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Product Launch Formula Bonus Call:

Mike Filsaime ProductLaunchFormula.com

Hosted by:

Jeff Walker

With Special Guest:

Mike Filsaime

Version 1.1

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Copyright Notice: This report is Copyright Jeff Walker © 2006. Additional material is copyrighted to its original owners.

You may not distribute this report in any way or any format.

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Jeff Walker: Welcome everyone.

This is a Product Launch Formula Bonus Call with Mike Filsaime. I’m very excited to have Mike on the line.

I’ve just gotten to know Mike in the last six months. The first time I heard of you, Mike, was on that teleseminar with Jo Han Mok. That was probably a year and a half ago.

Mike Filsaime: Yeah, that was the 7 Days to Profit call.

Jeff: That was a great call. Perry Marshall was also on that call . I had never heard of you before, so that’s when we first “met,” so to speak. It’s a funny way to meet someone … on one of these conference calls.

Mike and I have gotten to know each other pretty well, especially over the last six months. A couple of months ago we hung out at the Big Seminar together.

Mike: Yes, in L.A.

Jeff: I got in a bind a couple of times with Product Launch Formula and Mike really helped me out. When we did that Social Proof call, I bought every conference call line that was available for the teleseminar. I didn’t have near enough lines and Mike called me out of the blue. I think he gave me an extra 500 lines that he had tied in with his service. That was a godsend.

Not only did he help me out several times through Product Launch Formula , he also promoted Product Launch Formula. That’s when I realized the kind of clout Mike had. The only person who beat him out in terms of promoting Product Launch Formula was John Reese. Mike and Yanik Silver were neck and neck throughout the whole promotion.

So all of the sudden I realized just how powerful his presence was in the market. He could sell a huge amount of products. That was last October and then this past January 31 st we all saw exactly what Mike could do.

He came out with his Butterfly Marketing course and completely rocked the Internet marketing world. He sold right around 1.2 million dollars worth of product in 7 days.

That was an unbelievably impressive launch. I’m very glad to have Mike on the line here because he learned a lot during that launch and there

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were some things he did during that launch that have not been done before. Plus he refined things that had been done before but he did them better.

Last week I gave him a call and said, “Hey, can I get you on a call for my Product Launch Formula owners?” He said, “Sure thing.” So, welcome, Mike, and I’m so glad to have you on the line.

Mike: Thanks, Jeff. It’s a pleasure to be here. I’m really excited as I have not spoken to anybody about the launch strategies that I used.

I’m thinking about eventually putting a report together but it’s going to be fun for me to get it out of my head and actually talk about it. It’s going to be a great call.

Jeff: Great. It’s interesting because of what you teach in the Butterfly Marketing. As I got into the course more, I realized how synergistic it was with Product Launch Formula. I don’t know if there is an overlap in content, but they certainly work well together.

Mike: Yeah, I think so. I talk about the three phases of a site’s success. First is the pre-launch. Second is the launch and then there is the post-launch phase. Each one of those phases is very important to the success of a site. I think that sometimes people go straight to the launch phase and they don’t spend enough time doing the pre-launch or they will do a pre- launch and a launch but they don’t have anything in place for the long term growth after the launch. All three of those things are important.

Jeff: We are looking at your launch of Butterfly Marketing now. The launch was January 31 st .

Mike: Right.

Jeff: You had that date planned for a long time. I know you had that planned last October.

Mike: Yes, and I think I mentioned it in the manuscript. When you are launching a product you want to get the word out in the market place. I recommend starting the buzz campaign to the public 30 days in advance using your JV partners.

What we found was the last two to three days it was getting to the point of “Enough already! Let’s see this product!” I wouldn’t recommend getting JV partners involved any sooner than 30 days ahead. If they are involved 60 days to 90 days in advance, it creates too much of a tease.

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As far as you are concerned, with your list you can start it out 60, 90 even 120 days ahead. Last summer I started leaking hints that I was going to be working on a home study course called Butterfly Marketing with more details coming soon.

That was about it. It started creating questions coming in to my help desk and my email. People started asking, “Mike, I’m just curious. Where do you get the concept Butterfly Marketing? Does it have to do with somebody metamorphosing from a newbie to a guru, like a caterpillar to a butterfly? Are you using the chaos theory?”

I found it shocking that so many people knew that the term “chaos theory” tied in with the butterfly effect. It was something I had just learned when I started doing research on the butterfly effect and similar topics.

One of the things I thought was important was to black out that date on everybody’s calendar including everybody in marketing. I wanted people to know that I was putting together that Traffic Secrets style launch that Jeff Walker had helped so many people do.

I wanted to avoid a conflict. I didn’t want to give out that date out and find out that Stephen Pierce was doing a launch that week or Yanik was doing a launch that week. Then I would have JV partners saying, “Mike, I can’t help you out this week because I’m working with so and so.”

I think that by getting the date out early enough, anybody looking to launch a product around then, would probably move it at least to the week before or the week after. We didn’t have too much competition. I don’t think there was anything really big going on the week of January 31 so it ended up going very well.

There was no real scientific reason why I picked January 31 st other than just looking back at some past launches. I looked at when Frank Kern and Ed (last name) did Underachiever Mastery. They did it the last Tuesday in January of 2005. I think John Reese did his on the last Tuesday in August so I decided to do mine on the last Tuesday in January as well.

That ended up being the 31 st . I didn’t want to do it too close to the Christmas holidays . It seems that once you start getting to around January 31 st , nobody is thinking about how much they spent on the holidays. That didn’t even seem to be an issue

So the Tuesday launch worked very, very well. Originally I was going to go at 8:00 a.m. and then, Jeff, you spoke to me about reasons to go with

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12:00 p.m. instead. Maybe we’ll talk about that during the call. That ended up working very well.

Jeff: It’s interesting that you said to get the date out early to your competitors so you don’t have a potential of people walking on top of each other.

Mike: Right. Yeah.

Jeff: It is a great point to make. You rolled it out on January 31st, and 30 days in advance you rolled it out with your JV partners and the general public knew for sure that it was then. I think a lot of your fans knew something was coming before that.

I guarantee that most of the other people who are putting out a competing product knew at least a couple of months in advance. For the most part, people will stay away from your date. There is just no reason for people to try to compete with you.

Mike: It’s kind of like Armand, with the Big Seminar. Everybody always waits to see what date Armand is giving before they put a seminar out there. The last thing you would want to do is to have a seminar going up against Armand’s Big Seminar. That’s because he is going to pull in almost everybody who goes to seminars. You are not going to be able to pull anybody so it’s the same type of thing.

It’s a courtesy between marketers. They are not looking to be your competition on any particular day. If I had found out that somebody was doing a launch on the 31 st , I might have moved mine to February 14 th or 16 th or some other date . Well, not on Valentine’s Day but somewhere around there.

Jeff: You know, Mike, because of my position in the market I hear about a lot of product launches. I know of at least one that was planned for the 31 st

that ended up being moved because they realized they didn’t want to run into a buzz saw going up against you.

With regard to the idea of a Tuesday launch… I launched Product Launch Formula on a Friday. I would much rather launch on a Tuesday. But there was a lot going on behind the scenes. I originally had it planned for Tuesday the 28 th of October and we had a couple of things come up and we had to move it out.

I couldn’t move it to the next Tuesday because I was traveling on Wednesday. It ended up being on a Friday but I much rather it would have been a Tuesday. I like Tuesdays. I also like Thursdays but Tuesday is my favorite launch day.

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Mike: I like Tuesday because in the way that I look at a week is in the same way I look at a calendar, and calendars go from Sunday to Saturday. Tuesday kind of still feels like it is early in the week. You can still look at all of the momentum as going forward.

I think it is better than Monday, because Monday is a tough day. Everybody works on Monday. People who get two days off during the week are usually off on either Wednesdays and Sundays or Tuesdays and Thursdays but almost everybody works on Mondays. It’s the biggest email day for most people.

They are catching up at work and they are getting all of their emails from the weekend. Monday lets them clean up their inbox, get back to normal and then Tuesday there is no focus going on in their world other than the launch that you want to put in front of them.

Then you have the momentum to carry them all of the way through the weekend, kind of like the box office movie. They talk about the weekend gross from Friday, Saturday to Sunday. It lets you carry from Tuesday and still pull the whole weekend into it as well.

Jeff: I look at it similarly, but I think about “weekend people” and “weekday people”. On Monday you are too far away for the weekend people. Launching at midday on Tuesday is my favorite. Then that gives you a chance to mail Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday.

A lot of times I’ll give people a break on Friday going into the weekend and then I will hit them again on the weekend. It lets you put together a weekday promotion and a weekend promotion. Then come back with a last chance offer on Monday.

Mike: Yes.

