So here’s a sentence I never thought I’d type…
I just finished writing the introduction to the Korean edition of my book, Launch.
That’s 18 international editions now (so far!).
It’s pretty wild to think that there are people all over the world – in countries I’ve never even been to – using my formula to launch their businesses.
It got me thinking back to when I started out – when my entire email list was 17 people… and 3 of those were me!
So how do you go from 17 (OK…14!) subscribers to having a #1 bestselling book in the hands of hundreds of thousands of people?
By launching. And this is where it gets meta…
My book reached #1 on the New York Times list because I used the strategies inside the book to launch it.
A first-time author coming out of nowhere and hitting the top spot is rare… and proof that these strategies work.
That’s why it doesn’t matter where you’re starting from or how humble your beginning. If you can build an audience, deliver life-changing value, and make your marketing feel like an unmissable event… you can succeed.
Here’s more about how to do that…
What would it be like to reach tens of thousands of people with your message? What would that be like?
So I just wrote the introduction to the Korean language edition of my book Launch. That makes 18 editions, 18 foreign language editions. Here's a few of them. I don't even – not sure what languages these are – my publisher just sends them to me after they come out.
So now we've got the Korean language edition coming out. I just did some research on the Korean market. I wrote the introduction. It'll be coming out sometime in the next few months. It's just crazy because I've now sold hundreds of thousands of copies of this book. It was a New York Times, a number one New York Times bestseller. It's got over a thousand reviews on Amazon – 4.7 Stars – just saying over a thousand reviews on Amazon. And it's crazy because when – I can remember back when I was writing this book and it took me almost two years to write the book. And I would get up every morning at 5 a.m. My rule was that I had to – my fingers had to be on the keyboard within 10 minutes of my feet hitting the floor. And from 5 am to 7 am I would write every day. And ended up with this book.
And then how does it get to be in 18 languages? How does it sell hundreds of thousands of copies? How does it get so many reviews? Well, there's two answers to it. One is the way you get a book to really have legs and keep on selling. And this is a big secret – to write a great book. that's the truth secret because books sell through word of mouth. I'm going to tell you a little bit more about that in just a second but the other thing is, I followed my formula. This is the formula that I've been developing and I've been teaching you for 20 years on how to launch and it works just as well for books and at the end of the day, doing a great launch comes down to building an audience over time. And everyone starts slowly with the audience building but you build an audience slowly over time. You learn how to serve them and then you learn how to build marketing. That is a true event – that your audience looks forward to getting your marketing. And marketing that you can deliver value over time that naturally leads into the sale.
That's what this launch formula is all about.
It's in the book. I basically followed my book. I followed my own strategies to launch my own book and I know it's getting a little meta but it actually works and so I just, this is actually the updated Edition, this is the updated version of this book, and in it I actually quoted an Amazon review. So yes, I actually do go read my Amazon reviews. Maybe I shouldn't be doing that but I do it. And so one
day, when I was reading a review for the original, the old edition of this book, I came across one and it was from Tiffany Aliche, who I have gotten to know of since then. But at that point it was just a review I saw on Amazon. And the title of the review was, it launched me into an eight figure per year business, and that got my attention.
So I read the review and this is what the review said, and I got Tiffany's permission to read this, or to put this in the book, so I actually meta again, I put the review from the original Edition into the new book and said, “Five years ago I had an idea for a new business – an online school that taught women how to take their finances and lives to the next level – the Live Richer Academy. I had no idea how to introduce my new business to my audience then a friend suggested I read “Launch”.” So that goes back to that the way books sell is by people telling other people about the books. Sp this was the number of years after that first edition and a friend told Tiffany about this book so she got the book so I'll continue with her review, “not only did I read Launch but I followed it to a T. I did every single step. The results were amazing. Within the first 30 minutes of launching my school, I'd made $30,000. That was around what I used to make a year when I was a preschool teacher. The weeklong launch grossed me around $70,000. That was more money than I ever imagined. With the third launch I dusted the book off again and did all of the steps. This time I grossed around $250,000 during launch week. The last launch I did about a year ago made $560,000 in the launch week and I can proudly say that as of this year,” which was 2020 when she wrote this. This former preschool teacher now runs an eight figure per year business.
“Launching is not easy. It's a lot of work. What I like about this book is that it lays it all out all of the work step by step. If you're not sure how to share your new product or service with your audience, I highly suggest Launch. It helped to change the trajectory of my business and life.”
And there's the book, there's a photo of Tiffany that she allowed me to put in here and the crazy thing is, for those of you who've been around know my story, you know I started as a stay-at-home Dad.
It was nearly 30 years ago. My dream at that time was to possibly make $10,000 in a year to help support my family and my Ultimate Dream because I wrote, sat there, and wrote down all my goals. My Ultimate Dream was $100,000 per year. Never underestimate what you can accomplish if you just show up and consistently do the work. In those early days I didn't have anything for sale. I'd never sold anything in my life. I had no marketing chops, no experience, there was really, this is the 90s, the mid 90s, there was no one to even learn from back then. So I was just hacking it all together but I had this belief, I knew that there was going to be some way to make money online. If I could just gather an audience because way back in the mid ‘90s the biggest question was, “Can you actually make money online?”
But I knew, I intuitively knew, if I could build an audience then I could somehow create a business and in those early days that first newsletter went out to 17 people. That's what my email list was – 17 people. And I would track every single new subscriber. I had to spread sheet and every day if I got a new subscriber I would put that in. I would track that and eventually I got to the point where I was getting one subscriber a day and then two and then three and then four subscribers a day and then when I got up to some 20, 25, 30 subscribers a day, I like, wow that's almost a thousand subscribers a month. And it's still, even then, it took me time to figure out how to sell.
It was so hard back then. There was no one teaching. There was just no knowledge. There was almost no one making money. But I had this intuitive sense and that's where this Product Launch Formula all started. Back in those early, early days, I started to piece it all together.
But I'm only telling you this because that shows you just how humble the beginnings can be. And then you turn around and a few decades later you have your book out in 18 editions. You have thousands and thousands of successful clients. You have them out there changing the world and it's just because you keep on getting up and figuring out how to build your audience, how to sharpen your messaging, how to deliver more value, and then how to launch.
So I'm Jeff Walker. Wherever you're watching this, scroll down, let me know what you're thinking and let's go get them this week.
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