Launch (Updated & Expanded Edition): How to Sell Almost Anything Online, Build a Business You Love, and Live the Lifeof Your Dreams

by Jeff Walker

I’ve also got training videos and additional resources at the site, which you can access here: thelaunchbook.com/member

you’re interested in the PLF Coaching Program, you can learn more at ProductLaunchFormula.com. That’s the only plug I’ll give for my program in this entire book.

Please note that if you join my email list either at this book’s member site (thelaunchbook.com/member) or at ProductLaunchFormula.com, then you’ll eventually get to see me do a launch. I typically do only two or three a year, but if you’re following my emails and you’re patient enough, you’ll get to see me take you through the entire process. If you watch how I follow the formula, it just might be one of the best marketing lessons of your life.

The Product Launch Formula is a system to get your target market so engaged with your product (or business) that they almost beg you to sell it to them. And this all happens before you even release the product.

this is where the Product Launch Formula has changed the game. Remember those three game-changing factors I mentioned earlier—the decreased cost of communications, the increased speed of communications, and the greatly enhanced interactivity? Those are your keys to the kingdom. They’re the reason why tiny online businesses, run by ordinary folks like you and me, have built an entirely new playing field—a playing field with unprecedented opportunity.

So instead of shouting at your prospects, what if you engaged them in a conversation?

You can’t rely on one single marketing message; instead you need to think in sequences. Instead of relying on a single communication to make your point, you use a sequence of communications that build on each other. Our product launches use a series of sequences—the Pre-Prelaunch, the Prelaunch, the Open Cart, and the Post-Launch.

Pre-Prelaunch: This is where you begin. You use it to start building anticipation among your most loyal fans (and I understand that you might not have any loyal fans yet—I’ll get to that in Chapter 3). The Pre-Prelaunch is also used to judge how receptive the market will be to your offer and to figure out some of the primary objections people will have. (Objections are the concerns that a prospect has about a potential purchase—about buying your product.) Surprisingly enough, the Pre-Prelaunch can even be used to tweak your final offer.

Prelaunch: This is the heart and soul of your sequencing, where you gradually romance your market with three pieces of high-value Prelaunch Content. You use your Prelaunch to activate mental triggers such as authority, social proof, community, anticipation, and reciprocity, and you do all that while answering the objections of your market. Typically, you release your Prelaunch Content over a period of 5 to 12 days. The format for that content can vary widely, from videos to podcasts to email to written PDF reports to webinars to live broadcasts (and I’m sure we’ll invent a few more formats as the years go by).

Open Cart: This is the big day you’ve been building up to, the day you actually send the offer for your product or service out into the world and start taking orders. I call this “Open Cart” because you’re “opening the shopping cart.” Your launch is actually a sequence as well, and a very powerful one at that. It starts with the email that basically says, “We’re open, you can finally buy now,” and continue...

Post-Launch: This is the cleanup sequence, where you follow up with both your new clients and the prospects who didn’t buy from you. The Post-Launch isn’t as exciting as the other sequences, but it’s important because that’s where you deliver value and build your brand. An...

If you want to make your business and your marketing memorable, then your marketing needs to tell a story.

There is no better way or better place to tell your story than in your launch sequence. This is one of the hidden weapons of PLF, because the most powerful way to communicate your message is with a story, and the serial nature of your Prelaunch Sequence is a perfect place to tell that story.

if we perceive something as being scarce, we will naturally give it more value. If we view someone as an authority figure, we are almost automatically more influenced by that person than by others. And if we consider ourselves part of a community, we will overwhelmingly act in accordance with how we think the people in that community are supposed to act. Those are just three mental triggers: scarcity, authority, and community.

That’s the power of the list. It means that you have the ability to create a big payday on demand.

Make no mistake—once you start to build an email list for your business, you’ve taken a huge step toward controlling your financial destiny, and this is true no matter what type of business you’re in. A list or database of prospects and loyal clients is always one of the most important assets in any business.

Remember: The size of your list is not nearly as important as how responsive the list is, so your list relationship—which encourages response—is extremely important. The entire PLF process you are about to learn is one of the best ways to build your relationship with the people on your list.

I would rather have an email list of 1,000 people than a Facebook following of 20,000. Of course, results will vary dramatically due to many factors, including platform and engagement. But studies in the industry confirm my experience: in general, an email subscriber will outperform a social media follower in terms of pure response rates (both clicks and sales), and the results aren’t even close. My message here isn’t that you should ignore social media; just don’t use it as an excuse for not building your email list. You will regret it if you do. Better yet, use your social media presence to build your email list. Social

as of right now, email lists are much more powerful than social media lists, but a combination of the two of them is the most powerful.

A prospect is someone who has NOT bought anything from you yet (you can think of your prospect as a “future customer”). A customer (or client, or buyer) is someone who HAS bought something from you. In your business you will have both types of lists. The important thing to remember is that a list of customers (or buyers) is a lot more valuable than a list of prospects. In my personal experience, a person on your buyer list is worth 10 to 15 times what a person on your prospect list is worth.

Second, you will treat the two lists differently. You want to maintain a great relationship with both, but if you’re going to spend extra time and effort on your list relationship, then the place to spend it is on your buyer list. That usually means putting in the time and effort to send them some cool content or a bonus of some kind.

get my List Building Blueprint for free at thelaunchbook.com/list.

