Tips and Tricks for Making Money with Interviews

Emile and I will be attending Blogworld Expo next week in Las Vegas (October 14-16 @ Mandalay Bay).

If any Membercon readers will be there, let us know in the comments – let’s have a small meet-up – beers (or the beverage of your choice) are on us. We’ll pick a day/time as we get closer.

Blogworld Expo is the show we sold Podcast Expo to a couple years ago and it has really turned into a tremendous event. Honestly, Rick and team were able to turn the event into something I wasn’t able to – a huge industry-wide spectacle that everyone attends. (If I had to name my biggest business fault, it’s not letting things mature enough before selling it and moving on, but that’s a subject for an entire post I’ll write during the show.)

There are a few reasons we’ll be attending:

1) I’ve always approached any event, webinar or research project with one goal: if I can pick up just one tip, trick or nugget of information that helps us increase our revenue just 1%, the entire trip is an awesome investment.

2) Emile and I have been so focused on our niche membership and content sites that it is helpful to take a few days, step back, and get a broader view of what other successful site owners are doing to make more money.

3) Events like these are great for “recharging your batteries” and getting fresh motivation to do more. Making money online is terrific motivation, but sometimes you need more than that to confirm you’re on the right track and seeing the world with clarity. It is easy to get a skewed version of reality because you’re spending so much time on the “nitty gritty” details. Meeting other site owners face-to-face is a terrific way of making sure your business goggles are on straight.

Hope to see a few of you there. Feel free to call my cell phone on-site if you want to chat: 1-949-677-4905.

online entrepreneurs, taking action, website launches #bwe10, Blogworld Expo

This post is about two things:

1) Life sometimes gets in the way, and
2) Perfect is my enemy – and the enemy of everyone who creates content for sale.

I try to plan out each day, hour by hour. Working for yourself is the most awesome feeling, but I realized very quickly after I quit my job as a cop that having that freedom meant tasks will always take as long as the time you allot to them. Give yourself two hours to do something and I guarantee it will take exactly two hours, if not a few minutes more. Give yourself until the end of the day to complete a task, and a full day is exactly what it will take.

But the best planning in the world will inevitably be annihilated by life – a sick 11-year old daughter home from school (as was the case for me today), a laptop crash, or a member who requires more attention than usual. So my first message to you is: relax. Don’t beat yourself up. Your tasks will get done. It’s all part of the process of owning your own business.

On the other hand, today was the day we were to launch our first information product outside of our industry membership sites. InterviewIncome.com is going to be a hell of a class. We’re going to be teaching you step-by-step how we generate hundreds of thousands of dollars a year selling memberships and content using interviews as a base for everything we create. Our first group will be starting the course on Monday, April 5 – two weeks later than I had originally planned. (Sign up details for the inaugural class will be out later this week.)

All of our membership sites have systems and procedures in place to make sure content gets created and added on a regular basis. One of the issues we ran into when we first started the sites was that we continuously edited, re-edited and re-touched the audio from the interviews. We also continuously tweaked and re-arranged the transcripts. I wanted them perfect. And it took forever to add a single interview and go through all of the steps to promote the content to the world and to the members. The last 10% of the tweaking was taking 90% of the time we put into the content. It was agonizing.

When we realized we could relax and not “forever-fiddle” with the content to perfection, surprise, surprise – nobody cared. In fact when we asked, no one could even tell the difference. That final 10% that we spent 90% of our time on was totally lost on the people who we thought cared the most. In the end, they just wanted the meat. They didn’t care that it was presented perfectly. They were right.

These days, our membership sites are literally content creation machines. We have steps and processes in place that cover everything from what to create to how to create it and what to do with it once it’s finished. We’re going to teach it all.

But I’m finding myself frequently falling into the “perfection trap” with Interview Income. Probably because we know we’re creating this for other content creators. And while it will always be a work in progress, today was a good day to remind ourselves that this content is great stuff. It makes money for us every day and can be duplicated across any industry or topic. It may not be perfect in delivery, but the folks who sign up are going to learn exactly how to create a business from nothing, like we did.

You may think this is a thinly veiled pitch for the product. It’s not. Although, if you happen to be more curious about it now, well, gosh, OK.

But what it really is, is a call to quit diddling with your content and just get it out there. You know who you are. It’s easy to keep tweaking and editing and messing with it to get that last 10% perfect. NO ONE CARES. They won’t notice and what you’re really doing is just delaying your next step up the ladder to content creation nirvana.

So, while you can give yourself a pass for a delay because life gets in the way, you don’t get a pass for perfection.

creating content, starting a membership site, taking action editing interviews

I was on the phone today with a friend who has a membership site. We occasionally get on the phone and discuss strategies and techniques that are working, along with what’s not working for our sites. I could talk for hours about that stuff and find that just talking about what we are doing brings me new “a-ha” moments and I try to steal as many of his good ideas as I can.

One of the topics that came up was the percentage of our email subscribers that sign up for the email list but never confirm. It’s the curse of the double opt-in. A visitor comes to your site, puts in their email address and then never clicks on the confirmation link in the email that follows. There are a variety of things you can do to make sure that number is as low as possible. I’ll show you what we do in a moment.

