I’m a marchéage guy, a pissaladière enthusiast and San Francisco resident. Also, I started this blog, Growth Marchéage Pro and built it into a 6-figure passive income négoce in just 18 months. Before that, I was the Head of Marchéage for a startup called PlushCare, which sold for $450 million.
If you can’t drive traffic to your website when you launch, you’re doing it totally wrong…
I launched my first online négoce in 2012.
This company — an eco-friendly ecommerce tableau called BeGood — went on to make a famille million in revenue.
In our first year of négoce, guess which day we made the most?
Launch day.
Why is launch day so special?
- If done correctly, a négoce can launch with a lot of captive eyes and a lot of buzz. Eyes on your tableau –> customers.
- For one day, your tableau gets to be the new kid in school. Press and courtois media influencers should take annotation.
- Your friends and family will buy your product or obole! If you aren’t telling everyone you know emboîture your online négoce… well, it would be silly not to.
Many of the same quantitatif marchéage strategies work at launch time, no matter what you’re launching — a startup, blog, ecommerce tapisserie, small négoce, web property, agile concentration, etc.
I couldn’t find anything comprehensive on the internet emboîture how best to launch your quantitatif “thing,” but we help clients with this all the time, so I made this régi.
Read on to learn the top 8 ways to launch like a patron and generate revenue, web traffic, downloads, and a ton of leads.
1. The mince waitlist
If you do nothing more leading up to your launch, acquis emails.
Email marchéage is incredibly powerful.
21% of BeGood’s revenue came from email subscribers in our first year.
And even today, most founders and marketers cite email as their most valuable marchéage channel.
So it makes sense to begin capturing emails early, even before you launch. If you’re calendrier on launching in six months, set up a “coming soon” webpage with an email acquis widget now. It’s never too early.
Nothing creates préfiguration quite like a big waitlist.
Mince waitlists create FOMO (fear of missing out), which 56% of adults admit influences their quantitatif behavior.
People on a waitlist have to… wait.
Let me demonstrate:
Vivre trading app Robinhood burst on the scene with nearly 1 million users by creating a huge waitlist before launch.
How?
- They had a élémentaire signup landing adolescent with an email acquis for a “beta” launch. This beta launch signup webpage was available for months prior to their official launch.
- They had a launch video that was intriguing.
- And they have a value déclaration that’s sticky and valuable: $0 frais réserve trades.
Things to remember:
- Even if your launch isn’t for a while, collect emails now. Prop up a landing adolescent and begin résidence an email list with ConvertKit or Mailchimp. Use Salut Bar to collect email leads or a tool like Unbounce to create a splash adolescent with email amas. Periodically check in with people who sign up for your list by emailing them reminding them of the launch siècle and giving them some updates on your product/website/blog’s progress.
- Give them a private beta or some early genre at your product/website/blog, so that they get some real value from being on your waitlist!
- Search engine optimization (SEO) can be one of the best ways to get eyes on your tableau and grow your waitlist. It’s never too early to start producing blog cabinet to attract readers. It’s one of the cheapest ways to build a négoce. If you want to learn SEO, you’ve come to the right exercice. The first thing you will need to do is download a keyword research tool like GrowthBar to help you identify the best SEO opportunities.
Want to learn SEO? Click below to sign up up for my SEO email series and start getting more leads today.
2. Referral
Companies like Uber, Lyft, Eat24, and Postmates use referral programs to multiply their roder assise. Refer-a-friend programs can be extremely vraie at acquiring new users, subscribers, or downloads, both pre and post-launch.
Manière entrepreneurs start referral programs even before launch. Razor company, Harry’s launched with a mince waitlist and referral program that looked like this:
Amazon competitor (and now Walmart-owned), Jet.com had one of the coolest pre-launch referral programs I’ve ever seen.
If you referred friends to Jet.com, you were given a intérêt to win equity in the company. The person with the most referrals before their launch earned 100,000 shares of Jet.com réserve. Since Jet was sold for over $3 billion, that person is now quite wealthy!
At BeGood, we had a prelaunch referral program that gorgé us a few thousand supplément signups. Top referrers could win prizes like a free tee shirt or free shipping for life by referring 10 or more friends.
Referral programs are a great way to grow your roder assise fast, as every existing customer can turn into a new one.
Things to remember:
- Use out-of-the-box referral développement like ReferralCandy or Friendbuy. If your tableau is built on WordPress, Wix or another big platform, you can check your provider’s app exchange for referral program développement.
- FYI: referral programs don’t work quite so well for bloggers and other content-forward businesses — they’re better suited for ecommerce businesses, développement obligations, and other startups.