Jeff: I like seven day launches. You did a great job doing a seven day launch. It was a little different than Product Launch Formula but in a lot of ways I think you did a better job keeping the momentum going through your JV partners for that week.

We can talk about that in a second.

Mike: Okay.

Jeff: The other thing too, and I mention this in my Product Launch Formula course, is that January tends to be the best month for direct marketing. It varies by market, but overall January is the best. Certainly when you

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are selling a marketing product you are selling a product that is designed to change people’s lives.

In January people are looking for a change, a new direction. They’ve just gone through this reflection process and are looking for something.

Mike: They are in New Year’s resolution mode. This year is going to be my year. This will be the ticket out. That’s the type of mentality that goes into it when they are buying.

Jeff: So, Mike, why did you decide to go with the seven day launch?

Mike: I had a seven day goal. My seven day goal was to do 1,000 units in 7 days. You and I broke it out on the phone. What happens in the first hour and how do you compare the first hour sales to the first day sale?

Then compare the first day sale to the second day sale, and then a two day sale to one week sale and the math pretty much worked out that when you do an incredible launch like this. I’ll break down some of my numbers for you.

We sold 200 units in sixteen minutes. We sold 500 units in 5 ½ hours. We sold 691 units in 24 hours. As you can see, we sold 500 units in 5 hours and then maybe 191 units for the rest of the day after that. Most of the sales came in during those first five hours.

Almost a third of the entire first three week sales came in during the first five hours. We sold 691 on the first day. In five days we hit a thousand sales and then on the seventh day when it closed we were somewhere, I don’t have the exact numbers but it was something like 1,250. Right now we are in the 1,400’s and we are closing in on 1,500.

That is a strategy right there that we could talk about later in the call. That is the strategy of scarcity and number of units. Focusing on the seven day launch and right from the beginning letting my JV partners know that I was focusing on the seven day launch was very important because of a couple of things. People started saying to me, “Hey, do you think you are going to do a thousand in a day?”

My reaction was, “That’s not my goal.” I didn’t want to tell anybody my goal. I said, “I have my own goal but I’m not going to make it public. I’m not going to post it in a forum but I am focusing on a seven day launch.”

I knew what Reese did was really incredible with his million dollar day.

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People say it’s like breaking the four minute mile … now that it’s done, other people can also do it. I believe it can be done and I believe it can be broken even bigger and better, but I didn’t want to go out in the market place and say, “I’m going to be doing a million dollar day.” There was another marketer that did that after John and he got a lot of other people to put bonus packages in.

I don’t know what he did, but I think he did something like $600,000 or $700,000 in 24 hours. He had said in the outset that he was going to break that record and he was going to break a $1,000,000 in 24 hours and said, “Help me do it. Give me a bonus package for it.” I don’t know if you remember that promotion and I don’t want to say the name.

What ended up happening was that people were in the forums and I wouldn’t say they were calling it a flop but they weren’t giving it credit for doing $600,000 or $700,000 in 24 hours. They were looking at it like, “Oh, he said he was going to beat Reese. He didn’t even come close.” Well, if you ask me, $600,000 or $700,000 in 24 hours is incredible. I didn’t know if I was going to do $200,000.

I’ll tell you now I put out my worst case scenario Which was to do 300 units in 24 hours. Anything over that and I wouldn’t be disappointed. If I did any less than 300 then I guess you could say I would be slightly disappointed but my goal was a little bit more than that. My goal was to do 500 units in 24 hours and we did 691 so I exceeded that.

But I didn’t want to put that out publicly because you know how it goes in forums, Jeff. People like to poke holes and you know there was even a thread on one forum that said, “Will Mike kick John Reese’s ass?”

Then John posted in there and someone called me and said, “Hey, do you know about this post in the forum?” I looked at it and got sick to my stomach. It was two days before the launch …or something like that.

So, I went in there and posted. John and I had some emails after that but I felt that remark was unfair to both John and to me. I never said I was looking to go after any record. I was just looking to be my personal best.

So, now back to the focus, I didn’t want to have a “one big day.” I didn’t want to focus on that one day or that $1,000,000. My thing was that I wanted to go for the seven days. When you get affiliates committed to helping you out on the launch, they mark it on their calendar and they send their emails out for you and they move on. Maybe two or three guys stick with you on some follow up.

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My strategy was to let these guys know that I’m doing a seven day launch. I actually wrote a sales letter to be a JV with me. Go to http://ButterflyMarketing.com/JV-Invite.htm Some of the stuff in there I changed but basically what I did was I sent out an invitation to my JV partners to go to this page and I let them know up front that there were going to be prizes. Then after they opted in, there was a welcome video that ran for about eight minutes or ten minutes or eleven minutes or something like that.

I walked them through the entire seven day process. I told them the different strategies that we were going to do but that they may change. They actually did change. We went with three campaigns; the week chapter, the Paypal proof video and then the Mark Joyner call.

Then I told them that there were going to be prizes and I told them what the prizes were. The grand prize winner would get a Rolex watch and the first place runner-up would get a $3,000 Toshiba laptop. The second place runner up would get a Sony Viao laptop.

The third place runner-up would get a Gateway laptop and then it went down to Sony Handy Cam supportable DVD players to iPods, you know the 60 Giga iPods with the video and the docking station, all the way down to 11 gifts where every gift had a great value.

Basically, I held a carrot out there and I said, “The winner after seven days is going to win the Rolex.” Jeff, you know how marketers are with ego. They want bragging rights to be number one, number two, number three, whatever the case was.

What ended up happening was that within three to four hours the email started coming in. The instant messages started coming in. “How many does he have? How many does Russell have? Where is Ewan at?” I’ll give advice to you guys. If you ever do anything like this is don’t tell the affiliates who has sold how many.

Tell them from the beginning that the only thing you are going to tell them is what place somebody is in. Because if somebody just completely blows away everybody right from the beginning and just runs away with the Rolex, then it makes it impossible for anybody to win. You don’t want anybody laying down and feeling like, “well, I can’t beat this guy so if I go after him then it’s going to look like I failed. If I just bow out after the first promotion I can say he won it because I didn’t go after it.”

I don’t know if that makes sense but basically we would send out an email every single day that would say, “Here is the Rolex update. Gary

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Ambrose in first place and in parenthesis we put (Rolex). Second place would be Ewan. Third place would be Cody.”

Then the next day Cody would go in front of Ewan and then Brad would move ahead of Russell Brunson or whatever the case was. These guys every single day would ask, “Come on. I won’t tell anybody but tell me how many more units?”

I would say, “I can’t tell you. Feel free to email him but I can’t tell you.

You’ve still got a chance to win that Toshiba or the iPod. It’s up to you where you want to go.”

Out of the guys in the top ten, one of them emailed six times in seven days. I think the least I got out of the top ten was three promotions and most of them emailed four to five times in seven days. It was just great. We would stay in touch with them everyday.

We would tell them, “Here is what you need to do. Today we recommend that you focus on the three part payment plan. Today we recommend that you focus on the 30 day money back guarantee. Tie into the social proof. Point out the testimonials. Make sure they look for it on the page.”

We were in touch with them every single day and the Rolex update allowed them to bring everybody in. It gave us a reason to email.

We also gave the status of the top 20 because there were some people that were doing this just for credibility. They would see that maybe they were in 18 th place and maybe they dropped off to position number 21. They wouldn’t know but they don’t see themselves in the top 20.

So they emailed again and the next day they found themselves in the top 20 so they were able to gauge where they were. I have guys like Brian Edmundson, who has a list of 1800 people and he made the top 20. He sold 20 units with a list of 1800 people.

He put together a great campaign for it and for him it was just bragging rights. He was at Ken McArthur’s JV Alert seminar and people were coming up to him saying, “Hey, I heard you made the top 20 with a list of 1800 people.”

So, he is working at strategies. But letting your affiliates know where they rank is an incredible part of putting together a seven day launch. It holds that carrot in front of them.

It really, really, really did well because once the seven days were over, we started going from forty to sixty sales per day to four to five sales per

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day. That’s to be expected. You are running a high ticket item and if you can continue to get 3 to 5 sales a day for the rest of your life you will make a lot of money.

The point is, if you don’t focus on at least the seven days you will only get one day. I’m not quite sure that I would recommend going out with 30 days because you don’t want to take advantage of a person and make him work on your promotion for 30 days and then find out that he was number one for 28 days.

Then some big guy comes in with a huge list and wipes him out with one or two emails during the last two days. I think seven days was a good time line and everyone felt that they had a chance to compete.

Jeff: Yeah, I think seven days is also right for the market. It’s tough to keep up the intensity for much longer. There is a reason that most movies are two hours long.

Mike: Right.

Jeff: Maybe once you get past that two hours it becomes very difficult to hold people’s attention. There is a reason most pop songs are three and a half minutes long. There are exceptions where there might be a six minute song that just blows people away and holds them. There might also be a longer movie that holds people.