The first thing to do is get clear on who your prospect is; I use the term avatar. Think of your avatar as your typical prospect, the typical person you’re trying to reach. If you’re teaching about golf, you generally aren’t trying to reach all golfers; you might be going after school-age golfers who are trying to get a college scholarship. Or you might be going after 45- to 55-year-old women who are just starting to golf after their kids have gone off to college. Or you could be going after men with handicaps under 10 who want to improve their short game.

we’re going to create a “squeeze page,” which I will explain in a moment. That squeeze page will have a “lead magnet”— something of value (a video, a special report, a short e-course, a profile quiz) that you will give to your website visitors if they join (or subscribe to) your list. Your squeeze page and your lead magnet will be the keys to your list building efforts.

In the most basic form (and one of the most useful), you create two versions of your squeeze page. Then you use software to alternate which version is shown to your site visitors (check my Resource Page at thelaunchbook.com/resources) and watch to see which version has the best response rate. After you have a winner, then you use the winner but create another test to see if you can improve it even more, and so on. This is called split testing, or A:B testing, and it’s the key to constantly improving your site’s conversion rate. In this case, your conversion is simply the percentage of visitors you get to join your email list.

A squeeze page is a very simple page that gives visitors two options: They can opt in with their email address to get something free (this is your lead magnet). Or they can leave the page.

A Launch List consists of people who are specifically interested in following your launch.

you’ll put together an opt-in page inviting everyone to register to get your launch content—in this case it might be a video series about the treatment of trauma. Then you’ll email your list and tell them about this upcoming video series (in other words, you send them your Prelaunch Content). You’ll send several emails to your full list to try and encourage people to opt in for your new video series (i.e., for your new launch). Then, as you get into your launch, you’ll send your launch emails only to your Launch List instead of your full list. Only the people who are interested in the treatment of trauma will get the emails.

(You can see the full case study with

Reciprocity is the idea that if someone gives something to us, we will feel some obligation to give them something in return. This is a very important mental trigger—and again, something that goes back thousands of years. In fact, reciprocity is the very basis from which humans were able to create commerce and trade.

3. Trust Building trust is the ultimate shortcut to becoming influential in someone’s life.

5. Likability Likability is a mental trigger that you have certainly experienced in your life. The simple fact is that we enjoy doing business with people we know, like, and trust. We are more influenced by people we like than those we don’t like.

6. Events and Ritual When you turn your marketing into an event (which is what running a well-executed PLF-style launch is all about), then your marketing becomes magnetic. People love events, and they get pulled in by them. It makes them feel as though they are part of something bigger than themselves.

7. Community Community is a very powerful mental trigger. We act in accordance with how we think the people in our community are supposed to act.

8. Scarcity Scarcity is one of the most powerful mental triggers in existence, period. It’s simple—when there is less of something, we want it more. In reality, it’s the perception of scarcity that motivates us.

Social Proof Social proof is another super-powerful trigger. While it can be very hard to create in an old-style marketing campaign, social proof is extremely easy to build into your PLF-style product launch.

Generally at the beginning of your Prelaunch you start with a powerful piece of content that sets up the overall promise and opportunity of the launch. When you share strong, compelling content at the start of your Prelaunch, you instantly develop authority.

As you move further through the Prelaunch, you develop social proof as people make public comments about your Prelaunch Content. These comments can be on your blog or in social media—either way, you start to develop strong social proof. And hopefully your interaction throughout the Prelaunch starts to build likability with your prospects (and maybe even a little trust).

“How can I let people know something is coming without having it feel like I’m trying to sell them something?” As soon as people think you’re trying to sell something, their defenses go up. When your prospects feel as if there’s a sales pitch coming, they instantly believe you less and distrust you more. So the idea here is to begin the conversation about your product WITHOUT overtly selling it.

“How can I tease their curiosity?” Curiosity, which is closely related to anticipation, is another powerful mental trigger. It’s a hook that grabs people and doesn’t let go. If you can start to engage your prospects’ curiosity early on, you’ll keep them interested for the entire launch.

“How can I get their help in creating this product? How can I make this collaborative?” This is really important, and it’s something most people miss. People will support the things they help create. So if you can get people engaged and make them feel that they’re part of the process—possibly even that they’re almost co-creators—then you’ve moved them from prospects to cheerleaders.

5. “How can I start to engage my prospects in a conversation about my offer? How can I be engaging and avoid the ‘corporate speak’ that will kill my launch before it starts?”

“How can I make this fun and humorous and even exciting?” Make no mistake. Even though I’m teaching you an incredibly powerful set of tools, your job of keeping people’s attention in a crowded market will always be challenging. Think about every second you’re engaging them as a ticking “attention bomb.” You have only so many seconds to keep them engaged.

Every time you get your prospects to laugh or smile, it resets that ticking attention bomb, and you’ve gained some precious extra seconds.

“How can I stand out in a crowded market? How can I be different?”

“How can I figure out how my market wants to be sold to?”

But they are walking around with problems, and with hopes, dreams, desires, and fears that keep them up at night. They want solutions—and if you have a solution, they certainly want to buy it from you.

“How can I figure out my exact offer?”

“How can this naturally lead into my Prelaunch Sequence?” Since your launch (and PLF) is all about sequences, all about creating a greased chute that leads right into your launch day, it’s only natural to have your Pre-Prelaunch tie seamlessly into your Prelaunch Sequence.

EMAIL SUBJECT: Quick announcement and a favor... EMAIL BODY: Jeff Walker here. We’ll be sending your Trading Update in just a little bit. But first I need to ask you a favor. We’re really close to wrapping up our long-awaited trading manual. We will be releasing it in early January. But before we do, I have to ask you a couple of questions. Can you help us out? You can answer the questions here (and get a little more detail on the trading manual) at this link: www.example.com Thanks and best regards, Jeff