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I recently partnered with a programmer friend (David Schwartz) to launch a new PDF brander that I’m convinced could be my most successful product ever.   Given that this PDF brander is so inexpensive, that’s a pretty big statement.

The PDF brander is called Viral Document Toolkit, and as I mapped out a “product launch formula” or “product launch strategy,” I made a few notes to share with you.

Over the years, I’ve helped to launch many successful products, and I’ve also watched many product launches fizzle or never even get off the launch-pad.

Here are some of the seldom discuss, or under-emphasized, factors that you need to consider when mapping out your own product launch formula.

1) Existing Proven Demand

Of all of the factors that I look for in a new product … proven, existing demand is the one element that I consider essential.  Having to educate your market as to why they need a product, or even what it does, is too much of an uphill battle.

With the Viral Document Toolkit, I had been monitoring conversations on popular discussion forums for years, and knew that the market wanted a new PDF brander with  the features Viral Document Toolkit offers.

Just as importantly, I had been searching for a PDF brander that could do the things that Viral Document Toolkit does. Since this was a “personal pain” that I had experienced, I deeply understood exactly what the market was looking for. When you can offer a  product that the market wants AND you fully understand their needs and wants, then your product launch can be almost effortless.

When you understand the pains of the marketplace based on personal experience, you can more easily express those pains in language that resonates with your ideal customers.

2) Difficult To Duplicate

If a product is too easy to duplicate or reverse engineer, you’ll have copycats under-pricing you before your launch is in full swing.

You’ll expend a lot of energy and resources to make the market more acutely aware of a “solution to a pressing problem” only to have someone else tap into the energy you created, and then  dissipate it by under-pricing your product.

With Viral Document Toolkit, I used the difficulty and pain endured just in creating the software as an indicator that it would be relatively difficult to reverse engineer. At the same  time, much of the products development was shrouded in secrecy to give us a bigger “head-start” on the competition who might  eventually figure it out.

3) Sense Of Product Ownership

A product launch requires joint venture partners, and they are often much easier to recruit if they have a stake in the success of the product.

One way to accomplish this is to put them IN the product. Include interviews, audios, videos, or bonuses that were provided by prospective joint venture partners. For them to help create a  product, and then not promote it, would create tremendous dis-ease within them on a psychological level.

What would be causing the discord would be inconsistency in their behavior. They indicated that they believed in the product enough to help create it, yet they don’t believe in it enough to promote it. Their subconscious minds would likely resolve this conflict by pushing them to promote the product… provided it is a qualityproduct.

4) Persistence

This factor is very under-rated in the success of any online product launch. Your potential joint venture partners are often victims of information overload and task saturation.   They often tentatively agree to promote your product, but soon become absorbed in more urgent tasks.

By persistently reminding them of your launch, the fact that time is running out, and that they did  commit to promote it, you gently nudge joint venture partners towards actually promoting your product.

In “the product launch formula,” persistence often means the difference between a product that is promoted by “Mr. Big” and a product that no one promotes.

5) A Well Mapped-Out Plan

You need a well mapped-out plan that identifies all of the players, tools, tactics and timing.  Nothing should be left to chance.

Conditions beyond your control will appear, and you have to adjust,  but you need to begin with a plan that you assume will be executed flawlessly!

My friend Jeff Walker has the most thorough planning process that  I’ve ever seen. He has it in a course called “Product Launch Formula.”   When I first went  through Jeff’s Product Launch Formula, I embraced  everything that he taught, and instantly adopted his habit of  mind-mapping.

I credit Jeff, and how he used mind-mapping software with making flowing-out a product launch so easy that once you start the process, there is no question of  what to do next.

Since I spent 17 years flying military cargo aircraft, often flying to distant airdrop targets with split second timing, I really  appreciate planning what you’re going to do, and then carrying out  your plan. When I flew airdrop missions, it was expected that you would fly 2 - 18 hour flights over challenging terrain and arrive at a precise set of coordinates in the air within seconds of when you planned on being there.

I now often map out, and carry out, product launches with that degree of precision.  I encourage you to do the same.  I also encourage you to check out Jeff’s Product Launch Formula. It’s temporarily off the  market,  but he plans on releasing a version 2 soon!

If you want to monitor the release, and confirm where you can get the best  deal on it, I encourage you to visit: http://BestProductLaunchFormulaBonus.com

In any event, incorporate the five seldom discussed product launch  secrets listed above into your projects.  Since so few of your competitors  use them, you will  have a tremendous advantage

Willie Crawford is a joint venture broker, and product launch authority.   He specializes in using viral tools to effortlessly alert the market to hot new products. 11 1/2 years of online marketing has convinced him of the  power of viral PDF’s.  You can quickly and easily harness this amazingly effective tool today at: http://ViralDocumentToolkits.com

Webmasters are always in the lookout for newer link building opportunities. And thus when Social Bookmarking came into existence, they wasted no time to understand and utilize its possibilities for search engine optimization and marketing.

They even started creating different groups to bookmark different pages on give and take basis. Things were getting worst and service providers like Digg became serious about this sort of unethical manipulation. But as usual, webmasters are always looking out for some other manipulation method.

Among all these techniques, linkbaiting became the most popular choice to get a great number of incoming links very fast (may be within an hour of publishing the content).

Here we would like to define the term ‘linkbait’. To put it simply, a linkbait is a piece of content (content may include text, image, video, tool or anything) that people would love to visit again or store for repetitive use in future or may love to share with his or her friends. The focus of a linkbait is to create a talkable product so that people would love to link to it or bookmark it for future reference. More reference to this piece may bring you more number of links.

