Part of the guide: Affiliate Marketing
Phase 3: Product Launch
With your basic product funnel setup; it’s time to do your first product launch. You can do a launch straight away with a single front end offer + one OTO. Or you can skip this phase, start marketing and do a launch later when you’ve built out a few more backend offers.
You can only really do a product launch once. You can always do a 2.0 launch after you introduce a new system/more features; but generally you should only every launch a product once. Which is why you might want to develop some high ticket offers to promote to customers on the backend before launching in order to maximize revenue.
You might have a basic $100 product + $200 one time offer. An affiliate launch might generate 1000 sales, if 30% of customers buy the OTO that’s $160,000 in revenue. After paying affiliates that might be something like $80,000. Not bad.
However if you added a subscription membership site at $50/month as well as a high ticket $1000 coaching program the launch would be a different ball game. 10% of customers might buy the subscription membership site generating an extra $5000/month in PASSIVE income and 5% might purchase the coaching resulting in another $50,000.
With that said; this is how you launch:
Setup Affiliate Page
Setup your product on an affiliate platform like Clickbank or JVzoo before you do any of this. Now create an Optimize Press page inviting affiliates to promote your product launch, explain the commission structure, what the product is about and why they should promote. Ask them to opt-in to the email list to get further launch details (also so you can mail them to promote future launches).
On the page display the links to the Clickbank or JVzoo page so they can generate their affiliate links. Also offer a few swipe files for them to send on launch day (these are promo emails written by you so they can copy and paste them to their subscribers).
It’s also essential to run an affiliate contest. No content = no affiliates. An affiliate contest is where the vendor gives away a bunch of prizes to the top affiliates. You can keep it simple and offer $500-$1000 to the person who makes the most sales, $250-$750 to the 2nd affiliate with the most sales and so on.
Run a cash prize contest for the top 10 affiliates. How much you offer depends on what you can afford to lose, as well as what others in your niche are offering. A few weeks after launch, you can send the top affiliates their prizes.
Recruit Affiliates
Next you just have to recruit affiliates i.e. find people to promote your launch. Search for other product vendors in your niche, approach the biggest product owners and ask them to mail your offer. You might want to offer them a special deal or build some rapport first.
It’s a good idea to leave about 20 days to recruit affiliates. On launch day if all goes well your affiliates should mail their lists about your new product, traffic should flood in and the sales should flow.
All payments and affiliate commissions will be processed automatically. Affiliate launches done right always result in big pay days. More importantly; a launch will send a heavy number of customers through your door.
Once you’ve launched your product; there’s only one thing left to do; marketing.
Click Here To Go To Phase Four
Aaliyah Richards
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You have watched the number on the dashboard not match the number in your account. What is different now is simple: it settles on a public contract you can check yourself, not a dashboard I control.
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This post is really insightful! I had been struggling with the idea of a product launch, but the way you laid out the strategy made it seem so achievable. I’ll definitely follow your advice for my next launch. Thanks, David!
Oliver Gates
While the concept is solid, I’m not entirely convinced that these results are typical. Have you seen consistent success with these strategies across multiple niches? I’d love to see some case studies or examples to back up these claims.
Karim Solis
Just curious, David, do you think this strategy would work for a subscription-based service too? I’m considering implementing a similar launch for a monthly membership I’m creating. Any thoughts?
Sofia Delgado
I have to say, while the advice is useful, it feels a bit over-simplified. Launching a product and building a successful affiliate program requires a lot more effort and resources than it seems here. I’d appreciate more depth in the explanation.
Morgan Fletcher
Hey David! Great post as always. I was just thinking about how long it’s been since we last met up. We should definitely catch up soon! Maybe grab coffee next week?
Amira Bennet
This article brought back memories of when I first launched my info product. I had so many challenges finding the right affiliates. Your step-by-step process would have made my life so much easier back then. Great job simplifying it for others!
Ravi Singh
For anyone reading this, there’s also a tool called ‘ThriveCart’ that helps with setting up affiliate pages and handling payouts. It’s really intuitive and integrates well with platforms like Clickbank.
Eliza Monroe
Wow, I’ve learned so much from this post! The part about running an affiliate contest really opened my eyes to a new way of driving engagement. Thanks for the great tips!
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Most affiliates earn little, and that is disclosed up front. The difference here is not a promise about what you will make. It is that you can verify every payout yourself, on a public contract, in about twelve seconds.
See how the payout works →Most participants earn little to nothing. No income is guaranteed. You can verify every payout on the public smart contract.
I ran two of these exact launches before I left the industry, and the affiliate contest part is the piece that actually works exactly as described here — a real leaderboard with real prize money changes how hard people push, every time, no exceptions I ever saw. What the post skips entirely is what happens to the customers who bought the backend coaching program once the vendor’s attention moves to the next launch three months later, because it always does. That happened to buyers of mine, not through anyone lying to them, just because the whole model is structured around acquiring the next cohort rather than serving the last one. Twenty days of recruiting, one day of launch, and then everyone involved is already thinking about the sequel.
That’s not a bug though — it’s structural. A launch model optimizes for acquiring the customer. Retention afterward is a cost nowhere in this budget.
Twenty days to recruit affiliates, a launch to run, a contest to manage, swipe files to write. I read this and thought about which of my two days off this month I’d be giving up for it.
In plain English, what this post is describing is: beg other people with bigger lists to tell their subscribers about your thing, and bribe the ones who do the best job. That’s the whole ‘launch strategy.’ Nothing wrong with it, but let’s not dress it up as more complicated than it is.
The best case against Gail’s version: ‘begging with bribes’ also describes referral partnerships in almost every industry, and nobody calls those undignified when a software company does it. The dressing-up might just be the post correctly identifying that structure and giving it a process, which is more useful than the cynical read gives it credit for.
Nia, this whole plan assumes blocks of hours you don’t have. Recruiting affiliates alone is a research-and-outreach job. I don’t have a spare afternoon for that, forty-five minutes here and there, some weeks not even that.
Nia, the affiliate recruitment and swipe file writing is the part I’d script first — templated outreach instead of one-off emails, a shared doc for swipes instead of chasing each affiliate individually, a spreadsheet tracking who’s confirmed versus who’s gone quiet. None of that gets you the twenty days back, but it stops the admin work from eating further into the two days off you already don’t have.
Twenty-two years of budget cycles and I never once saw a business plan that read ‘launch once, generate a spike, then figure out the rest.’ Every launch here is treated as a discrete event with a start and an end, like a product doesn’t have to still exist and be supported the month after. Corporate life had its faults, God knows, but nobody got to just declare the quarter over and move to the next one.