Tips and Tricks for Making Money with Interviews

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Let us know if you have new ideas about this.

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

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

2) Download the mp3 file here

3) Read the transcript:

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

And the argument is –

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

The idea being that we have devalued music.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Which is crazy. It’s just insane.

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

Of course not.

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

Read more…

creating content, selling content online

You’ll find Part 1 here, Part 2 here.

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”?

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creating content, online entrepreneurs Andrew Warner, content creation, Mixergy

You’ll find Part 1 here.

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?

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creating content, online entrepreneurs Andrew Warner, Mixergy

You’ll find Part 2 here. Andrew Warner is a guy I learn from every day. He is building an enormous archive of interviews that he monetizes with both memberships and sponsorships.

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.

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creating content, online entrepreneurs Andrew Warner, creating content for sale, Mixergy