Book Launch Debrief: The First Twelve Hours

04/19/17 • 8 min

A behind the scenes glimpse of what’s been happening the first twelve hours of our book launch.

In this episode Russell gives a quick recap of the first twelve hours of the book launch. He shares how he felt when it looked like the average cart value didn’t look how expected, and what happened next.

Here are the important things you will hear on today’s episode:

Why you should always schedule launches for the afternoon rather than the morning.
Why the average cart value was so low, and how that made Russell feel.
And finally find out what the final numbers of the first twelve hours are and how it compares to the goal for the first week.

So listen below to find out how the big book launch turned out yesterday.

---Transcript---

What’s up everybody, this is Russell Brunson. I want to welcome....oh crap. I almost just, backing out of my driveway I literally just almost backed into a wall. And you guys would have caught it live here on Marketing In Your Car.

I hope you guys are all doing awesome today. Today, well yesterday was book launch day. And today is the day after book launch day and I bet you’re wondering how it’s going. So I wanted to tell you.

As you probably know, actually I can’t remember exactly how much I told you guys. Leading to the book launch, as with any launch, there’s a lot of stress and time and energy and stuff that goes into it. So Monday night we basically were at the office super, super late. And then at 3 o’clock got done, went home and came back Tuesday. Luckily we set up the launch time for 4 eastern, which we had 2 o’clock our time. So we had til 2 o’clock to get everything done, which I highly recommend on launch day.

We used to launch days at 9am in the mornings. It was always a nightmare, so we push them out late in the day, that way you’ve got time in the morning. We had about 5 hours. Everyone got back out here at 9, so we had 9 til 2, so 5 hours to get everything done. And we start moving and scrambling and going and going. It’s crazy, no matter how much stuff you have, that’s why it’s good to pick a launch date, because otherwise you’ll never actually get done. Because we never would have gotten it done ever. Even staying up all night and all morning, everything, it still was I think 9 minutes late before the funnel went live.

It’s funny, because you have wish list stuff you want to do to make it smaller and smaller and smaller, til the point where you’re like, “Alright, this is what we HAVE to do.” And then it’s like, “Oh crap, it’s got to go live, what are the stuff we have to cut out?” and it’s just kind of crazy.

So you launch it and sit back and you wait. And this is honestly for me, the worst time. It’s weird because you feel like it’s going to be this huge climatic boom, but it’s like the opposite, you get this huge climatic thing and then it stops. And then you’re just like, “What’s happening?” and then we start sending emails, but because us and 8 million other affiliates are all emailing the same day from Actionetics, Actionetics gets backed up and our emails aren’t going out and all sorts of other stuff starts happening. But luckily a lot of people were waiting, anxiously waiting to buy. So book sales started coming in, boom, boom, boom.

So we’re watching the sales come in at first and then we’re watching the stats and numbers to see where things are at and obviously it’s hard because the first group of people to come through are your hyperactive buyers, it’s you guys and you guys jack up our stats. I don’t trust our stats that early. But it’s still you’re watching to see and be curious. So we’re watching all the stats and the stats looked good but there’s this new stat dashboard in Clickfunnels, I didn’t even know it was there. I remember we talked about it at Funnel Hacking Live, but I hadn’t seen it. So I clicked on it and it was amazing because you can see the sales from everything. Front end products, upsells, order form bumps. Everything. So you get a glimpse of here’s what everything is.

So I’m looking at it all, based on numbers it looked good. Then there’s this number up here that said, “average cart value.” And the average cart value number was horrible. And I was like, “huh?” I keep watching it and as one hour turned into two, and the average cart value number kept getting worse and worse. I was almost to the point of depression and honestly I was coming back to my team like, “Okay, what do we do? Do we go and add in a whole other upsell?” because the cart value wasn’t as high as we needed it to be and all these millions of things start going through your head, so I’m like, “ I don’t want to add another upsell.” because I wanted.... this funnel is, as we talked about in the last podcast, is a short funnel. There’s offers in there, but it’s a short funnel because I was trying to shorten it. But then there’s longer on the value ...

A behind the scenes glimpse of what’s been happening the first twelve hours of our book launch.

