Have you ever noticed the year slip away before you even realise?

One minute you’re fighting off a New Year’s Eve hang-over whilst planning out what you’re going to do with your business in the next year, the next moment you find yourself wondering what to buy your family and friends for Christmas.

Somehow the year in between slipped past while you weren’t looking. Time is a sneaky little beast.

In my line of work, I get to see a lot of people launch a lot of new websites.

The ones that run smoothly, I never hear from, but the ones that don’t run quite so smoothly, I get quite an insight into what are the major causes of pre-launch stress.

I’m not a big planner; that’s just me. In fact just typing the word “planning” bores me.

But planning can also be exciting — it’s the start of something new, something that can change your life for the better.

And that’s why it’s so important.

I often get emails from clients who have to have some huge project complete, or implement a whole new payment system, or chase down bugs in their existing system by tomorrow, because that’s when The Big Launch is set.

My first thought is always “how did it get to this point?”

But honestly, it’s easy to do. It’s easy to wake up one morning, realise your deadline is the very next day and you’re still got a billion or so things to do.

So on a caffeine induced high, blood pressure topping 200 over 150, you try and complete fifty percent of your project in one percent of the project time.

It’s easy to do, it happens all the time. As mentioned, I get emails all the time from people saying “HELP! My launch is tomorrow”, and they haven’t yet worked out how to accept payments and deliver their product.

So how do we avoid this?

A wise man once told me: estimate the time it’ll take to complete your project, then multiply it by two and a half. That’s how long it’ll take.

And that’s usually pretty accurate.

Remember, the last week of your project you want to be just testing everything out, making sure things are running smoothly, and getting in touch with any launch partners you’re working with.

You DON’T want to be figuring out how to structure your sales and delivery.

Creating a product is only one part of a project. Contacting Joint Venture partners and/or affiliates is also only one part of a project.

Remember the nuts and bolts behind the site.

Remember that to be successful in a launch, you need to accept payment for your product, and then deliver your product into your customers’ hands.

Choosing which payment processor to use will be one of the first jobs you need to do.

Some processors, such as Clickbank, will require you to run the product by them before they accept it. Make sure you leave time to do this, and have a contingency plan in the case that it is rejected.

If you have beta testers helping you out, then it’s a good idea to get them to also test the sales process. Set your payment processor to Test Mode, or if there isn’t a test mode (such as with Paypal, for example), set the price to $0.01, and let your beta testers run the whole process.

Make sure you do this with at least a week to spare.

You’ll sleep FAR better the night before launch.

Best wishes, and happy launching,

Sam Stephens
www.GuardHQ.com
www.DLGuard.com