Not only has he made over $1,000 since it was listed 40 days ago, more importantly it’s been an incredible new source of leads for his higher-priced website content. In this discussion we talk about how you can list your E-Book for sale in the Kindle store and some tips, tricks and lessons learned that Rob shares to save you literally days of time getting it uploaded and listed.

Most of the information out there about how to publish for the Kindle is flat out wrong. Rob talks about his experiences and how it has helped him get new traffic to his content website.

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:

- Kindle Publishing page on Amazon
- Rob’s book in the Kindle store

Transcript:

Tim Bourquin: Well, let’s kind of move on to the distribution and the way you find new people that haven’t heard about you because –

Rob Booker: Right.

Tim Bourquin: Trader Interviews has been around for five to six years now and everyday there are people that have never ever heard of us and you think that at some point that’ll end, but it never does.

Rob Booker: Yeah, right.

Tim Bourquin: I like the idea of you put out some content — one of the things you do is sell a book for the Kindle on Amazon for $1.99.

Rob Booker: Right.

Tim Bourquin: The book we talked about. Why did you decide to do that? What’s the process of getting of my eBook put on for sale there? How does that work?

Rob Booker: Everything that I’ve ever done well that has generated interest in my membership website — and I honestly and humbly submit to you — has been done by mistake; trial and error. And I have for a long time wanted to publish for the Kindle, not because I thought that it would generate a lot of interest, but because I was fascinated by this platform. I was fascinated by the idea that it would be a new outlet for distribution. But I had no idea whether it would work or not and I simply, I originally did it more out of interest in the process than I did out of sort of generating interest. Because I just can’t pick the one thing that’s going to do it. I’ve just given up on picking the one thing that’s going to do it.

So, I did it out of interest to begin with because I realized that digital publishing probably five years from now is going to have an even greater — almost every book that I read myself, I’m reading on my iPhone on the Kindle application. And I had a Kindle but I gave it to my friend in Japan where the Kindle wasn’t available yet years ago. So, I gave him a first generation one. And I’ve told like 50 people they’ve got to start reading on it, and I just realized that it’s catching on and that people can go anywhere with all of their books.

So, it started out as this I want to publish for that and I want to be an early adapter if I can. I still consider it very early on in the process. I wanted to be an early adapter in figuring that process out for myself. Of course I could outsource it, but I did every single step of the way on this project by myself.

Tim Bourquin: And at $1.99 I can’t imagine you’re getting rich off of this.

Rob Booker: Correct.

Tim Bourquin: It’s definitely — so they’re paying for it which is always good.

Rob Booker: Right.

Tim Bourquin: But it’s a promotional tool in the end.

Rob Booker: It’s a promotional tool in the end. And that eBook is actually free and has been for actually five years, six years. It’s been free. It’s been downloaded; it’s probably a million times. Five hundred thousand is when I lost count because I switched servers and I no longer counted physical file downloads and that was three years ago, it was at 500,000.

Tim Bourquin: Wow.

Rob Booker: I mean the eBook in its free form has been downloaded maybe more than any other — it was the single greatest promotional tool that I ever did and it was the first eBook I wrote. I saved the Microsoft Word document with Adobe Distiller all those years ago and then I put it on the web and it just like – and I mean it’s easy to share, you could put your email address in it. It would automatically send it to you and then you could put — this is kind of like a no-no but you could put your friend’s email address in and it would send a copy to your friend.

Tim Bourquin: Right sure.

Rob Booker: And it would say that you know, “Bob thinks you should read this.” And then it went from person to person to person very quickly. And this is an expanded version. So I thought I improved it, I expanded it, I could charge for it and it would the best version of what I’ve done or the best issue of my eBooks or whatever you want to call it to put on the Kindle because it had been downloaded so often I had a built-in audience that would be ready to say, “All right, I’m ready to download that and give it a try.” And it was my first attempt to see if I could even make it work, if the pictures would show up, if the text would be formatted correctly, and boy it was like wrestling with –

Tim Bourquin: Yeah.

Rob Booker: It just drove me crazy at first.

Tim Bourquin: Well talk about the process…

Rob Booker: Okay.

Tim Bourquin: How do you get the — do you email Amazon? What do you do there?

Rob Booker: Well, I logged on to Amazon. I went to, I think, it’s DTP.amazon.com I think it’s the digital text platform or whatever that stands for. I think it’s DTP.amazon.com. And what you can do is you can actually log in to that website with your regular amazon.com log-in. So, they recognize you as a publisher as long as you’re a customer. It’s a seamless process so you can just log in and you’re ready to go.

Tim Bourquin: So, if I bought a book there, I’m already good to go?

