Do you ever feel like there's too many people doing what you want to do?

We can easily become overwhelmed in a world of 7 billion people and wonder if any thought is truly unique. Are there any original ideas anymore? Who am I to even try and why should my contribution matter?

• How could I compete?

• Who would listen to me?

• What sets me apart?

• What's the point of even creating?

Before you know it, you're caught up in a whirlwind of doubt. It's no wonder: we see the best of the best on a daily basis. The very best of the world is brought before us every day.

You follow the people who make things you're interested in, right? What this is doing is creating a Bubble of Awesomeness. You've created a pseudo reality for yourself.

What you see in your feed on a daily basis isn't a representation of the world as a whole because most people don't create. But you don't see the people who don't create because they're invisible.

We've been doing a series lately with a focus on launching products, creating urgency, and selling without discounts.

One of the 4 ways I shared in the last episode to create urgency in sales is adding bonuses.

Bonuses are a way to add value to your product to incentivize people to buy. This is in contrast to discounting. Rather than subtracting from the price, we're adding to the product.

In order for bonuses to work effectively, you need to make sure they are related to your product. If you're selling an online course, the bonuses you offer should enhance the value of the course and relate to the same subject.

In this episode, I give you 5 ideas for bonuses you can add to your online course to increase sales.

Urgency is the difference between making a few sales and making a ton of sales.

The reality is that people procrastinate. They need a reason to buy now. If there's not a reason to buy now, then people will put it off. It's just in our nature.

The problem is that the vast majority of purchases that are put off are never made. That means you miss out on sales from buyers who are otherwise qualified and would benefit from your product but can't be bothered to make the purchase.

This is where urgency comes in. Urgency creates a reason for people to act now. You provide some sort of incentive to close the deal before someone inevitably procrastinates because virtually all procrastinated purchases will never happen.

In this episode, I share four ways to create urgency to incentivize sales.

We all love discounts, right? Who doesn't love a deal?

If we can get something for cheaper, we're going to find a way. That's why if you ask someone if they like discounts, they'll say they love them!

But you might be forgetting about the times where you've gotten burned by discounts. Do you remember the last time you bought something full price only to see it get discounted shortly after? How did that make you feel?

In my experience, buying a product only to see it on sale for something cheaper right after leaves me feeling duped. I feel like I wasn't smart enough to figure out that I should have waited.

Nobody likes feeling like they're not smart. Yet this is the experience created by you, the product owner, for your loyal customers when you discount.

Let's run through a scenario...

This episode is the final part of our series on how to validate, create, market, and launch your product.

In this episode, we'll be talking about the launch process itself.

If you've followed all of the steps up to this point, people will have known the date for months now. You've set the deadline months in advance and you've been telling them exactly when you're going to launch. They've had a ton of time to get excited and the buzz is building.

Now, you just need to get them to your landing page so they can buy.

For this, I like to do a 48-hour launch.

The reason I like 48-hour launches is because if you've been following the process outlined in this courses for building buzz and ramping up to your launch for at least six months, people are very aware of when your launch date is.

48 hours is enough time for people to go to your page and buy, but it's also short enough to really push the urgency.

This time frame also gives you several natural opportunities to promote due to its length.

I did it wrong the first time.

I didn't do everything wrong, but the thing I did do wrong was the one, most critical element that would have doubled my launch revenue had I done it. How do I know? Because I did it the next year and it did double my launch revenue.

Let me first tell you what I did right: I prepared six months in advance. I announced my product with a landing page six months in advance. I gave people half a year to notice and was sharing it on social media in that time. I spent a lot of time refining the modules and content within my course.

So where did I mess up?

Emails.

By this time, I'd done everything I've explained so far in the first 5 parts of this series on how to validate, create, market, and launch a product. I'd even amassed an email list of 15,000 people in this time.

But I did one thing wrong.

In addition to engaging with your existing subscribers over email, you also want to be creating content that markets your launch.

These pieces of content are what will bring in new prospects who eventually become email subscribers, who eventually become customers.

Ideally, these pieces of content you're producing are so valuable that people are incentivized to share them with their audiences.

Think about the kind of content you share with your audience. What are the scenarios where you share a piece of content that is not your own? It has to be really valuable, right?

The kinds of content people share is content that makes them look good in the eyes of their audience. We all want to be seen as sources of good material—whether that's our own or simply others' content we curate.

It's an expression of our taste. If the content we share is good, then by proxy, our taste is good.

You want to create content that when shared, it makes the people who share it look good.

One of the biggest problems with launching your product is making sure you launch on time.

This is such a big problem in fact, that many people shy away from setting a launch date entirely!

But not having a launch date is going to work against you. Why? Because people don't notice announcements they notice consistency.

If you don't have a launch date, people will not know when to buy. As we'll be talking about later on in Part 7 of this series, you're going to be creating a launch window with incentives to buy.

If people don't know when that launch is, your launch window isn't going to fix that problem. Your launch will be a failure.

You have to be telling people about this launch date ahead of time and you have to tell them a lot because they're not going to notice if you only tell them once. They're especially not going to notice if you only tell them days or weeks before the event.

For my first product launch, I set a deadline, and I worked up until it was time to launch.

I put my product up for sale, sent emails out to my list and let them know that it was available. Inevitably, there were some problems and people submitted customer support tickets and we fixed the problems.

There were also people asking a lot of similar questions. Things like what the right way to use the included templates and guides is, or how to handle contracts with certain types of projects.

Of course, I can answer these questions individually, one at a time, over and over, but this isn't the most ideal way to approach things.

An approach I've only recently begun to implement is inviting early users to participate in a beta group.

Beta groups are comprised of people who get early access to your product.

The reason you'd want to do this is to get feedback on the product in order to be able to refine it before the public launch.

We're on Part 2 of a seven-part series on how to validate, create, market, and launch a product.

Today's episode is focused on validation. You want to make a product, but what good is it if no one buys? Not that good.

You may assume that if you make a product you want, there's other people who will want it too. This is possible. But you're still guessing. You're still hoping.

I personally don't like to invest months of my time on guesses and hope. I'd rather spend the bulk of my time up front validating an idea and making sure people are interested before I invest a ton of time creating the product.

Let me first start by saying that the only way you can be absolutely certain that someone will buy your product is to have a payment from them.

People telling you they'll buy your product is one thing, but you don't really know until you ask them to pull out their credit card.