It may be taking that step to full-time, placing your bets on a single product or taking an offline business or career online…how do you know if it is YOUR time?

This video may help you as I share some thoughts on what has led to breakthroughs in our online businesses.

Product Launch Profit

I get asked frequently if pre-planned product launches are the best way to organize your entry or next product release into your industry or if it is better to quietly enter your market and build over time.

Based on our extensive experience across many niches and products we highly recommend generating momentum and larger profits with a well-run product launch versus a gradual entrance in to the market.

Here are 10 reasons that you will want to consider a full-out product launch event around your first (or next) information product:

1. You set a deadline for yourself and your marketing partners to rally around, if you don't have this date, many people delay getting their product out, only get a trickle of partner interest, and limp out of the gate

2. You are forced to think "Marketing" since that is what a launch is all about.  Without a launch people tend to ramp up their marketing in stages leaving essential pieces out (like getting affiliates, loading them with tools, improving your sales funnel, etc…)

3. It's MUCH more effective marketing to a "warm" prospect than a cold one. Launches are all about attracting attention and then warming up your prospects quickly before you make your pitch – conversions end up much higher.

4. If you are just starting, the traffic surge, opt-in benefit and notoriety of a launch can cut your time to success in a market by months (even years)

5. Quickly make yourself a "player" in partner circles…this means that you get to share inside info on promotions, help each other build lists, mastermind together, etc…

6. A launch gives you momentum…there is nothing more powerful in business than inertia/momentum.  When you have momentum opportunities come to you instead of you having to continually chase them down.

7. Those who do not buy from your launch, but join your list offer a terrific opportunity as future customers, so the immediate profit from launches is great but so is the long-term impact of building a large list

8. You get ongoing benefits, even though your partners will primarily promote around the launch event itself and you will see a decline in overall promotion following the end of your launch, you will notice that some will continue to promote your products long after the launch date which means more traffic, more leads and more sales from this one-time effort

9. You gain confidence early on that you can earn significant profits from your business and that you can be a leader in your industry, this confidence can carry you through into even great success instead of limping slowly out of the gate and doubting your real ability to market online

10. Launches get easier as you get experience.  The first launch (as with the first of anything) is the toughest…once you get your first product launch in the bank you will find the others to be easier and more successful.  The sooner you get your first launch underway, the sooner you can become a profit leader in your marketplace

Product launches are alot of work, anyone that tells you otherwise is not being truthful, however the good part is that launches are typically short bursts of energy (3-4 weeks maximum) and provide huge business profits and momentum making it well worth the effort.

Product launches are one of the areas we provide extensive, step-by-step training on inside Information Marketer'sZone - if you are ready to become one of the big players online, build a solid, profit earning online business then you'll find the Zone will cut your time to profit and learning curve down massively.

The question was…"What if I am a complete newbie who does not have relationships, does not have a list to offer to the expert in terms of garnering publicity. Why would they cooperate with me?"

This is a very good question, one that we have direct experience with as we have entered 4 brand new markets (as a newbie) and been able to secure expert interviews in each market.

Here are some tips I used when I enter new markets as a complete newbie to get experts attention…

1. I look for experts that are currently doing a book or product launch, these people are EXTRA hungry for publicity as they are already operating in that mode so they are typically very receptive.  You can find them by monitoring the new books coming out on Amazon, Clickbank or other ebook directories, searching on press releases (Google News, PRWeb, etc…) around your marketplace, and watch other authority blogs/social networks in your market to see who they are picking up for interviews.

2. You give them access to the interview (or part of it…I like to conduct the interview in 2-parts if they allow me where the first part is designed around giving them a tool they can use to drum up more publicity where the second part is kept private for my customers) – they can use this as lead generation, give-aways to their list, put it on their blog, etc…

3. I show them my blog and let them know (the entire interview if you are using the interview as a lead-gen incentive or part if you are selling the interview) that their content and links back to their site will remain on this blog feeding them traffic for months/years…even if you are a newbie, that is worth a good amount.

4. In very rare cases where I REALLY want to get someone I will offer them something else (write 5 articles for their blog, conduct a series of free interviews, cut the transcripts for the interviews, give them a testimonial, etc…) in order to get their attention.

Once you have the first few in the bag, you can play them off one another which works wonderfully too.

Above all else, do not underestimate your ability to persuade top names with offers of free publicity, inbound links and some champion-oriented testimonials – they really do not typically get offers like this very often.

I remember  starting online back in 1999 and having both paid and "friendly" mentors that helped me with everything from mindset through understanding the business models, warning about common pitfalls and helping with various tools and resources.

