My biggest take away from my Marketing class while studying for my MBA were the 4Ps. Product. Price. Placement. Promotion.

If you can remember just these things, “pass go” on your ambitions of taking a marketing class, credit yourself 3 semester hours, and put your $1600+ towards a trip with me to some Spanish native-speaking, Caribbean Island.  

My upcoming product, unlike my personal finance book, How We Prevent Wealth: A Personal Finance Reflection, is going to do well. I’m sure of it, if my marketing plan is spot on.

Brainstorming “out loud”

Product: I have the product in the works. It’s a software program. I’ll reveal it once it’s complete.

Price: The downloadable program will sell for a measly $1, $3, or somewhere in between the two prices. I don’t know? Maybe I’ll poll people to see how much they think it’ll be worth. This would be the smart thing to do. It’s called market surveying. 

 I haven’t determined, yet, if I’ll charge a one-time payment, or a per annual basis. The latter would make a lot of sense if I continue to build upon it and create value for the customer.

Placement: Placement is all about the distribution channel that I’m going to choose. One of the best places for distributing digital content is e-junkie.com. What’s nice about e-junkie is the company provides digital storage and delivery of files (including encryption to minimize piracy) and multiple payment choices (including PayPal) for users. If the program does really well as a desktop program, I can then look into distributing through the Apple and Android Mobile Markets.

Promotion: This is key. My blog is a pretty low-key visited media outlet. Therefore, the best way that my program will be promoted is virally. I will have to rely on my friends and connections that I’ve built since I began blogging to spread the word about the benefits of the software program. If this doesn’t work really well, I could always use the Financial Samurai’s Get on the Map Service. It worked wonders for me when I ran my Wealth Number Challenge. He has a powerful reach of about 100,000 people and brought 3,000 curious on-lookers to the blog in July 2012.

The power of social media can’t be emphasized enough. Someone Tweeted one of my pages from this blog, which was directly related to the software program that I will launch next month, and I received almost 1000 hits on that very same day. My average daily hits are about 100. The Tweet had made it on the front page of Lifehacker.ru, the Russian version of Lifehacker.com, a site frequented by over 100,000 daily users.

But, in order to keep the buzz going I will need a pretty kick-ass landing page to at least capture page views, and the need for people to want to share the benefits of the product. I will also need a capturing logo and branded page. I’m going to run my product’s page similar to the design for my personal finance book’s page. So, I’ve reached out to my book cover designer to have an awesome logo created. Hopefully he will respond to me soon.

Conclusion

The marketing recipe for a successful launch of my program has been created. I’m only now at the mercy of the programmers who will deliver my product to me. I have full faith that they will do an awesome job and deliver it as promised. So, I guess I’ll find out really soon where my  plan will take me…

If you want to know when my product launches but are not a frequent reader of my blog fill in your information below and I’ll be sure to email you on or around the launch date.