Rob Booker: You’re already good to go. And then what it has is a very simple layout at the log-in screen. It’s my stuff or my bookshelf or my projects and my reports and then like a dashboard on the front page. And what you can do from that page is start a project and it goes through a five-step process where there are five sections all on the same page on amazon.com. And you can expand them by clicking on them just like a Gmail email that expands if you click on the title of the email, it expands down. Each section will expand down if you complete the section or if you click on it. You go through the process of naming it, doing a short description. You upload a file that’s an image of the cover so they can display it as an image of the cover and they give you very, very clear guidelines for what the size of that image should be. I think it’s 800 x 600 or 1280 x 800 or something along those lines. You could just make — I just went into an image program and wrote a bunch of words on a background and then just uploaded it. Did it by myself, I didn’t do anything special. You set the price for the book. You write your name in as the author. You check off if you’ve got the rights to publish it around the world and –

Tim Bourquin: Do they suggest a price for you or they want kind of the Kindle range in there?

Rob Booker: Yeah, that’s a good question. They say you can’t charge less than 99 cents for something and you can’t charge less than a $1.99 if it’s of a certain file size. So, you can start to work the process out in your mind that they’re paying for it to get distributed and downloaded to people’s phones and so forth so they’ve got to make that content available. So, if it’s a very big file, you have to have a minimum price. So, it’s the opposite of what you think Amazon would say. We’re accustomed to Amazon saying you can’t charge more than something, but what they’re really doing is they say you can’t charge less than something.

Tim Bourquin: They figured out what the costs are –

Rob Booker: Yeah, exactly. And so, I simply went through that five-step or four-step process. I went from the basic description of the material to saying that I did have the rights to publish it worldwide to uploading the actual content. And that Tim is where I wrestled with the beast.

Tim Bourquin: What kind of format did you have to upload?

Rob Booker: Strangely enough if you buy a book on Amazon — and anyone I don’t care which one you pick because I bought them all. If you buy a book and it says here’s how you publish to the Kindle, that book will be essentially full of stuff that I would advice everyone in the world of potential Amazon Kindle publishing to complete ignore.

Rob Booker: It was the worst — it was the worst information because every time I tried to upload it in the form that had been — it’s going to be simpler this way Rob, it’s going to be easier this way Rob, they’re going to be able to read it easier. So for two days for 10 hours, I did it the way that they said I was supposed to do it. And they said, “Whatever you do, do not just write it in Microsoft Word and then uploaded. Don’t do that. Don’t do that. And definitely don’t do it in Word 2007 or above. Don’t do that.” So of course I didn’t do that for three days. And of course at the end Tim, it was the simplest thing in the world. I finally got mad and I said, “Well I’m just going to try that.” I had my Microsoft Word document formatted exactly as I liked it — and maybe I could speak about that for a moment.

Tim Bourquin: Sure.

Rob Booker: And it had the images in line right in the documented; pasted right there, the charts, the pictures, everything in line with the text, laid it out like I liked it — and everybody knows how to use Microsoft Word.

Tim Bourquin: Yeah.

Rob Booker: I did a table of contents that linked to heading sections. So, I highlighted content in the table of contents and then I right-clicked and chose hyperlink and then I chose a place in the document where I wanted it to go. And then I formatted the text on the headings and all the subheadings just like I wanted; bold, underlined for each heading. Chapter heading, I wrote the letters and the numbers just like I wanted them and I gave them a heading format in Microsoft Word just like you would ordinarily do, and then I uploaded the stupid thing and it was perfect.

Tim Bourquin: So, when you were uploading it in like PDF or something, was it giving you error messages or was it looking right?

Rob Booker: It wasn’t even uploading the images. It couldn’t upload it correctly. The formatting was screwed up. Then they said, “Do html. Save it as a webpage and then upload it as a webpage.” Well then the images didn’t come out. And then upload it as a .mobi. What’s a .mobi? Is that a DJ? I mean what is that?

Tim Bourquin: Yeah.

Rob Booker: I mean I don’t even know what that is. So, I found out what .mobi was and I spent four hours doing .mobi. And I downloaded software packages that would convert this stuff that I did. And I realized at the end of the day…

Tim Bourquin: It was exactly what they told you not to do is what worked right?

Rob Booker: Exactly.

Tim Bourquin: So, it was a Word document you uploaded. It took it?

Rob Booker: It formatted it perfectly.

Tim Bourquin: Okay.

Rob Booker: And it put the images in line. It gray scaled the images. There was all this discussion about you’re supposed to choose the right color formatting and you’re supposed to — don’t use this certain type of image quality. And I finally gave up and all then I just put the images in just like I wanted. And guess what? Amazon reads it just fine. They got it all — really it was actually so simple that I looked back on the process and I said, “I’m going to do that again.” Like, “Now, I’m going to do that again because it was so easy.”

Tim Bourquin: Now how about the approval process? I mean are you allowed to put a link to your website at the bottom of every page? How do they see that kind of promotional part of it?

Rob Booker: You can put anything you want inside your book. You could put — I mean if you have the rights to put it meaning they’re more worried about copyright than they are about anything else. So, you could put a link to the website and what I put inside the eBook is an invitation. I say, “Listen if you trade conservatively and if you build up your account over time, there are some spectacular gains that you can make in the world of trading.” So, that’s a simplified version of what the eBook actually says And it says, “But if you don’t believe me and you don’t think then here’s my email address and here’s a special link that you can go to right now and we’ll send you even more information than what you’ve just read for free.”