Not only was this advice time-saving and resulted in clear profits, I'm certain I would not be where we are today if it had not been for this early mentor.

Mentoring is critical in the beginning, making sure you start right and get out of the gates quickly but it can be just as important as you continually progress to new levels in your business.

Here's a recent article from Richard Branson on Virgin's blog talking about his view of the importance around mentorship.

Mentors serve some very important role in your success:

1. They instill belief at a deep level that what you may seek to achieve can really be accomplished – belief is a powerful thing
2. They can help reduce your learning curve on confusing/mind-numbing aspects of getting your online business setup and running – this reduction can be huge
3. Mentors can help you avoid giant mistakes, most mentors have made those same mistakes and can save you from that painful experience
4. Mentors can let you see opportunities or positions that you may not yet have thought of – breakthrough ideas
5. Mentors can save you tens of thousands of dollars with solid resource and tool suggestions
6. Mentors can extend your expertise – we can't all be experts in everything, you may be great at generating traffic but you may suffer with converting that traffic into profit – a mentor can help bridge the gap

What is your view of mentors…have you found a mentor yet that has helped you in life and in business?

Not only do they sell like crazy, hold incredibly high profit potential and brand you an expert in your field, the fact that you can build large partner networks to help send you free traffic and make you profits while you sleep makes this business a no-brainer.

The challenge for most people is how they get their first (or next) information product written, developed and launched.

The reality is (as taught inside the Information Marketer's Zone) there are many ways to quickly bring products to market:

• Speak your product
• Outsource part or all of your product development
• Mix public domain or PLR content with your own to make new, evergreen products
• Create your infoproduct from your blog
• Create your infoproduct as you coach, teach or assist your market

But there is one method that can be a great way to put together a product based on the expertise of others in a very short period of time, literally in 1-2 days.

The technique involves guided interviews with experts.

You may have heard the concept of interviewing experts, yet most of the interviews do not hit the mark and end up less than ideal.  We like to add one "missing" factor to our interviews that make a huge difference in how effective these interviews are in both attracting interest and turning the customers that listen into champions who will buy from us in the future.

That factor surrounds the focused objective of the interview.

What you REALLY want to do is identify a very specific niche challenge in your marketplace… let's say it is "how do I lose 10 lbs of belly fat in 30 days".

You want to then find experts that will help with that specific challenge and then ask them a series of questions around step-by-step advice for achieving that desired result.

So, instead of a rambling 30-minutes of talking you get a laser-focused interview that pulls out the best system for helping your prospect achieve what they want the most.

This is what we now do with our interviews and get very good feedback from them.

Your Step-By-Step Process To Conduction Expert Interviews:

STEP 1. Determine the specific desire you are targeting within your marketplace and setting the outcome you seek to help your customers achieve.  This is the step that will help you set your interview aside from rambling, plain interview to a high-value, higher-priced information product

STEP 2. Seek out authority figures in your marketplace who you want to approach about an interview.  A good place to start are experts who are (or have recently) released a new book or ebook as they will be in a receptive mode for conducting interviews to achieve publicity.  A technique we commonly use is to conduct a longer interview (by phone, skype, video or written) and cut half of it for public consumption (to draw traffic and exposure to the expert which helps attract them) and the other half stays private as your own information product.

You want to share rights to everything with the author to use as they wish (most don't ever use it by the way) and tell them how you will help get them some free publicity.

STEP 3. Put together your questions, do some background research on your interview candidate to make the questions more personal and interesting.  Most important though is strive to get a step-by-step system that will help your customer achieve X where X is the #1 desire in your marketplace.

STEP 4. Get your recording setup established.  There are various skype recorders, the two that we highly recommend are: Pamela and SuperTinTin (our favorite) allowing you to capture and record audio and video Skype sessions.

STEP 5. Edit your interview, if your interview is audio only then use the free Audacity audio editing tool to do any cutting or splicing of intro music, etc…to your audio interview.  From Audacity you can render your audio into an mp3 format which you can then make available to your customers.  If your Skype is a video interview then you want to use a tool like iMovie or other video editing tool to manipulate the movie file and render it to a format like .mp4 or .avi so it can be sent or displayed to your customer.

STEP 6. You want to then upload your files for either download or streaming (your decision on how you want to make your content available to your customer).  I like hosting my larger files on Amazon S3 (cheap storage and bandwidth).  Finally, put up your sales or landing page and you are ready to go.

