Brent Hodgson has a great post over at his blog titled 5 Tips for Getting Freakin’ Awesome Testimonials.   All the tips he provides are excellent, but my favorite tip was number 2 which shows you how to ask for a testimonial.  If you do this correctly, it will lead your customers into providing you a killer testimonial.

In addition to the five tips Brent discusses, it is very important to consider how you will get testimonials for a brand new product launch.

The challenge with launching a new product becomes how do you get testimonials before you have sales?

It is important you get testimonials before you launch your product because you want your sales copy converting as high as possible on launch day.  Otherwise, your JV partners will not be happy when they send you traffic and you will obviously lose a ton of sales.

What I see many internet marketers do is use testimonials from the same JV partners that they are using to launch their products.  I highly disagree with this method and my split testing results has proved this method is not the best.

Think about it do you think people really believe the testimonial if they see it is the same people that emailed them pre-selling the product during the launch? 

Based on my split testing results my conversion has been much higher using two other methods.

The first method I use for a launch is to set up a landing page and advertise my product via PPC with very highly targeted keywords.  I focus only on the search network, not the content network because I want highly targeted traffic to flow to my page.  These are the people who are passionate about my niche so they will give the best testimonials if my product impresses them.  

On my landing page, I offer the product for free to a very limited number of people in exchange for a testimonial.   This method will normally give you plenty of testimonials to use if you have a good product. 

Some people will take your product and not provide a testimonial. If you fear this (which I would not) you have two options. 

1.  You can require them to leave their telephone number and then personally connect with them before you send the product.

2.  You could simply charge them for your product then give them their money back once they give you a testimonial.

Another method I use is to visit social networking site or forums and connect with people that would have a specific interest in the product I am about to launch.  I then connect with these people and give them a free copy in exchange for their honest testimonial.

Even after your product is launched you should never stop trying to get testimonials.  A cool thing I have done in the past that has increased conversion is to provide a down sell option on my order page which provides a discount if you buy and agree to give a testimonial.

One last tip, don’t forget about video testimonials because they can be even more impacting than written testimonials if you can line them up.

Isn’t the web just great!

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