Tim Bourquin: Wow.

Rob Booker: And that –

Tim Bourquin: Or for $1.99.

Rob Booker: Oh, no we’ll send a separate addition to the eBook for free.

Tim Bourquin: I got you, okay.

Rob Booker: It pushes the conversation further because now they’ve sent us an email, now they’ve subscribed. And so a reader of the eBook now is a member of our email family–

Tim Bourquin: Right.

Rob Booker: –by doing that. And almost every person who reads the book, almost every single one will click on that link and get that — so we say something very specific, it’s a call to action about a very specific thing. It says, “We need your email to send you this information” and our response back says, “We’d like to stay in touch with you. Here’s the free information that you requested. To stay in touch with us about this and get the next report or get the next whatever, go to the website, put your email address in and we’ll stay in touch with you.”

Tim Bourquin: Outstanding. Now, how has Amazon worked in terms of being a search engine? People type in Forex? Just like podcasters get great search from iTunes –

Rob Booker: Right.

Tim Bourquin: Does Amazon work? Does it get you a lot of people?

Rob Booker: Well, time will tell. I mean it took me about 24 to 48 hours for the book to get approved.

Tim Bourquin: Oh, I forgot to ask about that, do they approve it?

Rob Booker: Yeah.

Tim Bourquin: Is there some sort of an approval–

Rob Booker: There’s a 24-hour period of time to approve the content.

Tim Bourquin: Okay.

Rob Booker: And that means that someone reads through it and they says, “Yeah, it’s approved.” And I suspect that as long as you have the rights to do it, they’re just flipping through that material. And it was faster than 24 hours. It was really quick.

Tim Bourquin: Okay.

Rob Booker: And it was available for sale, but it didn’t have the description for another 48 hours. And it was available for sale for the first 10 hours without a picture of the book. So, you don’t want to panic if it goes on sale and it doesn’t have some of those elements. They’re coming, they just take awhile to update on the site. And then after that, it goes on sale.

What’s fascinating to me is that it went on sale and I don’t know how it did as far as search engines, but I went to 160. I sent you the image this morning. I took a screenshot. It actually went to 120, but I didn’t catch the screenshot. It went to 160 out of every book available on the Kindle store within about 48 to 72 hours and stayed in the below 200 range for like a week and a half or so, and it sold hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of copies –

Tim Bourquin: And you didn’t do anything different? You didn’t buy — you didn’t advertise it? It just did that organically?

Rob Booker: After that process was done, I sent out an email to my database. I wanted to see –

Tim Bourquin: Ah yes.

Rob Booker: – like first what can Amazon –

Tim Bourquin: Of course.

Rob Booker: – do for me. Then I sent an email out and then I did a Twitter update and I said here’s a little contest. And I did a contest. I said if you’ll write a review on Amazon about the book or if you’ll twit about it or if you put it on your Facebook status or you’ll send an email to all your friends, and you send us an update with a screenshot of what you did or the link to the review you wrote on Amazon, we’ll do a two-hour webinar for everybody that did something like that. We’ll put you all in there and then we’ll do a drawing and I’ll spend a couple of hours on the phone with somebody that did something extra special.

Tim Bourquin: Nice.

Rob Booker: And then it took off from there and it stayed — the ranking stayed really good for awhile even after that.

Tim Bourquin: Wow.

Rob Booker: So, I did do promotion after that. I kind of asked myself do I really want to use the trust that I have with my database to promote a $1.99 eBook? And the answer was, I don’t know; like I don’t know yet. I don’t what this will generate. I don’t how many people I’ve never heard from. And the answer is there were hundreds of people that I didn’t have on the list, I’d never known, never heard from, that came in the door because I published for the Kindle. Like hundreds of people that I never — they weren’t in the database.

Tim Bourquin: Right.

Rob Booker: They weren’t people who already knew me that I wouldn’t have had access to unless something had been available for them to find on Amazon.

Tim Bourquin: because they’ve never been on any other platform that you were there already –

Rob Booker: Exactly.

Tim Bourquin: So, this was a brand new platform where obviously there are millions and millions of users.

Rob Booker: And there’s a lot of people at home with a Kindle right?

Tim Bourquin: Right.

Rob Booker: They don’t — I mean they’re searching for — you know their brother does Forex or whatever, and a lot of people they’re finding it on their Kindle by searching for Forex or whatever and they’re seeing the book pop up and…

Tim Bourquin: All right. So, having said that now two questions: How much of the $1.99 do you keep and then I’ll go right out there and ask you how much money have you made doing this?

Rob Booker: I think I keep 60%? No 60 — I don’t even know, 70% that’s what it is.

Tim Bourquin: Okay.