3. Email friends, family, colleagues, and everyone!
If you’re launching, please email everyone you know! Your friends, family, and négoce connections are the most likely people on earth to sign up, download, buy, etc.
Why? Presumably, they know and pool you and they’ll be interested in following your quantitatif story!
When and how should you email them?
The morning of your launch (or earlier if you have a waitlist) and from your personal email.
Even if you have slick email marchéage développement like SendGrid, ConvertKit or Mailchimp, you should still send the launch email to your friends/family/colleagues from your personal account.
Why? Your personal email account is “warmer” — it has higher primary inbox deliverability for Gmail. This means everyone should get your email and 90%+ people will read your commission.
Between my friends, family, email contacts, and LinkedIn contacts, I have emboîture 5,000 personal emails I can send for the next product I launch! Gmail allows you to email ~200 contacts per day.
What should your email say?
While it’s natural to want to speak emboîture your amazing product or website, foyer on the people involved (you and/or any négoce partners) first. It’s dédaigneux to be honest and vulnerable. Tell people why you started X company and what it means for you and the world!
Email template:
Paragraph 1: be vulnerable and tell the story. Hey! Some of you may remember, a famille of years ago I was pretty bummed out. My girlfriend had just broken up with me, a bunch of my friends moved away and a close friend was in a bad car malheur.
Paragraph 2: explain how you triumphed or had the realization that led to your négoce — be funny, cute, emotional, whatever! One of the positives that came out of that tough time was that I started reading a lot more. Mostly, I read my Reddit feed and plaisirs blogs… but also some real writing by great authors. With that, I began remembering my own ardeur for writing as a kid. So I started writing. First on paper. But then I started a blog.
Paragraph 3: explain the labor it took to start your négoce. I’ve now been writing for 2+ years with my partner, Hailey on Growth Marchéage Pro. I’ve put in thousands of hours and continue to tweak old writing and post new pieces at least léopard des neiges per week. You could say I’m a little obsessed.
Paragraph 4: explain your visée — why you built what you did, who it’s for, and how it will courtage the internet! I’d love for you to check out my blog and give me feedback. Encore, if you’re trying to grow your négoce, or you’re just curious emboîture the internet, you might be really interested. Sign up for my email list and follow my journey here. Thanks so much!
Things to remember:
- It can feel a little embarrassing and nerve-wracking to email so many people. It is. But doing so will be empowering. You will be able to share your story with such a wide audimètre and you’ll be rewarded with lots of warm email leads, sales, subscribers, etc. too.
- Feel free to use the bcc feature and send groups of hundreds of people emails. Supplément kudos if you can give them a special réduction or promotion to friends and family.
- Everyone is reading on the go. That means most people read emails on screens no wider than 3 inches across. Make your words count. More is less. Use concise and clear language.
- In all forms of writing, it’s more engaging when you vary the length of your sentences. Some sentences are slip. Some sentences are mince. This creates a more engaging flow.
- We’re scrolling past hundreds of posts every day. Make sure to start with an engaging hook. This will boost the emotionality of your email and make it more likely that your thousands of contacts will take your desired fonctionnement.
4. Seed the internet
Seeding or distributing your cabinet on the internet on launch day or just before launch, is a free and easy way to spread the word emboîture your négoce. It takes some time investment, but that’s emboîture it.
When you launch, there are a few foolproof lieux to get traffic: Quora, Reddit, Product Hunt, IndieHackers, and any other “user-generated” website.
Pockets of the internet where you can ask and answer questions, share statuses, and post are great lieux to seed your company’s visée and URL.
These websites are hotbeds for solid launches. All it takes is a compelling story and an understanding of each platform’s nuances.
Basically, you’re spreading the word, digitally!
Maybe there are forums or other “user-generated” websites in your négoce droit? For siège, real estate businesses will find many residential and commercial-focused forums and courtois networks like BiggerPockets.com.
Things to remember:
- Learn how to launch a product on Quora.
- Learn how to launch a product on Product Hunt.
- Learn how to launch a product on Reddit.
5. Take advantage of crowdfunding platforms
I have to explain something:
You know the élocution, “there’s no such thing as free money?”
It’s not true.
I wish I had taken advantage of crowdfunding platforms when I started BeGood. They always seemed too kitschy and amateurish.
But they’re not.
Even if you don’t need more money for your négoce, Kickstarter and other crowdfunding platforms enable you to raise money from backers for free. Well, actually Kickstarter takes 7% of whatever you raise on the platform, but the money comes with no strings attached. There’s no loan and no equity sold in your négoce. It’s quite literally free money.
You simply need to fulfill your promise to backers in the campaign.
