3 Steps to Launching Your Online Products
If you’ve been in private practice a while, you’re already aware of the inevitable ceiling you hit when trading time for money with respect to 1:1 work with clients.
If you charge X dollars per hour and see X number of clients per week, your income will be fairly predictable.
To increase your income, you can always raise your rates, but there is only so high you can raise them without outpricing yourself or charging an unreasonable amount. You can always see more clients per week, but we all know how tiring that can be ... especially when maintaining your work-life balance as a priority.
Naturally, you’ve likely started to think about offering another product, such as a course, group, or workshop. Whether it’s in person or online, you can not only serve more people at once, you can also generate more income this way!
In last week’s article, we discussed what kinds of products you might want to create and some of your options for marketing ...
But how exactly do you launch a product you’ve just created … and actually make a sale?
Launching an online product generally involves 3 major steps:
Step 1: Your Client Journey
Before you even think about marketing your product, you’ll need to decide how your client is going to access your product.
Where do they find out more info about your product (think “sales page”)?
How do you collect their information so you can stay in touch?
How do they pay?
Where will your product be hosted?
There are lots of software programs out there that will handle each step of this process (ConvertKit, LeadPages, Stripe, Square, PayPal), and many that allow you to handle each step all in one platform (like Kajabi, ClickFunnels & Podia).
Ideally you want to make sure this journey is easy and comfortable as possible for yourself and your client. Talking to people who have launched before you and getting their experience and feedback is a great way to get started!
Step 2: Timing Is Everything
Consider not only WHEN you’re launching your product (is it the best time of year, is it falling over a major holiday, is the problem your ideal audience is facing at its peak right now, and do they have time to commit to solving it?
But ... how much time do YOU have to spend on inviting people to buy your product?
Do you want a time-limited launch where you open the doors and then close them at a certain time?
Do you want to do an ongoing launch where your product is available whenever people want to buy?
Do you have time to engage in important launch activities like webinars, facebook posts, email sequences or discovery calls?
The time you want to put into your launch sequence will dictate the type of launch you do, and generally dictate how many sign ups you get.
Step 3: Review Your Launch
This piece is often missed… launching online products isn’t likely something you’re going to do just once. Know that your first time might just be about learning. Learning about your audience, your product, and your launch strategy.
It is crucial to go back and look at what worked, what didn’t, and create a plan for what you want to do differently next time.
If you are looking for help to avoid making some common mistakes and receive support from an experienced product launcher …. check out our Scale Your Practice program.