But in general there are certain lengths for certain mediums. I think a product launch is tough to keep going for more than seven days.

Mike: You’ve got to keep a pulse on the market place. I would go into the forums and put the thermometer in and look at what was going on. You have to do some publicity.

I’ll tell you right here on the phone that I watched the forums and I got a friend to go post in there for me because I didn’t want to be the defender of my rights by saying, “Chapter number three, you don’t realize I already talk about that.”

I don’t necessarily go out to somebody but maybe I’ll be talking with Gary and he’ll say, “Oh, did you see that thread in the forum?” He’ll say, “These people don’t understand.” I’ll reply with something like, “Hey, do me a favor. Do you mind posting that in the forum just to correct those things?”

So, if you start looking to go out for 30 days you are putting your JV partners in the position to get some unsubscribes. People are going to

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think, “Hey, if I wanted to buy this thing I would have bought it in the first 13 emails that you sent me. Enough about this whatever product you are pushing out there.”

Seven days definitely seemed to work. The other key thing is everybody has the chance to win. That’s why I went with 11 prizes and I will rattle them off for you, Jeff, and tell you the approximate budget so that people know where I was at.

Certainly you don’t have to do what I did but it depends on how much return on the investment you think you will get with your launch. The Rolex was $5,500. The Toshiba was $3,000. The Gateway laptop was $1,100. The Sony laptop was $1,200. The Sony handy cam was $599.

The iPod 60 gig video was $399 and I gave a docking station which I think was $149. It came with that. The next one was an iPod 30 gig which was $299.

Then after that I think seventh and eight places both got a Panasonic seven inch portable DVD player. After that was I think a Sony DVD VCR. After that was an iPod Shuffle. For some reason I think I’m missing ninth place. I can’t remember.

The reason for so many prizes is that, again, if I would have done just one thing, like one laptop, there would have been people who know that they are eight and ninth place competitors and they[d think, “I don’t have a chance to win going up against so and so. So I’m not even going to bother anymore.”

What happened was we had people fighting for every position here. The people in position 22 wanted to be in the top 5. The people in the top 20 wanted to break into the prize zone. The people that were getting the iPod Shuffle wanted to move into get the iPod 60 gig. The people that were getting the iPod were saying, “Hey, if this guy ahead of me is only two units ahead of me I can go from the iPod to a Gateway laptop.

That was the important thing. By putting out more than one prize I was letting everybody know that everyone had an opportunity to win something. I felt it was important to make every prize a good value, not to get something in the mail and say, “Oh, what’s this Madonna CD?”

(laughter)

Jeff: Also, you are talking about a lot of people who are very competitive. Personally, I promoted your product. I was looking at those people ahead of me and thinking, “I don’t want those people to beat me.”

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I know a lot of marketers and this isn’t just for the Internet marketing world. I guarantee you entrepreneurs tend to be competitive people. There are a couple of people that I know that are strong marketers. They are like the Michael Jordans of competitors. They will stop at nothing, or at least nothing ethical, to win.

So, competition is a good thing and I used that. I wasn’t as methodical and I didn’t use the prizes, but I wish that I had. I used that among my JV partners. You’ve done a good job of that.

You’ve let that be transparent and shown a lot of people how you did that. I did that as well, although. I haven’t shown people what I sent out to my partners.

Mike: Yeah, let me give the URL to my JV partners blog now, so everyone can look at it. It’s http://wwwButterflyMarketing.com/JVblog .

Here are a couple of the strategies that we did that we felt weren’t done to this extreme before my launch...

First, was the prizes. People say, “Wow, that’s a lot!” If you add up everything that I mentioned, it came to $15,000. You have to look at that in the scope of your goals and understanding the possibilities of what can be done with the right product and the right JV partners. We did just over 1,400 units and there was certainly room in there to put $15,000 in there for prizes.

Again, you don’t have to go with the Rolex and three laptops. It’s just putting something in front of people that makes them competitive. Jeff, it’s like you said, people have egos and they are competitive by nature in a friendly way.

Also, there is a lot of social proof. By putting out those numbers right there everybody knows it’s being promoted to a private community of only the affiliates. But it’s like, “Hey, I want to show the world that right now I am better than the guy that is in sixth place . I want to move up.”

I would highly recommend that people offer some type of prizes and not just one. Offer at least three prizes because you want people to feel that if they don’t win, it was still worth their effort. You’ve got to make sure that the second and third place prizes are also a good value compared to first place prizes.

Jeff: I want to make sure to underline your thought process. Basically I’m going to paraphrase you. I’ve got $15,000. I’m going to spend this

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money on prizes. They cost $15,000 but the correct thinking is that if you get one partner to send one additional email that sells an extra 30 or 40 copies, then you would break even.

Mike: I was begging for tie breakers. I even posted out there. Mike asked me early in the campaign what happens if there was a tie. I said, “The tie breaker will be whoever has the most sales on the last day.” I am thinking how good would it be to have the guy in first and second place be tied with XX units and say, “Okay guys, you are tied. Whoever gets the most sales today wins.”

They are forced to send out another email. This guy thinks, “I didn’t come this far not to win this Rolex. I’m going to throw in this extra bonus.” All of the sudden he gets an extra 12 sales by the end of the day.

Mike: It gives you $6000 in profits and right there you’ve paid for half the prizes. Yeah, definitely Jeff, let me just say something to everybody who is listening.

When I was doing this launch I put down the names of those who I felt had the biggest ability to move products in the market. The names went Armand Morin, Jim Edwards, John Reese, Carl Galetti, Stephen Pierce, and a few other names.

I contacted them early on and offered them a review copy of the course. Most of them took it and then when the date was officially set, I contacted them. They then contacted me and they all had a legitimate reason why they could not promote.

Armand was doing an event at a hotel and then inviting everybody to his house the day that we were launching. Others had a conflict of interest with a launch of their own product with some of their protégés and so on. Other people were just starting their coaching program that weekend and wished me the best of luck.

When all was said and done, I did not get a single one of those people.

My coach and friend Richard Shefren called and said, “Mike, I was talking with Stephen Pierce. We are talking about what you did here. Can you do me a favor? Can you read me off the top ten?”

I said, “Sure. Number one was this, number two was that, number three was that.” He said, “I know one of those people personally and I may have heard of eight other people on the list. What you did is absolutely amazing.”

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Then I gave him the top 20 list and it was the same thing. He had heard of one person from names eleven through twenty.

I want people who are listening to this call now not to think, “Oh well, that is because you are connected in a clique of guys that only promote for other guys and so on.” These other guys who were friends of mine did not have the opportunity to promote.

I did not have any of the top dogs from other launches in mine and you take out the top ten and we still did a tremendous amount of sales. I think the top ten only produced, oh wow, I wish I was at my office where I had those stats, but I think the number was 25% of the sales came from the top 10.

That means 75% of the sales came from outside the top 10. It was not just these marketers out there that dominated the marketplace. Everybody was making sales. Like I said even position number 20 sold 20 units of a $1,000 item.

Never think that it cannot be done unless you know these top names in the marketplace. It can be done if you do a JV right , your product is right and you get it out to your JV partners (that is something I failed on miserably in the timeline - I should have gotten mine out three weeks before the launch started.)

My products arrived at my JV partners’ doors anywhere from four days before the launch started up to seven days after the launch started. We were behind – we were working on graphics and I have to tell you, duplication is not easy doing it your first time. It is a learning experience. I could do it almost with my eyes closed the second time.

I do not know, Jeff, if you had a similar experience. Learning it the first time and then it got easier the second and third time . But for me, the duplication was the toughest part. I had to get digital copies which is something I did not want to do. I ended up giving digital copies of my course to some of the JV partners.

I did not want people saying, “This is a great product. Go out and buy it. It is $997”… and having to say that without even seeing the product. I wanted them to really look at this thing because I had put my heart and soul into it. The people that did get it gave the best reviews because they could honestly say, “Wow, this is going to help me make an extra $100,000 this year!”

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Jeff: I know for me I have done two big home study courses and in terms of getting the physical product done, certainly it was a lot more comfortable the second time around.

But I will tell you this: if you are going to do one of these big courses there are going to be a lot of logistics. There are a lot of piddley little things and these things are probably not something that you just hand off to an assistant to do unless they are very sharp.

I mean, you are approving graphics and you are working on what text to put on each disk or what text to put on the cover. I cannot remember if I told you this or if it was someone else… but I said, “sweat the graphics,” because the two times I have done this, the graphics are what held up the show in the end.

Mike: Yeah.

Jeff: Everything else was ready to go.

Mike: It was the same with me. I got Rich. He is Dr. Duplicator, that is http://DrDuplicator.com and he said, “Mike, I got everything." I was saying, “When are we getting these things out to the JV partners, man? They are emailing me every single day.”

