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.

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.

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.

So Jonathan Coulton’s music is funny, melodic and pretty nerdy. This is one of his hits. We’ll get to what exactly a hit means in Coulton’s case a bit later, but it it’s a song called “Re Your Brains,” which imagines a pleading email written by an ex-officemate who is now a zombie.

No, they’re not all just purely joking, it can get serious. Although, even the serious ones are sort of funny. Like a song about suburban alienation and dysfunctional marriage called “Shot Back.”

Okay. So that’s Jonathan Coulton’s music. And the question is how does he take these songs and another 95 like them and turn it into half a million dollars in revenue? And the answer is the thing for any — you’re saying it’s taking money out of the hands of musicians, the internet.

All right. So we’re going to JonathanCoulton.com and here is the music page. And this is basically a reverse chronological list of the songs that I have released. Next to each one, there’s a button that lets you stream it and listen to it and there’s a button to buy it for a dollar.

So advantage 1 to this situation for Jonathan Coulton, when people click that button on his website, the money goes directly to him unlike in the old system where the label took a lot of the money, right?

There’s no cost here to the VIPs and there’s no infrastructure that requires feeding, a feed of — a flow of cash to keep it going. I mean it’s basically just him, right. He can do the whole thing himself.

It’s him and like in the old days like for every CD that was sold, you got very little of that money as the artist.

Yeah, I mean there’s –

Sometimes you didn’t get any money.

Right. I mean there’s distribution cost, there’s promotional cost, you have to pay people, you know, to clean the offices in the building that the label is housed in. Like all sorts of costs go into keeping artists, you know, on labels and continuing to put out records. And when you’re just doing it on the internet, there’s no physical costs at all.

Right.

You have to pay, tie your own computer and an internet connection.

And server space.

And server space But that’s another –

You’ve got to pay a cut right to PayPal?

Yeah.

Right. But a cut to PayPal is a lot different than a cut to Electra Records or whatever record label.

Yeah.

It’s a lot smaller cut.

So here’s this random guy who puts up his website. It’s a tiny little dot in the middle of the internet, but not only do people go there, they pay for something that, as you guys pointed, they can get very easily for free.

If you really want to, you can steal it, yeah.

And yet, people pay a dollar for it?

Yeah, they do. And I think that certainly there are some people who buy it because they don’t know they can get it for free. And if I had a button up here that said download all this stuff for free, a lot more people would do that I think. But, you know, I still think that a lot of the fails that come through are from people who are choosing to buy it. And it’s because, you know, I think in my case more than some other artists for sure, it’s you know that the money is going to me and I think people feel like they’re a part of something.

All right. So that last part that he said, that being a part of something, that to me is the key of what’s interesting about Jonathan Coulton. That’s why people are willing to pay for his songs because they feel like they have this relationship with him. And part of Jonathan Coulton’s business model is maintaining that relationship he has. He has a blog that he updates regularly. He’s constantly interacting with his fans on Facebook or tweeting things to his 60,000 Twitter followers. There are forums on his website where his fans can trade gossip about him or discuss their favorite songs or set brad boards to his concerts, that sort of thing. All right so what do you think, have I convinced you?

No.

Sorry. I mean the fact is that he just –

It sounds like the internet was great for Jonathan Coulton. I mean the problem with this comes in, in whether or not this is an example that anybody else can use to get, to make any money on the internet. And I think that to get to that point, we have to know what all the different things that he did to get to that point were. And I would imagine that it’s — that, you know, like just making the songs available was only part of it. He had to get a break somehow, right? Like he still had to have people want to buy his music and know who he was and that didn’t happen because he was on the radio, right?

Right. That’s a good point and that’s something that like a lot of people say. I’m sure that you’ve heard this too that the label system, you know, the old way before the pre-Napster music world, the label made your record for you, but it also got you a lot of fans and it promoted you. It got you on the radio. It sort of — it was the thing that set you up with an audience.

Yeah. They’ve got relationships with radio stations. They got relationships with stores. They’ve got relationships with movie studios and television studios. And these are all ways that the record labels have a long history of being able to get people to hear your music without paying for it –

Right.

– as well.

So what Jonathan Coulton would say to that is you don’t need the label for that either. Again, all you need is the internet and a lucky break and here was his lucky break.

The song that really hit big for me was the song “Code Monkey,” which was about a sad software designer, semi-autobiographical. For nine years, I wrote software and I quit that to do this.

You know, I put it out there and overnight, it sort of exploded. It was on Splashdot and –

Which is a big technology site.

That’s right. Yeah. And it’s notorious for bringing people’s servers down because it’s so many people read that it’s so –

Every tech geek in the world reads Splashdot.

Exactly. And so here was this song about a sad tech geek and it went directly, it was shot — it arrow shot directly to the heart of the tech geek community.

And that was the equivalent of, you know, me being discovered by Sam Impresario and you know or — you know, getting to go on the Ed Sullivan show when nobody knew who I was and people… You know, that was my breakthrough.

Do you think you would have been — you know, 20 years ago before the internet, before social media, would you have been able to — would you be able to make a living as a musician?

[0:09:58]

Well 20 years ago, I moved to New York City to make a living as a musician and instead I got a software job. So the answer is no. No. And I’m serious, I moved to New York with dreams of becoming a rock star, you know, and I kind of played in a band and kind of nothing happened and did some open mic nights. I didn’t know what to do. You know, in those days, you had to make a demo tape and bring your demo tape to an office. You know, and it’s the same thing with touring. You know, if you wanted to tour what you had to do was play locally because you could drive there in your car or take the subway there. You could afford to play a show for your six friends and the one other guy who was there by mistake. And if you did that enough times, then maybe the one other guy would like it and bring two of his friends next time. You gradually build this audience in ever widening concentric circles. So you get a — now you can afford to rent a van for six days and drive to Boston and Philadelphia and you’re still not making any money. And you’re building and building and building. It sounds terrible. It sounds terrible. The old way seems so hard and awful that I stayed out of the industry.

So what you’re saying is that you didn’t have what it takes to make it as a 20th century musician, but you have what it takes to make it to the 21st century.

That’s right. I was born a little bit too early that’s all.

All right. So he just said it right there. He couldn’t make it in the old way and then after the internet, he’s now making a living as a musician, how can you refute that?

I want him to tell me how to replicate his success.

What do you mean? You don’t think that…?

I mean I think that he’s making money because he wrote a song that hit on Slashdot, right?

What is another song that I could write that would hit that way?

I mean basically what you’re saying is that for Jonathan Coulton the internet basically provided like a perfect storm, right? He wrote a geek friendly song that also happened to be like slightly pop friendly.

And, you know, people on Slashdot are geeks and everybody likes decent pop music. So, you know, like when those two things converged… And then also Jonathan Coulton was, you know, able to have his songs widely available on the internet and also he wrote codes so he could have a website and everybody could see it immediately. And also, he, you know, has a history working in the industry and knows what he likes and knows what he wants to do and knows what he doesn’t want to do. He was able to like put these things together really fast.

I mean listening to that tape, the thing that I started thinking about was Justin Bieber who was honestly 2010′s big internet success story. Justin Bieber started out playing acoustic guitar covers of pop songs and soul songs and posting them on YouTube and then the industry took over. And Justin Bieber at this point is one of the biggest stars in the music industry and the recording industry, but also in the live touring industry. I mean, right. And Bieber played Madison Square Garden. They put out a — they made a movie about his journey from a small town boy in Canada to playing in Madison Square Garden. And that’s one thing that the industry can do that I think Jonathan Coulton still can’t do by himself.

Is make somebody — is make –

Is jump from that basic step to the –

To Madison Square Garden.

To Madison Square Garden.

Right, right. But I don’t really care about the Justin Biebers. I feel like there’s always going to be Justin Biebers. I’m going to Google who he is in a minute. But –

No, I’m just joking. I’m joking. I know who Justin Bieber is. I’ve got Bieber fever.

But I feel like there’s always those people. But like –

So you look — you’re thinking about like basically what we would call middle class musicians, right.

Yeah.

Like the ones who aren’t the huge stars but make a go of it and continue to be able to –

Right. And I think –

– make things work on a daily basis and sustain a career.

And it seems like Jonathan Coulton wouldn’t have made — wouldn’t have had a career as a musician. I mean he said so himself, he wouldn’t have had a career in music before. Like before the internet, that would have been basically impossible for him because he didn’t –he wasn’t label material.

Yeah. He couldn’t make that work for him. And in the past let’s just be, you know, like as long as we’re laying all these cards on the table, you know, you didn’t always have to have the labels work for you, right? There were other ways to do it. There was a big independent infrastructure. You know, there’s a DYI movement. There are all these different ways you can do it, but they do involve a lot of work, right. Like he was saying he didn’t want to book all these tours. He didn’t want to ride around in vans. He didn’t want to get two more people and then two more people and two more people –

Right.

– into his shows. Right. Like –

Yeah.

– it’s just the flaw.

Yeah, it’s easier — it’s much easier to post something on the internet and the hope you catch your break that way. It’s like much easier. And what he would say and I asked him about this, and I said are you just sort of a fluke or a niche fluke or do you think your model is replicable. And he was like absolutely, I have niche. I have a certain audience that likes me. They happen to a geeky audience that tends to gather on this one part of the internet. But he’s like, really what you need right now, what the modern world offers is like a place for you to put stuff up and then if people happen to like it, it’s really easy to share it with other people who like it and it’s really easy to pass it around.

That’s what the internet is groups of people who like the same stuff showing each other stuff like that. This is amazing. And so, you know, for me, it’s been remarkable to watch because I write all these different things about — you know, I’m a very niche subject matter guy too so, you know, my song about… I have a song about curling and that I’m sure has been played in curling clubs all over the country, all over the world because there are not a lot of songs about curling.

[0:15:17]
And so if you’re in this online forum and you’re meeting all the other people in the country who like curling, which by the way when was there another opportunity to meet all the people in the country who like curling, never. And so now you’re all talking about stuff and somebody says hey, here’s this song about curling and you send it to all of your curling buddies all over the world. And that’s — you know, that has been the engine that has driven my expansion of fans over the years.

All right. So right now, Jonathan Coulton’s business model is this beautiful self-sufficient ecosystem. His fans give him money, in return, he provides them with music and ways to feel connected like what you’re hearing right now. This is the 2011 Winter JoCo Cruise, the five-night Caribbean cruise that Jonathan organized with 350 of his fans. They paid a whole bunch of money to go on this cruise with him. He booked other musicians and they went on this cruise. And the sound you’re hearing is from Tuesday night of the cruise, which was karaoke night. All his fans got up and sang their favorites of his songs. This is the song you heard at the beginning “Re Your Brains.”

