Once you have done that first launch, then you can go through the process
again. You can refine it, you can review it, you can tweak
it, and then you can launch again. And it's so much easier because
you've already done it once before. The assets are created, your sales page
is created, your car open emails. The skeleton is there. You've written
most of them. Now we just need to twig them. The course is
created, all the program's created, you know how to teach it, All
of the difficult part is done. And now you know what didn't work so
you can fix it, and you know what did work so you can repeat
it and double down on it. Welcome to Imperfect Action. I'm Steph Taylor.
For years, I read all the books, downloaded all the freebies,
and did all the courses, but it wasn't until I started taking imperfect action
that my business had its first million dollar year. Imperfect action is about doing
things before you're ready, prioritizing consistent action over perfect action, and moving forward
even when you're not sure you're doing it right. On this show, you
can expect mindset advice, actionable marketing tips and strategies to build a business that
brings you more profit, more freedom, and even more joy. Are you
on the list to get my daily businesses? Every day I'll send you a
bite sized prompt designed to help you grow your business in a more intentional way.
Sign up at Stephtaylor dot co, forward slash DBB, or at the
link in the show notes. Hey, welcome back to in Perfect Action.
This is episode seven hundred and sixty, and today we're talking about launching a
brand new offer for the first time. I'm going to share a couple of
the things that you must know before you launch a brand new offer. Now,
usually when I'm talking about launching, I'm referring to a live launch,
which isn't something that you only do the very first time that you launch a
brand new offer out into the world. But today I am talking about launching
a brand new offer specifically use the live launch process. So now when I
talk about a live launch, what it really is is a limited time campaign,
limited time push to sell a particular offer, usually with free content,
that is designed to grow your audience with the right people for that offer,
nurture them across what I call the magician's gap, give them everything that they
need to decide whether it's the right fit for them or not, and address
any hesitations that they might have about whether it will work for them. And
then it's also going to give them a clear deadline for them to decide by.
Those are the three key ingredients of a live launch. It's limited time,
there's free content, and there is a deadline. The framework that I
love to wrap around live launching, and this will kind of make a little
bit more sense as I go through this episode and share the things that you
need to know before you launch something for the first time. But the framework
that I love to use is starting with running the launch. So when it's
the first time you are launching something, you are starting at this point where
you have nothing to build on, you have nothing to go on. You
are running the launch for the first time. Then after you've run the launch,
you've closed doors. Then you can go back and review your launch.
You can find out what worked, what didn't work, what hesitations your audience
had that you maybe didn't address. Then you can refine it, you can
make those tweaks, and then you can rinse it and repeat it. You
do it again, and you might repeat it twice a year, like we
do with Launch Magic. You might repeat it five or six times back to
back with the view of getting that whole process perfect so then you can then
automate it and stop live launching it. And I've done this with two of
my offers as well, so you've got a few different options when it comes
to the longer term goal. So even if you want your offer to go
evergreen eventually to be on an automated funnel and you're not live launching it all
the time, I generally still do recommend live launching it, and I will
do a I will do a future episode on this as well. But if
you go back and listen to episode six eighty four, I talked about how
to use repeatable live launchers to make more sales of your online course program or
membership. If you send me a DM six eighty four, six hundred and
eighty four, just that number on Instagram, I'm there at Steph Taylor dot
com, I will send you the direct link to go and listen to that
episode. If you are new to launching, or if you have already launched
something once before and you're starting to think about how you can maybe use live
launching as a way to generate more sales, then you want to go and
listen to that episode. So six hundred and eighty four, send me that
number on Instagram and I will send you the direct link. So in today's
episode, I'm sharing eight things you need to know before you launch something for
the very first time. Next episode, I'm going to share a little bit
about what you need to know before you launch it the second time and any
subsequent time after that. All Right, the first thing that you need to
know if you're launching something for the first time is that your first launch probably
won't be your biggest launch, and that is a good thing. Right the
first time you are launching your new offer, you are still figuring it all
out, especially if this is the first time you are launching anything at all.