He is like your friend Dave who, God bless him, came to my rescue. He is flying to England today to and we are in a different time zone. So I would be on Internet Messenger with Dave weird hours of the night and he was saying, “Alright Mike, what do you need?”

And I was saying, “Okay, this DVD case, here are the dimensions. It needs to say this but I need one to say Jeff Walker, Craig, and then I need this and I need this.”

You are right man. Getting the graphics done is the toughest part.

I thought it would be easier like, “Okay, you are the duplication company. You are the graphics company. You guys get together and get it done in twenty four hours.” That was not the case. It was a two-week process and it delayed getting everything done.

Just when you think everything is all set, you get a phone call from the duplication company. “Oh, what did you want to do for legal?” It is like, “Oh, right, well let me get my attorney to write up some legal stuff.”

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Then you find that she is not responding and other headaches like that. All these little things cause snags and you cannot produce in mass production unless everything is in place.

Jeff: And it is expensive! You want everything to be perfect because you do not want to spend $30,000 getting stuff duplicated and then have to redo it.

Mike: Exactly, yeah.

Jeff: I know that not everyone listening to the call or the recording is going to be doing a big home study course, physical course. A lot of you are doing digital projects or services or subscriptions but if you are doing one of these big courses, start doing the graphics long before you think you should..

And another thing… it is easy to get 90% of the graphics done. It is easy to come up with your basic design and have it look nice and great but getting those last items figured out, like what text you want on a cover and what text is going on what disk and what the titles of the disks are… all of that is going to take you five times more time than getting that initial design ready.

Mike: You should even get on the phone with the graphic designer. I would not consider doing this by email. I would have them get a legal pad and then you say, “Okay, I want this on the label of the DVD, I want this on the jacket of the DVD…”.

Then the biggest mistake with graphics, Jeff, is I never had a mock draft made up for my sales page.

So my duplicator was running out of time so he put it on his bed on a white sheet and took a picture of it. I had a launch for four hours with the ugliest picture of my course showing on my website. Then mine came FedEx the day of the launch and I put it up on a table in my office and did some things with the lighting to make it looked blacked out. Then I put it on a black table so it kind of looked like it was floating. Even to this day I never ended up getting really nice photos of the course like you have on ProductLaunchFormula.com.

Jeff: Yeah, I will tell you how I got that done in fact. I do not know if I ever

mentioned this to folks but I spent more for my photos than I did for my graphics. Actually, the person who told me about this was John Reese… he told me about this guy in Las Vegas, Robert House. You can Google him at Robert House Photography.

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Mike: So your photos are actually real products, right?

Jeff: Yes, real products.

Mike: But the entire background is almost eliminated. It looks like it was done on a green screen or something like that.

Jeff: He does amazing things. The guy is a pro at taking pictures of products.

Mike: If you guys want to know what Jeff and I are talking about, go to www.ProductLaunchFormula.com and then look at Jeff’s product assembled where they have the yellow hot sheets or the pink hot sheets or whatever the case is and the product with everything laid out.

They do not look like those fake graphics that you make an e-book cover out of. The actual course is suspended on the page with no background. Then go to Butterfly Marketing and see the one that I took with my digital camera and you can see the difference between the two. Again, that makes a big difference, you know.

Jeff: Yep, just Google “Robert House Photography.” I bet I spent $700 on product photos. I think each photo is going to run you about $30 or $35. I had all these photos of all the different components taken. It is not cheap but look at the value you are going to get if you are doing a launch for a major home study course. If you are going to have some success with it, I would spend the money for good product photos.

Mike: Again, when you are working on the product launch of your career up to that point you cannot be cheap on certain things. It will come back to bite you.

Jeff: Yeah. It is funny that you mention that. In my photos, there is a quick start guide. I was having everything FedExed over night to Las Vegas and I was paying the rush bill to have them done right away and then I realized , “Oh no, I do not have the quick start guide!”

I literally ran to Office Depot and had them printed out. I came up with the title page and I printed that on my printer. I ran over to Office Depot and had them print out on yellow or green paper and then I took approximately fifteen pages of yellow or green paper, folded it in half, stapled it together and sent that off to him. I just needed to put together a dummy quick start guide for the photo. So the quick start guide was not even done at that point, but I needed to get that photo done.

Mike: Yeah right, exactly.

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Jeff: This is what happens. Both you - and most people - end up crunching on the product at the end.

Mike: Yeah, guys, let me tell you some advice that Jeff gave me when I told him I was launching at 8:00 a.m. He said to me, “Mike, you might want to launch at 12:00 p.m. for this reason, this reason, and this reason.

And then Jeff said “Here is the last reason and it might be the most important reason.”

And I said “What is it?”

Jeff said, “Because every minute before your launch will seem like a day and you will be so thankful for those extra four hours.”

Well, Jeff was right. I was working on my sales copy. I was working on the opt-in form. I had a to-do list.

Sometimes I think on the surface, Jeff, when people call and say, “Hey, congratulations on a great launch, you did a great job,” I feel like telling them, “If you only knew!”

If they only knew how much you are working on the background till 4:00 a.m. or even going a day and a half without sleep. Right before the site is going live I was actually working on the opt-in form at the bottom of the sales page because it was just a dead box that I put “place opt in form here.” I had about six minutes left to put the opt-in form in until the site went live. Then the site went live and I did not even have an order responder sequence up until about six hours later.

Jeff said to me, “Mike, you do not want to be to the point of where you are waking up at seven and then doing a launch at eight …or are up all night waiting for 8:00 a.m.”

I’ve got to tell you, those extra four hours really came in handy.

That just goes to show you that when you are launching a product you are dealing with so many things. You are dealing with your affiliates, you are dealing with potential customers, and you are dealing with your duplication company, your graphics company, your life, everything! You really need to write everything on a “to-do” list and make sure that you are crossing it off as you are going along.

Jeff: I was the same way with my launch except I was actually working on the top of my sales letter with literally just three minutes to go. I had a lot of things change at the last second with my whole product and it was crazy.

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I was working on the product and you were smart enough to hire someone to work with your JV partner where I was doing all that myself.

Mike: Yes, yeah.

Jeff: I tell people that working with your JV partners is the single most time consuming thing as you get up to your launch.

Mike: Well, there are so many places we can go with JVs using bonuses and that can negatively affect your campaign. What ends up happening are these cookie problems saying, “Hey! I bought from Gary but Gary says he does not see me in his stats.”

Those kinds of emails took up a lot of my time and I handed them on to Nancy and Mike. I was happy to have Mike as my affiliate manager because I simply could not take care of all those things. The emails right after the launch, as much success as I had, were also two of the most stressful days of my life .

You are dealing with 1,300 people. Well, at that time it was like 800 people in two days emailing you, “What place was I? Did I qualify for the fast mover’s bonus? Did I get this, did I get that? Congratulations!”

I could not keep up with my inbox. Finally, I had to hire somebody just to carbon copy a message that said, “Mike will get back to you in a few days. He cannot possibly return all these emails.” I was getting about 400 or 500 real emails a day from support and affiliates on top of my regular emails that come in every day.

Jeff: It gets crazy. It just gets crazy.

Mike: I would recommend you get an affiliate manager. I will not get into everything here including the exact dollar amount. I did not set up anything complicated. We worked as a team.

I said to Mike, “I am going to set you a flat fee on every sale regardless if I make the sale, regardless if I got Jeff Walker in as a partner because I know him and you do not, or regardless if you get somebody in that I do not know.” It took the pressure off to feel that he had to go out to beat me to get to the people that we mutually knew off of him. We worked as a team.

I said to him, “You are going to get a flat fee for every single sale.” But Mike ended up writing the Rolex updates, he did the stats, he handled all the affiliates asking, “How do I get my link? What is the latest promotion?”

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We set up JV at http://ButterflyMarketing.com and that was forwarded to Mike. Even if a close friend like Gary Ambrose would email me and ask, “Mike, how do I check my stats for the $379 orders?” I would forward that to Mike. I didn’t handle any of that.

By Mike handling my replies they started realizing, “OK, I go through Mike Merz, not Mike Filsaime.” Man, I’ve got to tell you that really, really helped me because we were dealing with a decent number of affiliates.

Jeff: Just for everyone listening, I’ll second what Mike said. When you are in one of these launches with all of these JV partners, the management of those partners is going to be one of the biggest demands on your time. I know not everyone listening to this call is going to be able to afford Mike Merz, or a top-notch affiliate manager, but you should be ready for this one way or the other.

Mike: You know what Jeff? Let me tell you about the affordability of a JV manager. It’s paid performance. It comes out of the gross of each sale. I never paid him a penny up front. If we didn’t make any sales he didn’t get paid.

So, if you can figure into what you are going to pay your regular affiliates and work out something where you add an extra XX dollars for each sale, then you can afford it because it’s based on sales. If you only sell 50 you are going to pay him on 50, but he will be motivated to get the JV partners and train them.