Kicking off your own information product marketing business (or adding additional profit-making products to your existing business) can be simple and fast using this system for interviewing experts.  You will find additional training, tips and templates inside InfoMarketer'sZone that we have used for our own interview infoproducts.

Admittedly, a part of this was the romantic "outsiders" view of the wealth and prosperity that comes along with operating a successful business not to mention the glory that setting your own schedule evokes in your mind.

But there always was an underlying admiration for the spirit of the entrepreneur who does not "settle" for helping someone else achieve dreams but to pursue and drive toward achieving their own dreams.

After all, we know what an incredible feeling it is to spend time doing something we love.  Time flies, your expertise and enthusiasm seem unstoppable and the universe seems to fall into place when you do that which you love.

So it always struck me as the ultimate objective in life to spend your creativity, energy, time and effort doing something that you love doing rather than working for someone else, no matter how closely aligned their dream may be with your own.

I guess you could say I discovered the missing link early on…digging deeply into the psyche of successful entrepreneurs, understanding those that were wildly successful and those that were not.

First, let's outline some of the obvious steps that an entrepreneur takes when starting and growing their own business:

1. You first set some financial objectives – sometimes these are general, other times specific.  Specific is always better
2. Decide on a market – is it big enough, is it reachable, do you have a unique enough offering, is there enough potential
3. Develop a product or service strategy – will you sell someone else's products or will you create or license your own?
4. Setup your online marketing, sales and distribution strategy – an art in itself
5. Work your conversions – improve the performance of your marketing
6. Leverage partners to reach wide market reach
7. Continue to drive traffic, develop publicity and expand your market coverage to take more profit and add more value

I'm sure you will agree, even though you may have seen many of these before, this is a pretty valuable list in itself.  In fact, this list makes up the majority of the training we provide within Information Marketer's Zone Entrepreneur Kick-Start Program…but there is still a piece missing.

In fact, the missing piece is SO important that I know several people who have followed steps 1-7 religiously but have still miserably failed in their bid to become a successful entrepreneur.

What is it?

Passion and interest…what sets successful businesses apart from poorly performing businesses is that lack of leadership passion.  As the entrepreneur that will start and grow your business, you need to have and pass that passion on down through your business.

If you don't have passion or interest for your business then you won't…

• Dedicate every waking hour to building and sharing your business with your marketplace
• Have the interest to get to know your market at a deeper level allowing you to serve them better and have an advantage on your competition
• Break through the boredom and setbacks that every entrepreneur faces…if you are passionate and interested in what you are doing (in your ultimate objectives and goals) then these setbacks and slow times are simply tiny speed bumps whereas if you lack this passion and interest they eventually become giant, impassible, stone walls that prevent you from achieving your goals
• You will have a hard time getting others fired up around you…partners, publicists, leads, customers will all sense that you are not "all-in" and be less convinced of you or your business.

Passion and interest can exist in many forms, for example…

• You may be passionate about the marketplace/customers you serve (like-minded, share your passion or make you feel good to serve them)
• You may have a passion for the product or service (gets better results, YOUR technology, evolves the marketplace, sets new trends)
• Your passion may exist around the function you perform (you love selling, so you build your business so that you have ultimate control over what you sell and who you sell to) In this case your product and market matter less than the type of business and role you play in that business make up.

Did you guess the missing link?

What are your thoughts about the link between passion and entrepreneurial success?

Leave us a comment – let us know.

We continue work this week on production of a 10-part video course we will soon be making available for no-cost to you.

It's an exciting, but very intense project that we are putting together based on the feedback of our tens of thousands of email subscribers.

If you have anything specific you would like us to cover – you may still have time to get your request in (just reply to this email will get it done).

Even in such busy times it is important to keep learning what is working in today's online marketing environment.

We sift through thousands of blog posts, articles and courses each week to bring you the best…

The best resources we could find for you this weekend are:

Top Writing Tips From A Top Writer

It's near impossible to run a profitable online business without learning to write well…whether
it be creating your own written infoproducts, writing content to attract traffic or writing in support of publicity or partners, you can benefit from these tips

5 Ways To Improve Your Email Opt-In Rate

Nothing feels worse than putting a ton of work into creating a hot bonus for your  customers or putting out a top-notch newsletter only to see a trickle of subscribers sign up.  Here's how you can turn that trickle into a steady, profitable stream of opt-in subscribers.

5 Best Attention Grabbing Headlines

We all need to be marketing our business everyday, these top 5 headline grabbers will help you gain more attention for paid ads, signature lines, PR headlines, etc…

How To Build An SEO Campaign From The Ground Up

Getting started building your own Search Engine Optimization Campaign can be intimidating, one of the best bottom-up explanations I've seen comes from Neil Patel this week.  He has all of the elements we teach in detail within InfoMarketer'sZone…great read.