To me, I feel like this is the plutonic ideal of what the new model could be. This is Jonathan Coulton’s job. He hangs around, fools around in the guitar, writes a couple of songs, posts on his Facebook page. Maybe updates his blog, sends out some tweets to his Twitter followers and that’s his job. And then once a year, he goes on a cruise.

So I ask you again, what’s bad about that? Have I convinced you yet?

I still think it’s good for him and it’s not that good for everybody else, I guess.

Yeah. I think that someone like Jonathan Coulton, you know, he’s basically hit the lottery of the internet at this point. He has no involvement from a label and he gets to do all these things and he makes a huge amount of money. That’s going to happen for very, very few people.

My question is, is it going to happen for fewer people than it used to happen for? Like it was always hard to make it in the music industry, very few bands ever got their lucky break. I’m not saying is every musician going to make money in this glorious internet future, but is it better?

Well, yeah, but that’s the thing. He’s like he’s on person. He’s not doing anything other than like making a product and selling it and he hit — like he’s kind of like a Snuggie. You know, he’s a blanket with sleeves. We didn’t know we wanted it, and then all of a sudden, we did.

And we’re willing to pay like a dollar and send it to all of our friends or something.

Right.

Maybe the internet is good for one musician by himself, but he’s not a label. He doesn’t have to sort of invest and inspire younger artists and like maintain his older artist.

Like he — there’s a way for him to support himself, but he’s not a business.

And I think that that’s the key here. I mean that we’re going to keep coming back to this point. Jonathan Coulton, whether or not he in the future is an example that people will be able to follow and I’m sure that he is. I’m sure that in the future, somebody will say I wrote the song and know that there are people out there who are going to like it and that person will have seen the example that he laid out and be able to replicate it. But they have to be able to do all of those same things that he did. And for so many people, it’s just so much easier to do that with the support of somebody else. You know, they need somebody else to help record them, that person needs to get paid. They need somebody else to build a website, that person needs to get paid. They need somebody else to write emails to places like Slashdot or to websites like Buzzfeed or, I don’t know, you write a song about pasta and you send it to Epicurious, I don’t know, whatever. You know, like if you’re trying to serve that niche then you still have to be willing to do all of the legwork that gets you to the point of being able to sell it and that’s where musicians have to make what essentially amounts to a tough decision.

Right. And that’s a good place for us to close because Jonathan Coulton when I talked to him, he had just been debating this very question. He’d come to this point where he was tired of folding his own t-shirts, he has way more email than he could actually answer. He’d actually hired an assistant to help him answer email. And he was wondering like is there a way that I could be doing this better? Should I go with a label? And he went back and forth and he went to the label and he talked to the label. He talked to a couple of labels and these were not major labels, there were independent labels. These are 21st century internet savvy labels and they sort of talked to him and they said, well first, you need to set up a, you know, a Twitter account and he was like I got one. They were like how many followers you have. He was like, I have 60,000. They’re like, oh, you’re doing pretty good. And they started asking him for advice basically.

And so he stumbled on to a model that I think a label could follow and the way he explained it is there are people now who are starting to do it. Some of the other newer labels are starting to become much more internet savvy and basically helping other artists do the same thing.

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.

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?

Brad: Well, I mean the first thing that really changed the launches and how people set themselves apart was doing the webinar. I mean, that was big, that was huge, that was interactive, and it did really well for the leads and for converting the leads. I think the webinars are still very important. You have to be able to close on the webinar. But then, there are still that need and that desire to build that relationship with that lead, and again, the whole launch cycle is you got to create a significant problem and then this is the only solution or this is one of the best solutions.

There have been challenges of okay, we presented too many problems and too many solutions or too few problems and too few solutions. There’s got to be a good mix of okay, here are the problems that are significant that are pertinent to the current economic state that we’re in or really whatever is going on the market. And then here, the solutions really can’t deviate too far from those solutions.

Tim: So if the first set of the product launch was it was text articles that you’d get, maybe second was podcast and then it was video, now it’s webinars, anything you see out there in the future that might be the next big thing here as part of the product launch content?

Brad: Boy, I don’t know. I mean the more interaction that can be done, I think the better. I mean the more that you can interact. I mean there’s contests that are done. Again, my big thing is I’d like to create a relationship with that lead, and with the launch process, it’s very — you put what takes a long time to build a relationship and you squeeze that into a two or three-week process. So the more that you can build that relationship within a shorter period of time, I think that’s going to be better. I mean the more interaction that you can have, the more “Hey, this is what I’m all about. Let me personally connect with you — webinar, video, phone call, whatever.” But as far as like the next technology, I don’t know, you know. Squeeze the relationship build into a two-week process, then that’s what’s going to be the thing.

Tim: Yeah, we’ll see what that’s going to be. It would be interesting to watch. Now, what about for people that are just regularly sending out content? It’s kind of like a perpetual launch. Their product is always available and they’re sending out good content just to grow their list. I mean, one of the things that I do like about the launch is that it creates urgency and I know for a fact that the best content in the world won’t sell itself. You’ve got to create that urgency. So how do you that when you don’t really use the launch model?

Brad: There’s really a number of different ways to do that. I mean, you can go to the coupon where it’s a discount for fill in the blank of whatever is going on at the time. One of the guys that I’m working with now, we did a November 2nd sort of like an Election Day discount and that actually converted really well. Take advantage of it while the economy is just sort of playing on what’s going on.

The other way is raise the price. There’s nothing like creating urgency like I can’t save this much money anymore. Then there’s always the just deliver more value, deliver more content, just taking it up a level, whereas okay, it’s just going to be this daily newsletter, oh, then I’m adding video. Oh, they’re adding video. Man, I need to take advantage of that. Oh, they’re doing this to their site. Oh, they’re adding this. They’re adding more value to make it more desirable.

But with a lot of the people that are doing the free content, one of the things that’s a challenge is giving too much away for free and sort of creating that delicate balance of providing a ton of content, providing reasons above and beyond what normal people provide in that space to help educate, but then reeling it in enough to sort of whet the appetite of somebody to buy the next product. So that’s another way as well.

Tim: Now, one of the things I’ve always also said is that you should do whatever you can to sell your product first. You’re going to make as more money selling your own content and your own product right away. If you don’t convert them in your initial period, then start sending them affiliate links, right, because even if say your product is not a fit, that’s fine. Maybe somebody else is a fit for them better and I can still make some money from my list that way.

I know that some people, when they’re asked to do affiliate marketing, they won’t send out an email to their list until the product is on sale because they know that most affiliates want to kind of drain their list and make it their own and market to them down the road too.

So what do you think is the best way to make money with affiliate marketing and monetize my list for people who haven’t bought my product or even have bought my product but still keep my list and don’t dilute it so much that I’m just giving it away every time I market for somebody else?

Brad: I would say it’s relatively easy and that’s don’t sell to them. I mean that sounds kind of simple, but think about it like this. The email list that you have, the people that are on there, you have a relationship with them. Treat them as you would really want to be treated. A lot of the different affiliate marketing companies, they’ll give you different people in our space or wherever. They’ll say, “Here’s the swipe copy. You know, copy and paste this. Here’s that. Here’s the lead link. Do this.”

When I’m working with affiliates and encouraging them to market, it’s very simple. It’s the old I guess we can say the old American Idol. Make it your own. There’s nothing like taking a lead link that’s obviously affiliate track to you, actually watching or reading what’s on the next page and telling your audience what really you think about it. I mean, it takes five minutes to rewrite or analyze something that a company sends you for you to then remarket.

I mean, it’s easy to just do a copy and paste sort of blindly, but as far as results on the front end with selling and generating leads for that other company but also maintaining your relationship with your list, the more that you can personalize it and show people that “Hey, I’m actually reading this. I’m taking time to think about and analyze what I’m sending you. If I want you to opt in to something, you understand that I’ve already opted into it and that I understand and believe in it,” that makes the world of difference. Does that make sense? I mean, it’s just…

Tim: Yeah, absolutely. I’m huge with that too. I never send out just a copy that they’ve sent me. Some of it is great. Some of it is not so great. But I always put my own personal touch on it at the very least, and at the very least I change the subject line and almost always I change a lot of the body as well.

Brad: And that’s simple to do — change the subject line. If anything and what I’ve seen and had a lot of success with is just write a two-paragraph info. If you’re selling or promoting a video by another affiliate or promoting an article, watch the video, read the article, give your audience your two cents. I mean, that’s why they’re there. That’s why they’re on your list. They give a crap about what you’re saying and taking two minutes to write a paragraph, “Hey, I just watched this video on forex and the newest robot. I personally think robots are a piece of joke and… but here’s this video explaining why they’re not. Take a look at it. Enjoy.”

That takes no time and it creates a buffer between you and the product, because if the product stinks, then you can say, “Well, this was my opinion.” Your opinion is your own but it’s an added value for the company that you’re marketing for. They put a lot of time, they put a lot of money into that swipe copy, but I know personally that I would rather have nobody send the swipe copy and everybody send their own stuff. It’s going to be much higher conversion.

Tim: And then of course the question you always get and it’s a $64,000 question and there’s probably no right answer for it, but I got to ask it anyway. How often should I email my list with my own content, with affiliate offers? What do you think?

Brad: Oh, man. I mean, it really depends. In depends on the content that you’re producing. Like with you for example, when you have a new interview, put it up. I mean for me, when I write a new article for my site, I usually send it out twice. I send it out as soon as it’s done then I change the subject line on an email, write it a little bit different and send it again. Whenever I produce new content, then I send it out.

If there’s an affiliate opportunity to send out something, the best way is to send it out in a way that doesn’t seem like you’re sending it out all the time like, “Oh, here I’m making money on this. Here I’m making money on this.” If it’s a “Hey, I just came across this. I wanted to let you know,” you know, recognizing that your list is probably busy doing something else, but you’re busy but you’re taking time to share this with them. So if it’s a way to introduce that and share affiliate material with them in a way that doesn’t really look like your heart-selling them and that you’re thinking about them above and beyond your normal email sequence, they’re going to see that as beneficial.

Tim: Right. And with the interview too, I’ve tried to create content around that you may not be able to get a webinar, a full webinar for your audience with the person who has created the content or who you’re affiliate marketing for, but if I can get them on the phone to do a 15-minute interview and send that out as piece of content, “Oh, by the way, here’s their affiliate link,” I find that that’s so much better received as well. So trying to create some content. Yeah.