Rob Booker: Like I’m the least interested guy. I don’t have any goals. But I’m like, oh work what did I do? So, I think I’ve made about $1000 from the sales of the book. It maybe more than that now, but it’s about $1000. But in terms of people who signed up for other products or services what’s the lifetime value of publishing that? I would conservatively put it in the $10,000 to $15000 range. I would say that I am most likely going to sell a couple of webinar subscriptions and possibly down the road something even more personal than that. It’s a fairly good — I mean I do a pretty good job of converting people you know–

Tim Bourquin: Right.

Rob Booker: – once they’ve come into the family of email addresses or whatever.

Tim Bourquin: Now, this is good because Amazon is obviously kind of the premiere site. You could go out and try to find other places to publish this. I don’t know maybe on a Sony Reader.

Rob Booker: Right.

Tim Bourquin: If Amazon is 80% of the way there, do you go out and try to find all the 15 other sites that are the next 20% or do you say I’m happy Amazon – you know, my time is too valuable to go wherever else.

Rob Booker: Amazon made it so easy and has such a large universe of people available to me. And I’m such a fan of Amazon to begin with that that’s where my loyalty was and that’s what I decided to bite off to start with.

I did initially go to the iTunes section that says how to publish content for iTunes, and I realized that I do not understand a word of it. It was complicated and the submission process was burdensome. It was done by email, it was done by — it was a far more complicated process to keep a smaller amount of the revenue in the end for the iBooks application which I do have for iPhone as well but which I have absolutely, positively decided it’s not easy enough to publish for yet. It’s just not simple enough. The process isn’t a three-step process to upload it. It’s a contact us and then we’ll email you back if we feel like it. I mean they don’t even — that’s it. They just say, well just email us and we’ll let you know. And I thought email you and let you know like — I mean –

Tim Bourquin: Yeah.

Rob Booker: It’s like they’re going to approve whether my content — and you know maybe it’s worth it, maybe one day it’ll be worth it. But I like something that as seamless and simple to do the first time around as possible. And I’ll probably have to hire somebody to get me into the iTunes thing because it’s not a simple process just yet. It’s in its infancy.

Tim Bourquin: That’s pretty typical of the Apple too. The same thing happens with the app store here, a lot of grumblings about –

Rob Booker: Right.

Tim Bourquin: – how long it takes and they don’t approve things. You don’t know why. So, I would imagine it would be very similar for the iPad so…

Rob Booker: When I went down the road of wanting to develop an application for my subscriber database, for my membership site, to access their trading account and generate reports and implement different strategies, I had the option of going through the Apple app route. They keep 30% of the revenue and they go through an approval process and it’s searchable in the store. There are some really great benefits to that of course. And then also I had a friend come to me and say, “Rob, why don’t you just build it for a mobile browser? Why don’t you just build so that it’s a mobile browser based thing and you keep all the subscription revenue and people just log in through the browser, and then it’s just not available for the iPhone, it’s available for the Blackberry, for the Android and for the — which is huge in Europe is the Nokia whatever that operating system is. It’s huge. It runs on more devices in Europe than any other platform.” And I realized, oh my gosh, like I could just bypass the store the first time around with an application that’s simpler to build, there’s no approval process. I can put it out there.

And then secondarily, Twitter built a mobile application, a mobile website before they built an iTunes app store app. And it’s a really good analogy, like get it working for people on a mobile browser for free first with no application process and then maybe I’ll go down the road of building an app specifically to do the same thing.

Tim Bourquin: Yeah. And there is some value just like there’s value to being in the Amazon store that people can find you so…

Rob Booker: Right.

Tim Bourquin: That’s down the road, but there will be some value there. All right. Just back Amazon really quickly there and then we’ll finish up because this has been great Rob, I really appreciate it. Did you do anything special in terms of just writing a description that would be keyword rich? Anything like that you thought helped?

Rob Booker: There are two things about that. One is, I wondered if I could change my description or actually change the file if I had a mistake in the file after it was published. Because like I don’t do it as much as you do, I wish I could go back in time and learn as much about testing keywords and sentences as much as you do and I’m trying. I’m doing a better job thanks to some of the stuff that you published. I’m like putting more time into it. But I thought once I published this, is set in stone and the answer is, no. What’s interesting is that I could change my description and I could even upload an updated version of the Microsoft Words document as many times as I wanted. And what happens is it goes through another 24-hour approval process and during that time, the older version of your description stays put and the older version of your actual eBook download stays put. So, it’s still for sale, you don’t complicate that process. And once they approve it, they put the new file up on their servers that’ll be downloadable.

So, what’s nice about this is I can actually test keywords in my description and track if I can time it. I can go from one week to the next and say I’m going to change my description this week and I’m going to see what kind of difference that makes in the store. And so I’m definitely going to go down that road. I don’t have anything different than the original description right now. But that’s exactly what the next step in the process for me will be is, does changing the description make a difference.

Tim Bourquin: Absolutely. All right. Well, that’s just great. I’m definitely going to publish either some text transcripts of the interviews I’ve done and do a fancy cover. I’ll probably outsource it to Elance for 50 bucks and have a nice cover made or something along those lines. But this is great. I never considered publishing this as a platform. Obviously, a lot of smarter people than I am -you — have done this already. This is great. It’s just one more huge place that people that are hanging out that is a door for them to find you which is terrific.

