Internet Marketing Business Solutions From Richard Legg

I’ve always heard that launching a product can be an incredibly stressful experience, but as a marketer it’s something you have to go through at some stage.

I’ve heard some horror stories of things going wrong in major product launches, like servers going down, emails getting blocked because too many people are mailing out etc..

But I always figured those things happened to the “Big Name” marketers with hundreds of people promoting, and thousands and thousands of people flocking to the website.

So when it came for me to do my very first launch (albeit a “mini” launch) I thought that I was going to be safe enough and have a smooth run…

Boy, was I wrong!…

The reason I actually did a limited pre-release launch was two fold.

Reason #1

First of all, I wanted to give my readers a “front of the line” chance at getting my new product and putting it to use so that they’d have a headstart over everyone else who gets it when I do the main launch in the future.

I was also hoping to get some good feedback and possibly some more testimonials from people that I can use to improve the course for everyone.

Reason #2

But, since this was my first launch, I wanted to make sure that I did it small scale at first, so even if things did go wrong, I wouldn’t have a hundred angry JV partners after me.

You may not know this about me, but I’m a bit “particular” about making sure everything is as good as it can be. Which is why I test a lot in my marketing. And if I have partners that are good enough to mail out for me, I want to make sure that we all benefit from the partnership.

So what went wrong?

Well, in many ways the launch was actually a great success - I made a profit (which is always good ) and people were excited about the product (which is also good!)

But there were a few things that I could have improved.

1) The first one was making sure everything was ready ahead of time … I mean WAY ahead of time.

One thing that I’m not particularly good at is copywriting, so I had to get help from a professional. My copy guy is great at what he does and I was really excited to see what he could do.

But then …

Things started to go against us…

First of all he actually had to go into hospital for surgery (he’s ok thankfully) which put him behind schedule.

As if that wasn’t bad enough, his wife then had to go in for an emergency appendectomy (is that how you spell it? ) a day or so before the site was due to go live.

The end result was that the night before the launch he stayed up all night working on the copy until about 8am just to make sure it was ready in time for me to launch.

I can’t thank him enough for the effort he put in - but it resulted in a lot of unwanted stress for both of us. (And with this being my first launch, I didn’t want any!)

2) The second problem was the delivery mechanism.

Because this course came on DVD, it was a little more complicated than just setting up a download page on my website. I had to have a way of taking orders, sending them to a shipping company, and then have them fulfill the orders all automatically.

I managed to get a script to do this for me. After testing it myself and with a few other people, it all seemed to work perfectly.

But, on launch day, I found out that there were some people who couldn’t order because their country wasn’t listed. (Apparently the shipping company only ships to certain countries)

During my testing this hadn’t been a problem since most people testing it were in North America or in Europe.

The problem only cropped up AFTER the site had gone live and when it was too late to change to anything else.

Fortunately, this was only for a small percentage of people and I was able to fulfill orders manually myself, but still, it wasn’t perfect.

So what’s the moral of my ramblings?

Basically, it doesn’t matter how experienced you are, you are always going to face problems in marketing (and I guess, life in general).

But what matters is how you react to those problems.

I was lucky that I had a great copy guy who worked through the night, when others could have easily postponed, especially given the circumstances. And I was also able to send out orders manually to make sure people got a copy of the course.

Everyday is a learning experience.

I think that one of the things that separates the successful from the not-so-successful is how you react and grow based on those experiences.

So whatever you do, try to LEARN from your experiences whether they be good, bad, or a mixture of both.

To YOUR Success,

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