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

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

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

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

Let us know if you have new ideas about this.

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

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

2) Download the mp3 file here

3) Read the transcript:

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

And the argument is –

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

The idea being that we have devalued music.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Which is crazy. It’s just insane.

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

Of course not.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Yeah, I mean there’s –

Sometimes you didn’t get any money.

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

Right.

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

And server space.

And server space But that’s another –

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

Yeah.

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

Yeah.

It’s a lot smaller cut.

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

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

And yet, people pay a dollar for it?

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

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

No.

Sorry. I mean the fact is that he just –

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

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

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

Right.

– as well.

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

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

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

Which is a big technology site.

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

Every tech geek in the world reads Splashdot.

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

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

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

[0:09:58]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Is make somebody — is make –

Is jump from that basic step to the –

To Madison Square Garden.

To Madison Square Garden.

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

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

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

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

Yeah.

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

Right. And I think –

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

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

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

Right.

– into his shows. Right. Like –

Yeah.

– it’s just the flaw.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Right.

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

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

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

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

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

I recently convinced Brad to get on the phone with me and talk about everything from product launches to email marketing and everything else having to do with selling premium content online.

Listen in as I put him on the Interview Income hot seat and demand great answers about the best ways to launch an information product, promote it via email and maximize both profits and customer happiness with their purchase.

3 ways to listen/read:

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

2) Download the mp3 file here

3) Read the transcript below

Related Links:

- Brad’s site: Financial Marketers & Publishing Group

Transcript:

Tim: Hello, everybody and welcome to my interview here today. I’m talking with Brad Stafford. I’ve worked with Brad and known Brad for a few years now. He has been an affiliate manager for a big financial company in the past and done really well with that. Now, he’s out on his own doing his own marketing firm where he’s helping people who create content make money with it, monetize it in a lot of different ways.

I wanted to get Brad on the phone. We’ve talked to him before but he’s just really an expert in teaching people and showing people what works and knows what works when it comes to creating money out of the content that you’re working really hard to create. So Brad, first of all, thanks very much for joining me on the phone today.

Brad: Absolutely. It’s the least I can do. It’s always good to talk to you, Tim. That’s for sure.

Tim: All right. Well, so there’s a lot of questions that I had that have come to mind over the past few months as I’ve been trying to kind of play with different things in monetizing our content. I know our listeners are always looking for what’s going to work best, what can I work on to make money from the content that I’ve worked so hard for produce? And the first thing I want to kind of attack right off the bat is this product launch versus just constantly putting out drifts of content out there and converting people as you go.

And one of the things that I’ve noticed over the past few months is that A, everybody seems to be doing launches and they seemed to be getting longer to me. They seemed like before a launch just maybe three or four emails. Now, it’s like people want you to send six or seven emails out for their launch. And my sense is that the reason that’s happening is because launches have kind of lost a little bit of their shine and I’m wondering maybe if I’m wrong there or what are your thoughts on that?

Brad: Well, I mean, I think first of all, you know, the launches over the past couple of years have done extremely well. I think that product launches have been done in many different niches. I personally think that the financial world is one of if not the best at it. We have the most rabid audience. Really their ability to buy products is just overwhelming. But yeah, recently, the launches have been sort of hitting a wall and affiliates or affiliate marketers who have the launches that they’re managing are asking more and more and more.

And you asked if it is sort of hitting a wall in getting done. Yeah, I’m not sure 100% if launches are done. I think certainly the economy has thrown a significant ranch in that. I mean, when people aren’t trading, they’re not going to be buying products so it’s becoming more and more difficult to sell to them.

But I also think a lot of leads and a lot of the people who are buying these products and involved in these launches from a customer site, they’ve seen so many. I for one, I’m always signing up to pretty much any email list that I can get myself on and it’s just the number of launches that are coming out on a regular basis. It’s almost like the leads know what’s coming and so they’re, “Well, you don’t really have it.” Okay, you know, I get this then I get this then I get the webinar then I get the pitch, then okay, there’s only a certain amount of time left. So I think a lot of people are sort of they’ve seen that.

There have been some recently that have worked and have worked well, but I think for the most part, the launches are becoming more difficult. And when affiliate managers are asking you to send more and more, it’s because they’re wanting to basically use your relationship with your list and your audience to solidify their legitimacy and their product even more and more and more. So the more that you can send that, the better that they can hopefully convert that lead down the road.

Tim: Now, I know in the internet marketing space, just in that general kind of make money online, I know the launches maybe have really kind of maybe they’ve seen the top of the bell curve and they’re heading down in terms of usefulness. Perhaps in a niche that hasn’t seen this type of promotion, it would work really well, and the financial folks have been doing this for a little while so maybe we haven’t reached that apex yet, but maybe that’s coming.

In the launches that have worked, is there anything that you’ve seen that they’ve done to kind of differentiate themselves from everybody else doing launches?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Brad: Mm-hmm.

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

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

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

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

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

Brad: That’s it.

Tim: All right, thanks.

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

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

4 ways to watch/listen/read:

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

2) Download the mp3 file here
3) Read the transcript (below the video)
4) Watch the video:

Related Links:

- Mixergy.com

Transcript:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Tim Bourquin: And yet –

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

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

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

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

Andrew Warner: to answer that question first.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Tim Bourquin: Excellent. Thanks again.

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

4 ways to watch/listen/read:

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

2) Download the mp3 file here
3) Read the transcript (below the video)
4) Watch the video:

Related Links:

- Mixergy.com

Transcript:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

4 ways to watch/listen/read:

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

2) Download the mp3 file here
3) Read the transcript (below the video)
4) Watch the video:

Related Links:

- Mixergy.com

Transcript:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Andrew Warner: I think the opposite.

