Launching a product is not at all difficult, if you have done your homework properly. What homework should you have done?

1. Determine if the product is even needed…
   Pretty simple - are there already tools out there that do the same job?
2. Determine if there is a market…
   Without buyers, your product will not become a success.
3. Determine the selling price…
   What price will the market bear?
4. Delivery.
   How are you going to deliver the product after the sale?
5. Can you provide after sales care…
   Some of your buyers will be absolutely clueless.
   These people need support - can you provide it?
6. Upselling.
   Any product should not be the end of the experience for you or your buyers.

Let's look at each of these points in detail;

• Is the product needed. There could be many other products out there that do just about the same thing. What USP (Unique Selling Point) will yours have. Your product needs to have a "go faster stripe" or some other selling point in order to compete.
• Is there a market. Well, without buyers, you are doomed to failure. Often times, experienced product creators will seek out the customers BEFORE building the product. That way, they know people will purchase. On one of my products I conducted over 5 months of research before going forward and creating it.
• The selling price. Will you aim high, and sell a small amount? Will you aim at the bottom of the barrel price and sell hundreds, perhaps thousands? Will you give the product away for free and hope it takes off, somehow? Let's look at some figures;
  • By asking a (say) $99 price, I consider that fairly high for a given product. The product needs to be professional and as bug free as possible. I estimate that a decent product, with a known set of buyers should sell at least 100 to 150 copies at this price point. Well, you've made $10,000 or so (after commissions to others), as you'd probably have some sort of Affiliate Scheme paying 50% or so.
  • A bottom of the barrel price such as $5. Well, depending upon how you play it, you might get caught in the trap of "that's cheap, must be crap" and get few buyers. Or you might just get a number of buyers who then go onto sell the product to others (assuming you are using one of those kinky scripts that are about the palce now). Let's assume you sell 300 copies of your product at $5 each. That's income of $1500. Let's say that 150 of those people go on and sell another 5,000 copies. And those 5,000 sell another 2,000 before the scheme runs out of steam. You've made $1500, and you have a mailing list amounting to over 7,000 people.
  • Or, you can give it away for free. Well, my point about this, is that who on earth is going to promote it for you? Mr Average Marketer won't promote it and Mr Super Marketer definitely won't promote it. You are stuck with nice people blogging or posting on forums to try this new bit of software. Take up will be apathetic.I can tell a true story about a very well known marketer who wanted to promote one of my $50 products, but he would only promote it IF I increased the price to $100 or more. What does that say about free products? I re-iterate - you will get very few professional marketers promoting it (if any), as such take up will be so slow it might as well be nothing.
• Delivery. If your product takes off, you won't want to be emailing it out to people. You'll need some form of automated delivery. There are many solutions out there - I'll cover these in a future post.
• After Sales Care. When you start charging for a product, you'll have to provide after sales care. This is usually done via a helpdesk or using forum software. Some of your users will be absolutely clueless, some will know it all and contradict everything you say when trying to help others. Providing support is annoying, boring and a total waste of time. You can have as many FAQs, Videos, User Manuals as you like - people are inherently lazy and will just post a question because they can.
• Upselling. A very important piece of the online business jigsaw puzzle. Any product that is created should have multiple upsells - it makes sense. You might earn just as much from the upsells as you did from selling the product! Remember that you can only upsell to those people whose email addresses you have (unless you build the upsell directly into the product!). Now look back at
  "the selling price" and see how a mailing list has suddenly become ultra-important…
  • Your $99 buyers will be loathe to spend another $50 on an upsell. Let's say 20% of the buyers pay $50 for the upsell - 150 * 20% * $50 - that's another $1500 in your pocket.
  • Your $5 buyers will most likely be fairly amenable to the upsell. Let's say that 10% of them buy the $50 upsell. 7150 * 10% * $50 - that's another $35750 earned.
  • Your zero cost buyers are unlikely to go with the upsell, as you already have them in the habit of receiving something for nothing. I guess 5%, and say you have 500 freebie downloads? 500 * 5% * 50 is $1250 earned.

  Now perhaps you can see the immense value of having massive distribution at a fairly low cost.

A recap of income earned…

$99

150 sales at $99 = $14850.  Less 40% for affiliates:  $8910
$1500 in Upsells, for a total of $10410 earned.

$5

300 personal sales, for an income of $1500.
$35750 in Upsells for a grand total of  $37250.

Free

Zero income from sales and $1250 from upsells, for a grand total of $1250.

Caveats

Of course, with any product - you might never sell any. But a decent product, with a defined marketplace can sell well. The point I am trying to make in this post is that "free" is not always the best way to go, and neither is a "high price". Sometimes it's best to bottom feed…

Having an army of salesmen selling your product is the only way to mass distribution. With mass distribution comes a good-sized mailing list, and with a mailing list comes the opportunity to upsell. And remember that you can upsell more than once!

I've given away products for free and seen them absolutely nose-dive. I've sold products for $127 and seen many hundreds of copies sold. I've sold products via a whole raft of affiliates working for me - but I have never sold a product which allows the person selling it to keep 100% of the selling price, whilst I build a mailing list. It should be interesting to launch my next product on a bottom-feed schedule, eh?

I've blathered enough for one post. If anyone wants a more in-depth analysis of any point in this post, well comment to let me know and I'll get around to it.