Just for fun, I thought I’d go back and tally up how many words I wrote for a launch I supported at the end of 2019. It added up to be something like this:
- Sales page 6,200 words
- Challenge landing page 450 words
- Affiliate information 2,000
- Challenge video outlines 3,000
- Webinar landing page 300 words
- Upsell/downsell page 1,000 words
- 7 upsell emails 4,000 words
- 6 downsell emails 3,700 words
- 46 challenge and launch emails 20,158 words
That’s more than 40,000 words to support ONE launch.
This launch was extremely profitable (something around the neighborhood of 80% profit rate). They brought in multiple six figures in revenue, enrolled nearly a hundred new students, and saw a 26.5% conversion rate on their webinar! (You can read the full case study here.)
Now, of course, that doesn’t mean you have to create nearly that much content and copy for a launch, but it does illustrate how much copy goes into a big internet launch.
So let’s break this down so you can see exactly where all those thousands of words went.
Pre-Launch Event
In most cases, it’s a good idea do a pre-launch event that will bring in new people to your audience. This could be a webinar, a challenge, a giveaway, a bootcamp, or anything else your beautiful brain can dream up.
In the case of this launch, we did a 5-day challenge with a webinar at the end.
So for this we needed:
- An outline of the challenge content
- A landing page for people to sign up for the challenge
- Emails to invite existing audience to the challenge
- Emails during the challenge (one each day)
- Emails to invite existing audience to the webinar
- A webinar landing page
- And ad copy*.
*I wasn’t in charge of writing ad copy for this launch, but I do know that some of the copy I wrote was repurposed for ads.
Launch
For this project, we had an earlybird offer for people on a wait list, then regular sales period for people who weren’t on the wait list. There was also an upsell offer only for people who had participated in a previous course
For this portion, we included:
- Upsell offer emails
- Earlybird offer / waitlist emails
- Sales emails
In this example, there were 15 emails for both the earlybird and regular sales segments (and we repurposed some of the same copy just changing up the details).
Post-Launch
Not every launch has a post-launch period, but in our example, we had a downsell offer. The downsell was for the smaller, bite-sized course, for people who said no to the main offer because it was too expensive or too time consuming.
We had 6 emails in our downsell sequence sent only to people who didn’t buy during the launch.
How much content do YOU need?
As you can see, there is a LOT of content that goes into supporting a big launch like this.
You might be asking yourself… Do I need that much content to launch my thing?
Research has shown pretty conclusively that the more email you send during a launch, the better your sales will be — and especially the more emails you send on the last day. (In this example, they sent 5 emails on the last day alone.) That’s because as much as 50% of your sales may come in on the last day.
So, while only you can decide how much content is right for your launch, data tells us that investing the time or capital in plenty of high-quality content will help ensure that your launch is successful.