You are not saying to him, “I’ll pay you $10,000 up front to be my JV partner.” It doesn’t cost you anything. Mike worked for 45 days without seeing a penny.

Jeff: I remember before the launch I told you take the number of sales in the first 24 hours, more or less double that and that will probably be what you sell in a week. That is my first rule of thumb. Double the first 24 hours and it comes out pretty darned close.

Mike: If you look at the first hour, it was close to 300. That is what you told me, Jeff. Basically everyone who is committed to buy is ready at the order button on the day the site goes live.

True die-hard fans are sitting there hitting refresh, refresh, refresh. “Oh, the site’s live. I’m buying.” You double what we did in the first hour and that’s what you do in the first day. Then you double that and that’s what you do in the first seven days. 300 to 600 to 1,200. Anyway you look at it, it’s a success.

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Just a couple of points that I forgot to make, Jeff. One was if you have a physical product, make sure you give it to your JV partners to review.

Don’t give them a digital version of it. There were a couple of times where people were doing a launch for a 997 product. They were only sending digital versions to their affiliates.

If that’s what the budget calls for, then I understand. If you're going to have 50 affiliates, and it costs you $80 to produce a course and $20 to ship, it will cost you $5,000 just to send out 50 courses. Keep that in mind. But if you can work it into your budget, then send them a physical copy of the product. It goes into the laws of reciprocity.

I don’t know if you necessarily agree with this, Jeff, but I will assume you do. When you get that big box with the thud factor and you open it up and the Styrofoam is all over your kitchen floor. You open it up and rip into the plastic. Then you put the DVD into your DVD player. You have more appreciation for something like that than something that says go download your files from www.ButterflyMarketing.com/downloads.zip.”

It just doesn’t have that thud factor on your hard drive that it does when you open up the box. You’re coming back from getting a slice of pizza and you see this big box sitting at your front door.

All of a sudden, the reciprocity factor kicks in. The person says, “You know what, here’s a letter personally written to me. It says, ‘Hi Jeff,’ and the guy actually wrote my name here.”

I think that is going to increase the support on launch day, probably exponentially. I know it does with me.

Jeff: And if your partners are sharp, then it gives them more ammunition for their promotion. They can talk about opening that box up. They can talk about turning the manual to page 47 and getting this great tip.

You're giving your partners more tools. That way, their promotion will be that much more real.

Mike: The second thing I wanted to mention was my JV blog. We talked about putting a blog out there for the customers. The JV blog does the same thing for your partners.

It gets your JV partners excited. Every email that was sent out was posted on the blog. We would e-send the email out. At the bottom it

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would say, “To see past emails you may have missed, please go to www.ButterflyMarketing.com/jvblog .”

What was nice about the blog was that if you ever made a mistake and posted the wrong affiliate signup URL or anything like that, or if you had to make a change, you can mention it there. Just write: “Whoops! I said the join-up call was Thursday. I'm sorry, I meant Friday the 27 th ,” or whatever the case is.

You don’t have to send out that extra email, especially if you're just pointing them to the blog. The blog is dynamic.

When I'm going to JV for, let’s say, Jeff Walker or Jeff Johnson, or anybody that’s having a big day, I'm sure, Jeff, you’ve noticed that the emails come frequently, sometime two or three in a day.

The reason why is that you can send an email out to your JV partner three times in a day when you make a mistake. You're not going to upset them as much as you upset your list when you send out those emails and say, “Whoops.”

Jeff Walker is busy. He’s working all day on his own stuff. He gets an email for Mike Filsaime. He says, “Okay, I have to read this later.” Three hours later, he gets another email.

You open it up and just see the top of the subject line that says, “Whoops Jeff, sorry. We made a mistake. We’re not going to be using this promotion. You want to get this affiliate link.”

You’re like, “All right, I’ll read that later.” The next day, you say, “Okay

Jeff, yesterday we did great with this promotion. But today, we’re shooting the PayPal screen shot video. You want to use this affiliate link.”

You know what happens? Jeff gets “deer in the headlights” syndrome. He says, “You know what, I couldn’t keep up with the pre-launch, so I'm just going to have to send out an email on launch day.”

I don’t know if you relate to that, Jeff.

Jeff: Absolutely. From the other side of the fence, I found your JV blog to be very useful. I went there a lot, every day during your launch period. I'm speaking as a launch partner here.

The other thing to remember is that I'm getting these email updates from you as a JV partner. I'm on your JV partner list.

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I'm also getting your regular emails to your regular list. And of course, I joined your sub-list for the product, so I am getting emails for that. Plus, I'm getting the JV emails that you're sending out.

Mike: And you're getting email from all the JV partners, because you are on a lot of their lists.

Jeff: So I'm seeing Butterfly Marketing and Mike Filsaime show up in my box ten times a day.

Mike: There’s comfort knowing you can just go to the blog and get the latest update. I don’t have to worry about missing an email or reading it right away. I can just go to the blog. It’s updated to the minute, chronological, sequential, formatted in nice text, and you can scroll down and see previous emails that went out.

I think that that really helps in training the JV partners. Tell them to become acquainted with using the blog and that’s all they need to know.

Jeff: You also said in addition to reducing the confusion, it also cuts down on the emails I'm going to send to you and Mike Merz saying, “Uh oh, I lost or deleted the email. Now what was I supposed to do?”

I just go to the blog. If people missed that, it’s www.ButterflyMarketing.com/jvblog

Mike: Please don’t share that URL. Please don’t put that into any reports that you ever do. If you're ever writing a report and JV marketing please don’t put that out there.

That is a private URL. But certainly, in the context of this call for Product Launch Formula owners I want to share that with you. Please use that for your own use. If you could scroll down to the bottom, or look at the archives, you can see the actual video that I sent to my JV partners and how we launched out the entire site.

There’s a lot of posts on there. There are probably 30 different posts to read. But it’s a great case study, walking through the day of January 1 st

when we started the pre-launch, all the way up to seven days after the launch, with the Rolex updates and so on.

You'll even notice Jeff, that I used a lot of multimedia,. I welcome my JV partner with videos, “Hi, this is Mike Filsaime. This is what we’re doing, this is the price point, this is how you get paid, this is where you get your affiliate link, this is where you come to get more information.”

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Then, when I got the prizes, I actually took my camcorder and filmed a 15 minute video (almost like QVC ) going over the benefits of every single prize. I was excited.

I lined these things up on a table and used the video to show these guys, see that Rolex right there, people start saying, “I want to win that thing!”

Nobody likes to buy a Rolex. But to win one is great.

When I bought that Rolex I was such a lay-down. I walked in wearing jeans and a polo shirt and no one was looking at us. I was standing there, and this young kid looks over and says, “Can I help you, sir?” I said, “Yes, I’d like to buy a Rolex.”

You see the other guys in the suits. They throw their hands up and say, “This 22-year-old kid working here gets all the luck.” I said, “What do you have in the five or six thousand dollar range?”

He said, “We have this.” I said, “Oh, I don’t like the color of that. This one is too flashy. This looks classy.” He said, “Well, we have a payment plan, we have this.”

I said, “I’ll take it. Let’s wrap it up.” Again, you see the other two salesmen in the background throwing their hands up like, “How does this happen?” I even took a picture of the sales kid.

I told him it was a prize. He was so excited there was going to be a picture of him on the JV blog as “the person that sold the Rolex to us.” I told the kid, “Hey, I’ll make you famous and put you up on the blog.”

I gave him the URL.

It was very exciting. Even to this day, it was so exciting to buy that Rolex. I still can’t get myself to go out and buy a Rolex for myself for $5,000. But I’ll do it for the prize.

Jeff: I’m the same way. I just can't bring myself to go and spend the money on a Rolex. But I’d love to win one.

Mike: Exactly, I’ll win one. What do I have to do? Send out four or five emails? It’s funny. That JV blog is definitely a good thing for you guys to check out.

Jeff: I’ll give a little announcement here for everyone on the call. The person who won your Rolex was Gary Ambrose. We don’t have a date yet but

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I’ve confirmed with Gary that we’ll be doing a Product Launch Formula bonus call with him.

Mike: Guys, make sure you make that call. Gary is the silent genius. That’s what I call him. We meet every couple of months and hang out in the hotel room. Every time I talk to him I realize how smart he is..

He is a brilliant, brilliant marketer. Here is the guy who did $200,000 in sales for my product. He sold 200 units in seven days. That’s an incredible feat…. I’ve never seen anything like that.

You're going to be able to learn a lot from him. I didn’t even know you were doing that call, Jeff. I'm going to make sure I make that myself.

Jeff: We just confirmed it in the last couple of days. When I was off skiing in Telluride, I was also exchanging emails with Gary. So we’re going to be talking to him specifically about how to do a JV launch within a big product launch.