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Tags: linkbaiting

Peter Morville is widely recognized as a founding father of information architecture. He co-authored the best-selling book Information Architecture for the World Wide Web and has consulted with such organizations as Harvard, IBM, the International Monetary Fund, Microsoft, the National Cancer Institute and Yahoo! Peter is president of Semantic Studios, co-founder and past president of the Information Architecture Institute and a faculty member at the University of Michigan. Peter’s latest book, Ambient Findability, was published in 2005.

In his presentation for Webstock 2008, Peter called himself a crazy librarian who fell in love with the web. Peter designs sites so that people can find what they’re looking for. It’s not just about findability, Peter says. The structural design of shared information environments is important. The vast majority of Internet architects don’t even know the term Internet architects. Content authors, bloggers etc. have a responsibility for shared information. One lesson Peter says he constantly needs to give clients is that it’s not enough to provide a single taxonomy. You can bring multiple ideas and formats to a single document to a wide audience with different needs. The Stanford University site is a good example of a usable site. When you design for the web, you should provide usable navigation and a site search facility at the very minimum.

The Consumer Reports site is another good example. It doesn’t stop with global navigation but gives a couple of information sub-sets to tell the user what the site database consists of. One size does not fit all in taxonomy. The Mayo Clinic use a more user-friendly design by listing all diseases by their most common name rather than the formal medical terminology. The site was re-designed with users in mind and has positively flourished as a result. It demonstrates that you need to design site taxonomies for specific audiences and users.

The elements of the user experience are multilayered. Peter is sick of the word “usability” as it means different things to different people. Depending on who you talk to, usability could mean:

• useful
• usable
• valuable
• findable
• credible
• accessible
• desirable

All these elements are important. Peter recommends asking these three questions when designing a site layout:

1. can users find your web site?
2. can users navigate your web site?
3. can users find your products and services despite your web site?

He also claims that not enough attention is paid to accessibility these days. Your web site needs to advance your business goals and inspire trust. Peter mentioned Google search as an example. People tend to trust results that are listed high in Google. Findability and credibility are therefore increasingly connected.

Peter has provided site usability services for the National Cancer Institute. When he began working with the site, 90 percent of traffic was from the general public who had been diagnosed with cancer and were seeking specific information. Peter helped re-design the site to make sure these people found the information they were seeking about specific cancer types. At the time Peter worked on the site, an amazing 70 percent of searches on the major search engines were for specific types of cancer so the Cancer Institute used this information to improve the findability of their specific cancer pages.

We can talk about findability at the level of the object and the system, says Peter. What are the ways the object/data can be found? How do we make it easier to be found? How does the environment support the navigation and retrieval of the object/data? What he calls ambient findability is the ability to find anyone or anything from anywhere at anytime. The destination is never quite reached because perfect findability is impossible.

We’re now drowning in information and suffering from information anxiety in the information age. “A wealth of information creates a poverty of attention.” says Herbert Simon (Nobel Laureate Economist) or the Dilbert version of this is: “Information is gushing toward your brain like a firehouse aimed at a teacup”. We are creating alternate ways to receive information via our digital networks, Google Earth being a good example. Another example is the “kid tracker” which is a GPS wristwatch your kids wear so you can know the location of your kids 24/7. Soon, people will be able to track other people every second of every day. This raises privacy concerns.

Peter showed a couple of examples of findability technology available now. Within a wireless network area, you can now use the Cisco Wireless Location Appliance to add electronic tags to items so you can locate them at any time. Hospitals use the technology to tag wheelchairs so they can be found instantly and save staff time and money searching for them. It’s claimed this saves one hospital $28K per month. Another example was the keen couple who had tagging devices embedded in their hands so they could open each other’s apartment doors and access each other’s computers. How romantic!

So in a world where the information haystacks are getting larger, how do we create information needles? How do we solve the findability question? We need to think about business intelligence, visualizing patterns etc. Back in the 1980’s Peter wrote an article claiming that the Internet will turn everyone into a librarian and now it’s happened. We can’t stop talking about meta data, social media labels, bookmarks and Flickr tags! In 5-10 years, Peter thinks that many sites will become like Amazon in terms of findability.

Search is one of the most important ways we learn. “Search has become the new interface of commerce” says John Battelle. Search startups such as Endeca and Trexy are pioneering new ways to search. Everyzing is a search engine that allows you to search audio files by individual words within the transcript. Buzzillions is an example of a site using both structured meta data and tag search. Hybrid search solutions are launching all the time. Google is struggling with how to provide data the way people categorize it. Google Book Search is an example of a site with usability issues. Flickr solved this issue by using clusters to sort photo tags, with huge success.

Peter says that we need to focus on usability in the future. Everyone working on your site needs to have the same goals in mind. He completes his presentation with the story of the three stone cutters. There is a guy wandering in the wilderness and he comes upon a quarry and asks the workers there what they’re doing. The first stone cutter is working at a slow pace and says “I’m making a living”. The second guy is working really hard and fast. He says “I’m doing my very best”. The third guy is working at a pace somewhere in the middle but with a smile on his face. He says “I’m building a cathedral”.

Article by Kalena Jordan, one of the first search engine optimization experts in Australia, who is well known and respected in the industry, particularly in the U.S. As well as running a daily Search Engine Advice Column, Kalena manages Search Engine College - an online training institution offering instructor-led short courses and downloadable self-study courses in Search Engine Optimization and other Search Engine Marketing subjects.

Tags: search engines, seo positions