Brad: Absolutely. It’s just going above and beyond. I mean, it’s just providing — the more value that you can provide, the better it’s going to be. I mean a lot of times, the problem really in a lot of internet marketing is it’s so short term. It’s so short focused. It’s okay, I got to get this now. I got to do this now. I got to do this now. Whereas a lot of times, you’re not thinking of your lead as a lead that’s going to be with you for multiple months, not just, okay, they’re going to be with me for a couple of months and then I got to make as much money off of them as I can.

If you take the mindset that I’m going to treat this person like they’re going to be with me for five years, then they’re hopefully going to be with you for five years if you do it right. If you treat that person as I got to get them sold as fast as possible, then you better have a good lead source ’cause you’re going to need a lot of new leads coming in on a regular basis.

Tim: Right, to replace all those unsubscribes. Sure.

Brad: Mm-hmm.

Tim: Well, so for our listeners who are looking for some expertise, let’s pitch your company here at the end here. How do I get in touch with you and tackle and got some of your expertise in launching my product or figuring out how to monetize what I’m doing?

Brad: Well, you can shoot me an email, brad@fmpgllc.com, that’s Financial Marketers and Publishing Group llc.com. You can go to my website, fmpgllc.com. And really, you know, I just love to talk to people and I answer all emails as quickly and as accurately as possible. If there’s any questions about marketing or copyrighting, I do all of that stuff. And as Tim can hopefully attest to you, I’m a pretty easy guy to chill with and I like to introduce other people around. So, you know, just email me or check out my website.

Tim: Yeah, thanks. And in a time when there’s not a lot of integrity in the internet marketing or there’s not perceived to be any way, that Brad is definitely one of those guys who will give you straight answers and not give you all the B.S., and the truth about what it takes to make this work and do it with integrity ’cause I think you and I both believe that internet marketing can be done in a way that you’re truthful and you provide value and you’re not just trying to collect as many dollars as possible.

Brad: It’s the best way to do business. I mean, think about it as a long term. If I treat you right now, we might not be able to do anything right now, but in 10 years, in 15 years, maybe there’s a huge deal that we can do regardless, you know. You never want to burn bridges. You never want to cheat somebody because the niche that you’re in, no matter what it is, is a small world and word gets around fast. So it’s easier just to stay above the fold.

Tim: No question. All right. Of course, listeners, we’ll link to Brad’s website in the transcripts, but fmpgllc.com, right, Brad?

Brad: That’s it.

Tim: All right, thanks.

I loved being a cop – it was a tough decision to leave the department just months before I would have been promoted as one of the youngest detectives in the LAPD. But the company I started in my free time had grown to eight employees and having the founder out chasing bad guys all night was starting to cost more money than my modest civil servant salary brought in.

Now I have the best of both worlds. Emile and I own a successful company together where we get to do pretty much whatever we want all day and I still throw on a uniform two or three times a month for a 12-hour shift of chasing bad guys as a Reserve Police Officer (kind of like a volunteer firefighter, but with a Glock and body armor).

The mission of our small company has always been simple: Make money doing whatever works. That means if we thought we could make a profit selling vodka-infused caramel apples with Pixy Stix handles, we’d give it a try.

Over the past few months, Emile and I have been spending a few hours each day working on affiliate marketing. Our membership sites are doing well and it has allowed us to step back and look for other opportunities that can add to our bottom line. I haven’t talked about it until this point, because I didn’t think talking about it before we knew what the hell we were doing was worthy of your time. But a blog contest, coinciding with the fact that we’ve actually made some money doing it, has made it the right time.

Before talking about why I think affiliate marketing will help me take this side of the business to a new level, I’ll talk about why we’ve been working so hard on it since August. When Emile and I talked about giving it a try, I was skeptical. Could we really make enough profit that it would be worth diverting resources (namely time and money) from our paid content and membership sites? Did we really want to be in the same business as the “Cincinnati stay-at-home mom makes 5K a day with Acai Berry miracle cure!” crowd?

We found out there’s a lot more to it than Acai.

One of the things you’ll learn about us is that we don’t spend our days reading hundreds of blogs, reading long sales pages and books, and generally wasting time trying to figure out the best way to do something. The best way to figure out how to do something is to just freaking do it. We learn best by diving in and taking action.

We also don’t do anything “half ass” so let me start by showing our gross earnings in our main affiliate network account since we started in September:

As you can see we had some “beginner’s luck” in September, dropped back down after we thought we knew it all (and spent way to much money to earn way to little), and are building it back up to that first month. We’ve been very profitable every month but there is still something missing… more on that later.

I find myself comparing the internet marketing world with law enforcement all the time. This may sound a little odd, but I find ways to correlate the two after almost every 911 call. While my partner updates our log, I find myself looking for ways to relate the call to something in the business world. Lately, I’ve been thinking about how one specific incident relates to affiliate marketing.

I’ve made you wait far too long already for the payoff from the title of this post so here it is:

A while back my partner and I were on patrol in one of the rougher areas of the city around one in the morning. The in-car computer (where we get the details of the 911 calls) and the radio (where they initially broadcast the calls) was eerily quiet so we were looking for stolen cars by running the license plates of vehicles. The newer cars have license plate readers that can automatically run thousands of plates you pass by each shift, but we were doing it the old-fashioned way, by me calling out the plates and my partner typing them in the computer.

When you get a match, the computer gives you a very specifically-formatted message that looks different than a regular message return. It says: INQUIRY MATCH: STOLEN VEHICLE in big bold letters at the top of the screen and it makes your heart stop for a second while your mind catches up to your eyes and you realize you’re following a stolen car.

Any cop who says they don’t LOVE seeing that message is lying – because it means the next few minutes are going to be very exciting.

I’ll cut to the chase (literally). As we pulled in behind the vehicle and turned on our lights and siren, the vehicle accelerated and the pursuit was on. About 90 seconds into the chase as we turned a corner I heard a loud “pop.” It sounded a lot like what it sounds like when you run over an air-filled grocery bag with your car.

Ok, I’ll admit, the next part is a little…embarrassing. I turned to my partner and said, “Did we just run over something?” My partner leaned over and very “matter-of-factly” said, “Dude, he just shot at us.” All I could muster in response was, “What an asshole.” I thought I had said it just to myself in my head, but I later learned from my partner that I had said it out loud.

The passenger had leaned out the side of the vehicle and fired back at us. Because I was the driver officer, I didn’t see the bright muzzle flash from the right side of the vehicle my partner saw when it happened.

Long story short, after a few more blocks, the stolen vehicle pulled into a dead-end park where a very short gun battle of good guys vs. bad guys ensued. Needless to say, I’m still here (and so is my partner) and the parolees (who recovered from their wounds) are doing time in prison for attempted murder of a police officer.

As is my usual routine, I couldn’t help but think about how that incident related to affiliate marketing:

1) Affiliate marketing, like finding stolen vehicles, is a numbers game.
One of the things I learned early on is that you have to “run” a lot of cars in the computer to find the “G-Ride” (Grand Theft Auto aka G-Ride) as we call it. The more cars you run, the more likely it is you’ll find the car you’re looking for. It’s the same with affiliate marketing. There are literally thousands of offers out there to choose from. Some won’t make you a penny and others are pure gold if you can find the right target audience to go with the right ad. You have to try a lot of them to see which ones are going to fly. Once you find a winner, you spend as much money on it as you can.

How we’ll improve this year: We’ve gotten good enough at this to know that if we spend $100 on something and don’t make at least $75 right away, it’s probably not going to work. If I can make $75, I can probably tweak the ad or the targeting enough to put it over the edge and make it profitable. But it takes us way too long, in my opinion, to do this for every ad we try. I need to learn how to quickly test an ad with laser-like focus and spend as little as possible to see if it’s a good one. This year we can learn how to do a much better job of testing offers quickly and without “shooting in the dark” (pun intended) as we sometimes do with an offer by spending way to much, too quickly, only to find our target demographics were off.

2) The guy who shoots more accurately under pressure wins.
We all had guns that night. Our team had just trained harder for that moment. There’s a lot of money at stake in this industry and we know we’re competing with some very, very talented marketers. We’ve made some very nice coin in the four months we’ve been at this, but we’re small potatoes compared to the real players in this space. If we want to piss in the tall grass with the big dogs, we need to get a whole lot better at this. The real pros in affiliate marketing are calculating machines who know with crazy accuracy exactly how much every penny spent is going to earn. Like Gordon Gekko, they cut their losses quickly and let their winners run. I need to meet those people and attend those workshops.

3) Too much confidence can be a very dangerous thing. In the police academy you spend eight months learning how to deal with some pretty scary situations. What you learn very quickly after graduation is that when something happens fast and when you least expect it, you immediately fall back to your training. The most dangerous place to be in is the one where you think you have everything under control and nothing can surprise you. Affiliate marketing is about spotting trends and nuances before most everyone else and then spending as much money on that offer as you can before others figure out what you’re doing. What separates the top 5% from the other 95% is knowing that you always have to keep up with the latest trends and hot topics and never resting.

How we will improve this year: In affiliate marketing, I KNOW I still have a lot to learn. Sure we’ve had some success, but the day I decide I’ve learned everything is the day I’ll probably take a huge loss. In any industry you have people who feel like there is nothing left to learn – that there is nothing new that can be tested. That’s not true and I’ve always felt that if I don’t learn something from every conversation, seminar, workshop or conference I attend – that’s my fault – not the conference. I’ll go in with an open mind and know that the information is there for the taking – I just have to be willing to see it. Spotting a trend before the rest of the crowd is one thing we’ve been pretty good at. It’s very subtle and you won’t see it as the title of any conference keynote. But if you listen to what people are talking about and have just a little bit of vision to think two steps ahead, you CAN spot those trends.

4) Good writing makes all the difference
I’ve always been a decent writer. As a cop you do a lot of writing but it’s all about exact facts – with no exaggeration. There’s a little bit of persuasion – but not much. You state exactly what happened and what is known – without embellishing – because those exaggerations will come back to bite you in the ass in court when a good defense attorney begins their cross-examination.

Transitioning to writing affiliate ads was a bit of a shock to my system. Instead of “just the facts, Ma’am” writing, which can often be boring and dry, I now had to write in a way that was irresistibly interesting to the reader. Writing to get “clicks” and ultimately a sale is a lot different than police reports – and a lot more fun. Yet both types of writing are similar. You need to get your point across quickly and in a way that there is no confusion to the reader.

The best affiliate headlines I’ve written are those that get people excited to find out what’s on the other side in less than 4 or 5 words. The best police reports are ones that get the D.A. excited because they know they have a great case that makes sense, meets the criteria of the law and tells a story the jury will understand.

