re trying to promote something even if you don’t do that intentionally, however that can backfire. So everywhere you promote your site, try not only to post an ad for the product, but also something useful. A great way to go about it is to post tips for related topics and in the closing, mention the product as a source for more information by giving a link back to your site.

Expectations

As a final tip, let me set your expectations. You shouldn’t expect to make thousands from a single product launch especially if it’s a low cost product (side tip: promote more expensive products). You will have varied success – sometimes you may not sell anything at all. But to keep you motivated, remember that each site you build adds to your portfolio. Each site is an asset and you can leverage them to promote future products (simply link back from the old sites to your new promotion) and even to promote your other sites if you have any. Everything you do builds up and is all worth it even if you don’t see the immediate results!

In this example I’ve introduced you to the product launches in the Internet Marketing. But there are many more niches which work just as well (or even better due to lower competition). You should by all means go out there to other niches, subscribe to any affiliate programs you can find and promote the launches as you get invited.