You are now learning how to create a sales page, how to write
cut open emails, how to deliver a webinar, how to set up a
course, how to deliver your program, how to do all of the different
things, and you're probably also still in the process of growing your audience,
starting to nurture them, building your email list, all of these things at
the same time. You don't need to wait until you have a big audience
to launch, and I really don't want you to wait until you have a
big audience to launch. I think that a small audience can be the perfect
training ground. It's lower stakes, it gives you a little bit more I
guess, wiggle room where if something goes wrong, you're not embarrassing yourself in
front of thousands of people, right. And you know, I like to
think that most audiences are pretty understanding when things inevitably do go wrong, because
there are always going to be little tech mishaps, and that is absolutely fine.
It's a lot less stressful when you have a smaller audience and when you
have a smaller number of people signing up, because now you're not delivering your
course or your program or your membership for the very first time to loads and
loads of people. You've got a smaller group. You can give them a
little bit more personal attention. You can figure out what they need, and
as a result, they will get a better outcome and it's going to be
easier for you to deliver as well. And you know, thinking about some
of my most successful launch Magic students, some of them have come in with
a tiny audience and they've absolutely smashed their launch goals. One of my case
studies from a previous round of Launch Magic Alex Morgan. She mentors Pilate's studios
owners and over the twelve weeks she built her audience from scratch. She launched
with one hundred and eighty followers and sixteen people on her email list, and
she still had over a ten thousand dollars launch, So it's absolutely possible to
smash those launch goals with a smaller audience. I also am a big believer
that you end up with exactly the number of people you need in your first
launch. For example, the very first time I launched the podcast launch Plan,
I launched it as a group program and I ended up with two people.
This is I know this is a couple of years ago, but two
people for a group program, and I needed I told myself I would need
a minimum of five for it to be worthwhile going ahead. Because I had
those two people, that meant that I had to go and find out why
these people didn't buy and tweak it, and as a result, I completely
pivoted direction with that product and that ended up being the one that scaled and
that grew my revenue massively, very very quickly. So you end up with
the number of people that you need and if you end up with not very
many people, that's great because we can still learn from that. Once you
have done that first launch, then you can go through the process again.
You can refine it, you can review it, you can tweak it,
and then you can launch again. And it's so much easier because you've already
done it once before. The assets are created, your sales page is created,
your car open emails, the skeleton is there. You've written most of
them. Now we just need to twig them. The course is created or
the program's created. You know how to teach it. All of the difficult
part is done, and now you know what didn't work so you can fix
it, and you know what did work so you can repeat it and double
down on it. The second thing you need to know is please try to
place less pressure on your first launch, especially if it's the first time you
are launching something. I really would love it if you think of your first
launch as your training wheels for launching. It's like learning how to drive a
car in your driveway or in a parking lot, rather than learning how to
drive a car on the freeway. So try to keep it as simple and
as low pressure as possible, and remember that you can't compare your first launch
to somebody else's six figure launch when they've been launching things for years. The
first launch is an experiment. It gets to be fun, and you get
to use it a way to test whether this specific combination of your offer,
your messaging, your audience, and your free content, whether that combination works
to sell it or it doesn't. And one great way to place less pressure
is to launch it before you create it. So sell it to your audience
and then create it and release it module by module, or teach it live,
or you can launch it while you create it. If you don't love
the idea of having to create it after you've sold it. That's because the
whole launch process generally should take about sixty to ninety days. I would recommend
ninety if you haven't already been showing up and sharing free content about the particular
problem that you are solving for your audience with this offer. And when I
say sixty to ninety days, that's not sixty to ninety days of buy my
course or I have an exciting course coming join the wait list. That's not
sixty to ninety days of that. It's not sixty to ninety days of teasing
the offer, but instead it's sixty to ninety days of content, free content
that is bridging the magician's gap and if you have no idea what the magician's
gap is. In feb I'm teaching Module one of Launch Magic for free,
and in that I explain what the magician's gap is and how you can start
to share content that bridges that gap so that when you do open doors on
your launch, your audience is already ready and waiting to buy from you.
Now to get an invite to that free workshop, you want to be on
my waitlist for Launch Magic. That's the only way you get an invite.