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

4 ways to watch/listen/read:

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

2) Download the mp3 file here
3) Read the transcript (below the video)
4) Watch the video:

Related Links:

- Mixergy.com

Transcript:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Andrew Warner: Yeah.

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

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

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

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

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

Andrew Warner: Yeah.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

You’ll find Part 2 here.

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.

In part two we talk about how he published an E-book for the Amazon Kindle platform.

But first, our discussion about how he markets his content.

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:

- Rob’s website

Transcript:

Tim Bourquin: All right everybody, hello and welcome to MemberCon. Another interview here today, I’m going to speak with Rob Booker. And actually, I’ve spoken with Rob at our other membership site over at Traders Interviews, but he’s also an entrepreneur outside of all the things he does in the trading realm. And so, I wanted to talk to him specifically about one thing today and that was the way he sells content. He just told me about a book that he’s selling on Amazon for the Kindle called, “Forex Strategy 10: Low Risk/High Return Currency Trading”. We’re not going to talk about that obviously, that part of it, but just about selling the content and his ideas for getting the word out there. So, Rob thanks for joining me here.

Rob Booker: It’s good to be here Tim.

Tim Bourquin: So, Rob lives nearby me now and is here in the office which is cool, I don’t have to do the interview over the phone. So, you’ve always had this kind of thing in the middle where you are a trader and you do all that and you’ve got your following there, but you’re an online entrepreneur too and you like to sell content, to put stuff out there. Most guys aren’t into it as much you. You read our MemberCon blog.

Rob Booker: Right. Right.

Tim Bourquin: So, how did that happen? How do you — kind of are in the middle there?

Rob Booker: Well, I’ve gone from trading for myself to being a CTA, which is a Commodities Trading Advisor, so I manage for families and friends and I’m licensed by the National Futures Association. As you know, trading and the world of the markets can be a really lonely endeavor especially early on when you feel like you don’t know very much. So, like some other people, including you and others, I started writing a blog maybe even before the term had been popularized, which turned into a regular column which turned into a newsletter service which turned into a membership site which turned into a huge ball and chain around my neck — no just kidding.

Tim Bourquin: Having to always update it?

Rob Booker: Yeah. And it became an excellent way for me to repeat the concepts that I believe in with respect to trading. It helped solidify those beliefs. It’s so you know everything that I gave out in the subscription site, I felt like I was getting back in spades and it just sort of took on a life of its own. So, it’s been about six years now that I’ve run the membership site, publishing eBooks, content, actual published books, and selling subscriptions right on the website to members that have been around for years and years.

Tim Bourquin: Have you found a good balance between offering the free blog content, offering free eBooks like I saw on your site that you offer and transition those people over to actually become buyers or something?

Rob Booker: That’s a really great question. I think I’ve struggled with that as much as anybody or more than anybody. And I read just voraciously to try to increase my understanding of what I’m supposed to do or how I’m supposed to do it. And I feel like to a certain extent, I’m self-taught, but I have found, to answer your question, I think a happy methodology for offering something to people to become interested in the content to begin with and then asking them to take a step further. Absolutely, yes.

Tim Bourquin: Okay. So, is it a matter of one free eBook and then you’re pitching them afterwards? What’s kind of your mode of doing that?

Rob Booker: I actually had lunch yesterday with a fellow who’s kind of at the beginning stages of where I was six years ago and I’m happy to sort of talk about it openly. I have a multi-step, fairly simple process that I implement now. It’s more principle based than it is rule based. Meaning I try to offer on a regular basis once every 30 to 60 days something of value that’s absolutely free and that’s easy to share and in the past, an electronic book, a Microsoft Word document saved as a PDF, published by me, designed by me, done by me, which sort of generated enthusiasm for something authentic because it didn’t look I’d had a designer or graphic illustrator do it — something every 30 to 60 days that was absolutely free and easy to share. It could be an eBook. Sometimes I did mini websites about trading around an economic report. Sometimes I would do an interview. Sometimes I would actually do a full on video. I would answer questions that people had submitted to me by email and I’d put the video up on YouTube. And I would always try to make the content something that was of value in and of itself that really almost seemed like borderline, I probably shouldn’t be giving this away. Like other people would stop and say, “Well that’s too much, like you’re probably giving away too much.” But I wanted to do it to say, “Listen if you don’t ever want to do business with me that’s fine, but I don’t want to waste your time either.” I don’t want you to think, “Oh, another email from Rob Booker.” I want you to say, “Oh, it’s an email from Rob Booker, I don’t have to buy anything and it’s going to be interesting.”

Tim Bourquin: Right.

Rob Booker: So, that was the first stages of it. And that generated, over the course of the last six years, about 30,000 regular opt-in and double opt-in subscribers to my email database, which are waiting for me to send them out something from time to time.

Tim Bourquin: Right. And I guess between 30 and 60 days is a long enough time between that it’s not something where if you’re putting a lot of paid content between those, they still feel like I’m missing something here. I guess there’s a point at which you get to the point where you’re putting out so much content that they don’t feel like they’re missing anything. I think that’s a dangerous place to be.

Rob Booker: Yeah. And I think that’s something that’s been really hard for me to figure out how to do. But a lot of times the eBook or the questions that I do in the video or lately every month I’ve just been doing a video and publishing my actual live trading account statement or I actually do a mini question and answer session for 15 minutes about what trades I took and how I did it — and you can’t get the whole thing out in 15 minutes even if I wanted to. But what it does is I say — and this is what I’ve been doing for the last 30 days while you haven’t seen me. I’ve been working with the latest class in producing these trades. These trades were taken with the class. And so last time you saw me, the account was at x, y, and z and now it’s at 400 or whatever it’s at and in between we’ve talking about it the whole time. I’m happy to let you know what I’m doing, but I don’t have time and it’s just the honest truth, I don’t have time in 15 minutes to share the whole thing, but I’m completely transparent about it.

