How You Can Handle A Product Launch, Affiliate Contest And Build Your List At The Same Time

The past 7 days was one of the most challenging and exciting days in my Internet marketing career.

What happened was I tried to multi-task my promotional efforts by accomplishing three things at once:

• Launching and pre-launching my franchise all week
• Promoting another marketer’s launch as an affiliate (and competing in a highly competitive affiliate contest)
• Build my list in one of my favorite giveaway events - Awesome Fun Gifts

Most people, I believe would pick ONE and block out all the other activities for the rest of the next few days or the entire week.

However, I wanted to test myself and see how far I can go without compromising the results in either of the tasks…

After a lot of strategizing and implementation, I’ve achieved my desired result:

• My launch was a success - my business partner, Jaz Lai and I sold out all the franchise licenses for our launch :) 
• I’ve finished 3rd place in the affiliate contest for my promotion efforts netting me another $1,000 (RM3,600) in addition to my commissions (not sure if I actually finished 2nd or 3rd… so I’m still waiting for the merchant to tally the results)
• I was still able to make it in time to promote Awesome Fun Gifts

I was very lucky that I didn’t screw up any of the tasks above because I didn’t want to disappoint anybody (my partners, my subscribers and myself…)

Here’s what happened…

As I wanted to focus more on my main product, I decided that I would have to spend all week promoting only one product - mine. So what can I do? I had to do all sorts of other things in order to succeed as one of the top affiliates - I resorted to writing reviews on my own blog, optimizing it for the search engine and using PPC traffic to make sure I maxmized the profits all the while I was promoting my own product.

Jaz and I concluded our launch in less than 48 hours even though it clashed with the Awesome Fun Gifts. In a giveaway event, you can’t be a free loader. You MUST promote the event within the first day. So what happened? I resorted to article marketing, social bookmarking, twitter and Facebook to get as much traffic out to the site as much as I can. Only after my franchise was concluded, was I able to promote the event with my list again.

As I look back, I’m glad that a few of these strategies I used paid off:

• Don’t just rely on your mailing list - you must always diversify your traffic generation methods. As I was focusing on promoting my own product, I can only focus my list on one thing at a time so it is very important to leverage on other ways.
• I’ve used blogging, SEO (search engine optimization), PPC (Pay Per Click) and article directory submission to promote other products while my list was ‘tied up’.
• You can also leverage on Facebook, Twitter and Social Bookmarking methods (e.g. Digg, Stumble Upon, Propeller, Reddit, etc) - just throw everyting except the kitchen sink.
• I didn’t do everything by myself too… I’ve outsourced some of my work to my service providers.
• Above all, you must have confidence and believe that you can think outside the box. If I kept a narrow minded view that your list can only do one thing at a time and do nothing, you will miss out on a lot of opportunities. Don’t care what other people think - just give ‘em your best shot.