How to Launch Many Products Online with Liz Wilcox

Product launch expert Liz Wilcox shows us the steps it takes to launch a successful product and make money helping people. She has done this many times and is successfully unemployed because of it. Learn how she partners with others to launch more products that she every could alone.

Launching products is both an art and a science. Learn the step-by-step process to launch products and keep your customers coming back for more.

Today, I am excited to have Liz Wilcox on the show. Liz lives in and travels in an RV and she hasn’t had a job in over 10 years. Like Liz, you can be successfully unemployed.

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How Liz Makes Money Without Having a Job

Liz lives in an RV. For the last three years, she has been blogging, writing, and has been an RV influencer. Through her blog, Lizwilcox.com, she creates digital products for people to keep them happy and humored on the road, and she shares stories.

Liz runs a digital summit with some friends, and they have done that for three years in a row, which is a huge money maker for her. Last year, they reached over 7,000 people and hosted a live event.

On her blog, she offers a course. In addition, Liz is a launch strategist and copywriter. She realized that she loves selling. When she was younger, she tried selling Cutco knives and didn’t sell a single one.

Now, she is creating things she believes in and she knows they help serve her readers. She loves sales and live launching.

Liz does launch strategy and email copywriting for others to help them turn followers into friends that buy.

What Liz Did Before She Was Successfully Unemployed Launching Products

Liz has been an entrepreneur/freelancer her whole life. Currently, she is almost 32 and she hasn’t had a “real job” in about a decade. Her last job was at a gas station when she was in college. She hustled fried chicken, gasoline, and cashing people’s checks that didn’t have bank accounts.

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Liz went to college for elementary education and went on to get her Master’s Degree in educational leadership. She wanted to be a principal and an educational renegade who turned everyone on their heels with her ideas. She wanted to start a revolution.

Liz knew she didn’t want to work at a gas station the rest of her life. She was trying to think of a way to make more money and that’s where the idea came to her to be a principal.

The gas station she worked at fired her, after she worked there for three years, because her drawer was short $100. Management checked the cameras and said they couldn’t see her stealing the money, but they said they had to fire her.

Getting Fired From A Her First Jobhttps://successfullyunemployed.co/fiverr

At first, Liz cried in her car, listening to Justin Timberlake. She looked for a job for a few weeks and, when she went on Craigslist, she found someone who was looking for a tutor for his son.

She met the man who posted the job one evening at a Taco Bell. She got the job and worked for him for three years, on top of doing other freelance jobs. She cleaned people’s houses, delivered food, and did whatever she could through Craigslist gigs.

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It was at that time Liz realized she was in charge of her life. She didn’t have to work for someone else and their schedule. She didn’t need to deal with people coming in and yelling at her because the gas prices were high.

When she went into people’s houses to clean, they were happy to see her. She was paid anywhere from $60 to $80 an hour for tutoring.

The Change to Entrepreneurship and Working for Herself

Liz worked about 10 hours a week tutoring for a single man who was a doctor with two kids. When she told him she needed to work other jobs, he said he wanted her to work exclusively for him, so he paid her a salary.

Any time her car would break down, he would fix it for her. She realized she could be in charge of her own money making and she held all of the cards, because people valued her. The money is out there if you go for it, ask for it, and find the people you can serve.

Liz never went into a nine-to-five job, because she didn’t have to. Everybody has value and so do you. Get started now in something that is going to make you financially independent.

How Liz Makes Money from the Her Online Businesses Launching Products

When she first started, Liz didn’t know how to make money online, but she knew she wanted to travel the country in an RV. Her husband was in the army at the time, so she needed to come up with a way to make cash flow, so they could do the bucket list and live the #RVlife.

Liz started Googling and saw a lot of RV bloggers. She figured they were making a lot of money, because their sites said featured on Fox News and CNN. She thought if they could do it, she could do it, because she was at least two years older than them. She now sees how silly that thinking was.

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Liz started her website as a business, because she knew she wanted to make money from it. Starting it that way helped her make money from it, because she had that mindset. Within the first six months, she compiled a book with other bloggers, sold it, and gave them 50 percent of the commission.

Keep Your Eyes Open for New Products to Launch

That book grabbed the attention of a sponsor, and they paid her for copies of the book to get leads. She didn’t even know that was a thing. Liz got with the people that worked with her to create the book and they created the digital summit, which is an online event.

This was before digital conferences were popular. Now, they sell the videos and sponsorship ads.

Liz has an RV maintenance course. Her husband is a certified RV maintenance tech, and, after a couple of years, she finally convinced him to create the course with her.

Liz has the sales experience and the audience and thought it would be a good product that people would be interested in.