And people say, “Oh, my gosh, what are you doing like showing your account statement online? Like that’s insane. Who would ever do that? Your numbers are on there, you account, everything’s on there. Why would you do that?” And there answer is, because it’s about authenticity. It’s about saying, “Listen I’ve got something I think I can share with you in a short amount of time that might help you out, but listen if you want to go a step further, I have something that will allow you to do that.”

Tim Bourquin: And we should tell, for people that aren’t in the financial industry that that’s completely unusual. Most guys, they put out software out there, you know for a fact that they’re not traders. They’ve got somebody else to write it, it probably doesn’t work, it cost $5000.

Rob Booker: Right.

Tim Bourquin: So for somebody to actually show their account statements and prove that they know what they’re doing is extremely rare. And right there, you’ve got huge credibility.

Rob Booker: Right. It’s like a person who maybe runs a marathoning or a running site or somebody who runs a medical site that helps people monitor their heart rate or whatever; things like that. It’s like somebody saying come into my life for half a day or come into my life for 15 minutes and I’m just going to let it out. I’m going to let you know what the story is behind here and what’s going on. And it really goes a long way ’cause you get so many emails and there’s so much stuff out there that it’s just who is really behind all this. And I think that goes a long way for me in keeping people around on the list.

And it’s been sometimes — two months ago I had somebody that said they joined the list three years ago and they’ve been just getting emails on and off, they’d never written me back, they’d never talked to me on the phone, all they’ve been doing is just hanging out on the list. You know, I’m pretty low key about the whole thing. And then something came out, I said I was ready to take on another private student and work with them privately as a trader and he wrote in and he said, “I’m ready to do it” and it’s a very expensive sale. It’s a very, very expensive deal and he did it on the spot and had been sort of like all these years that I’d never heard anything from him — you know all I had been doing is basically he’d been freeloading off of that content for awhile.

Tim Bourquin: Yeah. Yeah.

Rob Booker: But really in the end, it built enough trust that over those years he was ready to do something.

Tim Bourquin: See that’s where I really am trying to find my way there too because three years in terms of the sales process, I can’t even imagine right? I mean I’m glad to have those people on the list, but my kind of MO has been if you haven’t bought within the first three days, I’m going to push you until you’re off the list. And if you had done that —

Rob Booker: Right.

Tim Bourquin: – you wouldn’t have made that sale so… I mean it’s good to keep in mind and it’s a good reminder for me that just because somebody is not ready to buy right now, doesn’t mean that they’re not going to be ready to buy in two years. I mean it just seems like an awful long time but they’re there.

Rob Booker: Right. Every like 90 days, I’ll do a larger class, an online webinar based class that’ll have between 20 and 30 spots available. And what I’ll do is go through a process of saying — I’ll email more frequently right at that stage and that’ll be more of a sales driven — it’ll almost look like an auto responder at that point where I will actually say it’s coming, get ready and then email me here to be on the early, you know, warning list. And then I’ll go from the early warning list to okay, it’s coming out tomorrow, get our keyboard ready — you know get ready –

Tim Bourquin: Right.

Rob Booker: – and then it’s tomorrow. And then usually I’ll build up to that over a three or four-day process, sometimes over a two-week process. You know, I’m pretty disorganized so I do the best I can by myself. And then by the day it comes out — I’m only doing 20 or 30 people for something that costs between $1497 to $1997 and it’s gone. It’s one day — on the day that it goes on sale, it’s gone.

Tim Bourquin: Wow.

Rob Booker: It’s over and it’s done. I only do that every once in awhile but when I do, I do. I hit them — like every day I say it’s coming and here’s my account statement. And then the next day, it’s coming and here’s an interview with a person who went through it three months ago who’s doing well now. And then the next day, I hit them again and I say here’s the full schedule. And then the next day, I hit them and I say, listen it’s coming out in three days and I’m not trying to be a jerk and I’m even trying to — like I’m telling you that if you don’t do it the it won’t be available.

Tim Bourquin: Right.

Rob Booker: I don’t really do this very often and the only reason I do it is for these reasons. And the fact of the matter is, it’s gone, it’s over with, and I fill the class up and then every time I feel like I really should do another one of these. I should do a bigger class –

Tim Bourquin: Right.

Rob Booker: – or I should do something else.

Tim Bourquin: So, you’re using product launch formula for all intents and purposes. It sounds like you’re doing it. You close it down, you lead up to it, you generate that excitement, which is kind of the product launch formula.

Rob Booker: Okay. That’s great.

Tim Bourquin: Okay.

Rob Booker:

Tim Bourquin: And that works. Because we’ve had things on sale and when you leave them on sale, if you had left that open as a recorded webinar for day in and day out, it just doesn’t sell.

Rob Booker: Oh, yeah.

Tim Bourquin: There’s something about that urgency.

Rob Booker: Right.

Tim Bourquin: There’s something about that buildup. But now do you get a lot of unsubscribes during that four or five day process?

Rob Booker: I get about — when I look at my report than goes out it’s between 24,000 and 27,000. It’s been higher than that. But I’ll get 1% unsubscribe and like 0.05% complaint. I don’t know if your service logs a complaint.

Tim Bourquin: Right. Yeah.

Rob Booker: And usually those complaints are you know unavoidable right? I mean you just can’t –

Tim Bourquin: They just hit the spam button.

Rob Booker: Yeah. Or somebody’s email — they don’t remember even double opting in or whatever else and I’m totally fine with that. I mean I wish everybody well on their way if they want to be a Mr. Grumpy Gills. But generally speaking, no I don’t. Because I tell them, I tell them pretty regularly you know, here’s my account statement and listen I’m going to email you in three weeks. I’m going to email you, you’re going to be hearing about it.