He did his own launch for you. I will underline that - 200 sales as a JV partner are, to me, almost unfathomable. But that’s what he did, on a joint venture basis, $200,000 in sales in one week.

His list isn't all that big. I would put Gary’s feat up there with John Reese doing a million dollars in a day. And it’s not like he didn’t have any competition.

Everyone and their brother was trying to sell your product. Out of that, he pulls out $200,000. It is just extraordinary.

Mike: I’ll save that for his call. But he’ll talk about how he paralleled his bonus package and launch with mine. He paralleled every campaign I was doing step by step.

He is going to give some great advice. It’s really good stuff.

Jeff: Everyone listening on the call, look forward to this. I’ll get that scheduled hopefully in the next two or three weeks and I’ll send out an announcement when we’re ready to go with that.

This is something else that is pretty much unknown - Gary helped me out with my launch. He was in the background with Product Launch Formula when I was having my problems with the blackout issues and getting my redirects set up.

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Any time you're talking about software coding, I think it’s like black magic. Gary whipped together some code for me for my partners to use when I re-launched my Product Launch Formula. I’m sure it took him just a couple of minutes, but it was still a huge help to me.

He did that out of the goodness of his heart, got a hold of me, and helped me out. That’s the first time I met Gary… back when I was launching Product Launch Formula.

Mike, tell me now, you have had some fulfillment issues. I sold a few of your courses. I’ve been hearing from people wondering when they're going to get your product.

Talk a little bit about that, some of the lessons learned, and what you're doing to address the situation.

Mike: Just so everybody knows, every course has already shipped. It takes two to three days U.S. and add about a week for international. Here’s the short story. I produced 200 units up front.

About 75 were sent to pre-sold customers. Let’s say about 50 went out to JV. There were about 75 copies ready to go. We had printed another 50 or so. I got my course.

As I told you, I got mine late. We’re being honest here and talking about the graphics issues and not getting them out to the JV partners in time.

I got mine but I wasn’t too thrilled about it. Then I got an instant message from Gary and a call from Rich Shefren. He talked to me about something called critical nonessentials.

I'm not going to give a whole lesson here on what he taught me over 20 minutes. Critical nonessentials basically means that when something meets or exceeds people’s expectations, they don’t always realize it.

When something fails to meet people’s expectations, it becomes a critical nonessential. All of a sudden, if they spend $997 and they're happy with the product, then that’s to be expected.

But if they're not happy with the way that it’s bound, for example, all of a sudden, anything else about the product doesn’t matter. It’s failed to meet their expectations, just when they opened it up out of the box.

This is something that Rich was teaching me on the phone. He said, “I have to be honest with you, Mike. I went through your course. It’s great, I just love everything that it can do.”

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I almost feel funny talking about this. He called the wow factor the “thud factor.” He said, “It had this clear plastic laminate on the front of the covers. It looked like a book report you turned in to your college professor.”

He said, “Look at this course, and then look at this Product Launch Formula course by Jeff. It’s got spiral binding. It’s hard.” I said, “You're

absolutely right.”

So I called up my fulfillment guy. I said, “Rich, we’ve got to go with a spiral binding.” He said, “I only have one machine. I can’t produce them that fast.”

I said, “We’ll have to go out and get more spiral binding machines.” That takes a day. He got back to me the next day. He said, “I found one, but it takes a week to get here.”

I said, “What if you have it overnighted?” He said, “It would cost three or four thousand dollars.” I said, “Well, just get it here. Add it to my budget. We’re already four days into holding off production on this thing.”

Then the orders just kept coming, and kept coming in. He ended up hiring interns. He actually rented an office, found a different space to handle just my orders, had five or six interns working full time, binding, doing all the labeling, and so on .

Finally, we were getting people saying, “Where’s the course? Where’s the course? It’s been five days, it’s been seven days.” We hadn’t even started producing it yet, up until last Monday.

Last Monday is when we started getting them out. That’s when I posted in the forum that there was a delay and the reason why. The truth was I just wanted to produce a better product for everybody.

Rich gave me what I thought was great news. I still think it was good news. He said, “Mike, I can produce five hundred courses, ship them the next day, then do five hundred, ship them the next day, then do five hundred, ship them the next day.”

They did 500 on Tuesday, 500 on Thursday, and then they did 500 on Saturday, and then they mailed them, being that the post office was closed yesterday, the last 300 or so today.

Five hundred units went out last Wednesday, 500 units went out on Friday, and the last 300 went out today. Everybody that ordered their

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course, they’re already shipped, and like I said, they’ll get there in two days.

The bottom line is that I wanted to produce a better package. It’s because of my not getting the review copy to myself in time. We were talking earlier on the call about getting the graphics done.

It’s not as easy as you think. If anybody on the call was wondering, most likely they already know because they're getting emails from me with updates.

That’s the truth behind the story. I hope when people look back on it three months from now and are actually using everything in the course, they completely forget about the seven day delay.

But I definitely want to apologize for that delay. It was certainly a learning process for me.

Jeff: I know with my first multimedia course, I had some issues. I didn’t go through the ordeal of getting the copy back and not liking it. But stuff didn’t get produced when I thought it was going to be produced.

Orders with international shipping took much longer than I thought they would. The international orders sat for a week without getting shipped even though I was told they had been shipped.

The thing people need to learn or understand is no product launch is perfect.

Mike: Things will go wrong. Jeff, I thought that was great that you spoke about that in Product Launch Formula. Basically, do a “to-do” list of the things that can go wrong.

I did that. I put a to-do list, like: PayPal can shut me down for unusual activity. My affiliate program can crash from too much traffic. The Web site can crash from too much traffic.

Later on, if I leave the money in there, then PayPal decides that it was unusual activity, they could freeze the funds and then I can't pay my affiliates. I looked at every single thing that could possibly go wrong.

I put it in a game plan to fix those things. All those things almost potentially went wrong. The good news is that all those things that were in your course, call PayPal, call your merchant account… so I had pro- active solutions.

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Call your host. Let your vendors know your plans. I did all those things. But then again, like you said, things go wrong. We were 95% perfect. But on the duplication, it was my first physical product and we ended up having that one week delay trying to produce a better cover.

Jeff: Again, for listeners, the lesson is: try to have everything planned out. Put the work in, but don’t expect it to be perfect. In fact, I talked about this in the course.

A “Tsunami Moment” is often taking the imperfections and using them. I remember talking to you the Friday of your launch week. I remember it well, because I was walking in downtown Durango going to dinner and talking to you on the cell phone, doing a little strategizing. You mentioned to me, “Yeah, we’re getting all the products redone.”

I said to myself, “Uh-oh!” The lesson there, and it’s always a lesson for any type of problem, is this: communication is the answer. As long as you tell people what’s going on, then you're going to be much better off.

Mike: We were a couple of days late. Like I said, I got it out to them last Monday. We were a couple of days late getting the information out. Here’s my thinking: People in hindsight, there in the forums, are saying, “This should have been done this way. This should have been done this way.”

They're probably right but maybe they're not. I don’t know. I had already said when you ordered it that you were going to be getting it on this day, this day, and this day.

Now I'm being told, “Okay, I have to order this machine..” I didn’t want to put anything else out there again that might not have been the case. I wanted to wait until I had all the facts.

When Rich said, “Mike, I can produce 500 units every two days and ship them on the days in between,” that was all I needed to know and then I posted that in the member’s forum last Monday and emailed it out to the members.

Everybody was happy. You know what? I said, “Look, it’s going to be a week’s delay just to make a better course. I told you that it would be within this time frame.

“If that doesn’t work for you, I’ll certainly honor a refund.” We got about six refunds from it. That’s okay. Those people are entitled to it. That was their promise.

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I feel I failed them because I think the course would have done them much better than them getting their money back because then the weekend comes over and they find it on their door but then have to ship it back to me.

People will say things like, “Well, you should have been prepared and have these 1,500 pre-built.” You don’t understand. If it costs you $100 to produce a course, it will cost you $150,000 to pre-package these courses.

What if you only do 300 or 400? You're going to eat $100,000 in products sitting on a pallet in a warehouse somewhere. You can't guarantee your success. To further that, the only thing that would have happened for me is that it would have given me 1,500 courses I would have pre-built in a way that wasn’t of the quality I wanted.

I would have had them all redone anyway and spent another $50,000 reprinting the manuals. I wouldn’t advise anyone to set a goal and pre- produce your goal of 1000 units (for example) ahead of time because you may only do 400 or 500.

You may not do 1,000. Ask your production company up front, “Assuming we do a thousand, how long will it take you to produce and fulfill them?” Make your shipping promise based on that.

Jeff: It’s interesting. I had 500 books done and a thousand discs. It was a lot of money and they wanted to be paid up front. But there are two ways to go.