How we will improve this year: Great writing is something that can always be improved and some of the best headline and copy writers in the country are going to be at Affiliate Summit. Getting people to click because of 4 or 5 words is an art. Sure, it’s easy to write fake crap that people will click on, but if it doesn’t convert on the other side, all you are doing is wasting money. A headline that says, “Naked Brittany Spears Pics” will have a killer click-through-rate (if you could even get that headline approved) but your conversion to a sale on the other side is going to be garbage. The great writers know how to get people to click without them feeling like a fool on the other side.

5) Persistence Pays: “Never give up.” It’s the first thing my tactics instructor in the Academy said on day 1 when he walked into the classroom. No matter what kind of hellish fight you’re in with the bad guy, you never give up – EVER. Most people who try affiliate marketing give up way too soon because testing, re-writing and testing again with different copy, different images, and different headlines is work and at first it’s frustrating. You read all these blog posts about people making more money than Trump in affiliate marketing and you think to yourself, “What the hell am I doing wrong? I’m not the brightest guy in the world, but I know I’m at least as smart as that moron over at XYZ blog.”

But then something happens along the way. Suddenly one of your ads starts to take off and it clicks. You realize you CAN make this happen and it’s surprising how deposits into your bank account can make all the frustration and late nights worthwhile. Then it becomes a matter of how many credit cards you can max out on those ads before you get paid by the affiliate network. It’s a good problem to have. Finding the next winning ad actually becomes fun. When you match the right ad with the right target market, it’s a helluva lot of fun to refresh your earnings for the day and see that number grow every few minutes.

How we will improve this year: We’ve made some money and enjoyed some success. But we’re nowhere near where we want to be. Our small company is very close to breaking through to $1,000,000 per year in affiliate marketing. Our persistence is going to payoff. The motivation I’ll get from talking to other successful affiliate marketers is tough to quantify, but I know it will make a big difference in our revenue. 2011 is going to be the year we crack this nut and make it to the top 1% of all affiliate marketers.

I’ll keep you updated on our progress and I plan to share a few “lessons learned” over the next few months.

And for those readers who worry we are moving our focus away from paid content and membership sites with interviews, don’t. It’s still the bulk of our business and we plan on expanding that area of the company as well.

This is part 4 of my interview with Andrew Warner of Mixergy.com. In this segment, I talk with Andrew about what he charges sponsors, why he has both sponsors and a membership model, how he determined his sponsorship price and why he never competes on price.

We also discuss how he uses memberships as currency to get things done.

4 ways to watch/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 the video)
4) Watch the video:

Related Links:

- Mixergy.com

Transcript:

Tim Bourquin: No. That’s a fantastic idea though is to see where — you’re right. I kind of have to laugh because I don’t know why I haven’t thought about that. I’ve never thought of it that way. We track them manually how long people stay. But to figure out which pages they’re coming from. I know they come from the sign-up page because they got to get there but how they get there, a whole trail, those tools are — I think are out there available to track them all the way. I don’t track it that closely either, and maybe we’re both making a mistake by not. I don’t know.

Andrew Warner: And the difference between us is that you charge a lot more for your site than I do so you deal with smaller numbers, bigger revenues and so it’s easier for you to go in manually and it’s more important for you to go in manually and figure out what’s going on and you could track it easier. For me with dozens of people a month coming in and paying 25 bucks — dozens of new people a month coming in paying 25 bucks is just too much. And I also — yeah, it’s just too much. It’s too much. But there’s another value, by the way, to doing a membership site. You suddenly have a currency. You suddenly can say to somebody who offers you some help, “Hey, I know you want to do this free but I’ll give you free premium membership” or to someone who you want to do some kind of partnership with or you want to get some help with or maybe if I’m launching a new feature on the site and I need the audience to come in and help in.

I’m not just saying come and be paid volunteers and hoping one or two people come. I’m saying if you come in and do it I’ll give you premium access to the site. There’s a value on this. You see people are screaming that they don’t have access to this. I’ll give it to you and that draws in more people to help, out and then it becomes a currency that you kind of can print up yourself and use to help grow your business.

But you did ask about sponsorships too and I’ll be open about the sponsorship revenue. When I started out I was charging, I think it was $650 for an ad in front of my interviews. I made up that number. I can tell you in a bit how I came up with that. Now what I do is I have six sponsors. Each one pays $650 a month and in addition to it, I have a few one-off sponsorship throughout the site that are harder to identify and actually harder for me to name because if I say this spot cost this much you’ll know exactly which sponsor is paying that much and sponsors don’t want people to know that they’re paying me more than they’re paying other people because then have to explain Andrew’s got a different audience here, and Andrew is bringing in guests who I want to be associated with, and even if his audience doesn’t sign up for my service, if the guest knows that my business exists the guest might invest in my company and so on.

So I won’t go into the one-off spot — the custom sponsorships that I have on the site, but I will say $650 or $750. I have to check it out.

Tim Bourquin: Well, how did you come up with that number?

Andrew Warner: Okay. So here’s what I did. I called up people who are sponsoring programs like mine, and I said, “What are you guys paying for these programs? I hear you in there. I’m a fan of them. What are you paying?” Of course, they told me, and they don’t want to keep that stuff a secret usually because they’re hoping you’ll underbid the people who they’re buying ads from. I said, “Okay. That’s interesting. How did it perform?” Again, they have an incentive to tell you that it’s performing super wealthy and compete with that, but they tend to be pretty open about that too. I said, “All right. How did that back in to number of orders? How did that back in to whatever action that you’re looking for?” Some people don’t necessarily need an order right away but they want new sign up.

I said, “All right. You’re paying 1,000 bucks. How many sign ups do you need? You need 1,000 sign ups? Okay. That comes out to a buck at sign up. I may not be able to deliver 1,000 sign ups I don’t think, but maybe I can deliver 500. How about we come up with $500 per month? If I don’t deliver enough, be open with me, and I’ll give you a discount. If I do deliver enough or I deliver more, good on you. You can keep it, but just be open with me.” What I really need is someone who I can give a super low price to in exchange for customizing my stuff to him and being much more of help to him than I could to other people in the future when it becomes bigger and bigger. And I also need a case study that I can then go out to other sponsors.

So what I did was I went to FreshBooks and I said, “You’re sponsoring programs like mine. How much do you pay per action and what’s the action that you want from these programs?” I think they said something like $7 dollars or so for every person who signed up for FreshBooks invoices — or some number like that. I said, “Okay. Why don’t I sell you the ad for $650,” and I remembered that’s how much I charged for that spot, “And if I can’t deliver a hundred people to you then I’ll give you a discount. But if I can be open with me and I’ll be able to use that to bring in other sponsors, and I’ll set my rate at $650,” which is what I did.

Tim Bourquin: That’s fascinating because I loved what you did with FreshBooks. You said, “If you want to know how much they paid for this ad, go in and create an invoice on FreshBooks and I’ll tell you what they paid for it.” And essentially getting people to go in and create accounts, I thought that was brilliant. Did that work well?

Andrew Warner: It worked absolutely well. We got way more than we were supposed to, and I didn’t even have to run the ads for as long as we planned. And you have to customize your sponsorships. If you just run a static ad, you might as well run a banner ad, and those things pay bupkis. What you want to do is customize it, bring out your own personality in the spot that you’re recording, talk specifically about your own experiences and have a call to action that connects with the audience; say “This is why you should do it because this is what I know about you.” And that’s the way that you can expand out. And you have that power because you’re doing interviews. You have that power because you’re not just running random Google ads.

Tim Bourquin: Now for that one, they could probably track it of course because they saw people coming from you and opening accounts, but I know for your Grasshopper ads you just say to go to grasshopper.com. How did they track the effectiveness of the ad?

Andrew Warner: I don’t track anymore. I want to track early on, and then I have to say to my guys, “Look, you can’t track.” Because who in their right mind — what person is saying — I think GoDaddy ads they say, “For 10% off GoDaddy mention my name,” or maybe it’s like 5%. When I’m at GoDaddy, can I really remember who it was who told me about them first? Can I then remember what stupid code they gave me? It’s usually something like “revision3X52″ or something. I can’t remember it. So you know what I do? I know about GoDaddy. I know that they have an offer. I do a search for discount, GoDaddy on Google. I come up with a good discount code, and that’s who gets the credit. That’s just not a sane way to track orders.

The other thing is, if all you’re coming to me for is tracking orders, then you’re not really — you’re not getting what I do best. I’m not here to send you orders that you can track. I’m here to do that, and I’m also here to build up your reputation, I’m also here to be the first person people think about when they’re asking themselves, “Who should I use for a virtual phone system?” If you’re asking yourself that, by now you’ll know it’s Grasshopper. If you’re asking yourself, “Okay, I need to set up the store? Who do I set it up with,” I’ve now pounded it into your head over and over Shopify. Now do I have to pound in Shopify and also pound in some random code? Of course not. Of course not. You would never see that in a television commercial. You’d never see Tide say, “Tide is terrific. Now go in there, and say Young and the Restless X57 when you’re at the grocery store,” because now they’d have to brand two things X57 and they have to brand in Tide. So screw that.

Tim Bourquin: And yet –

Andrew Warner: And you know what? If you’re open with sponsors and say, “That’s why I am doing this,” it’s going to be fine. They will understand it and they won’t hold firm. What I do though is I say to my audience, “Tell them. Say hello. Go and reach out to them somehow. You should approach these guys and that’s enough.”

Tim Bourquin: It seems that the podcast, on-line video — we’re all for some reason held to this higher standard than TV or radio or anybody else. What do you say to a sponsor when they say, “Look, I’ve got to be able to show a return on this, Andrew.” Well, you just answered that question, but I guess I’m just commenting on the frustration of being held to a higher standard than other advertising mediums.

Andrew Warner: That’s a good point. I actually have another phone call scheduled in a couple of minutes but I wanted –

Tim Bourquin: I was going to ask you about that.

Andrew Warner: to answer that question first.

Tim Bourquin: So, I’m sorry. I’ve kept you on the phone.

Andrew Warner: Here’s what I say. First of all, you got a man on or a woman on. You can’t be a wuss. You can’t say — and I know you’re putting yourself out there. Believe me, I’m putting myself out here now as I say, “Don’t be a wuss.” Someone who is listening to me now is going to think next — I will be a wuss at some point and are they going to judge me and say, “Look at him. He thought he was so tough. But now I’m listening to him and he’s a big wuss.”