And I kind of like remember when I took my first sales job I took it for three months specifically for the purpose of getting trained by this internet service provider. I went and worked in there in the afternoons in the sales department just for the training, just to sit there. And I remember people, you know, sharing things about like only letting people have it for a certain amount of time and the price is only available for a certain amount of time and principles like that. And one of the biggest one was this guy sat like three rows down from me — it’s like 15 years ago and he said, “Listen what you got to do is got to do small contracts.” You’ve got to say, “Listen I’m going to ask you a month from now for three minutes of your time to look at something so get ready for it. I want you to know that I’m going to send a bunch of stuff on this list, but a month from now or every once in awhile I am actually going to ask you to buy something from me. Get ready for it.”

Tim Bourquin: Yeah.

Rob Booker: So it’s like there in their mind. They’re like, “All right, I got. I got that there’s a mix here.” That this email list is a mix of, you know, free content that’s just enjoyable and then sometimes it’s going to come out and it’s going to say, “I’m ready to ask you to buy something from me.”

Tim Bourquin: Yeah.

Rob Booker: And they’re like, “Oh, okay. Well at least, I’m not caught by surprise on that.”

Tim Bourquin: Which that is a great idea and something we haven’t done. Maybe in that first email we sent where it’s nothing but a free piece of content, maybe the second one, but somewhere in those first two, you say, “Look, we sell something, it’s obvious to you” and even though you know it’s obvious to them, you haven’t said it. So, it is almost a surprise and I’m surprised that they’re surprised.

Rob Booker: Right.

Tim Bourquin: But if you just come out and say, “Look this is a business –

Rob Booker: Right.

Tim Bourquin: – I’m going to send you some great stuff here, but at some point I’m going to ask you to buy something too. I hope that’s okay.”

Rob Booker: Right. And I say usually I’m going to do as much as I can to help a large number of people for free. I speak for free. I don’t ever take a fee for speaking. You know almost all of the things that I’ve ever published in writing are totally free. I have a whole website page that’s dedicated to everything you can get from me for free. And then I say, but some of the stuff that I do involves proximity — it gets closer to what I’m doing. The closer you get to me, the more expensive it gets.

Tim Bourquin: Right.

Rob Booker: It’s a proximity thing. And everybody’s like, “Oh.” And so I have something that, you know, if you’re an arm’s length away, like a long way from me, it’s free. And then if you want to kind of trade with me for a three-week period of time over webinars, then it costs the next level. And then there’s only one other thing that you can do and that’s work with me alone for like six months and it’s ridiculously expensive and I’ve never lost touch with anybody that ever did that.

Tim Bourquin: Yeah.

Rob Booker: And that’s really expensive. But they get it, they know that that’s coming and I think that they say, “Ah, okay well at least he’s trying to do everything he can for free.” But then you can’t please everybody and some people are always going to well sure you know? You know, “Why can’t I come to the webinar?”

Tim Bourquin: Right. Why can’t I come to your house and sit next to you while you trade for six months for free?

Rob Booker: Exactly, for free.

Tim Bourquin: And feed me and put me up, yeah.

Rob Booker: You know people say that all the time. I think sometimes it’s a valid criticism. They say, “Well, you put yourself out there and you promote yourself as knowing so much” it’s like well, you know, if you’re going to put yourself out there then you better be ready to tell me — you’re spamming me or whatever, you’re emailing me or whatever, I deserve to know more. And I’m like listen — every time I hear something like that I’m like, “Well, what do you want to know? I’ll do a webinar presentation, what do you want to know?” I’m usually willing to say to that person, “Gosh, there’s probably some people out there like you that would like to see more of something.”

Tim Bourquin: Yeah.

Rob Booker: I’m not so like full of myself that I can’t realize that you know there are some people out there that maybe I haven’t given as much as I should have or could have. But then when it comes down to that proximity, I’m going draw the line there and say; “Listen there’s only enough room for so many people.”

Tim Bourquin: Right.

Rob Booker: And that’s that.

Tim Bourquin: In the financial industry I see it’s a little more of a problem than other places. But you get the fact that some people say, “Look, if you’re so good at this why are you teaching?”

Rob Booker: Yeah.

Tim Bourquin: The same thing with the interview income course that we do too.

Rob Booker: Right.

Tim Bourquin: So once in awhile we’ll get that, “Hey, if you’re making so much money doing this, why are you teaching it?”

Rob Booker: Right.

Tim Bourquin: What do you kind of say to those people?

Rob Booker: Well, one of my favorite players in all of baseball and I’m a reasonably interested baseball fan is Mariano Rivera of the New York Yankees, and there was a wonderful profile written of him in the New York Times magazine recently. Mariano Rivera says in that profile or it said of him that he will teach anybody his cut fastball. In the middle of the game actually, you will see him out in the bullpen with an opposing pitcher with his hand outstretched with his fingers over the ball and him putting his hand gently over the hand of the other pitcher showing him how that cut fastball is pitched. And people say, you know “Why would Mariano Rivera do that?”

Tim Bourquin: Yeah.

Rob Booker: Why would he — you know if it so important. And the answer is the more he teaches the better he gets. The more he shares, the better he feels about himself. And the fact of the matter is 99% of the people are going to take that information and they’re –

Tim Bourquin: Exactly.

Rob Booker: –they’re just not going to be able to use it anyway. But it doesn’t mean that he isn’t interested in the improvement of others. And I’ve always said — like why is success in one endeavor — why is that supposed to be related to disinterest in people who are just starting? Why are those two things supposed to connect to each other? Why wouldn’t it be the other way around? Why wouldn’t it be, well if you’re so successful also, why aren’t you giving back?