Rob Booker: Yeah, I decided that if I did it now and we’re still very early on, we’re only a couple of years into this whole thing. If I did this now, 15 years from now, I’m going to be really glad that I learned how to do it this early, I learned how to do it right early, and I learned what did and didn’t work early. I mean this is it. This is where a lot of books are going to be published and I realized that down the road I may decide to do a lot more of this if it’s profitable. But down the road, I don’t want to be trying to learn this or figure it out when it’s all a crowded space and it takes too long to figure out.

Tim Bourquin: Right. Well Rob hey, I really appreciate you coming in the office today and sharing all this. This is huge. I’m going to break it into two parts probably. The first part is about giving away free content and then second part about the Kindle. Thanks for your time. I appreciate it.

Rob Booker: Thank you Tim.

I’ve followed Anne Holland’s marketing information for years, first at MarketingSherpa.com and now at her newer site, WhichTestWon.com.

It’s a great site for test junkies and I love the “Test of the Week.”

This week’s test is from a membership site. I recommend everyone subscribe to the RSS feed and take a look at the free pdf reports available for download.

On every hike at some point my mind inevitably turns to business. MemberCon has grown nicely over the past few months, but there were (in my not-so-humble opinion) some nice articles written in our early days when the only reader was Emile.

And just this evening I went back and updated one of those earlier posts so I thought I’d point to a few gems that you probably missed in those first few weeks of this blog.

Here they are in no particular order

1) Membership Site Software Plugin Reviews – a good rundown of our thoughts on various membership software offerings.

2) How To Be a Niche Content Millionaire – My interview with David Eedle about how he started and grew his very niche membership site.

3) Should You Start a Forum or Message Board? – a discussion of the value of starting a message board for your website

4) Turn Your Knowledge Into Membership Dollars – my interview with Perry Lawrence about how he promotes his membership site

We’re also starting a new membership site in the motivation and success space this month – stay tuned for tons of test results and tips on how we’re building it from scratch.

Dave shows people how to use web video in a way that is engaging and attracts attention. In this quick interview, I talk to Dave about getting started and the future of video. We talk about the mess of formats and why it shouldn’t stop you from creating video now to make your site more compelling.

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:

WebVideoClass.com

Transcript:

Tim Bourquin: Hello everybody. Welcome to another show at MemberCon.com. You know, I’ve been talking a lot about the power of using videos to promote your content whatever you may be producing on any subject and the gentleman I have on the line today is Dave Kaminski. He’s got a really popular site that deals with obviously that subject which is WebVideoClass.com. And so, Dave, thanks very much for joining me on the phone today.

Dave Kaminski: Thanks for having me, Tim.

Tim Bourquin: Well, so you obviously get a lot of people who kind of realize that video is the way they want to go ’cause they see so much of it online but they’re not quite sure where to start. Is this something where I can come to you and kind of if I have no video editing experience I can kind of get up and running?

Dave Kaminski: Yes. The training that I provide, it’s meant for the person who has never touched a video camera in their life, and basically I walk you through step-by-step and, you know, everything you need to know about as far as equipment, technology, and best practices, as far as business and marketing and, you know, walk you through things step-by-step so you can start off knowing absolutely nothing and as fast as possible get videos online that are helping your business.

Tim Bourquin: Now, the thing I see people doing is two different types. So basically, are doing real video of people in the video itself or they’re doing some sort of slide presentation that’s accompany — is audio. What do you think is the best way to get started with that?

Dave Kaminski: There’s not one clear advantage as far as one over the other. What I actually do is I actually combine the two most of the time, but basically you have live video and by live video that’s going to be video that you shoot with a camera, and then you’re going to have screen capture video and that’s where you see like the PowerPoint slide presentations. And they both require different software but like I said, you know, I combine the thing so, you know, as part of my training, what I do is I show you okay, let’s take some live video and let’s take some slide and mix them all together. Now as far as someone who is just starting out is probably going to be easier for them to master the screen capture part first and then move on to live video.

Tim Bourquin: A lot of people are saying that the video is the best way to either put on your squeeze page or your homepage down instead of the text and long sales page. What are your thoughts on that?

Dave Kaminski: I would agree with that. I’m going to agree with that based on the successes of my students and based on my own experience. You know, video is a much more engaging format. If you go to a website and it just kind of a text opt-in well, you know, you kind of hesitate. You know, do I really want to opt-in? So I really want to get my email address to this guy? When you see a video and you see the person on the screen and the person does a real good video where they’re what I call transparent, meaning they’re showing you that they’re a real person and not trying to be something that they’re not, then the video is going to be far more effective than just plain text in that regard.

Tim Bourquin: The trend I kind of see now is people doing these longer maybe 30 or even 40 minutes, even an hour long videos and doing four or five of them after they opt-in to sell maybe a course at the end of that. Are people really paying attention for that long, for that many days? It seems like it used to be where it was 10 minutes, right? Anything that would fit on YouTube is what you want to do. What are you thoughts there?