So I know you’re putting yourself out there when you’re doing a podcast. You’re putting yourself out there when you’re doing interviews. You’re putting yourself out there when you’re interviewing people who are better than you at something, and you’re asking them to teach you and in addition to that I’m going to say, “Also put yourself out there when you’re with a sponsor.” And I know it’s extra painful to do that, but you have to and you have to do that by saying, “Look this is what I’m charging, and it’s worth it because I do have a little bit of a track record here and in addition to it, you will get this and that.” Here’s the other — so that’s the inner work that you need to do.

The other work that I think you need to do is you need to just understand that there are certain price points that companies don’t care about. I heard Joel Spolsky say this. He said, “Look, to a company if you’re charging them $600 or a thousand bucks, it doesn’t blow their mind. It’s not something that they will register that much. They’re saying to themselves, ‘I’m working with this guy, anything over a thousand bucks I have authority to do. We do a few things that are under a thousand bucks that are risks like doing a company picnic or go out for drinks.’ And if you fall within those little ranges, you’re fine.”

And so when it was time for me to raise my price to — I think I do charge 750 bucks. The reason I don’t know what it is, the ads sell themselves at this point. People who I interview will ask to sponsor my program. People who have seen their friends sponsor, will ask to sponsor. Eventually, this stuff kind of rolls, and you don’t have to do much work for it. But when it was time for me to double my price and I said, “I’m going to go back to my sponsors and say I’m charging twice?” Now I’m suddenly going to be in a whole other range, and I’m going to blow their minds by charging them twice. I said, “No, you know what I’m going to do? I’m going to reduce my price a little bit but I’m also going to reduce the number of ads that you get a lot.” And so instead of doing — when I was doing $650 instead of saying suddenly it’s going to be $1,200 a month, I said, “No, it’s going to still be $650 a month but now you’re going to get half of the sponsorships for the month.” And so that was a much easier sell to have. So that helped a lot.

The other thing is that you help your sponsors beyond it by introducing them to new guests, by introducing them to other people in the industry. When you do interviews, you’re going to be surrounded by people who are great. And if you’re not, go out there and get better interviewees, and that gives you the ability to be a connector and help people that goes beyond just reading a spot and beyond just throwing a banner or a Google ad.

Tim Bourquin: All right listeners, I’ve got to let Andrew go. I told him this would be 20 minutes. We’ve gone an hour. I can ask another two hours of questions. Go to Mixergy.com. I think he’s got a terrific model of sponsorship, membership, the whole thing is just really done well. If you want to get a good idea of what it takes to be successful, go to Mixergy.com, subscribe to the interviews, watch how he does them, but the content is great too.

Andrew, thanks so much for your time. I really appreciate you giving us some of this insight. It’s been some great tips and thanks for your time.

Andrew Warner: Thanks for having me on. I listen to your program. I was listening to your programs in Argentina on my way to the subway. That’s when I said to myself, “I need more than 20 minutes of Tim Bourquin.” So I’m glad and so proud to be on here.

Tim Bourquin: Excellent. Thanks again.

This is part 3 of my interview with Andrew Warner of Mixergy.com. In this segment, I talk with Andrew about why he thinks longer form content tells the story for as long as it needs is the right way to go. We also talk about making money from your content and how his audience reacted when he started getting sponsors and putting the archives behind a membership wall.

4 ways to watch/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 the video)
4) Watch the video:

Related Links:

- Mixergy.com

Transcript:

Andrew Warner: I think let it go. When you have someone on who’s really good, I want to hear everything. Frankly, if you guys just had a conversation where you talked about membership sites, and then you stopped and you said, “Oh, what did you have for breakfast today?” I think it humanizes the person for me. That’s kind of interesting. When you go off track a little bit, that’s also interesting for me. I think the audience here would be fascinated to know that I’m now at a Regus Office, and that I’m traveling the world with just a laptop and microphone but not traveling like one of these digital nomads. It gives them a little bit of sense of who I am. If I were to throw in some random fact like I got married about a year ago, I think they’d love to know who I am and it doesn’t detract from the interview.

So I say do as little editing as possible. Get that stuff out there and your mistakes and the parts that don’t seem to fit with the main message of the interview are just going to add more color to the interview, and they’re going to take your time away from editing and let you do things that you’re more passionate about.

Tim Bourquin: Good point because I didn’t start this interview saying, “Andrew, how did you get started?” because a lot of other people have kind of already addressed that and I know those interviews are out there. So I didn’t ask those questions and yet you’re saying you get that background information even if they have been interviewed a hundred times and already answered those questions. Is that kind of your mantra?

Andrew Warner: I think so. Well, yes and no. If the question has been asked a hundred times then no, you don’t need to do it. But if you start off really well, and it’s hard to start off well, but if you start off really well with, “Hey, Andrew, how big is the site now? Who were you talking to?” get people really excited. If I come out with something that’s really powerful, then the audience starts to say, “All right. I know I’m going to get meat in this interview, but I also would like to have some dessert.” Or “I also would like to have a little bit of relaxed conversation” and that’s fine, I think. But more important than any of that, you just take the stuff that you don’t like to do off your shoulders. You get to now have a simpler program that you can pass on to someone else, and let them edit it.

I didn’t do that in the beginning. I didn’t take this advice at first. But then I just would go through insane amounts of time editing and then editing makes you question yourself. You say, “Why did I say that? Well, let me go and delete that stupid statement that I said. What did I say? I just insulted myself there because I was in a moment of weakness and I said I’m a terrible interviewer in the interview. Why don’t I go back and edit that out?” As long as I edit that out it’s unfair for me to say, “I’m going to edit out the stuff that makes me look bad but not stuff that makes my guest look bad. Why should Jimmy Wells get an interview here. I could edit it out when he said that he failed with his first company” and then you never stop.

My wife read an article where Gary Vaynerchuk said he doesn’t do any editing. I said, “You know what? If he’s not doing any editing, the guy knows something here. Why don’t I try it? Let me just let it go.” At first it was really tough because I thought I was putting sub-par material out there. Then I realized, you know what? It’s blogging, it’s the internet. It’s all sub-perfect, but all these little jagged edges are what give it personality and people are much more forgiving and much more connecting when it’s like that. So that’s the direction I took. I’m not saying that going the other direction doesn’t make sense. I’m not saying somebody listening to us, you shouldn’t say, “Hey, I want a polished product because everyone is like Andrew who’s putting rough edges on their stuff.” I’m just saying it helps me pump stuff out, helps me focus on what I care about, and helps me outsource some of the work that I don’t like doing.

Then you know what else you could do? I did this recently. I needed people to take the action on something, to vote for me for some job by Southwestern. I remembered a lot of people — who’s going to go and vote, just to vote. So what if I say vote and then I’ll give you something in return. So what can I give them in return? I’m not giving them an iTunes gift card or anything that’s going to cost me money. Oh, you know what? I’ll take one of my unpolished interviews, and I’ll clean it up, and now I’ll say it’s re-mastered, and I’ll put that out there. Do you know how many people wanted a re-mastered past interview? I thought, “Wow that’s kind of interesting.” Maybe what I do is I put out that first version that’s more real, and then for people who want the re-mastered I could come back and take just the select interviews and re-master them.

Tim Bourquin: Yeah. Good. I like the idea. Give them some motivation to do what you’re asking them to do. Well, because you don’t edit, have you ever asked — has somebody ever asked you, “Andrew, I didn’t do really well there. Please don’t use that interview”?

Andrew Warner: I used to do that. I used to accept editing on behalf of my guest. It drives me nuts now because as soon as we’re done, I send it over to Joe to edit it or I edit it myself, and then it’s in the pipeline. Then it goes to the transcribers to do their work, and it’s being formatted, and it’s being ready to go online the next day. If you just want me to edit out one word, the whole system is out of whack now. I have to go back and undo it or I don’t have an interview for tomorrow. So now I say, “Look, we can’t do it. I have a membership site. What I can do for you is say, you don’t feel comfortable having that out in public, I’ll put your interview just for members only and that’s the best I can do.” Most people are okay with that.

Tim Bourquin: How about somebody who said, “Andrew, if –,” well, first of all, do you get them to sign a release before you interview them?

Andrew Warner: No, I don’t. Maybe I should get them to do it, but I don’t. I feel like I’m a reporter and reporters can’t say, “Sign a release.”

Tim Bourquin: Yeah, that’s good. We talked about doing releases, and some we get, some we don’t. But I don’t not do an interview if they don’t or if I forget. So I guess in some sense we’re hanging it out there a little bit, but for the most part if you treat people well, I think you’re probably okay doing that.

Andrew Warner: I think so too. That’s what I’m banking on.

Tim Bourquin: Let me ask you about the business side of things because you have sponsors of your interview, usually a couple or three sponsors. But then you also have a membership site. This is kind of a broad question, but how do you combine the two of those for revenue for the company?

Andrew Warner: So sponsorship goes on now. I put three sponsors, half a minute each one before an interview. It’s a little annoying to do a pre-roll and I wish I didn’t. But I can’t bring myself to interrupt an interview with a spot. Maybe I should, but I just like the flow in the interview. And then the membership stuff is for anything that’s older than a week or anything that’s specially fiery that the audience doesn’t — that the guest wants to have before — wants in the membership site. So the reason that I did membership is because I wanted to check out new revenue sources. I believe that if I said that the work is so good that people should pay for it, that the work will get good and get better and better and better to earn what people are paying for.

I also saw something else. I talked about it I think — Seth Godin’s interview here. Seth Godin’s interview was terrific on day one that I published it. But as soon as it became a day old, it got fewer viewers and then two days old it got fewer viewers still and then a year old people pretty much neglected it. Seth Godin has got so much content online that I’m not even dragging his users from Google searches. I think my Seth Godin interview might be on the third or 100th or who knows what page on Google search results for the name Seth Godin. So because it’s old it just gets lost and there’s no value on it and people don’t care. I said, “All right. If no one is watching this stuff anyway, I’m going to be the one who cares.” I’m going to put a price on it and I’m going say, “If you want the Seth Godin interview, it’s in the vault, you have to pay for it.”

Suddenly people were up in arms. You would think that they were fighting to listen to Seth Godin and all these other interviews every day. Do you think that they weren’t ignoring it but in fact that they were passionately re-listening to these interviews five or 10 times. What they started to realize was, “Oh, this is now valuable. If we accept that what Andrew is saying, this mirage that Andrew created is reality.” Suddenly older interviews are more valuable. Now they’re fighting for access to them. What that did is two things. One, we first brought in some revenue and second it let me test out a membership site. Then in the future I’d like to add more stuff, more features to that membership site, but for now that’s what I have. Oh, and it also brought in some revenue.

Tim Bourquin: I know for people starting out, do you recommend them building a following first and then do a membership site or should I go out and get sponsors right away even though I may not have many listeners? How do you recommend just starting out?