When Warren Buffett gave away his entire fortune to the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, nobody said to Warren Buffett you know anything. They just said, “Wow, that’s great.” And I think that’s the true spirit of the people who really do it actually very well, is they realize how difficult of a struggle it was of them. Now, when they take money for it, the criticism is why would you need this money to take it?

I just remembered something that a friend of mine told me once. He said, “Rob, you just tell them, whether you pay me this money or not is not going to affect my lifestyle. It won’t and I’ll be honest with you about that. But it might affect yours.” And that’s all I have to say on the subject is that I can’t take it any further than that, that I’m here to help you. Yes you could see my account statement, I am actually doing well enough that I don’t have to take your money to teach you, but I’d like to, if you’d like to do it. I become better as I do it. I absolutely reinforce principles that every day I forget. I forget them too. I’m no different or no better than anybody else. And it reinforces those principles and we take that journey together and it’s enjoyable for all of us. And it’s just something we’re never going to get away from are people who say, “Well, if you’re doing so well why would you teach?” And the answer is, “If you hate me so much why are you emailing me?”

Tim Bourquin: Exactly. And for me I think the answer is, look I’m a business owner, I’m an entrepreneur and there are ways that I volunteer my time with the police department. That’s what I do now.

Rob Booker: Right. Right.

Tim Bourquin: But I am not obligated to offer this for free just like you’re not obligated to pay.

Rob Booker: Yeah exactly.

Tim Bourquin: And it’s a choice. And to some extent you value what you can measure and you value what you pay for. I know that the people that take the course who pay for it are going to work harder at it and actually take it seriously.

Rob Booker: Uh-hum.

Tim Bourquin: If you don’t pay for it, you’re probably going to watch a few lessons and be done with it.

Rob Booker: Yeah. I have a one-page PDF that is written and it’s called why.PDF and I don’t where it is on my website. Wes who helps me with email — whenever that email comes in, that PDF goes out immediately. It says, “We get this question all the time. We totally understand it. We welcome your input. We’re looking forward to a dialogue about this subject with you and here are some answers because your question isn’t as unique as you might think it is” — which is the underlying implicit statement.

Tim Bourquin: Right.

Rob Booker: You know, “This isn’t the first time we’ve heard this. I’d love to share the answer with you and you’re going to have the take it or leave at that point,” and then you move from there.

And on the subject of letting people in for free, I have taught probably seminars in person over the last six years to probably about 1500 people separately in chunks of between 50 and 100 and sometimes as many as just 5 or 10. I have probably on 10 different occasions or more given a seat to somebody out of, you know, just pity. You know? Here’s –

Tim Bourquin: Right. Sure.

Rob Booker: “Yes, you can sit in my seminar.” And I felt good about it at the time. And I tell you in every single — and there are no exceptions — in every one of those instances, it was a complete disaster. They asked more questions, they sat in the front, and they interrupted the rest class –

Tim Bourquin: Taken more of your time.

Rob Booker: They interrupted the rest of the class. And what happened was they had a sense of entitlement about their spot there which was completely disproportionate. It was almost like I had welcomed them to take a bigger spot in this seminar than someone that paid. And it was my fault, I take complete responsibility for it, and I’m certainly not speaking poorly of those people. I mean some of them are still my friends. But I regret having done that not for my sake. I regret having done it for theirs. They made less progress. They felt less inclined to do the work that I asked them to do. It took them longer to work through the materials. In some cases they didn’t even show up for the second day or the third day of the seminar because it didn’t mean anything to them.

Tim Bourquin: Right. Right.

Rob Booker: And I just felt — I felt cheapened, they felt entitled, nobody felt better off. It was just a big mistake. I now have somebody else answer the questions from my friends. ‘Cause every time I do a seminar I get 20 very close friends who say, “Hey is there a spot?” And I have my West who’s my good friend and he’s worked with me for 10 years, he writes them and he says, “We have 30 people who are waiting for that free spot and the best we can tell you is if you really want it, just buy it. And if we can make it fit we’ll eventually try, but we can’t make any promises to everybody who asks.”

And then they realize that the pressure that I’m under as somebody who’s travelled all over the place, I feel this obligation to do as much as I can for free and I feel bad when I say no. And West tries to communicate that. He says, you know, “Try to not put all that pressure on ’cause we just don’t know how to fit everybody in for free.”

Tim Bourquin: Right. Right. It’s a business and everybody has got to make their own decision about it, but you have a lot of valid points.

Stay tuned for Part 2 about how Rob published his E-book for the Amazon Kindle…

I was curious as to what his results where and why he decided to offer a free version alongside the paid version. In this interview, he answers that question and many others. I ask him about his goals for selling paid content, his past experiences in doing so, and what he thinks about “launch fever” that seems to be overtaking the internet marketing world.

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:

- Nathan’s website
- Nathan’s site designer – Kimb Jones
- Pat Flynn – Smart Passive Income
- David Risley
- Chris Guillebeau

Transcript:

Tim Bourquin: Hello, everybody. Welcome back to my interview here at MemberCon.com. We’re going to be speaking with Nathan Hangen. And I got he got my attention because I saw his comment on somebody else’s blog. So I went over to his site and took a look at what he was doing, and he is doing a lot of the things that we talk about here at MemberCon. But one of the things that was really interesting to me is that he sells an eBook, but alongside it, he’s got a free version that anybody can download that is set up a little bit differently. We’re going to talk to him about that today and his whole business too. So Nathan, thanks for joining me on the phone today.

Nathan Hangen: No problem. I’m happy to be here.

Tim Bourquin: I’m going to jump right into this and then we’ll get a little background on it in a minute, but you’ve got an ebook that you sell on your website that you’ve got a paid one that people can pay for, but then you’ve got pretty much the same content right below with a link for a free download. Can you talk about how you made that decision to do both of those?

