Tips and Tricks for Making Money with Interviews

A parent who “heard you made money online” asked me yesterday at a kid’s birthday party how we got our first members for our first niche membership site. I hadn’t thought about that story in a while so I decided to put here in writing.

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.

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I came across this video today and it instantly got me thinking outside the box for marketing our paid content sites.

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.

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I’ve had a hunch for a long time that people who use certain web-based email accounts convert better into paying members than others. I also sensed, just from watching subscriptions to the email list and new daily members, that those folks that didn’t use web-based accounts when signing up for the email list, converted better into paying members.

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…

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Explaining how your membership site will help prospective members, quickly and effectively, is an important step.

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.

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We started using webinars to generate buzz and interest in premium content about six months ago. They are a terrific way to deliver helpful information to a worldwide audience and talk about the benefit of joining our membership sites or purchasing premium content. At $99 a month for an account with GoToWebinar.com it is cost effective as well.

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.

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