Here are the important things you will hear on today’s episode:

Why you should always schedule launches for the afternoon rather than the morning.
Why the average cart value was so low, and how that made Russell feel.
And finally find out what the final numbers of the first twelve hours are and how it compares to the goal for the first week.

So listen below to find out how the big book launch turned out yesterday.

---Transcript---

Previous Episode

Shrink The Funnel, Extend The Value

Hours before we launch our new book, these are my thoughts.

On today’s episode Russell talks about his book launch and how the funnel works and why he thinks it will increase cart value.

Here are some cool things in this episode:

Why Russell thinks shrinking the size of the funnel will help increase cart value for his book launch.
And why building a relationship on the back end is so important and has the potential to make much more money.

So listen below to hear how the funnel works for the book launch today.

---Transcript---

Good morning everybody, guess what today is? Today is book launch day and I’m so excited with this really weird underlying feeling of being so tired. We totally were up last night at the office until 3 and now it’s 9. So that’s 6 hours since we were.....that’s 4 1⁄2 hours of sleep. That’s pretty good. So a little tired, but feel good and excited and nervous all wrapped up into one huge thing.

The book launch goes live in 5 hours from right now. So we’re going in I have to finish the initial sales page, sales page for selling only a free book, it’s pretty intense and amazing and exciting and I cannot wait for you all to see it. In fact, by the time you hear this, it’ll probably be live. So that’s what’s happening today. We’re going live. This is 18 months worth of work and effort and stress all coming down to today.

It’s funny because it’s interesting at our events we do a hack a thon and make people stay up late and work and get a project done. At our certified partner event we make people do a hack a thon where they stay late. At our FHAT event we do that. There’s something about having a deadline that makes things get done. Because we’ve had a long time to work on this funnel but until it was like, k this is happening tomorrow. There’s just something about deadlines that make things actually get done. It’s kind of like how urgency and scarcity makes people buy, urgency and scarcity makes you get stuff done.

So we’ve got 5 or 6 of us hanging out at the office last night, we ordered sushi, working on the funnels and the pages and the videos and all the stuff. It’s turning out cool. So I know they’re all doing testing now and making sure all the order flow works and nothing breaks and all these kind of things. But that’s kind of what’s happening. I’m excited.

This is going to be a short one because I’m almost to the office already and I got a lot of work to do to get this thing live. But my one thing I wanted to share with you guys that I thought was cool, I talked to the inner circle group about this, back in the day I used to think that the goal of funnel was to sell people a thousand different ways. So we used to have these funnels that were really long. Not a good long either. It was like, upsell, downsell, upsell, downsell, just kept going until people hated me. And I thought that was the power of funnels and it’s not.

You can make a lot of money off somebody once through a funnel, but if you do it right, you make a lot of money off them forever. It should leave them having a better experience than without buying. Or it should make the buying experience better and not a worse experience; otherwise the funnel was a bad thing. And I don’t want these to be bad things for me or for anyone.

So I’ve been and you’ve all been into funnels where you get caught in this trap of upsells and downsells and it’s horrible. So my whole mindset this launch is how do we shorten the funnel? Which seems counterintuitive, but I want to shorten the funnel and then extend the value on the back. So what that means is basically when you go to book funnel you notice a couple of things. Page one you put in your shipping address, then page two basically you go from the book, to we upgrade you to the funnel hacker black box and also put in the fast product creation training.

So even though it’s a free book, during the check out process people will spend almost $70. So we increased our average cart, potential average cart value that much even though it’s a free offer. And then we just only have one real upsell. So the upsells there. If you say no to those there’s a downsell, but other than that it’s over. And then the transaction ends and on the thank you page, this is where we start the extending of the relationship building side of it.

So you come in the thank you page, there’s a 90 minute video of me training, which is one of my best, I’m proud of it, one of the best videos. So they get that, they get 90 minutes of education and training and it’s amazing. And the call to action at the end of the training is an opt in to this web class. They opt in to the web class and there’s 2 hours and 20 minutes of training that happens over the next few days.

Anyway, when you look at it, it’s like I’m extending, I’m shrinking the cart while still increasing the average cart value, then ex...