Andrew Warner: I like just testing everything and seeing what works or testing what you can without getting too distracted. Setting up a membership site is not tough. If I had to do it over again, I probably would have set up a membership site earlier. I probably would have done it right way and let everyone know, “This stuff is so good that it demands payment. It calls for you to pay for it.” Then it also keeps the backlash down. In fact, there’s no backlash. Everyone knows right away this stuff is going to be a premium service you have to pay.

Tim Bourquin: And I know you got a lot of mail that was like, “I will never pay for anything. I will never come to your site again.” I think my response has always been, “Ignore those people. They wouldn’t have become members anyway even thought they said they would. They’re lying.” So how did you kind of deal with that when you had to switch over and say, “Look guys, I’m spending a lot of time on this. I need to make some money”?

Andrew Warner: I just listened as much as possible. I accepted that I wasn’t going to be perfect with it and I’ll have to adjust. And I took it and I did suffer a little bit when people who I had respected and who I admired said, “What are you doing? That’s nuts.” But I was also supported by people like you and past guest, Jason Fried, who I mentioned, of 37Signals, sent me a nice note saying, “Hey, I don’t know if this is going to work what you’re doing, but I think you should charge for something.” And I said, “All right. There are enough people who I respect who say, ‘Give it a shot.’ I’m going to keep going with it.”

Tim Bourquin: I think that’s why Jason Fried’s interview is my favorite because I’ve seen other webinars he’s done and other presentations and conferences and he is like, “Business is very easy. You come up with a product and you charge for it. You don’t come up with a product, make it free and figure it out later.” I love that guy’s — his perspective on charging for what is valuable is — I couldn’t agree more with it, and I love to hear the people. But it seems like they’re the minority. We’re the minority, people that charge for content. There’s still this idea that content needs to be free. I mean what do you tell people when you say, “That’s not the case”?

Andrew Warner: You know what I get is this weird thing where people say, “I thought you wanted to help, man. I thought you wanted to help, and here you are just trying to make money.” As if the two can’t go together somehow. I don’t know where it comes from, this idea that — I got an audience of business people. You think business people would say, “Okay. Money doesn’t necessarily corrupt.” Money is not a bad thing, but I think these guys are setting themselves up for failure of a life when they don’t care about that. But I saw this years ago. I mean you bring up the fact that there was a period there in the internet where people didn’t think that they needed to make a profit. I was very quietly bringing in millions of dollars in revenue for Bradford & Reed, the company of my kid brother and I started out at school.

While everyone else was saying, “You know, making money is stupid. You need to invest in your business. You need to spend money to grow market share.” And then I watched them all just disappear. They had no power to stay because they couldn’t keep getting investors in the door. They couldn’t keep living this really crappy life where they were proud of how they were sleeping in these crappy homes because they didn’t really care about stuff. You know what? Stop caring about stuff and living in a crappy home and just riding a bicycle because you can’t afford a car, because you used to spend money on a car, because you don’t care about stuff, it gets old really, really quickly. And eventually you say, “No, you know what? I’m only going through life once. I got to have something. I got to have heat in the winter. It’s not so cool that I’m still living like I just came out of college.”

At that point you start to respect, hopefully, the person who’s making money or maybe some people think the opposite. Maybe at that point they’ll say — they’ll start to resent the people who are making money. “Well if not for Andrew making money off these guys and the world where Andrew is making money then the world would be a better place and we’d all live happily.…” I don’t know. That — I guess that’s the thought out there.

Tim Bourquin: I hear you. Absolutely. You’re absolutely right. Well, I’m going to ask you the tough question because I’m asking the guy who asks the tough questions. How much money do you make from sponsorship? How much money do you make on your membership?

Andrew Warner: All right. I’ll be honest and say I don’t know how much money I’m making on my membership. I don’t know. I know that I get on average one person a day who signs up to my site. 25 bucks membership is what I charge. I have to go in and maybe there’s a better way. I actually — now I invested in a startup that is going to hopefully make this easier. The way I do it now is I have to go into PayPal and export all the PayPal payments and find a way to get them into my accounting program, QuickBooks, and then figure out what’s really a payment and what’s not a payment and PayPal doesn’t export all the data properly. There’s got to be a better system, but I don’t know what it is. In fact, I’ll ask you in a moment what it is. I just can’t figure it out and it’s just — to me it’s just a headache. So I spend very little time on that. Maybe every few months I’ll sit down and I’ll go through it. Definitely, by the end of the year I’ll have it all down.

But I know that for my personal finance I go to a site like Mint.com. It just sucks in all my data from PayPal and sucks in all my data from Citibank, from my credit card, and tells me exactly how much money I’d spent on milk, it tells me how much money I’d spent on movies and so on. It categorizes it beautifully but there isn’t anything like that yet for business. As I said, I did an angel investment in a company that will hopefully solve that. I see that there’s a company called Zero.com that recently got $2 million investment to come to the U.S. and maybe solve that problem. I don’t know what the answer is there yet.

Tim Bourquin: So you’re not sure how long your members stay?

Andrew Warner: No. I don’t even know — that’s a good question too, exactly. How long is the average member staying? How can I tie that back to where I got them? I can’t tell you, with the plug-in that I use, what got in each member. I’d like to be able to go in if only out of curiosity, but more importantly to be able to say, “My best members are coming from the interview that I did with Tim Bourquin a few months back. I need to find an excuse to have Tim Bourquin on once a month so that I can hopefully grow the revenue.” I can’t do that. I don’t have a membership plug-in that can do that, and that’s where I am right now. I’m hoping that these guys will fix it. In my past interviews I’ve urged guests to create that kind of a system but I don’t have it. Do you have that? Would you know how many people signed up to your site because of Andrew Warner’s interview?

This is part 2 of my interview with Andrew Warner of Mixergy.com. In this segment, I talk with Andrew about how he researches his guests, the two types of interviews he does and how he presses his guests to give complete answers to questions without being rude or pushy.

We also talk about a famous interviewer and how Andrew formats his interviews after biographies.

4 ways to watch/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 the video)
4) Watch the video:

Related Links:

- Mixergy.com

Transcript:

Tim Bourquin: Let’s talk about the preparation and research that you do before an interview. Doing them every day, again, that’s another step that you have to take. What kind of research do you do on your guest?

Andrew Warner: There are two kinds of interviews that I do. I like to do biographical interviews and I also like to do educational interviews. Biographical interviews I use an outline that’s very similar with my favorite biography, the favorite books that I like to read. What they always do is they start off with, “Ted Turner walked down Manhattan, looked at the big building that now had CNN on it and with pride looked back at a career where you built up TBS, where you became a billionaire, when you did this and that and that.” That’s always the first chapter, and the reason they do it as the chapter is to say to the reader, “Look, this is why the person you are about to spend 400, 500, 600, 800 pages with is important. This is what he did that makes him so worthy of the pages that I’m writing here and makes him so worthy of your time to study him.” I do that too.

The first thing I do in a biographical interview is I say, “So how much money did you sell your company for?” or “How many readers did you get?” or when I interviewed the founder of Charity: Water, I wanted to know how many people did he impact with that charity? So right up front I say, Pow! Bang! Bang! That’s why this person is so good and worthy of your time. Then the next thing that I as an interviewer and my audience is going to be thinking is, “How did he get there?” So I do the same thing that chapter 2 in most biographies do. You could go and pick up any biography on your bookcase and have the same format. Chapter 2 is “Where did you start out?”

Now usually, in biographies they ask about family, about the mother, what the mother do, and start giving you the answers to those questions. For me it’s sometimes, “Did you have a lemonade stand? Did you have an internet company that you launched when you were a kid?” Very often what I find is people don’t have lemonade stands anymore as kids but they do have eBay businesses or they created digital games. To me that’s interesting to hear that they had experience programming or they had experience building companies. It’s not just day one they launch and everything works out beautifully. It might seem that way to the world but really when you dig in you find out, no, they had all this preparation years and years of failure, but they didn’t consider it failure because they were just kids. Then they built up their first business. I ask about the first business, the second, and so on.

Anyway, that’s the outline that I use for the biographical interview. To prepare for that is pretty easy. I’d go on LinkedIn, or I go on the bio of their website, or I look for some press, and I see step-by-step what did they do in their careers, and I also accept that there are certain things I’m not going to know online. I’m not going to be able to find out what their first business was, and I come to the interview with curiosity about that, and that comes out in the interview. I sometimes will, if I’m a little suspicious about what a person is saying in his biography, in fact I always am, I’ll go back and I’ll look for old articles from the time that we’re going to be discussing. So if he says that he founded Microsoft, I’m going to go back to the years when Microsoft launched and look for articles about Microsoft and see is there a reference to a third founder of Microsoft, for example, and that will help me come up with questions. So that’s one outline.

The other outline that I use is the educational interview. There I might want to say, “How can you launch a successful internet company?” for example. I did an interview yesterday with David Cohen, a guy who runs TechStars, a seed investment firm and who wrote a book recently called — what is the book called? More Faster Now — ah, I can’t remember the name, but it’s a really good book, and he was teaching what he teaches entrepreneurs that he backs. Well, what I did there was I said, “Okay. What are the big ideas that he has in that book?” Well, he actually did the work for me. He took all his big messages to founders, and he broke them down into what he called Seven Themes. I wrote out all Seven Themes.

I said, “Okay. Now I know what the Seven Themes are.” It’s not interesting to hear that an idea isn’t enough. That’s one of the themes. It’s interesting to hear a story that shows why an idea isn’t enough. So I’ll look for that story to prod him if I find an interesting story or maybe before the interview I’ll have a quick conversation. I’ll say, “Listen, I need a good story to explain this one point. Do you have one? Let’s talk about that a little bit. All right. But let’s not talk too much so we can keep it fresh.” That’s how I prepare for those kinds of interviews.

Tim Bourquin: Do you send them questions prior to the interview?

Andrew Warner: Some people had sent me questions prior to the interview, and I’ll be honest with you, I never look at them. I got too much going on in my life, and who wants to do homework by reading questions? What I really want to know is as a person who’s going to be interviewed is where is this going? What is this about? So before our interview, I asked you that, and you said, “Look, what I want to know is how do you get interviewees, how do you draw them out, how do you get sponsorship, we talked a little bit about traffic. That’s the big idea that I know we’re going to be talking about, and I can prepare for, and maybe I can add, “Hey, Tim, we should talk about getting traffic.”