I know the first time I did a product, I did it the same way, produced it ahead of time. It’s interesting. The thing I want to stress is that no launch is ever perfect. There’s always going to be issues.

Just deal with it. Go into it expecting you're going to have issues. Just roll with them. Often, they can be used as part of your promotion. For instance, you had people who couldn’t get through to your server for a couple hours.

Mike: Right, we took the data center down. Joel says to me – he owns the data center – “Mike, I’ll be on the phone with you when you launch.” All of a sudden, I start getting instant messages, “Mike, I can't get through to the site.”

Remember, everyone is there at 11:59 hitting refresh, refresh, refresh, waiting for the sales page to come up. You're already getting tons of traffic to the site.

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Joel says to me, “Mike, something’s wrong here. I can’t get a connection.” Then all of a sudden, he says, “Oh my goodness, my site is down.” His site, and he says, “Oh my goodness, all my clients’ sites are down.”

He says, “Hold on a second.” He comes back and goes, “Mike, you are under a Denial of Service attack.”

I’m like, “What?”

He goes, “Do you have any enemies, anybody trying to foil this launch for you here, trying to ruin your success?”

I said, “No. I don’t know why anybody would do this to me. You’ve got to be kidding me!”

So he said, “Let me call MCI.” That’s our Internet backbone provider. MCI said, “Let’s get our DOS (Denial of Service) department involved.” The DOS department comes back and says, “No, that’s real traffic.”

Joel was speechless. He’s looking at the server logs and tells MCI to double their bandwidth into the entire data center so he can get everybody else and myself online.

People said to me, “Mike, make sure what you do with the videos…” The videos were in iFrames on five different servers that I own. But the problem was all five servers were in the same data center.

I don’t know the terms, but he said something like I was using T1 bandwidth per millisecond. I don’t know exactly what that means, but basically, what he said was if I continued to get that type of traffic, I would be spending $30,000 a week in bandwidth.

He said that he had never seen anything like it. He was laughing, “I can’t believe this is real traffic. What do you have – the entire Internet at the site right now?”

So the site did go down, or was just slow to load. We still sold 200 units in 16 minutes. Just to let people know the excitement of how it feels, I use America Online. When you get an email with America Online and your volume is turned up, it makes a noise like “chk-chk.”

So here I am with my finger on the FTP. Something we should talk about before we wrap up is Fast Movers bonuses, because I can’t believe how powerful that was and you gave me that advice.

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I have four pages pre-made called Index 1, Index 2, Index 3, Index 4 and Index 5, that I am supposed to FTP that says, “This Bonus is sold out” – the first ten – First 25, this bonus is sold out – First 50, this bonus is sold out – And first 200, this bonus is sold out.

I couldn’t FTP up to my Website for 90 minutes. So I had all these people thinking they were in the top 10 or top 25 for days because I couldn’t change the page fast enough.

What ended up happening, it’s 11:59, I have my finger on my mouse, and there it goes, 57, 58, and then 12 o’clock. I hit the FTP button and the Sales Page goes live. I got my American Online inbox installed where my notification comes from PayPal.

It is dead silence for 10 minutes before this. Now the site is live. I’m not hearing anything for 10 seconds, 12 seconds, 15 seconds, then all of a sudden it starts going chk-chk-chk-chk-chk-chk.

It just kept going like that for minutes and minutes. Like I said, 200 orders came in during the first 16 minutes. I know that because I had to find out who the first 200 people were for the Fast Movers bonuses.

I looked at the time and the order came in at 12:16 and two seconds, or something like that, with order number 200. It was just amazing.

Jeff: What did that feel like?

Mike: It was surreal. I haven’t felt like that since making my first dollar online, or having that first thousand dollar day selling $19 products and stuff like that. Just watching the orders come in. I was on the phone with my web host and I could still hear chk-chk-chk-chk-chk coming into my inbox.

I was saying to myself, “Every time I hear that noise, it is $1,000!” Then you take a break and go out to a deli or bagel store and keep saying to yourself, “Wow! I’m out here getting a bagel and coffee, and these thousand dollar payments are just flooding into the account.”

It is one of the best feelings in the world, especially when you put your hard work into it. Jeff, I commend you for doing the same thing with your product. It was a written product. A lot of people today are doing products with transcripts.

Part of my bonuses were called transcripts. The manuscript that I wrote, and I know the one that you wrote was written out sequential and chronological with all your thoughts put out.

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A lot times people today are making a high ticket item package and it is really just transcripts of calls and so on. Even though it is great material, I still think it is better to write out something in a Word document, put everything out with table of contents and everything like that.

I felt very good. I couldn’t sell enough of these things. I knew I was helping people. It was probably one of the most exciting days of my life, if not the most exciting and also the scariest day of my life, because so much could go wrong.

So I was glad to get through it. Do you want to talk about the Fast Movers Bonus strategy before we wrap up?

Jeff: Yeah, it is funny because you just mentioned something. I’ve done a lot of these launches, but before you hit that send button, there is that nervousness. It is a combination of excitement, nervousness, and I felt that for Product Launch Formula.

I tend to be a pretty relaxed, cool, calm, collected…

Mike: Well, you had a lot to lose there, because you are the Product Launch Guy. It would be a failure in so many different ways if it didn’t come through. I know that you had confidence that you were going to do well, because it is a great product and you had good people behind it.

But you still have anxiety. There is nothing you can do to not worry about that.

Jeff: Plus I had so many people behind me - John Reese, Frank Kern, Yanik Silver, you, and so many others… all promoting it. And that last 15 minutes before my launch, when I was crunching through my sales letter, and I had Yanik and Jeff Mulligan, Mike Long all working with me on an Instant Messaging session.

That was literally in the last 15 minutes. Yanik literally changed my headline for me with three minutes to go. He Instant Messaged over a new headline. He said, “Put this up there.”

In that last 15 minutes, I was nervous for my partners, because so many people were behind me. It is like, “I can’t screw this up.”

Mike: Exactly. The pressure is there. Gary Ambrose and I were talking the day before. Excuse my language here, but I’m going to tell you exactly the way I said it to him. He says to me, “Hey, man, you’ve got to be excited.

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I’ve never seen anything like this. There are eight live threads going on about Butterfly Marketing. You must be so excited and so proud.”

I said, “No, Gary, I’m scared sh------.”

And he goes, “Why?”

I said, “It is at the point right now where everybody at the forum is saying, ‘Enough already. Let’s see the sales page. What is the product? I don’t know. Well, I have it. I’ve got the review. You should buy it. You shouldn’t buy it. Whatever the case was. If I see one more thread or one more email about Butterfly Marketing…’”

We hit that critical mass. We hit that point where we had to get this thing out. I had so many things that could go wrong. Number one, I didn’t use a merchant account. I normally use PayPal and StormPay. That was a big mistake. I had all my eggs in one basket.

If I was shut down, I’d be wasting all my affiliates’ traffic. People couldn’t buy. My Website could have crashed. Here’s the other thing: I used www.Paydotcom.com which is my own program. I own www.Paydotcom.com . So all the traffic Butterfly Marketing was getting, www.Paydotcom.com was getting, plus its normal traffic, plus the affiliates are in there hitting refresh, checking their stats and so on.

Even though it did perfectly, let’s assume that www.Paydotcom.com crashed, failed, or didn’t handle the stats. Then it would have been, “Mike decided to use his own shopping cart. He should have used 1ShoppingCart. So now his affiliates don’t know who is getting paid. I understand that not a single affiliate was tracked.” The downside was huge if the site didn’t perform.

I had all these things saying what if this actually happens. What if www.Paydotcom.com crashes? So I was really scared that all these things could go wrong, and I did everything I could to make sure they wouldn’t. Thank goodness they didn’t.

But let’s assume they did. Butterfly Marketing created a big buzz in the community. Let’s say PayPal shut me down in six minutes. I couldn’t get my account up for 30 days, or I couldn’t pay my affiliates, or everybody did all this great pre-launch and nobody could buy the product because something crashed.

This is what would have happened. Six months down the road, nine months down the road, somebody with a good product would be doing

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Jeff Walker style Product Launch Formula launch and creating a great buzz, and it would start to hit the forums.

People would have started to say, “This sounds like another Butterfly bomb to me. I hope this guy doesn’t do the same mistakes Mike did.” Do you follow me? This was the type of anxiety I was feeling before the launch.

So when Gary said, “You must be excited,” and I said, “No, I’m scared

sh-----,” I really, really was. I couldn’t wait to get through it. I just wanted to fast forward three days and make sure everything went smoothly. And sure enough, it did.

Jeff: Well Mike, I’ve had you on here an hour and a half, and I am really appreciative of your time. If you could just touch briefly on the idea of the Fast Movers, then we can wrap this up.

Mike: I thought it was hype.

