Is It Worth Your Money?

So, I’ve been experimenting with launch jacking a bit more. If you’ve not heard the term before, “Launch Jacking” is a phrase coined by Mike Long of Bring the Fresh where you build small sites based on new products being launched and soar to the top of the search engines in time to make a number of sales as a product is released. It can be extremely successful, with one Bring the Fresh student (Rick Rivera) making over $140,000 is six months and is now releasing a course on launch jacking.

I’ve had mixed feelings about it and have been lenient putting these principles into practice. You see, I am extremely cheap and don’t feel it necessary to promote 50 Internet marketing products, most of which end up being pure junk. It’s so easy to get distracted when you’re learning IM and if I’m one of the ones pushing a new product, for a while I felt very responsible if you decided to buy said product. It wasn’t until chatting with someone that I came across a revelation – I promote physical products all the time that I haven’t tried out or would not buy myself to a world that is already over saturated with stuff, and it never bothered me. This thought goes hand in hand with the quote I read recently “You are not your market”. While my opinions and experiences are valuable, I’m not selling to myself. So with this in mind, I jumped in on a number of product launches.

I do believe I’m going to make a rule for myself, however, that I will not promote anything unless I see a review copy (even if it’s a draft). During launches, more often than not individuals are bonus shopping, but as time goes on, they really want an honest review of the product. I really hate all the hype involved in launches – canned emails and “fake” review sites that sit more like advertisements. However, this stuff has known to convert so I decided to try some of it myself.

I built a review site on the product Content Lockdown by Jared Croslow. I was able to get a review copy and saw that it was actually a pretty good course. I got my site to rank #1 for “Content Lockdown” and “Content Lockdown Bonus” as well as #3 for “Content Lockdown Review”. I tweaked my site for conversions the way all the “experts” said to and waiting. One sale.

Now granted, one sale for some people would be amazing, but it was far below my expectations. I also learned that this particular launch did not do extremely well, so I chalked it up to bad luck. The thing is, I kept getting traffic – not much, but some. I began to get really frustrated.

At this point I decide to stop being an idiot and going back to “my style”. As I’m sure you can tell, I don’t write like an expert marketer, but instead a real person. She may not be a millionaire, but time and time again I look back to Tiffany Dow and how she markets. I don’t need to focus on the same things she does to understand the value of how she communicates to her readers and customers alike. So I did some more tweaking on my review site.

Rather than try to sell my bonus, I actually wrote in depth about what the course contains, why I like it, and revealed whether or not the upsell is actually worth it’s cost. I was honest, not flashy, and while I am offering a bonus, I made the point of the site to be a real review, not a “bridge” page. (A bridge page is a term Google uses for affiliate websites that are built with the sole purpose of redirecting traffic to a vendor and offer no real content).

The results of my “soft sell” approach? In 2 hours I had one unique visitor and one sale to show for it. 100% conversion rate – you can’t beat that.

I’m going to chalk this whole thing off as a new learning experience – launch jacking is fine and well if you continue to offer value with your sites. I can keep the keys to good conversion in mind when building my site, but I must always remind myself to assess if my site is made up of bridge pages or if it’s truly valuable. These sound like simple statements, but I think taking them in and making them your focus will bring much greater success to all of us.

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