It can be an exciting time getting a new product or service ready to be "unleashed on the world".

You likely have a lot of hopes and expectations to make the launch a successful one.

Will people be interested in it? What price should it be? What about getting listed with search engines?

Recently I went through this process and want to share with you my...

Blueprint For A Successful Launch

Late last fall, I teamed up with a very sharp painting contractor. We'll call him Clark.

Clark is trained in faux finish painting. If you are unfamiliar with that, it is a very popular interior painting technique that lets you give depth, texture and a variation of looks to walls.

You can simulate a marble look, venetian plaster appearances and literally dozens (if not hundreds!) of variations. Here is just a small sample of some of the looks that can be painted on walls:

Believe me, the pictures don't do justice to the incredible look that can be achieved!

The whole faux finish topic is all the more popular because it gets mentioned on various interior design shows which are popular in the U.S.

Over the period of a couple of days, I filmed Clark doing the "Venetian Plaster" technique from start to finish. We chose this particular look because it is one of the most popular.

I then edited the video and produced the video onto DVD which we had professional duplicated. This included packaging, upc bar coding and shrink wrapping to make it available for retail sale.

Presale Interest

While we were waiting for the whole project to be completed, I wanted to get a head start on the marketing and search engines.

With this in mind, I:

• researched the keywords and phrases which people were searching for related to this topic
• created a very simple page which I optimized for a few select keywords and phrases. Please note, this was not a complete site, just one page on a site
. This was linked to from my other sites
• made the page with a simple signup box for a free newsletter which would tell them when the DVD was available. I included the incentive of saying that there would be a generoud discount to thank them for being our first customers with it

I made sure not to offer the dvd for sale before it was actually available. It clearly stated that it was coming out shortly.

Initial Results

The results were very interesting to watch.

For one thing, I let google find the page on its own.

I was able to track and saw that the day after I posted the page, google "sniffed" it for the first time. That is their search engine spyders had found the page.

The amazing part was that it only took me 6 days to get listed on google with the page. Not only that, but I got some very good listings.

I was made aware of the google listing by the first subscriber to the rollout announcement. I checked my logs and saw that there were several visits that day from google searches.

The number of subscribers was impressive. They were coming in 6 or 7 a day with no advertising at all on our part.

The Launch

Last week we had the launch of the DVD. I am going to show you how we handled that and what the results were.

We'll also take a look at other methods of marketing the new product that we are doing in an upcoming article.