Head on over to stephtaylor dot co slash Magic or send me a DM on
Instagram. I'm there at stephtaylor dot coke send me the word magic and I
will send you the link to get onto the waitlist so that you can get
an invite and learn how to piece together the magician's gap with your own free
content. The third thing you need to know you can never truly know what
people want until you ask them to pay for it. You can spend it
all of the time thinking, planning, designing the perfect offer, but you
don't know if your audience wants it until you actually ask them to pay for
it. And you won't know if it's the perfect offer until you get it
out there and you actually deliver it to your clients or your students. This
is why I love launching it before you create it. It removes all of
that pressure, and it makes launching more of a research exercise than a it
has to be perfect at all costs kind of exercise. And yes, audience
research is great. Do some surveys, interview your ideal clients. But I've
also launched things where I've done so much research and I've been like, this
is exactly what they need. The messaging is perfect, everything is so well
aligned, but it didn't land because maybe I had overlooked something. For example,
when I first launched that podcast launch plan as a group program, I
had overlooked the fact that some people wanted to launch their podcast in four weeks,
others wanted to do it in six months. I had overlooked the fact
that it was school holidays, so people were at home with their kids and
couldn't commit to showing up to live calls consistently for eight weeks. There were
a few things that I hadn't really even thought about. And because I hadn't
wasted time creating anything more than just an outline of what I was going to
teach, I could then pivot it really easily, make it a self paced
course, and launch it again, which is what I did. The fourth
thing you need to know if people don't buy it doesn't necessarily mean they don't
want your offer, and it doesn't mean that they don't see the value in
it, but it does mean that they don't see why they should prioritize spending
money on it right now, or it means that they don't believe it's the
right fit for them to solve the problem they're experiencing or get the outcome that
they are desiring. So, if you are at this point where people are
not buying, you've launched it and nobody has bought it, you now have
two choices you can give up, and sadly, this is what way too
many people do. It makes me really sad because they've put all of this
time into creating all of the launch assets. A lot of the time they've
even created the course or the program first, and then nobody buys it,
and then they're like, well that was a waste of time. I give
up. I don't want to ever look at it ever again. I'm going
to move on. Courses don't work for me or my audience doesn't want that.
That's your first choice. Your other option is you can put your detected
hat on and you can figure out why did nobody buy that and make the
tweaks. You will learn so much more from doing this, And even if
you don't decide to relaunch the same offer, you can still learn from that
failed quote unquote failed launch and use that to inform the things that you sell
in the future. All right. Number five, The fifth thing you need
to know your messaging matters as much as the offer itself. So how you
position and communicate your offer can be more important than what is actually inside the
offer in terms of how it sells. It can be the difference between a
launch that succeeds and a launch that flops. And when it comes to messaging,
specifics really do sell. So what I see quite a lot with coaches
especially, is they might come up with a promise that's like, oh,
this is a coaching program to improve your life. That's pretty broad, it's
pretty vague. It's raising a lot more questions than it's answering, because suddenly
I'm like, well, what do you mean by improve what areas of my
life? How are you going to improve it? What's involved? I don't
get it. It's probably not a super urgent pain point either, like improving
my life. Yeah, that's great, but I'll do that when I have
more time next year. So then your ideal client isn't going to prioritize spending
money on it because they don't really see the urgency in it. They don't
feel that need to spend money on it right now. Versus, let's say
you were doing a coaching program to get over heartbreak. That is painful.
Somebody wants that pain to go away, so they're going to prioritize spending money
on it. And as soon as I say this gets specific, the first
hesitation that always pops up with my students is well, I don't want to
limit my sales. Limiting the number of people your offer will help is better
than not making any sales at all, because it's too broad or too vague,
and you know there are going to be still so many more people than
you can ever help just by getting specific. So even from you know,
I coaching program to improve your life versus a coaching program to get over heartbreak.
There's more than enough people that you can help in the specific version of
that. And also another thing to make sure with your messaging is make sure
that your ideal client has everything that they need to make the decision of whether
this is right for them or not. And that means preempting any questions and
hesitations they are going to have. This is tricky in the first launch because
you have no feedback to go on, you don't have any non buyers survey
results to use. It's a lot easier in your second launch because we can
ask the people who didn't buy what made you decide not to buy, and
then we can find out, oh, they didn't buy because they didn't think
it was for them, and actually it was for them. So obviously there
was a bit of a mismatch between my messaging and what I thought I was
communicating. And we can also make sure that we are bridging the magician's gap
with our free content. That's going to be super super powerful for selling your
offers. Number six, you need to know exactly who the offer you are
launching is for. Otherwise even the right people will think that it isn't right
for them, And I have made this mistake many times, even as recently
as a year ago, when I launched a new offer and I had read
through the non buy a survey after the launch, and it had somebody who
would have been the perfect fit for that offer saying oh, I think this
is too advance for me, and it had another person who also would have
been a good fit saying oh, I think this is too basic for me.