Next Episode

My New Journey Blog

The method behind my new blog, podcast, and YouTube channel.

On today’s episode Russell talks about how many book sales he has so far. He also talks about the new blog he is doing and how he plans to have time to do it, and how he’ll keep it consistent.

Here are some of the coolest things you will hear in this episode.

Find out if Russell was able to reach his first week goal in book sales within the first 24 hours.
Hear what Russell’s new blog will be about and find out the cool way he has come up with to get it done consistently despite his hatred for Word Press.
And finally find out how to get a hint about a top secret item Russell recently purchased that he thinks is super awesome.

So listen below to find out if Russell will beat or match his goal number of books sold in the first week.

---Transcript---

Good morning everybody. Guess what? Guess what? First off, it’s raining outside, which is cool. Second off, I’m heading to the office which is cool. And third off, it’s been a little over 24hours since we launched the book and guess what? We sold over 10 thousand copies! What?

Honestly, my goal when we first got started was 10 thousand copies the first week. Because last time it took us almost a month to sell 10 thousand copies, like, “If we did it in a week that would be amazing.” We did it yesterday. It wasn’t quite 24 hours, it was 27, technically it was a little longer than a day, but I’m counting it. I’m calling it 10 thousand in a day, because that’s what we did.

Anyway, so insane. Everyone who first off, bought, thank you everyone who promoted, thank you to everyone who’s continuing to promote, that’s awesome. This morning I woke up, we were at 12,500 books and it just keeps on rolling. So I’m just going to keep on rolling and see what with the Dotcom Secrets book either we’re almost or we just hit 100,000 copies or somewhere in there, total for the last 2 1⁄2 years. So I think with this momentum we’re going to hit 100,000 copies this month. That was our initial goal, which I thought was kind of farfetched but now I’m like, “Dang, I wonder if we actually could.” Which is crazy and exciting all wrapped up into one amazing thing. Anyway, that’s kind of what’s happening over here on this side of the world. It’s just insanely cool.

Alright, so today I want to talk about, I think I’ve talked about this before, mentioned it, but I’m trying to get it live today. It’s technically it’s kind of live, I didn’t mean to get it live, but I forgot I made a new footer graphic, and everyone in the footer started clicking in, so now technically it’s live because there’s comments and things happening.

First off, the nice thing with Clickfunnels now is you can save sections. So I created a cool footers section, that I’m putting on all of my pages. Actually there’s two footers. There’s a footer for my main pages, and then there’s a mini footer for sales and upsell pages. So anyway, there’s two footers, but I designed them perfectly and now I just, every page I make, I just go to add it, boom, boom, boom and then they’re on all the pages.

So the one above it, it links to my new blog, which is a journey of how I went from zero to a million copies of the book, which is kind of cool. I’m calling this a journey blog, which someone may have already called that, but I’m copying it. I initially saw Groove HQ do it with their software. They told this journey of how they went from zero to 100,000 MRR. And then I saw Neil Patel do it. Zero to 100,000 visitors a month on his blog. So I’m doing it, going from zero to a million copies of the book sold.

So I think I got the first 8 posts up there. For the last two months I’ve been doing these posts, one a week, kind of going through all the prelaunch stuff with the book. So it’s kind of cool, it’s this journey blog that takes you through this journey because I figure, I think blogging is boring because it’s just these random blog posts about whatever. But with a journey blog, it’s kind of like these podcasts. People tell me they listen to two or three episodes of the podcast, they get hooked and they go back to the very beginning and binge listen to every episode, which is kind of cool and hard to do when you have a two hour long show. That’s why I like doing these short ones.

You can go and you can binge listen and it’s the same with this blog. I want people coming in on week 22, reading something cool we did and be like, wait, there are 80 thousand books sold, how did they start this journey? They can start on page one and going through and boom, going through this whole timeline journey of zero to a million and binge read up the entire blog. So that’s kind of the goal with the blog, which I think is kind of cool. So you guys can see it, it’s at russellbrunson.com. I haven’t really started promoted it yet. So if you want to see it, I’m trying to get it ...