Ep. 59 Three Must Haves For Your Next Launch

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If you are listening to this podcast right after it was released, you know that I am in the middle of a very large joint venture launch. If you’re listening to this after the fact, that’s okay because what I am about to share with you today works, no matter what.

Alright so 21 successful launch ingredients, I sent an email out to my list a couple of days ago, talking about launches. And the reason is because Cathy and I from Funnel Gorgeous, are releasing a Launch Gorgeous coaching program. This is basically a step by step done with you program where we’re going to help people launch their next offer. And we’re offering this for free for anyone who purchases Pete Vargas’ Stage to Scale. If you follow me on Instagram or Facebook, you’ve probably seen me talk about it.

So I was thinking about what goes into a successful launch, and I’m not sure that I’m going to be able to get through all 21 in just one episode. You can see on my blog over at Juliechenell.com, you can see the 21 successful launch ingredients blog post. And I go through these features that I think are incredibly important.

A lot of people, I asked, if I were to go deep into one of these topics, one of these ingredients, “Which one would you want me to go into?” and I got tons of responses from you guys, so I really appreciate that. And a lot of you had the same answer. And a lot of you wanted to know a day by day breakdown. And it’s funny because for Launch Gorgeous, for this bonus that we’re giving away, we are going to do a day by day breakdown. So anybody who joins Pete’s Stage to Scale program will get Launch Gorgeous and we will walk you through the steps of a launch.

And it’s funny to me because while I love day by day breakdowns of like, “Okay, on this day this is the email you send, this is the Facebook post you write, this is the Instagram story you put up.” The truth of the matter is you don’t really need a day by day breakdown if you understand the art of launching. So I want to kind of talk about that a little bit today on this podcast because I think is something that gets missed.

Launching is about telling a story. There needs to be a story line and sometimes I think when the risk when you just rely on a day by day breakdown, is that it can sound really stilted. Imagine for a minute that you have, my son Evan is 16, he really wants a girlfriend. And I sit down with Evan and I say, “I’m going to give you a day by day breakdown of what you need to do in the next 30 days to win over some girl” that he likes. So I do that, I say, “Okay, day one you’re going to go up to her and you’re going to hand her a little note. Day two you’re going to buy her lunch at school. Day three you’re going to ask for her phone number.” Whatever it happens to be, and it works sort of. But I think what happens is you sort of strip, if I were to do that I would strip Evan of his ability to tap into his own creativity, his own ideas, his own intuition and reading the room, and reading the girl he’s interested in. He would be stripped of that because he would be following this sort of letter of the law breakdown.

And I understand why a breakdown is helpful, but when you understand that a launch is a storyline, then there’s literally unlimited amounts of creativity and intuition you can use to create incredible launches. That’s not to say that there aren’t rules and formulas to follow, because honestly in my mastermind I have been testing a lot of my ideas on the insiders, and the last several launches that have come out of Digital Insiders have been insane, like insane conversion rates.

In fact, I have a client in there Larry, he sold his first $2000 course, now mind you, he did have an audience, and sold 423 units in 7 days, which is something like $846,000. Ridiculous. So there are methods, but in a launch here are the key pieces of a storyline.

The first is that there is always anticipation. I like to call this pressure, but a sense of something coming. If you do a launch and you don’t create anticipation it will fall flat. So when you think about a song, when you listen to a song on the radio, you have a verse, and you have the chorus, and then you have the second verse and then you have the chorus, and then usually there’s a bridge, that’s what they call it, a bridge where it sort of builds an intensity and then back to the chorus. That third chorus is the climax of the song, that’s the point of the song where you usually feel the most emotion. And if you watch songs like, I’m just going to give an example, Frozen, there’s a verse, first verse, and then “Let it go, let it go, let it go.” That part, then there’s a second verse, and then “Let it go, let it go.” And then if you’ve seen the movie 8 million times like I have the part where she’s talking about the frozen fractals all around and she’s building the ice castle, and it’s the bridge, it’s the part of the song that doesn’t really match the verse, and it doesn’t really match the chorus, but it’s sort of this intensity building, like “Oh my gosh.” And then it’s the third chorus, “Let it go, let it go.” And it’s the most dramatic of all the choruses.

Your third chorus is your cart opening, it is that sort of like, “Oh my gosh.” I think part of the problem with launching for people is that they don’t realize, they think that, in a song, the third chorus is the end of the song. There’s the verse and the chorus, and the verse and the chorus, and the bridge. So there’s essentially four sections of the song before we get to that third chorus. So there’s a lot of buildup, and I feel like people don’t understand anticipation, buildup and pressure well. And they think that what they do every day during an open cart launch is what makes the difference, and it’s not. It’s everything that comes before it.

If I turned on Let it Go right now and I literally just turned on the bridge and you’d never heard the song before, it would do nothing for you. If I turn on the whole song and you hear the whole song, and then you get to the bridge, now it’s a whole different ball game. And if I then add on top of it the animation, well now you’re weeping. Well, maybe not, but you get my story, you get my drift.

