Episode 21 – Product Launches and Gaining Traction Part 2

Mastermind.fm

Welcome to Episode 21 of Mastermind.fm! Today our masterminds Jean and James will continue last week’s discussion of product launches and gaining traction for your new product. Last week they covered getting a website together, building a mailing list and social media presence, and a handful of other great advice for making your product launch successful. What else will they talk about today? Come find out! As always, show notes are below but listen in for the whole conversation so you don’t miss a thing!

Engaging Your Users

What are people saying about your product? There are a few good places you can test the pulse of your product from and use to draw more interest with your own feedback to users.

• WordPress.org
  • Support Forums
  • Reviews
• Social Media
  • Facebook
  • Twitter

In the early days of any product, there are bound to be bugs and a shifting of focus/use cases from your original intent. Pay close attention your first customers, engage them, make fans and cheerleaders of them. Word of mouth in the early days is critical! Build a great reputation as an engaged developer right out of the gates.

Content Marketing

Building a foundation of great content surrounding your community and product is a great way to draw attention while contributing back to your community. Delicious Brains is a great example of blogged content built up around products. Offering content via email is another great way to reach people.

Affiliate Marketing

Joining in with others raises visibility and lends credibility to your product. You’re essentially paying people to promote your product, but in James’ words: if you believe in your product, what does it matter how people discover you? Get it out there to them however you can if you’ve got something that’s going to make their life better.

Plugin Partnerships

If possible, team up! Partnering with theme companies can be great promotion and ensure that your product looks great in popular themes. Hosts are another good potential partner. GoDaddy for example is moving to a heavy focus on the WordPress ecosystem, partnering with popular plugin developers to offer a great experience to WordPress users. Attend business conferences like Pressnomics and be prepared to lay out how your product can be a solution to a company’s needs.

Translate

WordPress reaches a much greater audience than just the English speaking world. Provide a translated readme.txt and work towards getting translated into as many languages as possible. This not only gives you a wider potential audience, it gives you a huge advantage over non-translated competing plugins. Even if you can’t afford to hire a translator, there are other incentives you can offer, such as free licensing.

Featured On The Show:

• Ninja Forms
• WP Mayor
• WP RSS Aggregator
• Post Status
• WP Tavern
• Delicious Brains
• Optin Monster
• Envato
• Astoundify
• UpThemes
• Parallelus
• GoDaddy
• PressNomics
• SiteKick Pro
• WPML
• MailPoet