Tips and Tricks for Making Money with Interviews

Izzy and Tim from FoolishAdventure.com were kind enough to have me on their show this week.

In the podcast, I tell some stories about how I got into the paid content business plus some of the things I’ve learned along the way that I haven’t talked about before.

You can check it out here.

Izzy and Tim ask some great questions – a great example of how to interview well, actually. So if you don’t listen for my killer business tips, listen just to pick up a few interview tricks.

membership pricing, selling content online, starting a membership site membership sites

You may have heard all the hubub about Apple’s new version of Final Cut Pro X over the last few weeks. Some pro video editors see it as a step backwards. But for “prosumers” like Emile and I, it’s a terrific next step from iMovie that we’ve purchased and will begin using to do more video.

What really convinced me to spend the $299 for the downloadable program were a set of free Final Cut Pro X tutorials from IzzyVideo.com. Emile and I have known and followed Izzy over the past couple of years, but it was a coincidence that we landed on his site for the tutorials after I did a search for lessons on how to use the product.

Izzy is a helluva smart online entrepreneur and one of the things he’s doing with these FCP X lessons is brilliant and I wanted to call your attention to the business model. He’s offering the lessons free of charge as streaming videos on his website. If you want to download the lessons to your computer and also get the media files he uses to edit with during the lessons so you can follow along, he is charging a very reasonable $49 (and currently discounted to an even more reasonable $37).

It’s a terrific example of how content creators can serve all audiences and still make money selling their free tutorials, lessons and content. For those content creators who are hesitant to throw all of their content behind a pay wall, it’s also an excellent hybrid business model that will still allow you to attract traffic and followers while offering a premium product.

Offering the download of a streaming product along with a thing or two not available with the stream can work for any content creator on any topic or subject matter.

We’ll have to do an interview with Izzy in a few months to see how it all worked out. In the meantime, I just became a customer.

Izzy also does a podcast and blog with Tim Conley about online business tactics and selling online content that I highly recommend called FoolishAdventure.com. Be sure to subscribe to the RSS feed and check out some of the back episodes – pure gold.

creating content, online entrepreneurs, selling content online Final Cut Pro X tutorials, free Final Cut Pro X tutorials, Izzy Hyman

The Planet Money radio show and podcast, a favorite NPR podcast second only to This American Life, recently did a story on how the Internet had changed the music industry forever.

It’s not a new theme, of course, but one part of the show caught my attention. They profiled independent musician Jonathan Coulton and talked about how he sells nearly $500,000 worth of his music every year on his own website and without a record contract.

Many of the things he talks about work just as well with other types of content as they do with music. Particularly the part when Jonathan talks about how his relationship with his followers and fans is the fuel for his sales. Without it, he acknowledges he wouldn’t be nearly as successful.

As an entrepreneur, I always start a website with the exit in mind – how will I be able to sell this to someone else down the road? But the problem then becomes trying to build a site where we as the content producers aren’t front and center and built around our personalities. Trying to do so will usually result in failure because even the best content available won’t sell if your audience doesn’t feel some sort of connection with you personally.

For now, we’ve decided to be front and center in order to have success and make money. We’ll just have to figure out how we extricate ourselves from the site when it’s time to sell. There’s no easy answer, but since the sales must come first, it’s the only choice we see for now.

Let us know if you have new ideas about this.

For now, here is the audio clip of the segment and a transcript below.

1) Listen to the audio here (click on the triangle play button):

2) Download the mp3 file here

3) Read the transcript:

All right. So the story that I guess the record labels want us all to believe is that we’re all in trouble because it’s impossible to sell music for a fair price these days because it’s so easy to steal it, right? And the idea is that Napster made this all possible and now we’re all used to it, there’s no turning back.

And the argument is –

And the argument from the industry’s point of view is that this makes it incredibly hard to sell records when anybody who has a broadband connection can basically just go in the internet and get them for free.

The idea being that we have devalued music.

I see. And what do you guys think about that argument?

I think it’s probably fairly accurate. I mean I’m not sure that the price pre-Napster was entirely fair and the way that the money broke down certainly didn’t always benefit the artist.

But we’re all used to getting it for free and or for 99 cents a song or maybe, you know, 49. And I think that that ultimately does hurt the artist.

All right. So, the rest of this podcast is a counter argument to that sentiment. The man I’m going to introduce you to is basically a one-man refutation of that argument and let’s meet him now. Most people listening probably have not heard of this man. His songs never get played on the radio. He doesn’t have a contract with any music label and yet he makes a lot of money doing music, a lot of money.

This is a spreadsheet of my income over the last four years, so 2007 through 2010.

And I’m looking at the total net, are you prepared to reveal those figures?

You know, it’s — I don’t know. It’s always — it’s embarrassing to talk about that.

Ladies and gentlemen, Franny, Jacob meet Jonathan Coulton. He is a singer/songwriter in Brooklyn and I, unlike him, am not embarrassed to say what he made in 2010. He actually authorized me to tell everybody. He brought in almost half a million dollars. And since his overhead costs are very low, most of that money goes straight to him.

Which is crazy. It’s just insane.

Did you ever imagine yourself making this much money off of your music?

Of course not.

This is absurd. It’s an absurd situation. Look at me, this ridiculous office here in the parlor of this Brooklyn brownstone. This is the business that I’m doing here, it doesn’t seem right.