Dave Kaminski: Well, statistically, people have a very, very short attention span when it comes to web video. Usually, it’s in around two minutes. They’ll watch it for about two minutes and then viewership drops way off. So what you’ll see a lot of marketers or internet marketers are doing is now disable the control bar on the video player so people are forced to watch the entire video from beginning to end. They can’t scrub through it. But statistically people have a very, very short attention span. I think on YouTube alone, I believe by the 60-second mark, I believe 75% of viewers are already gone.

Tim Bourquin: And I’ve seen that a lot too where the player buttons are gone. Does that really work? I mean is that the right thing to do to force our users to kind of play by our rules, do you think?

Dave Kaminski: I’m not a fan of it. I think it’s poor etiquette as far as putting up web pages goes. You know, you never want to do anything on your web page where you’re taking control away from the viewer and in that case where you’re disabling the control bars, the viewer’s only option is to go to a different web page to get rid of that video. So I’m not a fan of it. I haven’t seen any statistics that says, “Hey, it works great” or “Hey, it doesn’t work great.” But like I said, it’s just in my opinion, it’s not very good etiquette.

Tim Bourquin: How about the other part of that where you go to a website and the video plays immediately rather than me having to click on the play button. What do you think about those?

Dave Kaminski: That’s something that I’m personally not a fan of either. Again, that’s controlling — that’s taking away control from the viewer. On all my videos, what I do, you know, people come to the site. They’re going to click the play button, they control it. It’s a little fussier than taking away the whole control bar but it’s something that right off the bat I wouldn’t recommend people do.

Tim Bourquin: And then a lot of people are trying to add clickable links within the video itself. Is that something you see growing in popularity and what else do you see is kind of the future of video here?

Dave Kaminski: Well, as far as clickable links, that’s something that right now can really only be done with flash video players and it’s becoming more and more popular. The problem is we’ve got HTML5 video coming around the corner and HTML5 video is the newest big thing. And basically, what people need to know about HTML5 video is that it was designed to make it simple. It was designed to make web videos simple. It was going to define a single web video format and it’s going to make it real easy for people to get web videos on their web pages and it’s going to make it real easy for people to watch web videos ’cause they don’t need any plug-ins for their browsers.

What’s happened is Google and Apple and Mozilla Firefox and all the powers to be they turned it into a big mess. No one can agree on what standard video format will work with HTML5. There’s different browsers supporting different formats. So as far as a big thing being HTML5 video, right now it’s a mess and most of the people on the internet who are not using mobile devices, they’re still going to watch flash videos which means you can go back and use a flash player where you can have the clickable objects.

For example, I offer a player where at the end of a video an opt-in form can come up or people can click a “buy now” button. Again, stuff like that can only be done with a flash player and it hasn’t been determined yet but flash might be on the way out and it might be replaced with HTML5 where we can’t do all these fancy things with video players but HTML5 isn’t going to take a hold until, you know, all the powers to be, get things sorted out and agree on one format for web video.

Tim Bourquin: And then, of course, all the editing software is going to have to be updated to save and whatever — what is the format that it goes into?

Dave Kaminski: Well, for HTML5 video — well, first I’ll back up. You know, if we’re talking normal video like you go to YouTube and watch, all that is flash, and video editing software actually won’t convert your videos to flash. You need to use third-party software that will convert it to flash and there’s a number of tools available on the internet both free and paid for, but with HTML5 video different formats.

First, we have H.264 which is a codec which is the code that produces a video and H.264 codec can actually be used in a flash video player. A lot of the videos you see on the internet right now that are playing in a flash video player including my own, they’re all encoded with H.264 and it’s a codec that gives you really good video quality at really small file sizes. But not all of the browsers, when it comes to HTML5, support this codec.

For example, only Safari supports it and all mobile devices such as iPads and iPhones, they support H.264. Google Chrome supports H.264. Now as far as the other formats, we have Firefox, they do not support it because it’s not an open source codec. They support what’s known as the AG format and Google just released a new open source video codec called WebM. They did it yesterday and that’s supported by Google and Firefox but it doesn’t work with all the other guys who are, you know, arguing over which format to use.

So right now for someone who wants to produce web video, what I recommend they do is produce it in an H.264 format. It will work in flash player and it will work on majority of the browsers out there excluding Firefox.

Tim Bourquin: All right. Well, obviously, there is a while lot to learn here and if you’re new to video like I am, I’m just getting started doing some of these PowerPoint and audio screencast together, Dave’s site is a terrific resource for that so you can go to his site right now by clicking on the link below this video here and find out all about the offerings there because obviously if you’re not using video now, you’re getting behind the times that most people will tell you that you’ve got to start getting that interactivity on your site very soon so… Dave, thanks very much for your time. I really appreciate your time on the phone with us today.

Dave Kaminski: My pleasure, Tim.