John Reese did it with a 24 hour “buy now and you get these additional bonuses.” But I didn’t think it would really work.

But I was talking with you and you said, “What are your scarcity strategies?”

I said, “I don’t know, Jeff. Do they really work?”

You said, “Yeah, Mike, they do. This is what I did - I had this bonus for the first x number of buyers.”

You were telling me how people were emailing you to find out if they got in on that.

Folks, Jeff and I did a lot of talking before the call. We probably spoke every two days. Jeff would tell me, “You need to leak out on the blog that there is going to be these bonuses. Let people know.”

So I followed Jeff’s strategies. I was actually on a cruise with a lot of different marketers, Shawn Casey, Paulie Sable, Carlos Garcia. It was two o’clock in the morning. We are on one of the decks. We are eating pizza at the 24 hour pizza place.

I said, “Paulie, do you have your legal pad in your bag?”

He said, “Yeah.”

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I said, “Let’s go over some ideas for these strategies, these Fast Movers bonuses.”

I think we might have used that term first, “Fast Movers”. I don’t know if it was used before. I had heard that expression before and I really like the sound of it – the fast movers. I think for the first 10 people that purchased, they got lifetime access to any coaching program, seminar, or workshop I ever do.

So if I was to do a $5,000 a year coaching program, they get it for life. If I do a $20,000 workshop, they would come for free. Anything like that. So that was the first ten.

The first 25 would get a one hour consultation with me and free copy of The Moving the Butterfly Effect on DVD or VHS.

The first 50 would get a one hour call with me, live, with everybody else. So we would have fifty people dial in and listen to me live. I don’t remember them all.

The first 200 people would get the call with Jeff Walker, Mike Merz, and Richard Rubenstein. So imagine it is going to be similar to this call with the duplicator guy and my JV guy. We’re going to talk about what we did for the launch.

Then it just went through different calls I’m going to do with Carlos Garcia that they are going to get resale rights to, all the way down to the seven day bonus where they all get a ticket to the Internet Marketing Main Event, which has a double agenda for me.

This thing worked out so well. To the people who purchased in the first seven days, I gave out two free tickets to the Internet Marketing Main Event. You don’t want to have a free event, basically, because then you can get a lot of riffraff, and people just flooding into an event.

They are getting free tickets, but they are pre-qualified $997 buyers. So yesterday I finally posted that bonus in our member’s forum, and we sold 162 tickets to the event in Philadelphia in September. The normal price is $797. Those 162 people each got a guest ticket.

So we are already pre-sold for 320 people for an event that is nine months away. To me, it was another way of parlay the success and say, “Thank you,” to them. Talk about a win-win situation.

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You know how hard it is like to get people to a live event. Now to have 300 people in the event, nine months early, before we even put up the sales page, is great.

Jeff: We can make another announcement here. Mike was gracious enough to ask me to speak at that event. So I’ll be there.

Mike: Yes, that will be at www.InternetMarketingMainEvent.com . Right now it is last year’s sales letter, but it is going to be in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, September 15 th , 16 th and 17 th . Stephen Pierce is speaking there. Jeff Walker will be there. Jeff Johnson, Matt Bacak, Vince James, and some other good names, John Childers, and others.

We still have six more speakers to book. It is going to be an exciting event. We are thinking it might be 400 or 500 people.

Jeff: I didn’t know you had Johnson there. As you know, Jeff is a good buddy of mine. He’s only spoken at one event.

Mike: I will say he gave me a ‘yes’ with an asterisk. He said, “Count me in, but there are some things that I would have to check,”

So that is like a 50/50 – let’s leave it at that. He’s great.

So the Fast Movers bonuses, like I said, I couldn’t FTP up there to change it, but the other strategy that I did, which I wasn’t sure if it would work, but it did, was that I did the call with Mark Joiner the night before.

We had two phone lines booked, 500 on mine, 500 on his, and a webcast. There had to be 1,500 to 2,000 people listening to this call.

One of the bonuses that you got for being on the call is I would give you the URL of the sales letter a day ahead of time. It’s probably not up there now and it doesn’t matter because the sales page is live, but it was something like www.ButterflyMarketing.com/preview.htm , something like that.

At the end of the call, we were able to give the website out where 2,000 people could read the sales letter the day before with no order button and they could see the Fast Movers bonuses.

Now, the race is on to see who gets in. That was one of the reasons why we sold 200 units in 16 minutes. I would venture to say that’s got to be a record. Looking at other people’s bonuses, the way they structured it, most of them were for the first 24 hours.

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By us saying it’s for the first 10 buyers, and we let them peek at the sales letter the day before, they didn’t need to read it. That’s why the sales started coming in after 15 seconds.

They didn’t even need to read the sales letter. They just hit page down, found the order button, and paid. One guy paid in 15 seconds. That was a great strategy. We started leaking out the fact that there were Fast Movers bonuses.

I started hinting at what they would be. That really, really helped get the sales up the first day. People were buying like crazy, kicking and screaming, “Oh man, I was number 51. I missed by one second.”

But they were all happy just to be part of it.

Jeff: Yet it was very well done. I did the same thing, very similar, but my mistake was people didn’t get to see what the Fast Movers were, the special bonuses were until the actual launch. No launch is ever perfect, and that’s where my mistake was.

In retrospect, the way you did it, allowing them to see that ahead of time, was a lot more powerful. It was great.

Mike: It seemed to work out well. I wasn’t sure how it would be, letting people see the sales page a day early. But that ended up working out pretty well. That’s something you might want to consider testing.

Jeff: I’ll absolutely do that next time. Just to wrap this up, again thank you very much. I really appreciate this. I’m glad that we’re able to share this with my Product Launch Formula Owners.

We’ve been talking about some amazing numbers here. Sometimes people hear these and get almost overwhelmed and think, “I could never do that.” People just can’t relate to a million dollars or 1.2 million in a week, or $200,000 in 16 minutes.

I sympathize with them. This is a gradual process that you work up to these type of things. I’ve had people do launches for a few thousand dollars. I’ve had them do launches for $10,000, $20,000, $30,000, $60,000.

Every time I hear about one of those, I get so excited that people are putting this to work. Of course, you sent me this wonderful testimonial talking about how you had Product Launch Formula open on your desk.

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Mike: It’s cheesy, but some of my beginning paragraphs were carbon copy – I remember looking at one. I’m like, “What’s my angle today?” I looked at yours, two days before the launch.

It started with, “Things are getting pretty hectic around here” – so I was like, “Thinks are getting pretty hectic around here.” I followed your formula step-by-step.

It really, really helped. Any advice I would give to people would be just believe in yourself. This is no joke. Look at when Reese did Traffic Secrets. It was the last Tuesday in August.

Let’s assume it was like August 24 th or 25 th , something like that. Then he did the report that came out a couple of days later, the report where he gave you credit, Jeff.

I think it was “One Man, One Day, One Site, One Product, One Million Dollars,” that thing. In there, he gave you credit. It was like he might have spoken about the four minute mile.

He said, “It can be done.” Now, go to the Who-is directory and look at Butterfly Marketing. Look at the day that that domain was registered. It was registered the day that John sent out that report.

When he showed the market that it could be done, this was a year and a half ago, and Jeff, this was probably before you and I even met on that teleseminar call. Nobody knew who I was back then.

It took me a year and a half to get this project out. It paid off. I had a

dream. I had a concept for this Butterfly Marketing. I was working on other projects. The reason why it didn’t come out sooner is throughout that year I ended up launching www.Listdotcom.com and www.JVNetwork.com .

I purchased Instant Buzz. We worked really hard on www.Paydotcom.com . I had to do the Internet Marketing Main Event One. Then I could work on Butterfly Marketing because there was a lot to go into it.

But I had a dream. As soon as I saw John Reese do it, I said, “I could do this.” Guys, I was a nobody online back then. I had one or two small websites. There were maybe ten people online that knew my name back then.

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I said, “You know what? I have a plan for Butterfly Marketing.” I planned it to be a big day like it was, set that date. Product Launch Formula came out right on time – a few months ahead of my course.

I couldn’t believe it. Then I met Jeff. We did some consulting. I will tell you, the first thing to do is believe that you can do it. Then just go out there and do it. Start creating the product.

Start working on a Word document file. Start getting experts to do interviews with you. Package it up and launch it. You know what? Fail, fail, and do $200,000.

Set your goals for $250,000, do $225,000 and let people say you failed. When it’s all said and done, you’ll have a great launch and $225,000. Then you can start understanding how you can leverage one success to the next success.

You can never stop.

Jeff: Fantastic. The key is to get it out there. Put one foot out in front of the other and get rolling. Thank you very much, Mike.

Mike: My pleasure, Jeff. Thanks a lot, I appreciate it.

Jeff: I’m just really tickled to have you on here. Congratulations on an unbelievable launch.