How To Launch The **** Out Of Your Ebook
Tuesday, February 3rd, 2009
If you’ve tried to sell a product online before, you know that there’s a lot more to the process than just creating the product. People say “if you build it, they will come,” but it’s not true. Many people have trusted that advice, only to spend countless hours creating a wonderful product that nobody bought.
Why would people not buy your product, if it’s so good? Well, there are many possible reasons.
- Did you convince your audience of your credibility?
- Are you a good enough copywriter to create a compelling sales page?
- Did you get powerful testimonials from well known people?
- Did you build up enough buzz before launching?
- Did you sign up key people as affiliates?
- Worst of all, were you doomed from the start because you didn’t research whether there was a big enough market for your product?
The list of pitfalls goes on and on. There are so many intricacies to a product launch that it takes enormous effort to master the process. Jeff Walker learned so much about how to successfully launch a product, that he was able to sell his Product Launch Formula for $2,000 a copy. But $2,000 is probably a lot more than you want to pay, right?
There’s now a much cheaper alternative. Dave Navarro and Naomi Dunford have come out with a new ebook called How To Launch The **** Out Of Your Ebook. From the title you can tell that this is specific to writing and selling ebooks, but actually most of the information applies to any kind of online product launch. (In case you’re wondering, no, they never reveal what **** stands for.)
I’ve bought both Dave’s and Naomi’s products before, so I didn’t need much convincing. Plus, people actually hire Dave as their launch coach. I didn’t even know there was such a thing as a launch coach, but it makes perfect sense when you consider how much the launch affects your sales. Naomi saw this firsthand when she launched Online Business School with Dave as her launch coach, and made five figures in three days.
Their sales page very clearly says what’s in it, so I won’t repeat that. I’ll just tell you what I thought about it. First, the good.
The information in this ebook is essential for running a successful ebook launch, and nobody else is really talking about it. I didn’t even know that there was more to a launch than just saying “Here, I wrote this. Buy it!” It turns out, there’s a lot more than that.
This ebook contains a lot of information (113 pages), covering the entire launch process. It takes you all the way from testing your market, to actually writing your ebook, to running the launch, to making money even after the launch is over. It’s very thorough, and it includes lots of worksheets to help you stay on track from start to finish.
It’s hard to imagine this ebook not easily paying for itself when you put it into practice. And even if it doesn’t, for whatever reason, there’s no risk. Dave and Naomi will not only give you your money back, but you can actually get double your money back! (Getting your money back is completely hassle-free, but getting double your money back requires completing their worksheets and showing that you actually tried.)
Now, the bad. Yes, unfortunately there are some things I didn’t like about it. It’s still worth buying, but I have to mention these things.
First, if you’ve bought any of Dave’s or Naomi’s products before, you know that they usually make them really entertaining. Dave’s “What’s Holding You Back” was a pleasure to read, even for people who aren’t productivity junkies. Naomi’s “SEO School” was so much fun that some people probably bought it even though they don’t care about SEO.
But How To Launch The **** Out Of Your Ebook doesn’t have a lot of personality in it. This is something you would buy just for the information, not to be entertained. Maybe I’m being a little picky in expecting information about product launches to be fun, but hey, that’s what I like.
I found some parts of it far too basic. Some of it is written for people who don’t have a blog yet. If someone doesn’t even have a blog, I don’t know what they’re doing writing an ebook. Then again, I’m just speaking from my perspective. If someone is new to blogging, or not even blogging yet, they’ll find this part very helpful. Writing an ebook without knowing how to leverage a blog would surely be a disaster.
I thought it was too long, and it contained lots of really bad typos. Not to be the spelling police or anything, but typos always jump off the page at me, and this ebook has way more than its share (though the copy I have is three months old, so it might have been cleaned up since then).
Finally, there’s a glaring omission when they talk about AWeber. I can’t believe they didn’t mention using pop-overs and lightboxes to increase your newsletter subscribers. I understand that some people don’t want to do this because they consider it too intrusive, but anyone who uses AWeber needs to at least be aware of these options. Darren Rowse wrote about his amazing results with pop-overs in How to Drastically Increase Subscriber Numbers to Your Email Newsletter.
Overall, I’d say that How To Launch The **** Out Of Your Ebook provides lots of critical information for anyone who sells ebooks (or any other online products, really). If you want to maximize the success of your ebook launches, this is a much cheaper alternative than Product Launch Formula. And it’s half off the regular price until Thursday, February 5th (the sales page shows the regular price, so verify the reduced price at checkout).
