By Michele Scism
The Results Lady

In the last post I shared with you four things I did for my current product launch, Social Media Manager Profits™, that really worked well.  Well I thought in this post I would share with you a few lessons I learned and what I will be adjusting before I re-launch this product.

Just to give you a little background to the marketing behind this product.  We decided to do a 7 day beta launch as a test.  I am so glad we did.  I created a 3 part video training series on social media and at the end of the 3rd video I made an offer for the product.   Then once the 7 days were finished we pulled the videos down and closed registration for the product.  We will re-open registration in a few days but with no launch.  We will come back in early October and do the official launch for the product again.

So what would I change about what we did or what we will do for the re-launch?

Understand that making great videos can be time consuming

I have to tell you I was really beating myself up for a while about it taking me 30 hours to create a 30 minute video.  I wrote several blog posts about it – being a little naive, I thought it should have taken me about 10 hours from start to finish.  Then I got a wonderful message from a professional videographer and he told me that I was right on track.  He said when they start to prepare for a project they project 1 hour per minute of final video.  So no more beating myself up.

Let me tell you though that I am a total convert when it comes to sales videos.  Instead of those super long sales pages that we see everywhere which normally during a great launch only convert 2 to 3% to buying customers.  My sales videos (without a sales letter at all) converted 6.9% to buying customers.  Talk about a party around here!

We will go with better video hosting

Big lesson.  As a totally non-technical person it never really dawned on me that some people might have troubles opening the videos.  They worked fine on my computer and on my online business managers computer and I thought that meant everyone would be able to see them too.  What I didn't realize was that not all hosting sites are made the same.  So after having to make some major changes in the middle of the launch we finally found a hosting company that had enough band width or whatever it is that makes it easy to watch videos.  I don't know – I just know we ended up on Vimeo.com and it seemed to work out great.

Even more time spent developing affiliate relationships

If you read my last post you know that we had a really great push by our affiliates.  What I did learn though is that the really big affiliates – those with big lists, a great audience and some major influence don't do things last minute.  We really needed to start letting them know from 6 to 12 months ahead of time what we had coming up.  So this takes actual planning to know what you will be doing 12 months ahead of time.  For entrepreneurs especially because we have a tendency to put new products out in months instead of years.  In our business, we are going to start looking out 12 to 18 months so we can plan what is coming and get our affiliates on board early.

There were some other minor things that we will be adjusting before we re-launch but I have to say it was really exciting to see those sales coming in so fast during that week.  I highly recommend that you try it!!