Product Launch Secrets: What Could Go Wrong Will!

Posted by Professional Writing Services

July 27, 2009

In the last blog post I talked about the lead into product creation.

If I could say anything about this project is that if anything could have gone, wrong it did!

More on that later…

One of my goals was to make the product profitable for affiliates AND more profitable for me.

This would accomplish two goals, it would help my affiliates drive traffic and sales while also increasing my profits over time—even if I decided to do a limited offer give away.

To accomplish this I hyperlinked to products and websites with traceable, analytic links so I could see which links would be most useful and popular.

One of the great tools out there now is Ninja Affiliate. This program allows you to create your website site specific affiliate links so they cannot be copied AND get you the affiliate referral credit.

After thinking about this more, I decided to include links to a couple of my social media profiles and my websites and created a fan page on Facebook (which was turned on live about a week before launch) and a Twitter identity just for this product.

In the ebook I developed an easily understandable concept for applying the strategies to address the problem and then outlined the content.

Things changed as I wrote but I put the final design work up for bid and submitted the manuscript to a few people for editorial comments and corrections.

There are a variety of professional freelance sites available out on the internet but I enjoyed the professionalism I found at eLance and so decided to use their services again.

The bids varied greatly and sorting through the portfolios was a daunting task. Bids ranged from as low as $50 up to $700.

Eventually I narrowed my choice down to three but finally decided on a provider that seemed to have the energy and extra personality that I was looking for at a midrange price.

Imagine my chagrin when she also asked for all the image files separately. It turns out that when images are placed into the Word program it alters their quality.

Yikes!

I had about 80 of them in a folder with lots of other images.

Disaster then struck…

Although I did extend the deadline for her, she announced a family emergency and that she was abandoning the project!

This does not sound too bad but it was a holiday weekend, I had just found two new competing titles, AND my second choice provider was unavailable, half my money was already paid out and the rest was tied up until the offices reopened almost a week later!

So, I hit the forums and located two professionals to help me. One who would design the mini site and another who volunteered to help me out AND gave me a great deal since I was already out of some money.

So, what can I recommend for anyone else working on a similar project?
I recommend naming the images according to the chapters and then the actual name of the image. You can also number them in addition to the chapter and name–but if you move them this becomes a nightmare.

Also, to help your graphics person, make an ordered list of the images in a text file under each chapter or section headers AND submit them in the order as they appear. If you can, set up a temporary account where your provider can access them online.

eLance has a message board where you can place all the files related to the project. (My new designer just had me email them over.)

Finally, make sure all the images were purchased, created by a hired graphics person, or were in the public domain to avoid any legal issues in the future.

The next phase of the project was to wait for design concepts to arrive and to begin working on the landing page and other requirements for the affiliate group I decided to work with…