So that is so key, anticipation, pressure, all that kind of stuff. So that’s one thing. The second thing is people want to know that they are a part of something exciting. And when you have a very wrote day by day breakdown, it can feel like you’re removed from the actual playing out of the launch. This is why I love it when people write their email copy and write their posts live, because there is an energy in words that are live, that is different than automated.

I can’t prove this except that all of my experience shows me that if I sit down and I write something live and in the moment, it is going to sound more real and more alive than if I write something ahead of time, and just schedule it out. It doesn’t mean you can’t schedule things out, it doesn’t mean you can’t prepare, doesn’t mean you can’t brainstorm hooks and storylines and all that kind of stuff, because I actually think that you can and should.

In fact, one of the things that I’m going to be doing in Launch Gorgeous, with the people is helping them come up with just unending amounts of hooks and angles to take the story from. That way when you’re in the live moment, when you’re writing the emails, writing the posts, the cart is open, you’re getting the feedback from customers, you can go to your bank of hooks and be like, “You know what, this is the hook that they need right now. This is what’s going to happen.” And there’s no way to anticipate that ahead of time, so you prepare, and then you act as live as possible.

So that’s the second piece. You know in addition to pressure and anticipation, people want to feel like they’re a part of something exciting. And that usually means unpredictability, a little bit of variety right. Tony Robbins says that’s one of our human needs, variety. Where something switches or changes in the middle of it. Or there’s something unexpected that happens and they want that sense of live energy.

And then the third most critical component of a launch in addition to anticipation and excitement in the moment, is scarcity and urgency, and the fact that things are ending, that there is a time limit. When you put, when you really understand anticipation, unpredictability and scarcity and urgency, when you understand those components, most launches, assuming of course that you have taken the time to have a great offer and good design and good copy and you have an audience, most launches will be above average in their success if you get those three components really dialed in.

So I do this all the time, I talk about pressure building, I talk about plot twists, plot twists are that variety, that excitement, that unpredictability, that sense of it is happening in real time. Think about any sort of big news event, right now as we are, the time of this recording, we are watching as our congress does an impeachment inquiry. Whether you are for it or wildly against it, doesn’t matter. Everybody’s dialed in. Everybody’s checking Twitter. Everybody’s turning on the news and seeing what is the next, it’s live, it’s happening in real time. There’s that sense of like, “Anything could happen.”

And then the third thing is that scarcity and urgency, and that is the thing that forces people to take action, because they’re sitting on the fence or they’re procrastinating, and they know that if they don’t take action it will, you know, it will be gone and they will miss out.

So those three components are absolutely critical in any launch. And if you are going to purchase Pete Vargas’ Stage to Scale Method, you will be getting our Launch Gorgeous bonus, which is more than just a course, it is an entire program done with you where, yes of course I will give out the checklists and the breakdowns, but more importantly I’m going to teach the art and the science of these three unbelievably critical pieces. The anticipation, the unpredictability, and the scarcity and urgency. And then of course, we’ll talk about creating great offers and nurturing your audience, building your list.

But I know that if I get those three pieces right, that somebody really understands them, every launch they do will be successful because they understand how to tell the story in a way that gets people excited for the ride. So I hope that was helpful and I’ll talk to you guys soon.

Ep. 57. 7 Steps To Building An Amazing JV Offer!

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so I want to talk today about creating awesome JV offers. So this is a topic that is top of mind for me right now because I am getting ready to participate in a really big launch. In fact, I haven’t done an affiliate launch since 2017, the great Expert Secrets debacle, when I was an affiliate for Russell Brunson’s book.

I entered a contest definitely a little scarred for life on that. Just kidding, it was awesome. It was also incredibly stressful, but I learned a lot.

So I haven’t done a lot of affiliate launches since then, but I met this amazing business owner and entrepreneur and friend in Kenya last summer actually. His name is Pete Vargas, I had been sort of creeping around his profile and his funnels and things because I knew that he was the guy that you go to when you want to learn how to get on stage.

And this is something that was really top of mind, in fact, in 2018 somewhere at the beginning of 2018 I decided that I really wanted to speak onstage more. So I spoke this into the universe and then proceeded to start positioning myself and learning about it, and so Pete Vargas was top of mind. Anyway, I met him in person, became really good friends with him. It’s amazing how fast you bond when you’re on a safari being chased by a lion. And it was awesome.

So he asked me a couple of months ago, he said, “You know, I’m about to do my big launch Stage To Scale, and I would love for you to be a JV.” I was like, “Absolutely. Not only do I like you, not only do I like your stuff, not only do I think you deliver high quality, I’ve learned from you, but I think my audience would really like this too.”

So today I’m going to go behind the scenes on how to create an incredible JV offer inside my process. And I am developing my JV offer and partnership with Pete Vargas’ launch in November. So even if you are not part of a huge affiliate launch, any time you want to sell someone else’s product, I would recommend you follow these steps.

So step one, plan a killer bonus. So there are plenty of affiliates out there on planet internet that will just drop links and pray. But the drop and pray method is just a terrible idea. And if you want to add any kind of affiliate or JV marketing as a revenue stream in your business, you really need to create a killer bonus to go with the offer, because that’s the incentive people need to purchase under your link. Otherwise, why not just go through the original creator. So step one is plan a killer bonus offer.

