I know a lot of people – a lot – who like to decide to launch with little time to actually prepare for the launch.

Last-minute anything makes me a little nervous, but as you’ll find out in today’s episode, I’ll give you the green light if you put do these three things.

But before we get into the “ready to launch” mode, let me share with you my take on fast launches, why you’re cheating out your audience, and also the three things that often don’t happen as a result!

Here’s What You Might Not Be Able To Do

No Time For Affiliates

As I often tell people who are launching for the first time, setting up an affiliate program is like setting up another launch. When you decide to ask people to promote your product, they become your primary focus — meaning creating things like graphics, swipe files, doing interviews, and keeping in contact with them on a regular basis.

In addition to that, you’ve got a whole technical backend that needs to be set up–and this is not just a plug and play set up. Being sure that sales are tracked properly is probably the most important thing you can do when running an affiliate program.

So, setting something up quickly isn’t really a great idea…or at least it isn’t in my opinion. Add that to the warming up phase when you first reach out to contact affiliates, allowing them time to schedule it into their schedules and also create a campaign specifically for your launch!

No Time To Tease

One of the biggest and most obvious things you’ll realize when you choose to launch quickly is that there’s no time to tease the launch beforehand. This might be okay for some of you who have more established businesses or if your entire sales funnel is already built out…we’ll go into that more in just a minute. If you’ve got social proof, you may not have to worry about this as much.

Someone who’s just starting out…if you’ve got no tease time, you essentially just dropping something on your list out of nowhere… I like having leaking time. I like having time to make sure there’s interest before I launch.

Getting In Front Of New Audiences

When you do things last minute – you likely will not have a ton of time to do any outreach to get in front of other people’s audiences — like guest posts or interviews. Now, you may do outreach regularly, so you always have new posts and interviews coming out every single month…that’s a better space to be in. I’ll go into that in just a second.

If you think you can hustle up a few posts, write them, and get them published in less than a month, think about the work you’ll need to do. This adds a crazy amount of additional work that you could have avoided with a little more time! Of course, as I mention in the podcast, if writing is your jam or if hustling up last-minute press is your thing, then ignore me and go forth and get yourself some press!

Now that you know three essential pieces of any successful online launch, let’s talk about how to fight this.

Because – if you’re a last-minute launcher…sometimes that’s just your work rhythm…that’s the way you roll.

Help For Last Minute Launches

If you know that in general, you’re probably going to launch in a rushed fashion most every single time you launched…here are four things you can aim to set up in your business!

Step one: Set up a general affiliate program.

Well, you can set up an affiliate program that is overarching that is always there. You can sign people up for this when you do guest posts or interviews or you can invite people to be part of that you know will promote for you during your launches.

Important tip: Start communicating with them regularly – letting them know what’s coming. Send an email every single month letting them know what’s happening in your business, what you’re thinking about launching…and include them in your process.

Anytime where you can let someone come along on the ride with you as a great thing – builds trust, community, and ownership.

Step Two: Create relevant autoresponders.

Like I mentioned before, if you launch at the last minute, you won’t have a ton of time to fit in pre-launch content. This content is critical for building awareness, excitement, and letting people know something is coming.

But it’s not the only way to do it!

Create an autoresponder sequence that keeps people in the loop the same way you do for your affiliates.

So say you have a program, an e-course or maybe you have a quarterly or monthly workshop that you want to do. Well make sure that you have an interest list for that thing, event or product and then make sure you have a few (at least) follow-up emails that engage people in some way–get them to reply to a question, share a blog post they may have not seen, tell them to join a Facebook group or follow you on Instagram!

Something I’ve just created is a free community where I can easily share what’s on the podcast, new posts, resources I find as well as when I’m launching something!

Doing this includes your audience in what you’re doing so they always know when you’re going to be launching. So you don’t really have to leak. You already kind of bring them into the fold.

Step Three: Start Doing Outreach Regularly.

One of the first things I learned about growing my list, getting more traffic, and building my business was to always be reaching new people.  When you don’t have a ton of time until your launch opens, you really only have time to focus on the people who are already on your list.

You don’t have that extra few weeks to write additional blog posts for someone else’s website. You don’t have time to schedule an interview and know that it’s going to go up on the exact perfect day.

So – start making it a regular business activity to seek out new audiences and get in front of them.

That might look like you doing 2 interviews per month and 2 guest posts per month.

When you make it a regular activity – you’ll always be coming on people’s radar.

So – I know this is one of those “best practices” things that we all like to NOT DO.

But make sure you say yes to people who want to interview you, looking for places to get in front of new eyes…

That’s what is going to allow you to play the “last-minute or rush it” launch game!

I’ve been pretty fortunate to appear on some podcasts, on some websites, doing guest posts on a regular basis and that’s why when it comes to my launch I don’t have to add that to my launch to-do list.

Step Four: Write Out Every Detail of Your Sales Process.

It’s all about saving time or being able to flip the switch when you want to launch quickly. One of the main things you need to get a handle on is how to accept money.

Create a google doc of every single thing that happens when you turn on the sales page of your offer. That might look something like this:

• update relevant dates on the sales page
• update any outdated information on the sales page
• make your sales buttons
• create your product in whatever shopping cart you use
• create a new order form or duplicate a specific one
• embed product/service button code onto the page
• remove any un-needed webforms but keep the code in the google doc
• update the autoresponder
• test test test
• make sales page public instead of password protected
• redirect interest page to sales page
• test
• have someone else test it

Hopefully, you get the idea. Just walk through the process once, document it and you’ll be set to handle it the next time you choose to open the doors!

Resources Mentioned In This Episode

Affiliate program plugins & products:

• WP Affiliate Plugin
• Infusionsoft (built-in affiliate program)
• Thrive Cart (checkout software with affiliate ability)
• Ambassador

People who run amazing affiliate programs:

• Marie Forleo’s B-School
• Stu McClaren’s Tribe

What You Should Do Right Now

You’ve got 2 things you can do right now – both require you to take one more action. If you’d be so kind and have a moment, I would so appreciate you even doing 1 of these…especially if you love the show and want to get featured on a future episode!

• First thing – Jump over to iTunes to rate and review the Fearless Launching show and help other people find it too!

• Second thing — Let me know what you thought! Leave a comment below or shoot me an email!