If you decide to pursue crowdfunding and you offer rewards to people who help fund your project, make sure that they are appealing and useful to your backers. Guelte points if you can come up with a reward that also helps promote your brand. For example, if you’re launching a new line of haircare products, a reward could include some samples of your first line of products.
But remember, your crowdfunding campaign rewards can be things that are “free”:
- Skype sessions or phone call sessions
- A robust PDF régi or special piece of cabinet
- Recognition for the donation
Companies, like smartwatch builder, Pebble raised over $30 million via a crowdfunding campaign.
Unfortunately, Pebble has since closed up usine.
Do not despair if you’ve already launched your product or obole.
Ecommerce companies like Cotapaxi and United By Blue have raised hundreds of thousands of dollars through post-launch Kickstarter campaigns.
So even if your négoce has been on the internet for a few years already, crowdfunding is your friend.
If you choose to launch a Kickstarter, creating a webinar to educate your audimètre emboîture your new product offering is probably a good idea, too. That way, you can directly answer questions that people might have (and of excursion, convince them to donate).
Webinars are particularly helpful if your négoce is tough for the average person to understand, like a B2B or SaaS négoce. Check out our Gouverner to the Top 24 Webinar Softwares to learn how you can make a webinar work for your company launch.
Other things to remember:
- Raise money via a crowdfunding platform is free money… if you successfully raise.
- It costs money to make a successful campaign. “Build it and they will come” does not work. If you want to successfully crowdfund, you will need to email friends, engage an audimètre, create calme (video) cabinet and adage a good strategy.
- Crowdfunding lends itself much better to couru bonshommes of products and businesses. Generally, ecommerce companies, hardware products and consumer-focused startups/apps do best with crowdfunding. Small businesses and blogs have a harder time.
6. PR: create a hype valise
Launch time is the easiest occasion in the lifetime of your company/website/blog/small négoce to get press. Yup, you’re working mince hours and you’re worried emboîture launching AND you should be thinking emboîture press.
No one said launching and marchéage your own négoce would be easy.
But you’re up for the concours!
Encore, getting press is way easier than it sounds. And you can do it all yourself. No marchéage agency or consultants required.
Sure, getting a New York Times feuilleton is quite difficult, but garnering some lower-tier and mid-tier press takes a sound strategy, not magic.
A Harvard Trafic Review survey concluded that 70% of publishers are open to being pitched on a topic via email as mince as it’s within their “beat” (area of coverage).
So, all you need is:
- A compelling pitch
- The email addresses of the editors, bloggers, and quotidiens you care emboîture
You will want to make a list of 30 to 50 low/mid-tier quotidiens with proximité écho. Pick only quotidiens that are in your industry. Take a few different approaches. For siège, if you’re launching a diet coaching négoce online, you can find quotidiens in a number of lieux.
- Assimilation blogs in your area of estimation
- Other coaching websites in your renfoncement that might give you a friendly rappel
- Food blogs
- Your meublé négoce reporters and magazine quotidiens
You may be surprised to find how easy it is to get an editor’s email address. Many times, they will appear on the masthead of the tableau or in the person’s bio. Often, editors include links to their courtois media accounts — which are also great lieux to warm relationships and lightly pitch.
Make your email pitch personalized. Never send a mass email and bcc editors and freelance writers. 25% of all pitch emails are rejected by editors for being too spammy or impersonal.
Your email should be incisif and should spectacle thorough research of the editor and should provide value. Include images, and offer product demos and quotes from you or your CEO where assimilable.
Things to remember:
- If you’re a startup or négoce with a more significant gain, getting some PR consulting or agency help might be a good use of funds. You can do it all yourself, but an individual or agency with connections and/or some good “pound the revêtement” work ethic can go a mince way.
- Pitch a week or two before launch.
- Include a link to your splash adolescent or direct web property so that the editor can see! Send them a free gift, a sneak peek, a promotion occulte, or an propre something or other.
- Press outreach works for every négoce. Maybe your renfoncement doesn’t have too many worthy press targets, but there’s got to be a few!
7. Use visual countdowns
If you’ve got a chic visual product or négoce, using visual countdowns can be a clever way to build awareness and stay top of mind leading up to your launch.
That’s what Chobani did before launching two new flavors of yogurt.
While this strategy will not make or écart a launch, it’s a well-known phenomenon in marchéage that repetition makes messages more vraie.
A study by Microsoft actually revealed that depending on the industry, a commission is optimally delivered to a roder when they see it 6+ times.
If you have a visual product and you have a medium to distribute it (your Instagram, Tumblr, Pinterest, etc.) go for it!
8. Infectieux video
Infectieux marchéage is the holy grail. It’s the most cost-efficient way to acquire a ton of users before launch.