Find out more about Dave at WebVideoClass.com

One of the keynote addresses a few years ago was a Vice President of Blendtec, a blender company. Why in the world would a blender company be keynoting a new media convention? Because they were using online videos and new media to get a huge amount of traffic to their site (and actually selling a heck of a lot of blenders) by blending anything and everything.

They blended an iPhone the day it came out and they blended an iPad they day it came out.

It’s a brilliant strategy. Buy whatever is the hot gadget getting lots of attention and immediately have the company founder destroy it in one of their blenders. It’s hugely entertaining and is the perfect way to prove your blender rocks.

If it can blend an iPad, just think about how great it works on your smoothie.

As you watch the video, be thinking about how you could grab attention in your industry by doing something similar:

By the way, during the keynote the speaker blended a garden rake and a cell phone. It was a huge hit.

Obviously one of the first questions everyone has is how to start building a list and building traffic to a niche content site when you have:

a) a tiny (or non-existent) budget
b) limited time
c) limited patience (a biggie for me, especially)

So this is what we did to get a jump start on traffic and exposure for our first content website and it still works like GOLD today. Gold, Jerry, GOLD! (for you Seinfeld fans).

I’ll try to get to the point as quickly as possible, but I need to give you a little background so you understand how this works.

Back when I owned a few trade shows, the most important marketing we produced had two goals: get more attendees and get more exhibitors. We needed to not only make people aware of our events in the first place, but to also make the workshops and panels so compelling that they’d get on a plane from across the country and and attend the paid conference.

After we confirmed a speaker for one of the conference workshops, I’d take the typically boring, lame and otherwise uninspiring text that the speaker would send us for their session and turn it into something that sounded exciting, interesting and “can’t miss.” The more enticing the workshops, the more likely the attendee will attend the show and also sign up for the conference.

Conference organizers are always looking for ways to make their workshops sound great. The more ways they can do this, the better it is for them and for the attendees who sometimes have to choose between 5-6 concurrent sessions.

There are conferences and events for every niche imaginable. You wouldn’t believe how many trade shows there are. If you can think of a niche, I can almost guarantee there is a trade show or conference out there that addresses it. (There are even two large trade shows for people who own trade shows. I know – I’ve attended them both.)

Anyway, years ago we started a paid content site in a niche that had two very large trade shows. However, we weren’t very well known in the industry. But knowing that all trade show and conference organizers are looking for ways to make their conference program interesting, I contacted each of them and proposed the following.

I offered to do very quick 2-3 minute interviews with each of their conference speakers about who they were and why attendees should attend their specific workshop. At the beginning of each of these interviews, I would of course say, “Hello, this is Tim Bourquin from XYZ.com, and I’m here with John Doe who’s here to talk about his workshop at the XYZ convention coming up this Fall. John can you tell us what you’ll be teaching in your session…”

We would then provide the conference organizer with a piece of code that they could cut and paste next to the speaker name and workshop title. The code would produce a flash player (in this case it was a tiny graphic of a microphone), that when clicked, would play the quick audio interview of me talking with the speaker about why attendees should be at his session. We hosted the audio for free to make it dead simple – cut-and-paste simple, for the organizer to put the interview on their schedule page.

At the top of each conference schedule page it would say, “Click on the microphone to hear the speaker discuss their session.”

The conference and trade show organizers loved it because their prospective attendees could get more information about the sessions, it made their schedule more interactive and interesting, and it didn’t cause them to do any more work or take visitors away from their website.

We loved it because every interview had our URL right at the beginning of every audio clip and every single person who heard it was a prospective member because they were already interested in the trade show which was, of course, focused on the topic of our membership site.

It was instant promotion for our brand-new content site and we very quickly built our list, traffic and memberships with that first effort.

The key to getting the organizer on board is to be very low-key with your promotion. Agree to say the URL at the beginning and that’s it – and that’s all you need to do anyway.

So there you go – free, super-targeted traffic for your new membership site using interviews.

You can find trade shows in your industry at a few different sites like TSNN.com or BizTradeShows.com. Or simply use a search engine and type in ["your industry" conventions].

A quick search of various trade show sites revealed all kinds of schedules where quick interviews with the speakers would be terrific additions, like this one, this one and this one.

This is just one of many, many ways we get traffic, content buyers and new subscribers for our membership sites. And we’re going to be teaching all of them soon on InterviewIncome.com including the nuts and bolts of recording the interviews, creating the flash player code, and turning that traffic into members.

I never considered television ads for our sites, but after seeing this, you bet I’m looking into it. It’s all about making the numbers work. For our higher priced products, I think I can.

The hypothesis was that people who signed up for our email list with their primary ISP or work email had a “trust starting point” that was higher than a web-based account and therefore were easier to convert into paying members in a shorter time.

Bear with me on this. I know that more and more people are using web-based email accounts as their primary email these days, but humor me. (But please tell me where I’m wrong about the following in the comments as always!)

