In the online internet marketing world, launching is a big thing, with some online fitness businesses using it as their primary method of promoting and selling.

From my experience, it’s a great tool to heavily promote a new online programme or service, or occasionally promote your existing offerings.

After all, if you’ve put large amounts of work into your online fitness business, why wouldn’t you want to make some noise about it.

Oh, and some sales.

A well executed launch of your new online fitness business or service is going to help you do that, which is a sure fire way to get peoples attention on who you are and what you offer.

Although launching can become and feel like a difficult and complicated task, this blog is going to keep it real. I’ll only be sharing with you the techniques and tactics that I’ve personally used with success, while removing any of the guesswork.

Why Launch

Your first ever launch essentially marks the start of your new online fitness business, or new programme or service. Perhaps you’ve spent weeks or even months creating your online programme, then a well executed launch is going to ensure you get the attention it deserves.

Your launch is also a dedicated time that you focus heavily on marketing and sales, but it’s important to note that it also just marks the start of your on-going marketing and sales tactics.

So it’s a great way to find out what you enjoy and what actually works for you. Therefore your online programme or service doesn’t live or die based on your launch. This is just a start of things to come.

The Role of Launches

The goal of your first ever launch is to build:

When you use the system I share with you in this lesson, you’ll be able to do all of this in a short space of time. Use this launch momentum to get you off to the right start!

The Framework

It’s time to take a quick look into the overall launch framework that you should use.

It consists of 5 core phases that will happen over the course of a 4-6 week launch. Each phase is designed for a very specific reason, and by understanding this, you can begin to build your own launch sequence. Let’s take a look at each phase now:

Phase 1: The giveaway

Your email list is the key component to a successful launch. This where you will spend considerable time throughout the launch – emailing your list with content and tailored offerings. If you don’t have an email list or need to significantly grow yours in order to achieve results from a launch, then this phase is critical for you.

Therefore your giveaway is something that your existing audience AND cold traffic would really like to know about. So much so, they are willing to part with their email address for the pleasure.

Phase 2: The survey

Now you have an email list and the attention of your audience (because you just delivered massive value via your giveaway), you now want to seamlessly start transitioning into what you will soon be offering. Since your launch is all about phases that lead right to your launch day, the survey phase is the perfect tool to use here.

At this point you are going to offer a survey to your email list, which will of course be linked to your upcoming pre-content phase. In just 1-2 emails you can get people engaged, and get them excited for what’s to come.

Phase 3: Pre-launch content

The third phase of your launch is about providing even more free and valuable content before you ask for the sale. You’ll do this in your pre launch content, which is usually a 3 part email, article, video or blog series that all link back to the problem your potentials clients are having. This will also be fuelled by the survey you just previously completed.

Phase 4 – Open cart

After all the previous work you’ve just put into your launch, it’s now time to actually launch it, and ask people to join or purchase. The open cart phase of your launch will likely last between 5-7 days, with an email being sent each day it’s open. This will further encourage people to buy, plus break down any objections that people have.

This is the time that you start making money and see a significant return on your dedication.

Phase 5 – Post-launch review

After you’ve opened the cart and potentially closed it, the work isn’t quite over.

You’ve now got some new clients or customers to serve, and you should immediately do a review of your launch and learn from it. What worked for you, and what didn’t? What would you change if you had to do it again, and what would you keep?

Plus, this is also an ideal time to learn from those who bought AND didn’t buy from you during the launch. These are all key questions to answer during this important post launch review.

So that’s the 5 key phases that you should use to conduct your first ever launch.

You can see that some work is involved, but if you’ve ever tried selling something online before, you know it’s not that easy. By following this proven and tested formula, it can make selling programmes or coaching online much easier.

At this point, you might also be wondering how long it will take to actually go through a launch like this. So now we’ll take a look at your launch time line so that you are prepared for every phase and when it needs to be completed.

The Launch Timeline

A successful launch takes time.

It’s not something that you will be able to throw together in just a few days time, nor will it only take a few days to execute on.

From experience, each 5 phases of the launch framework will take at least one week to complete, and they should be completed one after another.

This means your launch will require at least 5 weeks of your focused attention and effort. And this does not include the weeks prior to building your site and creating the content or programmes you wish to sell.

In an ideal world, all of the ground work has been completed, so your website is built, the landing pages are working, the giveaway is ready and your sales emails are written.

This means you can focus on the task for that day, such as sending the email or chatting with new clients. If you aren’t prepared, then you’ll be scrambling to make it work throughout the entire launch, and you’ll be left feeling like that was the hardest money you’ve ever made.

So to ensure this doesn’t happen to you, planning your launch time line is essential, and that’s what we will cover below.

You just discovered the 5 key phases of a good launch, which should all take at least a week to complete. Based on this, we can plan for your launch like below:

For this example, you can see that the launch day will be the 30^th May (open cart). This is when we want to open the cart. This is usually a good time of the month, as people get paid about now.

Prior to opening the cart, you’ll also see that we need our pre launch content the week prior. This has been planned to go out on Monday, Wednesday and Friday, which gives ample of time to let people consume it and take some action on it.

The week before that, we then have the survey phase. At the start of the week, the email list will be informed of the survey and then again towards the middle of the week.

Before this phase comes the giveaway phase, and at least one week has been devoted to promoting this via Facebook ads and to our existing audience via email and social media.

And lastly we can add in our post launch review, after all is said and done. Again this is likely to take the week, so we book it in accordingly.

So this is how our entire example launch framework should look – and I highly recommend that you create your own timeline that resembles something similar. If you don’t have 5 weeks to launch right now, like you plan on going away on holiday for 2 weeks, then launching isn’t for you right now. As you can see, this launch model takes time to work, and it will require daily work and focus in order to make a success.

Action Steps

Your action steps from this lesson are to plan your own launch time-line, mapping out each of the 5 key phases and when they will happen. You should then begin at phase 1 and start creating the required content to make it happen. Each phase should be addressed individually before moving onto the next one. Remember to include the necessary tools and resources that are also required to deliver the content you create.