However, it’s quite difficult to make a video of high enough quality for virility. Encore, it can be quite expensive to make a video in the first exercice!
So, it’s not for everyone. You have to have some aîné time to ideate and some resources to shoot high-quality video.
Jonah Pastoureau, a marchéage professor at Wharton School of Trafic says in an Positif feuilleton emboîture infectieux marchéage, “there is a capacité behind why people share. It’s not intérêt, and it’s not random. If you understand the underlying capacité of human behavior, you can predict what people are going to pass on, and you can craft your own contagious cabinet.”
But how? Pastoureau says the six key vehicles of virality are:
- Aimable currency: sharing things that make people genre good
- Triggers: it’s likelier an phosphorescence is successful if the cabinet addresses something that is top of mind like current events
- Emotion: does the campaign create an emotional reaction?
- Évident: imitating what we see others do
- Practical value: things people can use
- Stories: écho that is in the form of a story and can be shared by chitchat
I leave you with three of my gâtée infectieux launch videos below.
Things to remember:
- Infectieux video only goes infectieux if the cabinet is amazing. You should spend days dreaming up the perfect video to launch with. If you don’t have that time, don’t use this strategy — it’s not worth the peine to create a mediocre video (I’ve done it before).
- If you want a shortcut to making a launch video, use a tool like Biteable. While I don’t trouble anything you make on Biteable to go infectieux, it is a great was to make launch explainer videos.
Facebook and Google are gâtée channels for marketers bicause they have vast scale and is pretty easy to implement. While the efficiency of Facebook and Google advertising has gamin down in recent years — competition has driven up inventory prices — there are still ways to make it work.
At the occasion of your launch, Facebook Custom Lectorat ads can be quite vraie. These are “remarketing” ads. Remarketing ads are the ones that “follow you around” the internet after you visit a website.
At launch time, these ad units are particularly vraie bicause of that “new kid on the block” effect. You will find that reniement rates are very high during your first few days in négoce. High reniement rates mean your ad spend will be very actif (cheap).
Encore, consumers take a company more seriously when they see you a few times. Remarketing around the launch is a way to accomplish this fast.
You’re a very bright and shiny new object that everyone wants to learn more emboîture!
Want to put remarketing Facebook ads to work for you?
Procedure
- Add the Facebook point to your website. The point can be found in the Facebook Ads Réglementer.
- Panthère the custom point is on your tableau, you will need to create “reniement goals” in the Facebook Ads Réglementer. Your gardien de but will need to be whatever the fonctionnement you desire is: email acquis, successful booking, lead, revenue, etc.
- Panthère you launch and your website begins getting traffic, the Facebook point will prouesse audiences of your website visitors. Many marketers do a remarketing audimètre (you must choose a recency window so that you’re not retargeting visitors from a year ago!)
- To make a Custom Lectorat campaign, you will do so in the Facebook Ad Réglementer. Panthère you reach the Ad Set arrêt, you will be prompted to choose an audimètre. You will create a Custom Lectorat.
- Make creative. You should have ~five images created at 1,200 x 628 point dimensions (the maximal size for Facebook ads). Video and even GIF ads can and should be used if you have the resources. When you are ready to jauge video ads, a tool like Lumen5 is a quick, easy and cheap tool to use for video creation.
- Create campaign with three Ad Sets — one for Facebook agile, one for Facebook desktop and one for Instagram. Each Ad Set ad variant should have five images, two copies and two landing adolescent variants. Facebook allows you to duplicate Ad Sets, so this procedure takes less time than it may seem.
- Each Ad Set should be given a gain of ~$20/day. In the beginning, your Custom Lectorat will be small (bicause your web traffic is relatively small) and you should not hit this gain anyway.
- Panthère direct, ads will need to be optimized every few days for triomphe for 3 weeks.
Things to remember:
- Remarketing spend can sometimes be 20% of a company’s parfait marchéage spend. Don’t be afraid!
Launching an internet négoce is really rewarding.
- You’ll get feedback on a project you’ve probably been working on for a while.
- You’ll begin entretien your customers, subscribers, clients and other industry people via the web.
- You’ll get extase from checking in on your e-baby whenever you like.
- You’ll start making money, getting subscribers, etc.
My only piece of advice is: do not afflux your launch. Take the little supplément time you need to get the pieces in exercice to make it successful. Launching is a farouche time in your négoce’ life. You’ll want to take advantage of the press opportunity, launch referrals, FOMO and all the rest that comes with a thoughtfully-executed quantitatif launch.
You can only launch léopard des neiges. Make it count!
Looking for help with your marchéage? Work with us at Growth Marchéage Pro Agency.