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creating content, selling content online

I love data and hard numbers when it comes to experiments and another blogger has confirmed what I have said before: short emails get better click-through than long emails.

Email is a notification tool – not a sales tool. Check that: you are selling something in the email – you’re selling the recipient on clicking the link. You are not selling the product itself.

Your broadcast and auto-responder emails should be written with one goal in mind: getting the recipient to click on the link.

The blog post I linked to above shows results of an A/B test and some guesses as to why shorter copy results in more action on the part of they user.

One commenter on the post makes an interesting point. If you aren’t able to build a landing page for your email and the sales copy HAS to be in the email, longer form works better (for him, anyway).

There may be times when you just don’t have the option of building a web page to make the sale and the email copy has to take on that responsibility. Hopefully those times are rare, because in my experience email copy doesn’t sell – websites do.

I would add one more piece of advice. Always place your link near the very top of your email – preferably immediately following the first sentence. This forces you to be very efficient with your wording and sell the recipient on why they should click in a single sentence. It takes practice, but it’s definitely something anyone can learn to do well.

email marketing email copywriting

Brad Stafford was the affiliate marketing manager for one of the largest financial membership sites on the web for many years. He’s now launched his own company, helping financial website owners learn how to sell their content with great email copy and honest-to-goodness solid content.

I recently convinced Brad to get on the phone with me and talk about everything from product launches to email marketing and everything else having to do with selling premium content online.

Listen in as I put him on the Interview Income hot seat and demand great answers about the best ways to launch an information product, promote it via email and maximize both profits and customer happiness with their purchase.

3 ways to listen/read:

1) Listen to the audio here (click on the triangle play button):

2) Download the mp3 file here

3) Read the transcript below

Related Links:

- Brad’s site: Financial Marketers & Publishing Group

Transcript:

Tim: Hello, everybody and welcome to my interview here today. I’m talking with Brad Stafford. I’ve worked with Brad and known Brad for a few years now. He has been an affiliate manager for a big financial company in the past and done really well with that. Now, he’s out on his own doing his own marketing firm where he’s helping people who create content make money with it, monetize it in a lot of different ways.

I wanted to get Brad on the phone. We’ve talked to him before but he’s just really an expert in teaching people and showing people what works and knows what works when it comes to creating money out of the content that you’re working really hard to create. So Brad, first of all, thanks very much for joining me on the phone today.

Brad: Absolutely. It’s the least I can do. It’s always good to talk to you, Tim. That’s for sure.

Tim: All right. Well, so there’s a lot of questions that I had that have come to mind over the past few months as I’ve been trying to kind of play with different things in monetizing our content. I know our listeners are always looking for what’s going to work best, what can I work on to make money from the content that I’ve worked so hard for produce? And the first thing I want to kind of attack right off the bat is this product launch versus just constantly putting out drifts of content out there and converting people as you go.

And one of the things that I’ve noticed over the past few months is that A, everybody seems to be doing launches and they seemed to be getting longer to me. They seemed like before a launch just maybe three or four emails. Now, it’s like people want you to send six or seven emails out for their launch. And my sense is that the reason that’s happening is because launches have kind of lost a little bit of their shine and I’m wondering maybe if I’m wrong there or what are your thoughts on that?

Brad: Well, I mean, I think first of all, you know, the launches over the past couple of years have done extremely well. I think that product launches have been done in many different niches. I personally think that the financial world is one of if not the best at it. We have the most rabid audience. Really their ability to buy products is just overwhelming. But yeah, recently, the launches have been sort of hitting a wall and affiliates or affiliate marketers who have the launches that they’re managing are asking more and more and more.

And you asked if it is sort of hitting a wall in getting done. Yeah, I’m not sure 100% if launches are done. I think certainly the economy has thrown a significant ranch in that. I mean, when people aren’t trading, they’re not going to be buying products so it’s becoming more and more difficult to sell to them.

But I also think a lot of leads and a lot of the people who are buying these products and involved in these launches from a customer site, they’ve seen so many. I for one, I’m always signing up to pretty much any email list that I can get myself on and it’s just the number of launches that are coming out on a regular basis. It’s almost like the leads know what’s coming and so they’re, “Well, you don’t really have it.” Okay, you know, I get this then I get this then I get the webinar then I get the pitch, then okay, there’s only a certain amount of time left. So I think a lot of people are sort of they’ve seen that.

There have been some recently that have worked and have worked well, but I think for the most part, the launches are becoming more difficult. And when affiliate managers are asking you to send more and more, it’s because they’re wanting to basically use your relationship with your list and your audience to solidify their legitimacy and their product even more and more and more. So the more that you can send that, the better that they can hopefully convert that lead down the road.

Tim: Now, I know in the internet marketing space, just in that general kind of make money online, I know the launches maybe have really kind of maybe they’ve seen the top of the bell curve and they’re heading down in terms of usefulness. Perhaps in a niche that hasn’t seen this type of promotion, it would work really well, and the financial folks have been doing this for a little while so maybe we haven’t reached that apex yet, but maybe that’s coming.

In the launches that have worked, is there anything that you’ve seen that they’ve done to kind of differentiate themselves from everybody else doing launches?

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affiliate program, email marketing, starting a membership site affiliate marketing, Brad Stafford