That’s what most guests want. They don’t want a list of questions, and you don’t want to prepare a list of questions and be obligated like a robot to go through them step-by-step. I just want to have a natural conversation. So instead of writing out the questions and doing homework yourself and send it to them, what I think helps is to say, “This is going to be an interview about your business biography; how you got here and what you’ve built to get here, or this is going to be an interview teaching how to raise funding, and I’ll be using the seven techniques that you talked about in your book.” That’s all they want. That’s all you should give them, and I think that helps a lot.

Having said that, here’s what helps my interviews do really well. I always write out that first question. I’m not married to it, but that first question will get the audience interested, that first question if it’s done right, will get my guest to feel confident, puff out his chest, and say, “Yes, I do deserve to be interviewed. I do have a life that’s worth talking about, and I answered that first question so well, that now I know the rest of the interview. I can knock this out of the park for Andrew.” So that’s my advice for people who are doing interviews.

One more thing, David Cohen’s book which he co-authored with Brad Feld is Do More Faster. I just looked it up.

Tim Bourquin: Got it, Do More Faster. Okay. I knew it was something about faster in there for sure. Well, you’re known for asking the tough questions and not just the tough questions. You don’t let somebody gloss over the answer. If you want an answer to something and they kind of give you the CNBC 30-second PR formatted answer, you don’t let that slip. You say — you ask the question again and again. And one of your favorite questions is, “How much money are you making?” which I think is hilarious because not a lot of people ask it. It’s not the most comfortable question. How do you get people to open up, and what’s the balance between pushing them to answer the question really legitimately and not the PR formatted junk, but the real true answer without feeling like, you know, you’re got to piss the guest off?

Andrew Warner: I’ve got a little mute button here on the mic. When I started I had that mute button too, and when I asked the question that I was embarrassed to ask, it was just a ballsy question, I would — we weren’t doing video back then. I would ask the question and then I’d hit the mute button so that I wouldn’t go back and say, “Oh, but you don’t have to answer. It’s okay.” I just would ask it and then hit the mute button and shut up. If you do that, people will very often just give you the answer. We’re just kind of trained that way somehow. You know, when you walk into a used car sale, in fact to any car salesman’s office, and he asks you, “What do you want to pay?” he shuts up. When a good negotiator says, “What do you think is a fair price?” they just shut up. They don’t negotiate with themselves by saying, “Well, because $18,000 is a good price. I gave someone else $17,000 before, and I’m willing to go to $16,000 but no lower than $15,000.” No. They say, “What do you think is a good price?” and then they shut up. The same thing with me. I just had to train myself to do that and shut up.

Having said that, by asking people over and over now how much money do they make, people now will send me their finances before the interviews. People now before the interviews will tell me, “I’m willing to have this kind of conversation with you, and I know I’m coming on, and I’m going to be talking about this.” So it becomes an accepted part of my work. But I also don’t — I don’t become a jerk about it. I’m not doing gotcha journalism. I’m not trying to show that this guy is a fool. I really come in there with a sincere need to learn and a sincere reverence for my guest. I’m doing these interviews of people who I admire because I don’t want to sit on the sidelines and read about them in Forbes Magazine or Fortune Magazine. I want to go in there and jump into the conversation. I don’t want to just read Seth Godin’s book and say, “Ooh, that’s a good marketing idea. That’s terrific.” I want to say, “Hey, Seth, this doesn’t seem to make sense when I compare it to what Ted Turner did or what Sam Walton did.” I want to go in and that question and sincerely get the answer and really dig into life. So people understand that I have that sincerity.

Tim Bourquin: I guess the tendency for a lot of people is the bigger the guest, the more you want to treat them with kid gloves, but you can’t do it, right? You should be interviewing them the same way you’re interviewing the guy that maybe just sold this company but nobody’s ever heard of. Would you agree with that?

Andrew Warner: Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. Now, I think that we’re going to say this to people, and you’d be a great advice in your interviews and on your site. But they’re still going to make mistakes. The best thing I think to do is to just keep setting up new interviews. Don’t give yourself when you make a mistake and you realize, “Oh, Tim, just said I shouldn’t be doing this. I shouldn’t treat this guy with kid gloves and I did. I wussed out here.” What you need to do is just set one interview and then set another one. Before you even do that first interview, set another one right after that, and then before you do the second interview set up a third one. So just keep yourself going and going and going and going and going.

If you watch the — my favorite interviewer, he’s Charlie Rose. Everybody admires Charlie Rose in the business. He’s terrific, right? But in the early days they’ll tell you he barreled on with his questions. He was so long-winded but he was on PBS. Who knows what’s on PBS? Who was watching him even back then? So people didn’t really see all these mistakes. He got some time to learn and before that, he was interviewing man on the street interviews, and nobody saw the dopey questions he was asking then. But he just kept getting better and better and better. He was so bad at one point with his long-winded questions, that Saturday Night Live did a piece on him where they were making fun of his long-winded questions and a guest said, “Get the question out already.”

Today you watch him and one of his best questions is or one of — it’s not even a question so much, but someone will make a statement and he’ll say, “Because…” one word and he’d draw them out. He didn’t just get that way overnight. He got that way by interviewing man on the street, by doing long-winded questions that got him laughed at by Saturday Night Live, by being on PBS before people were watching him on PBS and eventually got better and better. So my ultimate, ultimate piece of advice here, just do it a lot. Do it a lot, a lot, a lot, a lot.

Tim Bourquin: Now, I like Charlie Rose as well, except I tend to feel that Charlie Rose interrupts his guests quite a bit, and I’m wondering when do you feel like interrupting is the right way if your guest is just getting off track?

Andrew Warner: I have a hard time because I’m using Skype video and it’s like a CB radio. It’s like “Breaker, breaker. I have a question for you. Over.” And this person has to answer the question and then I’d say, “Oh,” and I have a follow-up question. And if I try to interrupt, there’s a whole lot of “Oh, what did you say? Oh.” There was a lag. It’s really frustrating. I’d much rather do it live, and I think even the rhythm here that we’re having in this conversation is better because it’s on the phone, and there isn’t the lag. If I didn’t have the lag, I would do a lot more interrupting. And the way that I would interrupt and the way that I do it even now is to say, “I’m sorry to interrupt, but I got to just dig into what you said” or “I’m sorry to interrupt, but what you said is just too fascinating. We got to go back to what you said before” or I say, “Look, this is my passion, to study business. You just glossed over the first 10 years of your career. I got to go back and find out. How did you get that first customer?”

Most people will understand if you say, “I’m interrupting not because I’m a jerk, but I’m interrupting because I’m so fascinated by what you said that I can’t let it go.” They’ll understand. So that’s the big thing that I do. Then I also often because of the lag I have to keep explaining to guests, “There’s going to be a lag. It’s going to sound like you’re interrupting me and I’m interrupting you. We just have to accept that the technology is like that today.” You know what? When I watched MTV for the first time years ago, some people in the audience might remember, MTV now is just so professional. Everything is terrific. They used to have their version of the farewell. They had a big screen that came on that would say, “Sorry. We’re having technical difficulties. We can’t make this work right now.” There was no MTV because they had technical difficulties. Can you imagine that today? Of course not.

Well, we’re in the world of MTV in the early days here with interviews. But MTV stuck around. They got out there first. They built up their audience, their reputation, their brand, their experience. Look at where they are today. Same thing now. I’m getting in here when the technology is a little bit weird, when it’s not all perfect, when the audience doesn’t fully get what podcasting is. But I just keep building and building and building and building along with the industry.

Tim Bourquin: When you do have technical difficulties, I like that you don’t sit there and apologize for five minutes and then restart. You just dive right back into it.

Andrew Warner: I’m getting better and better at that, yeah, and then I just piece it back together. One of my issues is that I refuse to do heavy editing on my interviews because editing takes forever, and then it’s not a passion inspiring job. You sit there and you edit and you start to think, “Well, if I edited that, do I need to edit this?” And now my life is editing. Who gets up in the morning going, “Yay! I get to edit.” Maybe some people, not me. I say, “Yay! I get to ask great questions, and I get to have good feedback from the audience, and I get to watch my tribe grow.” So I just say, “Look, I’m going to end the interview.” I’m going to say, “We’re having technical difficulties. I have to deal with it” or if the interview broke off when we come back I say, “Ah, we lost the connection. These guys here are having terrible internet. But the question that I ask is –,” and I go into that.

Tim Bourquin: That brings up and it wasn’t on my list of questions, but you bring up a point about outsourcing that triggered my mind. I would love to outsource the editing of my interviews, but I just feel like nobody else would know what’s the important stuff and what’s not. So I end up doing it myself as well. What are your thoughts there?

Andrew Warner: I can’t even tell what’s the important stuff and what’s not. It’s really tough. I think that for me, when I listen to your interviews, I want more. If I’m listening — I think your interviews usually go — is it 20 minutes or so, half hour?

Tim Bourquin: Yeah, 20 minutes to half hour. I mean this one is going to go longer. Maybe I’ll break it up into two, but I kind of find like 20 minutes is my sweet spot.

Andrew Warner: I think the opposite.

In this four-part interview, I talk with Andrew about how he uses interviews to get traffic to his site and how he gets interviewees to answer questions fully and without the typical public relations gloss-over.

4 ways to watch/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 the video)
4) Watch the video:

Related Links:

- Mixergy.com

Transcript:

Tim Bourquin: Hello, everybody and welcome back to a MemberCon interview. I have a very special guest today, Andrew Warner. I’ve talked about him a few times on my blog already. His site is Mixergy.com. He’s one of the only other guys I know out there who is building an entire site, an entire content-based and archived-based on interviews. He’s got great ones. He interviews a ton of people, puts up a ton of content every day.

So I’m going to ask Andrew about how he gets these interviews, how he builds his audience with the interviews, how he gets the people to talk and dish the good stuff in those interviews, and why he decided to build that whole site based on that type of content? Because as you know, I’m a huge proponent of interviews. We talk about it here all the time and we have sites that we make the majority of our revenue on as paid content sites with interviews. So Andrew is an expert in that area after doing this for so long.

So Andrew, thank you very much for joining me on the phone today.

Andrew Warner: Thanks for having me on. And the other thing I want to make sure to tell people is how to use interviews to get traffic because you know what? There’s nothing worse than putting your heart and soul and hours of agony staring at that computer screen writing the perfect blog post and then nobody comes or maybe your mother or a friend of yours come, and then that’s even worse because then you feel bad that your friend is now doing you this favor and looking at this blog post that now you feel stinks. There’s nothing worse than doing all that work and not having anyone come. I’m going to tell people how they can use interviews to get traffic to get people over to their websites.