Nathan Hangen: Sure, absolutely. To be honest, I talk a lot about experimenting on my blog and that’s what this was. It’s really just an experiment. Number one, it’s not original content. It’s a combination of old posts mixed with some new thoughts. And so I didn’t feel right. I wasn’t sure how I felt to be honest about pricing, and I couldn’t come up with or have a price that I was happy with.

So, at the same time, I also wanted to test the responsiveness of my audience, see who was there for free stuff, see who was there for me and who might be willing to pay more. And so what I did was I basically created this as a free product. No opt-in required, you know. If you want to come and get it, I paid money, 150 bucks for the design, and I said “Come and get it if you want it.” But if I also offered more with the premium version. You can get access to my Members Area. You can talk to me and I have some premium podcast there and just a bunch of stuff, not a ton but enough. And so I said you can come and get that. You can get the premium version for 10 bucks and so I wanted to see how many people would opt for the premium versus the free, and I thought that would give me a good test for how responsive my audience was to what I was doing.

Tim Bourquin: And what did you find out? Did people pay for it?

Nathan Hangen: Yeah. To be honest, I didn’t expect a lot and so I only think I got a lot in the beginning primarily because I didn’t really pitch it. And if you look at my blog even now, it’s kind of hard to find it. And it’s almost intentional. I didn’t want it to be like a launch or anything. But people are paying for it. I think right now, we’re at about nothing huge. I think I’ve got 30 people that have paid for it and they’re in my Members Area. I just raised the price to kind of I like the people that are there and I’d be happy if we didn’t have any more. So a lot of people took the free option and that’s okay.

Tim Bourquin: You’re in the military. You’re going to be out in a month. You’re going to try and do your website full-time. Thanks for your service by the way. I appreciate that. So, where do you make the majority of your revenue then with your blog that you intend to do this full-time after?

Nathan Hangen: That’s a great question because to be honest, it changes every single month. It’s kind of weird. I’ve done a lot of launches and so let me take it back this way. I have two sets of income. I have the monthly stuff that happens regularly and then I have the launch stuff. So, an example of a monthly income would be like Twitter Rockstar and Facebook Rockstar and consulting that I do, which probably makes about 25% of my income. And then I have things like the Beyond Blogging book and the Beyond Blogging project, which the Beyond Blogging project was pretty big pretty big success, same with the book. And so that’s probably another 50% of my income I would say, that whole Beyond Blogging thing, and then the other 25% comes up from a combination of new projects like Blogger Beats and Roark Media but mostly affiliate sales.

Tim Bourquin: Okay, mostly affiliate sales. You’ve got a lot of different things going on that kind of add a little piece to the pie of your overall income. Do you recommend trying to get a lot of different things out there or do you find that that is kind of hard to manage and you would rather be focused on one thing?

Nathan Hangen: It’s super hard to manage and I don’t know if I recommend it. I mean, it’s that approach has gotten me where I am today and so I can’t turn my back on it. I’ve always been a throw a bunch of stuff on the wall to see what sticks kind of guy, but I think it also leads to a place where you’re not willing to stick out some stick it out long enough with something, and so you got to walk the fine line. The reason I do so much is because I meet so many awesome people and I form partnerships, and that alleviated a lot of that burden. So it’s not all just me. But I also I have a lot of interests and that’s my way of I guess jumping on them all. So I would I would recommend initially start with something and work your way through your finding your voice in your marketing approach and then you can start testing different things to see what works.

Tim Bourquin: Well, when I first saw the ebook that you were offering for free in addition to the paid version, my first gut reaction was here is another blogger who is a little bit hesitant to ask people to pay for your content, but and yet you’ve done that. You’ve done that before. So I’m curious as to why. Why not just go out and sell it? Because you know the contents of value even if it’s repurposing other stuff. You know, why it almost I guess the question is that it makes me sense that you feel like it wasn’t worth the money in the first place. Does that make sense?

Nathan Hangen: Absolutely and that’s a great question. And to be honest, number one, I don’t want to get trapped in this hamster wheel blogging where I rely on my blog with a platform to create products and sell stuff. I’m much more interested in creating things. You know, Beyond Blogging for instance was 47 bucks and there’s a lot of huge controversy about the pricing of $47 for an ebook and it’s ridiculous. But Beyond Blogging project opened at 500 and it’s going to be 800 bucks when we reopen it. And so I’m not really afraid to ask. I think and it’s not that I don’t value the information in that.

I think really, I wanted to use it as a test. I just wanted to see number one, if I branded it the way I did it’s claiming your destiny with people how would people feel about that. Number two, I gave people I told people they could give it away for free as long as they attribute it back to me. And so, I wanted to kind of use it as a grassroots thing. Perhaps looking back, I didn’t approach it in the right way and I should have promoted it more if I was going to do that. But it was a test. It was like who’s everybody says they’re with me but who is really with me. Even though it’s only $10, I knew that that would be the differentiator, and to be honest, I found out who my real fans were and who were supporting the business.

Tim Bourquin: That is interesting, and of course, I love tests. We test a ton of things on our membership sites as well so I totally get that. That makes a lot of sense. Do you find that you talked about that controversy with the dollar pricing at $47. I mean I can’t believe people would actually be upset that that’s much. I’m assuming it was on because they thought it was too expensive, but I found the most vocal crowd is the people that complain about it and the people that are willing to pay just without their credit card and buy it. What are your senses there?

Nathan Hangen: Yeah, absolutely. I don’t if you know. Are you familiar with Chris Brogan at all?

Tim Bourquin: Of course, yeah.