It had been a while since I checked that percentage so I thought I’d share it with you for several of our sites. Below are graphics of two of our email lists. One from our membership site Trader Interviews and another from one of our niche sites where we sell e-Books and other online content:

As you can see, in the last 30 days, 17.40% of the subscribers are “unverified”, meaning they never confirmed their email sign up by clicking on the confirmation email link. 5.70% have unsubscribed. Both numbers are surprising to me. The former because I thought that number was actually lower and the later because I thought it was much higher. (See my post, “High Fives For Unsubscribes” for my opinion of unsubscribes.)

I’ve done all kinds of searches to see if those numbers are in line with other services in the industry but have come up short. All I can do at this point is try to lower those numbers and use our own history as the benchmark. Please leave a comment if you know where I might find this information. I’ve found that most site owners don’t share the information, which is understandable. I’m not comfortable showing my actual numbers yet, which is why they are covered – maybe I will be down the road.

For the niche content site that isn’t a membership site but has individual information products for sale, here’s how it looks:

Eerily similar on the “unverified” number, even though the two sites are in two completely different niches. But perhaps not so surprising considering we do the exact same things to try to get them on the list and confirmed.

However, the unsubscribe rate is much lower on this one. My sense is that the “attention span” of this industry is longer than the first one, but that’s just a hunch. I’ll need to dive into that number a bit more to see what may be going on.

Much has been written and debated about the double opt-in vs. single opt-in method. Industry best practices say double-opt in is the more ethical way to run your list. No one is added to your list who has not expressly given permission to be added. I’ve run both types of lists and I can tell you that while double opt-in lists will grow more slowly, the quality is much higher and conversion rates on sales to those lists are much better. Remember, I’m not in this to build huge lists. I want lists of action takers and buyers. If they can be huge too, well, awesome. But in my experience, the larger the list, the less responsive simply because a larger list is less targeted.

More niche = more passion = more action takers.

What we do to increase the opt-in as much as possible is be as clear as possible about what they do next. Tell your potential subscriber EXACTLY what they need to do next every step of the way.

In our case, if they subscribe using a form on a regular page, they get this graphic immediately after they hit submit:

If they enter their email in the lightbox, they see this:

It looks a bit like an error message and requires them to click “OK” to make it go away. I was a little concerned about it at first but our “unverified” percentage went down when we implemented it because the subscriber is told exactly what they need to do to get the carrot we offered for their email address.

Double opt-in is more work – no question. But do a few things to make sure the subscriber knows exactly what to expect, and you’ll grow an action-taking list that performs.

Now we need to figure out how to get that “unverified” number down to 10%. That’s my goal for next month. How low can we get it to go? We’ll see.

email marketing, taking action double opt-in vs single opt-in email marketing

As more and more content creators realize that selling unique and useful content via membership sites and subscriptions is the way to go, the competition for dollars and attention will increase.

We all have a unique opportunity window now to be early-birds to the party so don’t wait! Any excuse you are using to hold off on launching your membership site, e-book or subscription product just delays putting dollars in your pocket.

Taking action is important, but proper execution will make the difference between a couple new members a month and a couple per day.

That said, I’m seeing a lot of bloggers sabotage their efforts from the beginning. The problem is that they “half-ass” their sales copy and even bury their product near the bottom of their site. It’s almost as if they are apologizing to their audience for wanting to make money. I see this more often with bloggers who have been blogging for peanuts (i.e. Google AdSense ads or low-cost 125×125 buttons) and have finally decided to charge for their content. They are scared to death that someone isn’t going to “like” them anymore or they might have a few people unsubscribe from their blog or newsletter because they are trying to sell something.

There are two separate issues here.

1. Many bloggers view even the most subtle sales copy as “hype” – which is why their aversion to anything sales-related keeps their blogs as hobbies instead of turning into true businesses. Copy that sells in a straightforward, “story-like” way isn’t hype and bloggers need to understand the difference.

2. I started making money with my membership site the day I realized that I should be happy whenever someone unsubscribes because they are helping me keep my email list full of prospects and not freebie hunters. I pay for every subscriber on my email service so I want people who aren’t going to buy to remove themselves as quickly as possible.

Bottom line: it takes a shift in thinking, but the moment you realize that buyers on your email list are far more important than the pure size of your list, you’ll start making money. I’ll take a list of 200 buyers over a list of 20,000 “fans” any day of the week and twice on Sunday.

As long as you are delivering a quality message, give yourself a high-five every time someone unsubscribes from your list because they think you are trying to sell something to them. It’s one less person you are wasting time on who will never buy.

Your job as content creator is not to get as many “awesome post!” comments as possible. You can’t build an online business with adoring fans. You build it with paying customers.

creating content, starting a membership site, taking action effective website copy, writing good sales copy

I just finished watching a terrific discussion on Tony Robbins’ site with Frank Kern and John Reese.

I consider myself pretty cynical and very skeptical (thinks I’m working on), but this is probably the first time I’ve felt “called out” by those attitudes and it was a wake up call for me. And while Tony wasn’t talking to me personally, of course, in some ways I think this video was meant for me.

You may feel the same way after watching:

http://tonyrobbinstraining.com/320/interview-with-frank-kern-and-john-reese/

taking action Frank Kern, John Reese, Tony Robbins