Launch jacking is an affiliate marketing strategy where a business can take advantage of a new product launch and write a review or blog post about their experience with the product. If your review answers the readers’ questions and convinces them to click on your Call to Action, they are taken to the product developer’s product landing page to buy the product. This strategy works for both physical and digital products.
Launch jacking is not only a strategy for earning affiliate marketing commissions, but it can be a great source to gain additional traffic and backlinks to improve your website’s domain authority. In turn, that improves your ability to get other content ranked higher in the Search Engine Results Page (SERP). For example, writing a negative review will not likely cause the reader to make a purchase. However, if yours is the only negative review, prospects will likely click on your review to learn why. This traffic tells the search engines to rank your page and domain a bit higher, helping some of your other content rank higher as well.
When a company launches a new product, the product developer generally sends out a series of emails to their email list or buys ads that include links to their product’s sales landing page. Of course, the reader of those ads or email will often not just buy the product on impulse without doing a little more research first. The higher the price of the product, the more the prospect will do research before they reach for their credit card.
Knowing this, most serious product developers employ a strategy to incentivize affiliates to create brand awareness and educate prospects as part of their customer acquisition strategy. The product developers offer commissions to individuals that send a prospect to their site and buy their product. Commissions on digital products average about 50% while commissions for physical products are much lower.
Where Do Product Developers List Products?
Product developers have many options when it comes to choosing an affiliate network. Here are several popular affiliate network sites.
When it comes to launch jacking, your job is to have the most compelling article or post that the prospect finds during their research. The more your page can alleviate any confusion a prospect may have about the product and assuage any fears they may have, the more apt they are to click on the Call to Action links you include in your product review.
What makes launch jacking so powerful is that there is little or no competition for keywords with the product name. When the product name is paired with a few popular search words, the resulting long-tail keyword creates a blue ocean keyword that is easier to rank for. Some popular launch jacking keyword pairings are:
Product name + Review Product name + Review from Real User Product name + Discount Product name + Deal Product name + Coupon Product name + Bonus Product name + Product Creator Product name + Pros & Cons
You can also combine keyword pairings such as Product name + Review + Discount + Bonus.
How to Find Products That Are Ready to Launch.
Here are two popular site calendars where product developers can post the date of their product launch along with other information about their product for affiliates to use in their reviews.
Most of the listings on these sites are for new launches, however, reviews can be written for existing products as well. For existing products, you take the best elements of all the preexisting reviews and give it a new twist, thereby creating a better and more in-depth review. This can cause your review to leapfrog many of the preexisting reviews and allow your new review to rank well. The higher your domain authority, the better your chances of reaching the first Search Engine Results Page (SERP) spots.
For a new launch, first you need to find a product that will be launching in a few weeks. This will give you some time to write your review. When you click on a prospective product you’re considering writing a review for, look for ones that have a link to a Joint Venture (JV) page. The Joint Venture page is where the majority of the information you can use to write your review is contained. If you’re interested in a product without a JV page you will have to do a lot more independent research and write more original content for a compelling review.
Product Research
Before you consider investing the time and energy to write a review, you need to determine if writing a launch jacking review is worth your efforts.
When you find a potential target product, one thing you want to determine is how many other reviews already exist. Begin by entering the launch jacking keyword pairings you hope to rank for such as “product name” + “review” into your search engine.
If there are plenty of other prelaunch reviews already, your next step is to check the Domain Authority (DA) and traffic from the other sites to determine how hard it may be to get your review ranked on the SERP. I use the Alexa Traffic Ranking browser extension to do a quick check of their traffic. To find a site’s Domain Authority, Moz and ahref are two popular sites that will give you a limited number of searches for free. If all the other sites that have reviews are from a website with a much higher DA and traffic count, it will be harder to get your review near the top of the SERP.
Next, you will want to use the Google Keyword Planner and enter your launch jacking keyword pairings. Look at the keyword ideas to see if you have any competition. The search will give you some alternate keywords you may want to rank for, as well as get a sense of the number of searches and relative competition. What you may discover is that there is a lot of competition for “Product Name” + “Review”, but none for “Product Name” + “Pros & Cons”.
In addition to using a search engine like Google, look on YouTube to see if there are any reviews for the physical or digital product.
If there is limited competition, the next step is to learn a bit more about the creator of the product. You will discover that it will either not have a very good launch because the creator has no brand awareness, or have a very good chance of a successful launch based on previous successful launches.