Have a comment or something to add to this list…let us know.

For most people, sticking an opt-in form in the top right hand corner of their webpage or blog is their entire email list building strategy.

They then wonder why they are getting absurdly low opt-in rates of .05-1% when they could easily be converting far more visitors into hungry subscribers.

Just think about how big a difference this really can be?

We convert 1-5% of direct traffic that visit our sales sites into customers – that means 1-5 out of every 100 people that visit our sales pages will buy the first time around.  That's not bad, fairly standard for top end sites – most do not even convert to this level consistently.

On the other hand, conversions of driving someone from our email list to a sales page are more in the range of  10% over time, not to mention the fact that we continue to sell other products and services to these subscribers.

That's a 500% to 1000% improvement in conversions and can amount to BIG profits for you in your business.

As you can see, you want to do everything you can to improve your email opt-in rate because the flow-through profits this will bring are huge.

Here are 5 ways we have used to improve our opt-in rates:

1.  Your Headline is critical to gaining your visitor's attention, interest and desire in handing over their email address to you.  Keep these 3 things in mind…1) Make a promise or commitment 2) Make that promise highly aligned with your audience's top emotional desire 3) Make sure your headline is in strong alignment with the content on the page

2. Multiple Exposures.  Putting one, tiny opt-in box in the top right hand of your front page is not enough, you want your opt-in form in the following places 1) Blog on every page – test putting it after each post as a widget or a deloayed pop-up on exit (as a lightbox) – these can have dramatic improvements on your email opt-in rate 2) Each page of your website (EXCEPT your main sales page – that should be left to the single purpose of selling) 3) Links in articles or blog posts that are syndicated 4) A stand-alone squeeze page

3. Squeeze or Dedicated Opt-In Landing Page.  There are many situations where you want to draw in new traffic via external (syndicated articles, guest blog posts, social networks, Youtube video descriptions) or your own content pages where you want to send your traffic next to your incented email opt-in.  For that traffic, you want to have a highly effective "squeeze page" that is designed with a headline, benefit bullets, pictures and/or video with an opt-in form above the fold (without having to scroll).   These pages can convert at 25%-50% if they are compelling enough and can be a massively successful way to grow your email opt-in rate.

4. Actively Market Your Opt-In Offer.  Sounds logical, but the reality is that 99.9% of online marketers market everything BUT their opt-in and "hope" that someone opts-in by chance when they arrive at their site.  Change your approach and begin to send traffic directly to squeeze or landing pages where the primary focus is not first to sell something, but to get the opt-in.

5. On Page Optimizations.  There are several techniques you should test that can make a big difference in conversion rates.  For example, we recently helped a client triple their conversion rate by simply taking their existing opt-in forms and changing them to an orange background so they were more visible.  In other cases, placing a picture or video within the opt-in form or on the squeeze page attracts more attention and looks more professional.  Making these tweaks may seem like drudgery, just think of it as spending a few minutes to improve your chances of hitting the jackpot.

Having an effective email opt-in funnel in place on your website is the closest thing to the having your own automatic money machine…certainly deserving of your time and money.    Try putting the next few hours of effort you would have spent trying to get more traffic into improving the response from the traffic you are already getting.

That marketing online has changed from pushing email out to customers toward using pull mechanisms like social networking and blogging.

It seems that everyone except those who run big, profitable, highly successful online businesses have been convinced that list building and email marketing are old-school.

But what if I told you that email marketing is MORE important than ever before…and that building a list should be a top priority no matter what stage of online marketing you are working right now…

It's true, I'll share with you why with some real examples in this video…

Here are three of my favorite email marketing tools (these are tools that we use to grow and manage our lists of 10,000+ in 4 different markets):

1. Aweber Autoresponder….simply the best, we've used them to manage our lists, create opt-in forms for our blogs and landing pages, send out pre-designed email campaigns and blast out broadcasts to keep our list engaged and responsive
2. NoteTab Light – simple, free text editor that lets me write email autoresponder messages and newsletter blasts in text that I cut and paste into Aweber
3. InfoMarketer'sZone - This resource site includes a 6-week Bootstrap Online Profits Course, lots of email marketing templates and subject headings as well as a Private Mentorship Forum that gives you 1-on-1 access to top internet marketers day or night.

Have a question or comment, let us know by leaving a comment on this blog post.