A good digital product is worth its weight in gold. While most content can be recycled (and indeed, recycled content may be part of your new digital product), having something stationary to offer your audience – whether that be an ebook, a webinar, a video series or anything else – is great for building brand loyalty, increasing visibility and generating conversions that your blog just won’t give you.
But how exactly do you properly launch one? We all know that good things take time. Giving your digital product the boost it needs to be successful takes a bit of preparation.
There’s a lot of conflicting advice on the internet about the ‘right’ way to approach launching a digital product, and not all of it is worth your time. In this post, I’m going to give you a set of guidelines based on my own experience and the usual time block I use in order to launch my own digital products.
These guidelines are based on the assumption you have a clear idea of what your digital product is and you are almost done building it – so it doesn’t include obvious things like brainstorming the concept and researching the demand in the market. All of that should be completed in the product conception stage.
Checkpoint #1: Six weeks til launch
At the six-week point, I am assuming you have almost built and proceeded to revise your new digital product. This is a very important period because this is where all the planning into the product itself takes place. The number one thing you need to do is research your keywords.
You have probably already done due diligence researching your keywords when brainstorming your product (if not, you’d better start now!). But it’s not just about choosing your core keywords you are going to optimize your product for; it’s about finding all those extra (probably longer-tail) search queries which will help you form your marketing strategy.
Look for keywords for:
Optimizing your future digital assets (promo video, infographic, etc)
Brainstorming ideas for guest posts that you’ll use to spread the word
Optimizing social media assets that you’ll use to support the promotion (like a separate Twitter account, Facebook and Instagram business page, etc)
Developing extra landing pages that will form your conversion funnel
A well-organized keyword list will help you define your marketing strategy and come up with more marketing ideas. I suggest giving Seranking a try for keyword suggestions. The platform has a robust keyword research feature that can help you group your keywords properly to keep your strategy organized.
From there, you can create a marketing roadmap of what should be written and published. Look into relevant hashtags and seasonal trends which can be used to attract more attention.
I tend to advise against creating a detailed editorial calendar at this point as it could be too overwhelming at the six-week mark. You will just need something that will give you a bird’s eye view of your future promotional efforts. A marketing roadmap puts everything in perspective and ties different pieces together.
Use dates, but try to avoid being too specific. Think of it as a draft before you go into more details.
Here are some ideas that you can use for your marketing roadmap:
Visual marketing assets: explanatory videos, instruct-ographics, etc
Newsletter blasts one week prior to launch, and on the day of launch
Twitter party on the day of launch. Many of your readers will be more than happy to sit down for an hour and chat on Twitter celebrating your launch, which is a boon for promoting digital products you know they can benefit from
Email to influencers on the day of launch
Promotion of an announcement article, press release, video and/or infographic through Viral Content Bee on the day of launch
Freebie marketing one week prior to launch. Plan what you can give away for free to generate some initial buzz. For example, if your digital product is a book, you can give away a chapter, or turn it into a mobile-friendly flipbook using a tool like Flipsnack, then use their lead form integration to collect more sign-ups:
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