Step two is to know the product that you’re selling so well, that you don’t accidentally create the wrong bonuses. And I see this happen all the time. You have an amazing product you’re affiliating for and then you accidentally offer just more of the same stuff in your bonus. Pete’s Stage To Scale program is going to cover three core concepts, crafting your story, landing a stage, and creating an offer to sell from stage. So that meant that as I sat down as a partner, I have to provide a bonus that doesn’t cover those three things, since they’re already included. So it would make no sense for me to do a crafting your story extra workshop or creating an offer that will sell. None of that stuff I need to provide, because he’s providing it.

So step three, create something brand new that your people don’t have yet. It’s always hilarious to me when amateur affiliates will be like, it’s so easy to become an affiliate because you just don’t have to create anything. But the reality is when you enter a launch like this, you have to create something new because you’re selling to your audience. So it doesn’t really make sense for me to just tack on something that you guys have already purchased in the past, that’s a no go. Because it’s like, oh I already got that. So I don’t get any advantage to buying this product because I already have the bonus. You don’t want customers to have a bad taste in their mouth or be like, I shouldn’t have bought it then because I can buy it now.

So when you agree to a JV partnership launch, you’re agreeing to create something new because you are selling right to your audience, and a lot of your audience is already going to have the products that you already have in your store or shop or whatever.

So step four, plan an affiliate sales page. An affiliate sales page is different than other types of sales pages because you won’t actually be transacting any money. But you do need a way to get customer information, especially for people who are interested. So my favorite model is this, you write a full sales page all about your bonus offer. At the end of the page you tell people that they can get all of it for free when they purchase the affiliate offer. So in my case it’s you’re going to get all this cool stuff for free when you purchase Pete’s Stage To Scale. And then when they click the button at the bottom, it will open up a pop up that will take their name and email and then redirect them to the affiliate offer to my link.

This way I have the contact information of the super hot leads that are opting in, but maybe haven’t purchased. And so I know a lot of people have asked me, “Does your affiliate sales page sell the affiliate offer?” And I always say no, because most of those offers, if you’re affiliating for them, they’re already going to have a great sales page, they’re going to have follow up ads, and all that kind of stuff. And Pete has an amazing launch planned, a sales page, video content, all this kind of stuff. So your affiliate sales page needs to focus on your piece of the offer. And instead of selling his offer, you sell the click. You sell the click to his offer through your bonus offer. With that said, it is always a good idea though, to have a video at the very top that acts as a bridge script.

So what’s a bridge script? Step five is to create a bridge script video, and bridge script emails. So the bridge script video is how you tie you and your offer to the person that you’re affiliating for. So that should go at the top of the sales page. It can be a short story, builds rapport, has a hook, and it connects you to the other seller. And the other way that you can build these sort of bridge scripts are through things like email. Even this podcast episode in a way, is a bridge script. Because if you’re listening to this, you’re hearing me talk about Pete and me and our relationship, so I’m sort of bridging the gap so when you see this launch happen out on social media, you’re not going to be surprised.

If you’re participating in a formal, like open/close cart launch, your email series will warm people up to the JV launch and offer. So you can create a pop up Cacebook group, a messenger list, you can go live on Facebook or Insta stories, you can run ads, but just remember you need to constantly be building those bridges so that they understand, “Oh, she’s affiliated with this person. Why? Why is he so cool? Why is he so awesome? And her offer goes really well with his because….why?” So that’s important.

And then step six, make sure that your offer is irresistible and insane. If it’s a big JV launch, kind of like the one I’m about to do, there’s going to be a lot of people creating incredible bonus offers, you can’t go small, you’ve got to go big. Think about your audience, what they want, what they need and keep in mind they will be purchasing, of course, through your link and will already have a lot of content to consume because they’re buying into their program. So don’t just vomit bonuses, think really strategically. How can you offer a more high touch experience, or delay the start of your bonuses until after they’ve gone through the original course? Make it a no brainer to say yes.

So this launch is going to be big. People like Mike Dillard, Stu McLaren, other big names are participating, so I am going to be bringing in my partner in crime, Cathy Olson, and the Funnel Gorgeous brand promise, and we’re going to be combining into an affiliate offer that is nothing we’ve sold before. And it will include me live in a coaching environment, nothing I’ve done like this in the last two years.

So that leads me to step seven of creating a great JV offer, and that is make sure you have a nice juicy hook. So hopefully that helps. The seven steps again are, step one, plan a killer bonus. Step two, know the product so well you don’t accidentally create the wrong bonuses. Step three, create something brand new that your people don’t have yet. Step four, make sure you plan an affiliate sales page. Step five, create bridge script videos and emails. Step six, make sure your offer is irresistible and insane. And step seven, make sure you have a nice juicy hook.

You might hear more from me on this whole big launch as it starts to unfold. In the meantime, thank you guys for listening, I appreciate you all, hopefully it was helpful, and I’ll talk to you soon.