They launched the course over a year ago and, since then, they have had over 300 students. It is an ongoing course and she has several affiliates that get half of the sales. This is making money continuously.

The underlying theme of all of this is partnerships. You do not need to do this alone. Liz feels like she accelerated, because she didn’t do this by herself.

Build Relationships With Those Who Buy Your Products

Her strength is building her audience and building true relationships with her subscribers. Her weakness is putting all the pieces together and hitting every benchmark. If she has accountability, she will never miss a deadline.

Liz has managed to convince people to build products with her. She has built three alone and four with other people. She does the summit with three other people, so she gets a quarter of the profits.

By working with other people, it makes it that much bigger and it gives her a bigger audience when she is launching her course. The first book Liz created she compiled.

She asked other people to write different chapters and it is just a collection of stories.

If you are thinking that you are not ready to quit your job or you are wondering how to get to the next level, it is all about networking, positioning yourself for partnerships, and being open to those relationships.

Having affiliates is a great way to make money, but if you can partner with someone else, think of how much bigger your audience will be.

When Launching a Product, Don’t Start with Creating the Product

A lot of people spend months and years thinking about the perfect product. Liz follows the Jeff Walker Product Launch Formula. It is simple. To launch a product, you need to prelaunch it. You need to talk about it and share with your audience what it is that you are doing.

When Liz first launched her course, she launched it in March 2018. In December 2017, she sent out an email to her audience list and said she was thinking about building a course and invited them to click a link if they thought it was a good idea.

From that email, 131 people clicked the link. Liz thought that was a good result, because if she made 10 percent of those sales, it would be worth it.

From January to March, Liz kept talking about the course. She does a live show with her RV blog and she talked about it there and took questions about RV maintenance, which was the topic.

She wrote newsletters about the topic, etc., until she got to the open cart. Liz thinks about it as how can I get my subscribers to click and buy the course.

Reverse Engineer How You Reach Your Customers When Launching Products

When you are creating a product that is online or is a service, how can you get people to click the button the second you open the cart? She reverse engineers it.

You have to have a relationship with your subscribers, your potential customers, already. What she teaches with the email copywriting and launch strategy is how to turn your audience members from fans to friends.

Once they are your friend, they will click the link to buy your product.

You need to take them on a journey from follower to fan to a friend that buys. Liz recommends doing that through your email newsletter.

If You Want Your Followers to be Your Friend, Answer Your Emails and Reply to Comments

Social media can feel like a beast, so pick one platform and reply to people. The same networking and sales strategy that worked 200 years ago works today. Open yourself up and truly serve your people.

There is no such thing as an evergreen funnel where you can set it and forget it.

If you are not nurturing the people coming into your influencer sphere, they are not going to go through the funnel and click to buy.

Nurture Your Customers
Be authentic and be genuine.
Part of that is actually responding to comments and replying to emails.
Be active in your network!

Liz was recently talking to someone who messaged her. They made a connection with her, regarding a Facebook group they are both in and Liz’s location.

They started talking and within about an hour, the messenger said something about working with Liz.

They are pretty much friends now. If she isn’t open to receiving those types of messages, that will be cut off.

If you are at the beginning stage and you are building something online, you have the advantage. You have the time to put into those relationships. This isn’t the stage where you are scaling your business and you don’t have the time anymore. When you are building it, you have the time.

Get an Opt in, If You Don’t Have One, Then Get a Welcome Sequence

This is your way of turning that person into a friend within a week. It is all about getting to know them and asking them questions in the email. When they respond, answer them back.

In Liz’s welcome email, she asks if they have an RV or not. The person can simply reply yes or no, but it opens up the bridge between you and them so you can get conversations going. Just start talking to people and be authentic.

Liz loves Mountain Dew and she talks about it.

She pokes fun at it and says she is not their ideal customer, because she is not a 12 year-old boy who like motocross. Joking like that lets people in.

Think about something that stands out about you that is authentic and just go from there.

Liz’s Thoughts About Having an Assistant Who Replies to Emails and Comments for All the Products She Has

Email is Liz’s life. She loves it and has actually worked for someone as their customer service support and then later as their personal assistant, when their regular assistant was out on maternity leave.

She has answered thousands of emails, but not as another person. That is never a good idea.

There are times when you get so big that it doesn’t behoove you to answer every single email, especially customer support questions where people can’t log in.

You can get a customer support assistant and you can get an executive assistant to say this is where you log in. As you build digital products, there are going to be those technical support questions and you should get someone to support you.

If someone asks you a personal question and bares their heart to you, reply to them.

That person will be so shocked that you replied personally and said a couple of things, whether it is advice or empathy.

This is where it is at. It is the difference between an eye roll and feeling like a person is 100 percent committed to you and trusts you.

