Why you shouldn’t build a new website for your next product 0

Posted In Product Launch

I’m going to start with the exception to the rule. If you are

a large venture backed company
willing to invest lots of time and effort into creating great websites with lots of ground breaking content
or your products are assets that will likely be sold off to third parties or go public

…then by all means you should create a new site for your product.

However, most of the bloggers out there who put out their own products should be launching those products from their blog, especially info products.

Most of my fitness bros seem to be creating new sites and they do it out of laziness, which is counter intuitive.

Building a new site from scratch should be more work, but it’s not, because you can have any internet jockey dump optimizepress on a fresh wordpress install and make a spamy looking landing page with an 90% bounce rate for next to nothing.

Here’s why you shouldn’t do that.

Your personal blog is better anyway

You’ve invested 11ty billion hours into your blog building up a following, getting traffic, and hopefully getting some search engine rankings.

Your blog has some domain authority, which means, google views your blog as a decent overall site, or at least it views your website as better than a brand new website with no content.

The new domain that you started has

no content
no backlinks
no domain authority
no visitors
no trust
no familiarity

…and likely never will have these things because you will abandon it after your product launch. You won’t even know if the server is down 6 months later because you aren’t paying attention to it. The site will never get updated and even if you do get it ranking, those rankings will disappear due to lack of updates.

You’re wasting a huge opportunity

Likely you are going to put some effort into that new site. You’re going to get a bunch of affiliates and friends to link to the site.

If you put that page on your personal blog all of those links are adding to your overall domain authority and they are adding to any of the internal pages you link from inside that page.

Every new post is subtly adding to the rankings of your new landing page and every backlink to your landing page is subtly adding to the rankings of your blog posts.

Putting it on a new domain is just throwing that all away on a site that won’t ever rank.

Moreover, if you put all that effort building a new site into split testing your existing site, all your products could perform better.

People don’t trust your new site

This shouldn’t be news to anyone, but most of these landing pages are universally terrible, again, out of laziness. When people see your white screen with giant red lettering, they know you’re selling to them and they don’t like that. So they bounce.

All you have to do is build a custom page template that’s full width and has your navigation stripped out. Keep some form of small logo and make the rest of the page similar in style. This keeps people from getting distracted by your navigation but retains the familiar feel.

If you take the time to build in the formatting and buttons needed for your landing pages, you can use this same theme for every new product you launch in the future. You don’t have to keep redoing it from scratch every time.

Then when you split test and make changes to your landing page, you can make that change to all of them at once by changing the page template (theme).

The difference is that people will recognize this is you, the dude who’s blog they read every week, the person they trust. They haven’t left your site and although the navigation is gone, it still feels like your site. This is important.

Integrating your products into your main blog will change the way you create products

Particularly in my industry, I see bloggers create tons of products. After a few years they become indistinguishable.

Despite having more products, it becomes harder to sell them, because customers can’t decide which one they should buy.

What’s the difference between 8 second abs and 7 second core? I don’t know, I guess I can’t buy until I figure that out. Bounce.

By integrating your products right into your blog, you’re going to be forced to see this problem and deal with it.

Customers need to be able to compare which products are going to solve which problems. If you can’t articulate that, you aren’t ready to make a new product and you should probably think about how you are going to make your next product different enough to be worth buying.

Maybe you should just update an old product and resell?

Make a nice product comparison chart that explains exactly what each product does and maybe how much it costs. If not for yourself, do it for your potential customers.

This chart goes on your overall product page which links out to your individual product landing pages.

You and your visitors need to see your products all the time.

When your product pages are integrated into your blog

you’re going to regularly see stats in analytics
you’re going to see where people come from
you’re going to be reminded that these products still exist so you can write about them

That one off product website you made in 2002 is just floating out in the ether, never to be seen, or linked to again. That old product may still outsell your current new product if you kept promoting it. This is more likely than you would expect.

Customers are more likely to buy when they get multiple exposures to a product. Keeping your main product page featured in your navigation or individual product pages linked directly within your navigation gives them that opportunity.

Hell, I put a pictures of my client’s DVDs right inside his giant flyout navigation. Just sprinkled them everywhere. This absolutely killed.

One team one dream.

Now what am I not saying?

I’m not saying that you shouldn’t register every possible domain with a variation of your product’s name. You should absolutely do that and then forward those all to your product page, both to grab type in traffic and to prevent others from using your name.

I’m also not saying that this has to last forever. You can always move that product to it’s own site. You can always do this later if you need to sell off that product or that product starts to take on a life of it’s own. Just wait until it’s worth all the effort to build an amazing site rather than a single page of just copy.

So making this into some sort of coherent to-do list…

Put your products in their own page on your existing blog.
Have a custom full width page template made for your all your landing pages
- Strip out navigation except for your small logo at the top which links back to your main page
- Build in the formatting, short-codes, and buttons needed for things like testimonials, videos, guarantees, and purchasing
- Use it over and over while split testing to make it better and better
If you have multiple products, create a comparison chart to articulate how they are different and what problems they solve. This goes on your main product page which then links out to your individual product pages.
Put links, banners, and pictures of your products all throughout your blog.
Register every possible variant of your product name and then just forward it to that product’s page on your blog.