Three rules for planning a gentle launch

If you’ve ever put off launching because the standard way of doing so looks exhausting–this post is for you.

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I used to think that in order to have a successful launch, I had to be loud. I had to be everywhere at once. And I had to be at least slightly burnt out. A couple of years in, I’ve learned something simpler: if a launch plan doesn’t work for you, it won’t work for your business either.

I’m currently in the pre-launch period for Grow, my gentle marketing programme, and I’m launching it for the fourth or fifth time. That surprises me a little, because when I started my business seven years ago I put off launching for the longest time. I thought that to launch I’d have to become someone I’m really not, and do things that don’t work with my sensitivities and my neurodivergence.

What I’ve landed on a few years on are three rules about the channels and content I use during a launch. They keep me grounded, and they mean planning a launch is now a much calmer experience.

Rule one: what existing content can I use?

This is always where I start, and it’s the reason launching has become so much less work over the years.

For Grow, that means going back through my blog posts about marketing and checking whether they already have a call to action linking to the programme, or whether I need to add one. It means looking at the marketing struggles quiz I made a couple of years ago and asking whether it needs a few new pins. And it means going through older newsletters about marketing—I uploaded a couple to my blog this time that had never made it there before.

Nothing here is new. It’s just noticing that I already have content doing its job through SEO and Pinterest, and making sure it points somewhere useful.

–> Read more on How to reuse and repurpose your newsletter content

Rule two: how can my existing channels support this launch?

I plan this in my Paper Republic notebook, on the calendar insert, usually three months at a time. I write down when I want to send newsletters, and the fixed dates for Grow—the monthly planning call, the recorded office hours.

This time I decided to go from two free newsletters a month to three, so I’d have room to write about the quiz and the new lead magnet. I thought about which new pins to make. And I thought about YouTube, which is a relatively recent channel for me, and how it could give a bit of attention to Grow—which is partly how this video came about.

The question I’m asking myself isn’t “where else should I be?” It’s “what are the channels I already have, and what would I like each of them to do?”

Rule three: what, if anything, do I want to add?

This is the fun one, and also the most optional.

Looking back over the past four or five launches I made several new lead magnets. The first new thing I made was the marketing struggles quiz, which continues to do really well. Last year I made a mini podcast series about marketing that tied into the autumn launch. This time I’ve created a marketing audit—a workbook of about sixteen pages that takes you through reviewing your existing marketing.

The audit focuses not just on the likes and downloads and views, but on how your marketing feels: is this channel actually working for you? And then it walks you through your options based on what you find, including how to decide whether to add a new channel at all. I’m genuinely excited about it.

One thing matters a lot to me here: whatever I make has to work as a standalone thing. I don’t want to create a lead magnet that only makes sense as part of something else. The quiz is useful on its own. So is the audit.

But—and this is the important part—I’ve had plenty of launches where I didn’t have the capacity to make anything new, and those launches were fine. We don’t have to create something new every time. It can be lovely for us and for our audience when we do. It just isn’t a requirement. This time I feel more energised and up for experimenting, so I did.

Why all of this is evergreen

If you look at those three questions together—existing content, existing channels, anything new—everything they produce is evergreen. That’s deliberate, and it’s a key pillar of my marketing generally.

I hate the idea of creating content that disappears after 24 or 72 hours. What I make instead keeps working when I’m not in launch mode: it brings people in through SEO, Pinterest, YouTube and Substack, and it keeps bringing people to the waitlist for Grow.

What I’m not doing

There’s a pin I saw on Pinterest the other day: one of those dense launch calendars, colour-coded, every day accounted for across five platforms. There’s nothing wrong with it. It’s roughly what I attempted in the early days of my business, and it left me overwhelmed, burnt out, and sick of whatever I was launching before the launch had even started.

That calendar is not the only way to run a successful launch. You can have a launch that’s much gentler and absolutely no less effective.

For me the key choice is focus over breadth. I felt scattered when I tried to be everywhere, like I was throwing things at a wall. Now I have my channels and my content, and I can adjust whenever I want to. Part of that adjusting is why I’m trying a waitlist-only launch this time—partly as an experiment, partly to deal with launch fatigue, both mine and my audience’s.

And if you’re familiar with my work, it won’t surprise you that I don’t use social media, and haven’t since 2021.

The other thing I do is recycle the launch content itself. I’m launching for one week, to the waitlist only, and the emails that go out that week are largely recycled. I’ve written a lot of newsletters about Grow over four or five launches, so I have plenty to play with. Sometimes I send the same newsletter again—nobody remembers what you sent five months ago. More often I rework it, which in my case usually means making it shorter.

Something to try

If you have a launch coming up, explore the three questions before you open a calendar: what existing content can I use, what can my existing channels do, and what—if anything—do I want to add?

I’d guess you’ll find you have more to work with than you thought.

–> I’ll be talking more about the waitlist-only launch and how I’ve structured it in part two.

I’d love to hear how you feel about launching–leave a comment here.

If this resonated, come join the waitlist for Grow, my marketing programme. It teaches you gentle, non-overwhelming marketing that’s intentional, sustainable and actually yours—and you’ll be first to hear when it opens again.

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