This is a good way of networking. Get on people’s lists that you admire, hit that reply button, and put a couple of words out there about their recent blog post or podcast.

Make Sure Your Products You Are Launching Are Helping the Most People

Having an open cart means you can have an evergreen funnel and you can create email sequences.

This is a set it and maintain it situation. The other option is to close the cart and create scarcity, so it drives people to sign up once it opens again.

Liz recently had a conversation with someone who said everyone is telling her to close her cart, but she doesn’t feel good about it.

There are some benefits, other than forcing people to buy, to closing your cart, especially for your sanity.

If you keep your cart open, you are constantly thinking about it and how you can get more customers and what the conversion rate is. When you close the cart, you can really serve your students. This is how Liz prefers to look at it — she closes the cart.

Some people aren’t going to buy without that final push.

It creates scarcity.

But, you should close the cart, because it gives you peace of mind. When you launch something, your stress level can get up to your ears.

When you close it, you can wash your hands of it and just serve the students. You don’t have to worry about sales anymore.

They need you to be in it with them. You are going to have a ton of emails and you need to reply to them, because they trust you and gave you money.

How to Scale the Business when Launching Products

Liz was editing videos and creating the course on RV maintenance, while she was tent camping, speaking, and sponsoring an RV-related event.

If she can launch a course under those circumstances and do as well as she did, whatever your idea is, no matter your circumstances, you are going to blow it out of the water.

Liz was in a tent, it was 20 degrees, and she had her four year-old with her. Liz was staying up all night to get the course done.

The first time Liz launched the RV maintenance course, she had one affiliate. Her big dream was to have five heavy hitters who were going to match her sales so she could double her income.

But, she was in a tent and she was freezing, and she wasn’t ready to reach out to those people yet.

When you are trying to scale, if you’ve been doing it right and building your network, you can start reaching out and show them what you have done with your product and ask them to be a part of it.

Using Black Friday to Increase Sales When you Launch Products

This past winter, Liz had a ton of people selling her course during their 12 days of Christmas sale or Black Friday sale. She didn’t sell anything, because she was working on the digital summit with her friend and she didn’t have time to work on it.

She had income coming in when the cart was open and she wasn’t doing anything.

You can also scale with Facebook ads. Liz doesn’t have experience with these, because everything she has done has been organic. She is all about building relationships and getting her hands dirty. Liz has friends that have had great success with Facebook and Instagram ads.

Evergreen funnels are another way to scale. You can check out Click Funnels and Kajabi and get things evergreen.

Liz prefers the affiliate route and building relationships, because then she is not at the mercy of Facebook ads, she is at the mercy of the people she has built relationships with and who have the same customers as her.

Dustin didn’t have a great return with Facebook ads. He spent around $25,000 on these ads, which maybe turned into $3,000 or $4,000 in sales. However, if your SEO is good and and Google sends you traffic based on that, it is great traffic.

You can always get better traffic and you can always modify your content for Google. This is one thing Liz is working on to scale her business. Liz has ads on her website and her Pinterest manager is always telling her that her SEO needs to get better.

Liz is going back through old blog posts and modifying it for SEO, so she can get more people to her opt in and on her email list.

After three years, Liz has some canned replies. When someone replies that they have an RV, she has a simple response she sends back. This shows that you are a real person and you are interested in them.

Successfully Unemployed Rapid Fire Round

What Liz is Doing to Make the World the Better Place

Liz donates 10 percent of everything her website makes to the National Parks Foundation.

This is something she and her subscribers care a lot about.

She used to tell her subscribers, but she doesn’t anymore, because she doesn’t want to use it as a sales strategy.

The Advice Liz Would Give to Someone Who Wanted to Get Started Either RVing or Selling a Product

Open a ConvertKit account and pay the $29 a month, because it is worth it. Go to the landing pages. They have a lot of options to choose from now.

Create a landing page that says what it is that is coming, what you are going to talk about, and ask them to sign up for your email list. Put this on Facebook and Instagram, and send it to anyone you have emails for who you think would be interested in it.

When people sign up for your email list, send them an email thanking them for signing up.

After that, keep emailing them, while you are working on your website and social media. This is your prelaunch for any and all products. Share the process with them.

The Advice Liz Would Give to Her Younger Self

Start a blog and don’t go to college. Liz feels like it was a waste of time for her, but she went to college because her mom told her she was too smart not to go.

Liz wanted to be a stand up comedian and she wanted to be on Saturday Night Live. Her mom said she was crazy, she was the smartest person in the family, and she was going to go to college.

Liz was the first person to graduate college in her family, so she felt a lot of pressure. She grew up very poor and she thought teachers made a lot of money.