Content Sources to Write Your Launch Jacking Review
At this point, your research indicates that you have a good chance of writing a review for a launch jacking keyword pairing that will rank well. Now is the time to write a review. Two sources you will use to write your review include the product’s sales page and the Joint Venture page.
Depending upon the type of product and your reputation, you can often request special review access from the product developer. For example, if you have a site that produces camping videos, a product developer for a camping product may agree to send you one of the first products so you can test it and write about your experience. For digital products, all the product developer needs to provide is a link, so digital products are often much easier to get access to for your review. This is one reason digital products make great affiliate marketing products.
On the Joint Venture page, the product developer will generally include their contact information.
Another source of review information is any demo videos that the product developer created for their launch.
Once you collect all of your data, you will want to write your review. You can cut and paste much of the content from the Joint Venture page and the product developer’s sales landing page as the basis of your review. You can then add some of your own narrative and naturally insert your launch jacking keyword pairing into the text. You will also want to include a series of Call to Actions, which will take the reader to the affiliate link that you have set up with the product developer’s chosen affiliate networks site such as Clickbank.
How to Write a Launch Jacking Review That Will Convert.
The assumption at this point is that you have a product you want to review and an account with the affiliate network that the product developed used. When you request the link, the affiliate network will provide not only the link to the product developer’s sales landing page, but also include your unique affiliate code. This way, when your reader clicks the link and buys the product, the affiliate network will know where the lead came from so they know who earned the commission.
Even if the buyer does not buy immediately and returns sometime later to make the purchase, that user is still associated with you, so you will earn a commission on the sale.
If you hope to rank, any review you write must be greater than 800 words. In fact, 1200 plus words should be your goal. Generally speaking, the more words and more times you can naturally use the keywords in your narrative, the better your chance it will rank on the SERP.
When you write your review, you will want to follow the format of a long-form sales page and include at least three Calls to Action to buy the product. The best reviews use many images or screenshots of the product throughout the review. Don’t be afraid to change up the font and text color to appeal to the three types of consumers of internet content; Skimmers, Scanners, and Readers. Make sure that all the images, titles, captions, and alt tags include the launch jacking keyword pairing.
If you are doing a video review, you can use the time tested Infomercial format.
Be sure to use the launch jacking keyword pairing such as “product name” + “review” in the title, excerpt, snip, and the first paragraph of your review, as well as the product name multiple times in your review. To have a successful launch jacking review, you should always follow good SEO practices.
Many launch jacking reviews start with an image of the product or a screenshot at the top followed by a short introduction.
After the introduction, include your first Call to Action.
Follow this up discussing the features and the benefits. Be sure to include how the product will help the buyer. Using bullets and screenshots will help this section stand out.
After the features and benefits section, include your second Call to Action.
Next, include any bonus that the product developer is offering the buyer for being one of the first to by the product.
After the bonus section, include your third Call to Action.
When you are happy with the review, publish it so the public can read it.
How to Build Quality Backlinks to Your Review
Just because your review is public does not guarantee that anyone will read it. Now is the time to tell the search engines that it is worth ranking it in the SERP.
To improve your ranking, it is always a good idea to include at least one video in your launch jacking review from YouTube. Include a link in the YouTube video description section that points to your launch jacking review page because it will provide a valuable backlink to aid in getting your review a better SERP ranking. Since YouTube is a Google asset, it likes backlinks from YouTube. That being said, consider uploading your video on Vimeo and Dailymotion to harvest their Link Juice as well.
Many launch jacking reviews include a video that demonstrates how to unpack and set up a physical product or how to use the digital product. The producer will often have some videos on their Joint Venture page that you can simply download and include in your review.
Hopefully, you already have a Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn page. If not, set them up. You should also consider Reddit, Pinterest, and Instagram. Make a post for each social media platform that includes an image and the launch jacking keyword paring you want to rank for in the title. Add some text such as “The following is a review of …” or “Discover the pros and cons of …”, plus a link back to your review page. All of these linkbacks from video and social media sites will tell the search engines to rank your review page higher.
Optimize Your Launch Jacking Page.
Your number one goal is to get organic traffic with all the backlinks to your launch jacking review page. Remember, it’s a numbers game, because only about 5-10% of people will ever click on your affiliate link. Over time, the traffic that you consistently receive will help your Domain Authority, making future reviews rank higher.
To squeeze out some additional value from the traffic that does not click on your affiliate link, many pages will offer visitors something related for free to just to get the visitor’s email address. Once you have the visitor’s email address, you can retarget them with additional offers.
How can you use launch jacking reviews to earn affiliate commissions and drive traffic to your site?