Tim Bourquin: Perfect. Well, let’s kind of start with that because I know that I’ve been tempted in the past to interview somebody who maybe isn’t the best person for it, but I know that they’re going to push it out to a ton of people and their audience. Typically, that’s not the case. If they have a big audience and they’re going to push it out there right for you. But have you ever been tempted to interview somebody just because you thought that they may not be a great interview, but you knew they’d bring people to your site?

Andrew Warner: There are enough people who would be great interviews and also would bring over traffic that I don’t worry too much about that. The other thing is I have a different philosophy from you. I believe that I can’t tell who’s going to be that great interview guest. I’ve had people on who I — just before the interview I said, “I don’t want to interview them.” I remember saying to my wife, “I got to stay and have a conversation with this idiot for an hour, and this guy hasn’t done anything, and he’s not going to be interesting.” And then in the interview, maybe five minutes in, the guy wins me over, and I have one of the best interviews ever, and people a year later will e-mail me to say that that person changed their lives. And mine too because the person who I though wouldn’t be helpful at all and wouldn’t be a good interview, ended up being not only a great interview but a personal friend and supporter. So I do as many interviews as I can, and then I kind of let the audience and the experience figure out who’s going to be the best guest.

Tim Bourquin: I like that strategy, except that you’re live. It’s almost like it has to be good for those people that are on live. For me if I record it and I don’t use it, that’s just my time. No big deal. But you’re live with an audience as you interview.

Andrew Warner: It’s true, and the audience will help me make it a little bit better, but it doesn’t really matter ultimately. The idea is just put it all out there, and the audience will find you. If there are some interviews that you’re especially proud of, I know there are some that I’m especially proud of, I signal to the audience that these are going to be the really good ones. And I do that by highlighting them on website, by putting their image up at the top so that they’re on every single page. I do that by giving it a really good title. I do that by e-mailing my audience and saying, “Hey, I just did an especially good interview. I know that you don’t have time to listen to the hours and hours and hours of interview. You may not have time for it. But if you don’t and you only have one hour this month, this is the one interview you should be listening to.” And that’s how I signal what’s really good.

But you know what? Sometimes the audience will surprise me. They’ll say, “You weren’t interested in how to raise money because you’re not looking to raise money, but we are. And that guy over there who you interviewed last week, who you didn’t give a good headline to, who you didn’t do anything to attract us over to that interview, we still discovered that interview. And you know what? That interview was important to us.” So I go back to the e-mail list and I say, “Hey, I didn’t even realize this was important. I think you should check it out because apparently it’s very useful.” So that’s the way that I — I don’t stress too much who’s going to be a great guest. I don’t stress too much about whether they’ll have anything interesting to say. I worry about it. I spend time making sure that the interview will be good, but I can’t overstress about it.

Tim Bourquin: Are most of your interviews coming to you today and —

Andrew Warner: Yeah.

Tim Bourquin: – in the beginning, how did you decide who you were going to reach out to, to get an interview with?

Andrew Warner: In the beginning, what I did was I interviewed the people who I was really curious about who happen to be in my life who are supportive of me. So there’s a woman who once made me an offer of like $75 million for an internet company that I started years ago. We did a lot of business together. She ended up buying a big chunk of my company. And I knew her, and I knew her company, and I knew her experience, and I knew it was inspiring, but it’s kind of odd to sit down at coffee with a friend and say, “Hey, tell me how you got here.” But when I did my interviews I said, “Now I’ve got the excuse. Now I can go back to this woman, Rosalind Resnick, and say, ‘Rosalind, how did you get here? Let’s go back to the beginning. What was your first idea? All right. And how did that work out?’” “Well, it failed.” “Okay. What was your second idea?” “That failed too.”

Then you go through her story, and you find out how she ended up a company from her kitchen table to the public markets to Nasdaq, and it becomes an inspiring story for me even though I kind of lived through part of that story as a friend of hers. I remember seeing the investment bankers at her office crunching the numbers and getting her ready to go public. I still learned so much more and I still got more inspired by digging into her stories. So that’s how I got her as an interview and that’s how I started out. The other thing that I did and if people go back and listen to my old interviews, they’ll hear it, is I did what salespeople do. I always ask for referrals.

So you’ll hear in the interview I’ll say, “Hey, this was a great interview. My mission here is to interview other successful entrepreneurs. Who do you think I should interview?” And when I did it that way, I made a mistake so then I had to add one little thing. The mistake that I made, some people pick up on it others won’t, is by just saying, “Who do you think is a great entrepreneur who I should interview?” People started giving me names like, “You should go talk to Donald Trump” or “You should go talk to Richard Branson.” People who they admired but had no connection to. I had to add one other thing to that. I had to say, “Who do you know who’s a great entrepreneur who I should interview and you could introduce me to?” By just adding that, I tapped into their Rolodex, into their databases, into the people in their lives who are like Rosalind Resnick is to me. People who they admired, wanted to find out more about, and were willing to make the introductions. Then I said, “Will you make the introduction after this interview?” And sure enough they would and that’s what helped me grow my interviewees.

Tim Bourquin: That is a great tip, Andrew. To act like a salesperson, I love that analogy that you cannot get off the phone without asking for referrals. Every salesperson does it and you should too. And I like the fact that you commit them to making that introduction right then, because I guess if you just say, “Can you introduce me to people?” “Sure. I’ll think about it and get back to you.” Of course, they never do, right?

Andrew Warner: Yeah.

Tim Bourquin: So that’s a great idea. All right. Now that you have people coming to you — first of all, for how many interviews have you done, do you think, so far?

Andrew Warner: I haven’t counted them but I think it’s over 300 easily, and that’s in the last — over the last year I did an interview every single weekday, and that’s what helped get my numbers up, but I think I might have started maybe two years ago or two and a half years ago. And back then I did maybe a couple of interviews a month.

Tim Bourquin: So this was a question that we talked about on my blog too is that because you do something every day, that’s a lot of work, it’s a lot of scheduling, it’s a lot of — making sure you can connect to these people and do the interview and do the editing and get it up there. I initially said something about the fact that you don’t have to do something every day and you said, “Look, Tim, all I can tell you is that I get a ton more traffic when I do more.” So is that really the secret? Is it to do something every single day?

Andrew Warner: I interviewed the founder of I Can Has Cheezburger? This guy has a network of blogs of funny pictures, cat funny pictures. He owns FAILBlog.org and so on. I asked him, “When you bought it, what’s one of the first changes that you made?” He said, “Well, I didn’t want to adjust anything once I bought the company because I didn’t want to disrupt it.” But the one big change that he said he made was he published more consistently. I said, “Why does that matter?” He said, “Well, when people know that every time they come in for lunch and look at ICanHasCheezburger.com there’ll be a new funny cat video, they’re much more likely to come back and keep coming back. That’s one reason why I think it makes sense to do it every day.

The other reason is I stunk as an interviewer, and I wanted more experience. I realized that when I do something every single day, I’ll get better at it. It’s not that if I did it once a week I would think, “Ah, I should have asked that other question” or “I should have been a little bit more forceful here” or “I should have just adjusted the mike a little bit over there.” I can act on that tomorrow. If I did an interview a week, I might forget what was so painfully bad about that previous interview that I had to fix it. I’d forget that maybe I should have just relaxed and accepted that my first two questions stunk, but my third one was going to be good. So it helped me get better and better and better, and that’s one of the reasons why I do it.

Then also the system starts to have a momentum of its own. It takes less and less work now to do an interview. In fact, I now have somebody who edits the interviews for me. I can edit the interviews myself and post them all within a half hour. It doesn’t take me nearly as long to do that work as I think it would take me if I were to write a new blog post on my own. So that’s why I believe in going daily. Now, at some point in the future I might say, “Let’s go once a week.” Maybe I should do one interview a week and then break it up into five pieces. I don’t know. But I’m saying that I now feel comfortable talking to you on mike and I’m not sweating the way that I did when I started and I’m not sitting here saying, “Well, why did you interrupt Tim in the beginning of the interview and say that you also want to talk about traffic?” I’m not saying to myself, “Are you saying I’m too much?” I’m not questioning myself. I’m feeling comfortable expressing myself because I do this now, and I do this every day.

Speaking of traffic, let me just say this about how to get traffic. You write a blog post, nobody comes, you have to hustle like crazy to get people to come over to your site. When you do an interview, your guests do a lot of the heavy lifting. By that I mean, they come up with a great content, and we’ll talk about that, but they also can help you get traffic to it, to the interview. I did an interview with a marketer once and I asked him afterwards, I said, “Look, can you please tell me what I can do to market myself?” And he gave me a list of suggestions, and the one big suggestion that worked easily and gave me the most impact was this, he said, “After an interview is done, e-mail the guest and ask the guest to promote the interview. People have Twitter accounts. They have Facebook accounts. They have e-mail accounts. They have press pages on their websites. They don’t remember to promote your interview, but they have the ability to. They might be nervous about promoting the interview because they’re worried about how they came across, but if you ask, they’re much more likely to.”

So now what I do is after — not every interview, but after most interviews, I just send an e-mail afterwards saying, “If there are any mistakes with the interview, if I put the wrong picture, or if I had the text wrong, let me know. By the way, I’m going to be promoting this interview. Would you mind promoting it to your followers too?” And that helped me get a lot of traffic to the site because every guest now becomes a cheerleader for my site and when — who was it? Gary — lots of people but I’ll pick Gary Vaynerchuk. When Gary Vaynerchuk came to do an interview on my site, I got thousands of people who were his fans, who were passionate about what Gary is doing to come in and watch his interview. Many of them stuck around and started becoming fans of my other interviews and of my work in general, and then they helped bring their friends over. So the person who you’re interviewing is going to bring over the right target audience for your future interviews too, and that helps a lot.

Finally, actually there are lots of different ways to use interviews to get guests. Let me come up with one last one. One last one is there are certain people today who have followers, who have fans. It used to be that only musicians, only actors would have fans. Today, businesses have fans, and that’s kind of in that jokey Facebookey way but also in a very real way. Certain businesses have fans, and if you interview people who have fans, you’re going to be able to bring their fan base over to your site. Gary Vaynerchuk is a great example but so is Jason Fried, the founder of 37Signals. In our world, the internet entrepreneur world, Jason Fried has got a lot of fans and he’s a celebrity and those fans come over to my site and become active on my site.

So that’s just a couple of ways to use interviews to bring traffic and to bring people over to your site. There are lots of different ways, and it’s way easier than if you would just sit there with a blank screen and try to type out your ultimate wisdom and then go out and try to promote your site all on your own.

Tim Bourquin: Yeah, definitely one of the beauties of interviews is instantly having somebody else with an audience to promote to. That’s one of the other reasons why I love interviews as content so much.

You’ll find Part 2 here.