So on my hundredth visit to AWeber.com today to check on our email list sign ups for our membership site lists, I saw an email from the domain trashmail.net had signed up for our email list – but not yet confirmed with the click on the double-opt-in confirmation link. Interesting, I thought. Immediately I concluded that I had about a 0.002% chance of ever converting that person to a paying member. I might as well delete them right now from our email list and save us both the heartache.

Trashmail.net is one of a number of services where you can get temporary junk email address and delete and add them quickly to avoid spam. I get it. A worthy service that serves a purpose for the un-trusting email newsletter subscriber. (Special thanks to the jerk spammers of the world for making such a service necessary. I hope to meet you at fight club someday so I can beat you up with all my other legitimate online business friends.)

Anyway, if someone begins our relationship using a junk email address and what I can only assume is an obvious low level of trust, do I really have a chance of converting them into a paying member down the road? Perhaps, but gut tells me it’s a long shot. Like one in a thousand? More like one in a million. (“So you’re saying there’s a chance….” for you Dumb and Dumber fans).

It got me thinking that it was time to finally run the numbers and see which types of email accounts converted best to paying members. This is very raw data and there are countless ways to look at this, but across all our membership sites, here’s what I found.

In terms of paying members at our sites:

- 25% are Gmail accounts
- 16% are Yahoo accounts
- 8% are Hotmail accounts
- 51% for ISP, website/blog owner, work email and other

That alone is interesting, but doesn’t really tell the whole story. Perhaps Gmail is just the most popular so that’s why more people have those email addresses. So I went a step further and calculated the number of members as a percentage of the number of those email accounts on our email lists (where 95% of our members come from).

- 14% for Gmail
- 7.6% for Hotmail
- 7.5% for Yahoo
- 70.9% for ISP, website/blog owner, work email, and other

The conclusion: non-web-based emails convert the best to paying members, but for web-based emails, Gmail account holders convert best to paying members by nearly double Hotmail and Yahoo.

Now, this is just a preliminary look. I need to dig deeper to find out which ISP emails convert best. Or perhaps there is a small number of some other type of web-based account that although smaller in number have an awesome conversion rate.

But overall, it’s clear that a Gmail email list sign up is ultimately worth more to us as membership site owners than any other web-based email.

P.S. I was a political science major in college so if a mathematician out there sees I’ve interpreted my rough data incorrectly, let me know.

And by the way, that TrashMail.net address has yet to confirm their opt-in. I’m not holding my breath…

I’ve written in the past about how selling with a story is the best way to do this.

We just updated our “selling story” for our main membership site and posted it below. I’d love your feedback in the comments. It feels like it might need some background music.

Let me know what you think. If you were interested in online trading and investing, does it make you want to join our site?

(If you are reading this post in an RSS reader, you may need to come over to the site to see the video below.)

Do you have a “selling story?” I’ll bet you do, even if you haven’t made a video yet. More on coming up with your “selling story” in another post.

There are two business models that have worked nicely for us with webinars:

1. Do a free one-hour webinar with a partner that has a product to offer. 45-minutes is pure education on a specific topic, 10 minutes of questions and answers, then 5 minutes of pitch for the guest presenters product. We take 50% of everything sold through the webinar.

2. A free one-hour webinar with a partner who then does a follow-up webinar that is paid. The one-hour webinar is education on a subject and at the end is a pitch for the paid webinar. One we did recently was a free one-hour webinar and a 3-hour paid webinar the following week. (three evenings with one hour each). We split the revenue 50/50.

While we’ve found that 7:30 pm EST / 4:30 pm PST works best for our US-based audience, we have a large international audience for that site as well. We record the video webinar using Camtasia and post it about 18 hours after the live webinar.

Offering the video recording made sense – especially when our international audience would have to get up in the middle of the night to view the live recording. The intent is, of course, that anyone who isn’t able to attend the live webinar will watch it later. This would fine if I actually thought people were watching the recording when we sent them the link. Some certainly do, but my sense is that many don’t.

The more webinars we do and as our list gets used to the fact that the recording will be available later, the lower our attendance at the live webinars have become. It’s a trend I am becoming increasingly concerned with. The stats show that not even half of the people who didn’t attend the live webinar (but registered so they would get access to the recording) are watching it. I know everyone says the media world is transitioning to an “on demand” culture and that consumers of the media are demanding media be on their terms. I get it.

The trouble is, the media never gets consumed if it is available “on demand” forever. As with everything else when it comes to getting people to take action, when the recording is available forever, there is no urgency to watch it and therefore it doesn’t happen.

There are a few solutions we’re considering:

1. Do the live webinar and then replay the webinar recording at a specific time that would be late afternoon / early evening for Europe, Asia and the Middle East.

2. Offer the recording for only 48 hours after the live webinar, after which time it will be taken down. It would create the urgency to get more people to watch the recording.

I think #2 is the best solution, but I’m interested in hearing the feedback of others who know the webinar space well like Paul Colligan and Ken Molay of the Webinar Blog. What do you think, guys?

If anyone else has ideas or has experienced this trend as well, I’d love to hear them in the comments.