So that straightaway tells me, oh, I was a little bit too
vague, maybe a little bit too broad in who my ideal client for this
offer was. So it really helps to have one ideal client defined. And
when I say one, I mean a specific person. Give them a name.
It's not a group of people, it's not a range of people,
it's not a target audience. One person. And when you are writing any
content, any sales copy, creating your webinars, anything in your launch,
thinking about it as if you are writing specifically to this one person. It
makes life so much easier. It also makes it easier for you to design
your offer because now you have a clear path from A to B from what
they are struggling with right now. To the transformation the result that they have,
and you can start to avoid those rabbit holes of Oh, but I'm
going to add this module because just in case they are in this situation and
they might be struggling with this as well, So I'm going to add this
extra rabbit hole. And suddenly you've built out this Mammoth course or this Mammoth
program or Mammoths membership. Because you're trying to help too many different ideal clients.
One clear ideal client and talk to them, have conversations with them.
Please, This is like the best research you can do is have those conversations
and find out what language they are using. Listen to the words that they
are using, and reflect those words back to them in the copy that you
are writing. Rather than trying to impress them with how much you know as
the expert, instead show them I understand you, I get what you are
struggling with, and this is my solution to what you are struggling with.
Number seven, Decisions aren't set in stones, so make them quickly and take
action. Things like the platform that you use to host your online course,
the name you give your membership, the headline you put on your sales page.
The ideal client you choose for this launch, the number of modules you
have inside your programs. These things can be changed really easily, So make
these decisions quickly. Rather than wasting time deciding between options on these things that
are pretty inconsequential, use that time to pick one, test it, put
it out there, and then go back to the drawing board if you need
to, rather than sitting there spinning around in your head trying to pick the
right option the first time around. For example, rather than spending hours deciding
what to teach in your free webinar, pick a topic, teach it,
and if it doesn't convert, now you have some real feedback that you can
work with, and you can try again. You can create a different webinar
and launch again, which then leads me beautifully to number eight. If it
flops, you now have feedback, and that is so much better than wasting
your time in indecision. And when I say this, I mean literally any
part of your launch, or your entire launch as a whole. So for
example, I've had launches where the webinar converted really well, but the car
open email sequence, the sales emails that somebody gets after the live webinar.
Those emails didn't convert well, and great, now I have feedback. Now
I know this part of my launch worked well, so next time I will
repeat that. And this part of my launch didn't work well, and next
time I will not repeat that. I will change it. I have had
more failed launches than most people have had of launches in total, and I
am so glad that I've had those because it's taught me so much more than
anything else could have. It's taught me more about my audience, about my
offers, my messaging, my business, myself, and even recently so at
the end of twenty twenty three, I launched a group twenty twenty four Planning
Strategy Intensive with four live calls, and we didn't have enough people sign up
for it to go ahead. But you know what this made me realize was,
oh, I I had this conversation with my audience. I made me
realize December maybe wasn't the best time to launch something because everyone was too busy
and too overwhelmed. They couldn't commit to calls. People were saying, I'm
just getting through the end of the year. I can't even think about twenty
twenty four yet this gave me feedback. This gave me options I knew well.
Option one, I can launch it again in early twenty twenty four.
Option two, I can keep this in mind for next time and launch it
in November twenty twenty four. For twenty twenty five, I could also potentially
put it together as a self paced course and launch that. There are different
things that I can do to overcome the reasons why people didn't sign up.
So launching is really something that you can do over and over and over again.
Okay, And if you are ready for a sustainable, successful way to
sell your offers, then I would love for you to join me inside Launch
Magic when we open up doors again at the end of Feb. In it,
you will create a rinse and repeat launch strategy for more sales of your
digital product, more on demand cash injections, and more freedom in your business
anytime you want it. I only run it twice a year. Doors open
again twenty second of Feb. We start at the start of March, and
like I mentioned before, I'm running a bonus free workshop where I teach Module
one for free for those who are on the waitlist only. You need to
be on the waitlist to get the invite, So if you want to get
on that, send me a DM on Instagram. I'm there at stephtaylor dot
co. Send me the word magic or head on over to stephtaylor dot co
slash magic and you can get on the waitlist over there. Now, if
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so much for listening. Catch you next time.