Nathan Hangen: Okay, yeah. He promoted it because he is in the book and we interviewed for the book. And so his crowd he doesn’t market to his crowd. His crowd is it’s different. So, to them basically, the people who are complaining were the whiners. They’ve complained to him about everything else and so it’s just they weren’t going to buy it anyway and they’re miserable, and so they want everybody else to be miserable. $47 is not a lot of money even for an ebook. You know, I’ve seen them go for quite a bit more. And so, it was hard at first because it was the first time I’ve been out in the spotlight that much and there was a lot of critics. But then I realized these people weren’t my audience anyway and so it doesn’t really matter what they think, and that was the real that was a real lesson for me.

Tim Bourquin: Yeah. I know. I’ve seen I follow Chris. I’ve known him for a few years here and my take on that is that whenever you have a blog for a couple of years or more, you’ve done nothing but just give great content and great blog posts and giving everything away for free. That moment you try to start charging for something, it’s so much harder. It’s just I think it’s much easier if you start out selling something from day one and kind of put that mindset in people’s heads so they don’t think that that this is just freebies all the time.

Nathan Hangen: Yeah. And my pal David recently talks about this a lot. He kind of taught me, you’ve got to train your audience to be not only to see offers but to be receptive to them and to pay attention to them. And so, it starts with I’m not one of those people who believes in just blogging and blogging and blogging and giving it all away for free because you see a lot of that. Yeah, you can get 10,000 subscribers pretty quickly if you don’t sell anything, but then you’re stuck in that hamster wheel. You’re not selling anything, you’re not making any money, and you’re trying to please commenters instead of make costumers. And so I much try to think the approach where I’m just going to start selling right off the bat.

Tim Bourquin: I like that pleasing commenters rather than selling, about pleasing customers or getting customers. That’s exactly the right that’s exactly how I think of it as well. And I’ve talked about this on MemberCon that we don’t have an enormous list because we get a lot of unsubscribes because people, even though we send out a good week’s worth of free information before we even make our first pitch, people a lot of people unsubscribe at that very first pitch and that tells me they were never going to buy anything anyway so I don’t want them on the list. I want people on the list who are at least open to thinking about it, and you’ve probably figured out the same thing.

Nathan Hangen: Yeah, absolutely. I don’t know if you read my post on Copyblogger on Tuesday I think it was, but it was basically about be yourself, don’t apologize for it even if you have to be a little more than yourself. I’m known as kind of an edgy like, over the top, I’ll say anything that’s on my mind type of guy because I don’t believe in sugar coating things. And yes, people are unsubscribing. They don’t like my empire motif. They think I’m a jerk, whatever. You know, that’s fine. If you don’t like what I’m saying on my blog, you’re probably not going to like me in person and you’re not going to like what I’m selling. So let’s just cut to the chase and call it a day and stop wasting our time.

Tim Bourquin: Sure. And being plain vanilla is not what attracts readers anyway. You can write boring posts that don’t really take a side on anything and you’ll find that you’ll have a really tough time building an audience that way. So, I’m not a believer in controversy for controversy’s sake but certainly don’t don’t water down what you have to say just so you don’t upset anybody ’cause you’ll never going to get a following that way, which it sounds like you’ve done as well.

Nathan Hangen: Yeah, I tried vanilla for about the first year, maybe even longer of my blog, and it didn’t work at all and I didn’t get any traction. I couldn’t figure out why and then it hit me, you know. I’m just like everybody else.

Tim Bourquin: Now, I noticed on the front page too, you’ve got the opt-in form there to sign up to get something to join your email list, but you don’t have a lightbox. Have you tried a lightbox in the past?

Nathan Hangen: I actually I have an exit popup. It’s a Robert Plank script. I’m not sure if you’re familiar with him or not.

Tim Bourquin: Yes, I am.

Nathan Hangen: But it’s called action popup.

Nathan Hangen: And I use it. I think it’s at the cookie one time. I’m testing it. I tried to test it more and run it more times, run it less times, and it’s very it works very well. But I’m at a point now where I’m kind of reevaluating what I’m doing and what my goal is, and so I’m trying to remove as many variables. But I do believe in live actions. People complain about them all the time and I don’t care. It works and it’s not a deal breaker for most people.

Tim Bourquin: Now, the guest post that you did for Copyblogger, obviously, he has got a huge audience. Do you find that that results in some initial pop in traffic but then your site traffic goes down again or does that traffic stick and then become regular readers for you?

Nathan Hangen: Well, I started guest posting for places like Copyblogger and ProBlogger back when I had a different blog design, and I found that nothing was sticking at all. And I realized, number one, it was my positioning and it was my branding. And so, once I changed that now, yeah, I do experience it does fade away but a lot of it does stick. There’s I could get a hundred subscribers from Copyblogger in a day and most of them stay especially now that I’ve added I made my newsletter better. I’m always working on that conversion and on that funnel and making it better. So, it does stick. I mean, you lose the traffic, but over time, it will start to stick more and more.

Tim Bourquin: And do you email your list daily, weekly? What’s your frequency?

Nathan Hangen: I started off emailing them every time I ran a post, but I found they interfere with my newsletters. So now what I do is I I have an autoresponder that emails them twice a week and I email my personal newsletter letting them know what my about my posts, my guest posts, my products. I do that once a week so it’s three times a week.

Tim Bourquin: Okay. All right. I know I’m kind of all over the place here but your design of your site, it’s really nice. Who did that for you?

Nathan Hangen: His name was Kim Jones. He is based in the UK over at he’s going to kill me if I can’t remember it Basic Studios is who did it and it’s actually very inexpensive. I was happy about that.

Tim Bourquin: All right, good. Well, I might go check him out myself because we’re kind of using just a template that we spruced up a little bit here and there until we get traffic and then but it’s about time we start to rebrand it and have a little bit better look, especially hearing from what you said that that was an important part of kind of getting people to stick around. It was looking like you’re official, I’m assuming.

Nathan Hangen: It was night and day. I mean really, it was my traffic is I mean my daily traffic has doubled since then, and just everything has come together because of that and I attribute it a lot of it to that designer. And in fact, I’m happy with it now that I’m still tweaking it. I just talked to another designer friend of mine to do some more tweaking for me. So I’m always tweaking.

Tim Bourquin: Okay. And about those affiliate dollars that you’re making, I know that you’ve got the 125 by 125 ads that are kind of pretty typical on a lot of blogs these days. Have you found some things that really work well either outside of the ads or those ads themselves to kind of really boost your affiliate income?

Nathan Hangen: Actually, those ads are all products of mine so there’s no ad there except for under my post, there’s I think that right now I have one ad for I think it’s Jonathan Meat Product, but aside from that, all of the rest of the stuff except there’s a Basecamp ad there too. But anyway, I find that the autoresponder stuff works a lot better than the ads. There’s a product called the niche blogger that really does really well for me and it’s building my list, things like Basecamp, a lot of different products like that, just little things. And then it’s funny but lately I’ve been having a lot of success on Twitter as an affiliate. I just I helped Chris Guillebeau with his launch, the Empire Kit, and you know, I was fortunate enough to make around ten sales, about 1500 bucks just from a couple of tweets. The same thing happened in a Video Boss launch, and so I’m finding that blog ads, blog posts don’t work, but emails and tweets do work.

Tim Bourquin: Interesting. Yeah, I’ve noticed too that the more I get into the internet marketing space, I’ve only been in it for two years so I still consider myself a bit of newbie compared to a lot of people. But the big guys in it, the Frank Kerns and everybody else, it seems like everybody is pushing their launches and you get five or six emails a day for the same launch from different people. That seems to be kind of a growing problem to me. I don’t know that that’s going to be as effective a year from now as it is now. Do you see that as an issue?

Nathan Hangen: I do and in fact, I was just talking with Brian Clark about that ’cause there’s a lot of discussion even in my niche which is less internet marketing, more of content marketing, you know. There’s a lot of launches and I think it comes down to number one, everybody is just relying on what have worked five years ago. Nobody is coming up with anything new. And even though those guys have a huge list and they might be doing seven-figure paydays, it’s still wearing thin. And so I think what we’re going to have to see is number one, better positioning, better and better effort. I mean, people are focusing too much on the marketing and not enough on kind of the word of mouth thing. And I think the word of mouth is really where the money is at.

Tim Bourquin: Does that mean that it’s going to be more about content marketing and blogging rather than the list? Do you think that the money in the list mantra is going to switch over to the monies in the content?

Nathan Hangen: Well, I think in a sense it has, but to be honest, I would rather have a huge list than a huge blog subscriber list in terms of RSS ’cause I think the list is always going to work. The people that bought Frank Kern’s product are going to buy Andy Jenkins’ product tomorrow. But eventually, you’re going to run out those people so I think that’s why things like even offline marketing and just trying new methods, even like webinars and USTREAM and just getting real, showing that you’re a real person and you’re not just coming down from above with this $2000 product that’s supposed to blow you away. I think people need to focus more on on the positioning of their products. I think that’s I think that’s what it’s about.

Tim Bourquin: All right. Finally, what’s next for you? What are your goals for your blog and in your business this year especially now that you’re going without the safety net of a job, which I which was a scary time for me but I’m glad I did it? What kind of goals have you set for yourself here?

Nathan Hangen: Well, a couple of things. Beyond Blogging, I just interviewed first is we just interviewed Seth Godin and Gwen Bell and J.D. Roth. We’re coming out with a new version of that with nine other great people. So that’s coming out. Beyond Blogging project is about to reopen and that’s going to be that’s going to be a that has been a very fun time for me. But more than anything I’m working on a few products on my blog but I’m moving more into software, iPhone apps, and you know, kind of mobile frameworks, plug-ins, and things like that. I’m moving heavily into software because I think that’s where a lot of the future dollars are. And so I’m soon to be developing digital products but I’m really also working on evergreen software products.

Tim Bourquin: Right. Are you writing those yourself to have some experience there or do you outsource that?

Nathan Hangen: I come up with the idea. I outsource everything else.

Tim Bourquin: Okay. And any website that you found that’s really good for finding outsource programmers?

Nathan Hangen: Well, so far I’ve been using Elance pretty successful. If you’re interested in learning more about one guy that’s doing really well is Pat Flynn over at…

Tim Bourquin: Smart Passive Income.

Nathan Hangen: Yeah, exactly. And he is doing I had talked to him about it and he is doing some great things. His goal is to make a thousand dollars a day and he think it’s obtainable, and I think I think it is obtainable. So start at Elance but find a good developer that you can rely on and stick with them.

Tim Bourquin: Yeah, I’ve been following his monthly income reports which are always interesting, and I’m surprised about the income he has made from the iPhone apps, but it’s just an enormous opportunity. So, there’s always something new, something you got to chase down before it gets too popular I guess, and the iPhone app is part of where it’s at right now.

Nathan Hangen: Yup. It’s just I think more than anything and what my business is about is about creating products that people want and not about creating products to have something to sell. I think if people really focus on finding markets that are underserved or close to that, then they’ll have a lot more success than just trying to make something that sounds good.

Tim Bourquin: Good point. All right. Well, you can find Nathan at his blog. We’ll link to it, but it’s Nathan Hangen dot com. Well, let’s do the whole thing, nathanhangen.com, and you can read his blog there and I highly recommend subscribing. He’s got some great tips and tricks there that I’ve been following as well. So Nathan, thanks for your time today. I really appreciate it.

Nathan Hangen: Hey, no problem. Thanks, Tim, for having me.

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