Michael Senoff Easy High Ticket Product Creation Transcript
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BEN: This is Ben Settle of BenSettle.com and today I am interviewing my friend and one of my personal marketing go to guys Michael Senoff with HardToFindSeminars.com about how high ticket info product creation using audio interviews.
Michael has created over 200 information products over the past few years including one that sells for $5,970. And he did it without being an expert on the subject or spending a lot of time and resources. In fact I have worked with Michael on several projects and it never ceases to amaze me how he cashes out these high quality and high ticket products so fast. And best of all he is also an expert at showing other people how to do the same thing. You don’t need to be an expert in anything. You don’t need fancy speaking skills or anything else. And you certainly don’t need a lot of money and resources to do this. Just follow the recipe Michael is going to give you and you will have a product in just a few days, maybe even just a few hours that you can start selling for $100, $500 or even $1000 or more. I have seen him do it many, many times and he is going to show us how to do it right now. So with that said Michael thank you for doing this and how are you?
MICHAEL: Ben I am doing well. Thank you for the wonderful introduction. It was very kind of you and I appreciate it.
BEN: Well I have learned an awful lot from you about the subject and I know a lot of people listening to this need some good ways to get started. Maybe they had an e-book or just some ideas and they would just love to have some product created so they can start selling it and making some good money but they don’t know where to begin.
MICHAEL: Well sometimes it takes people a little time to get going. I will use you as a perfect example. We have been talking about this stuff for probably three or four years. I think you are probably kicking yourself because you are wishing that you had started doing this two or three year’s ago because you would have a mountain of stuff.
BEN: Oh absolutely. There is no question about it. It’s exciting and when you start doing it and you start seeing results you realize why you have been doing this for so long.
MICHAEL: Well hopefully we can show your listeners how easy it is and some of the magic that happens by starting to do audio interviews and using audio to sell and market.
BEN: You know what I’m going to challenge you on something. You make a pretty big claim on your site that you can show people how to turn a $28 book into a $3900 product. Now how do you do that and what is that all about?
MICHAEL: There is a lot to it but I’ll give you a simplified version. I think the best way to do it is to use an example of how I have done this in the form of a story. I’ll talk about one of my high end selling products that is called the HMA Marketing Consulting Systems. This is a home study training where we train people to become marketing consultants. We have consultants all over the world who have bought into this home study system. I started marketing it at the end of 2004 and every year we are generating more and more sales all automatically. Now there was a lot of work at the very beginning. A lot of audio interviews but the main outline of this HMA Marketing System was in the form of a book that sold on Amazon for about $10. And I found a marketing expert who wrote this book just like there are millions of experts who have tremendous expertise. And because they are not as educated as you or I about direct marketing and the information product industry and this kind of niche that anyone listening is so lucky to be involved in because 99.9% of the population have no idea about, so they go the traditional route.
And experts believe that what they need to do is put all their knowledge into a book and that’s what most people do. Like you can go to any expert just like I found this expert who had this book and I approached him and I said how would you like to take that book and turn it into a marketing consulting system? Now I do want to add that he had already turned his book into a system of videos that he was training people to do marketing consulting. But he had no online presence. So he had a book and he had a set of videos and he was putting people through training. But when I contacted him he was doing nothing with that.
So when I approached him I said I would do all the marketing and I would sell your fundamental ideas on marketing consulting and I would like to use audio interviews with you and use the marketing that I know how to do to build the value of this book, to increase it into an information product that can be delivered both online and in physical form. And that is what I have and have been marketing for the last three years called HMA Marketing Consulting System.
BEN: Okay Michael what is it that you did first? And how did you come up with the outline for the HMA System?
MICHAEL: In a nutshell. First I negotiated a deal. I told him that I was going to do all the marketing using my skills to do audio interviews. And he agreed. Then the very first thing that I did was I said let’s do an interview. So I took his outline of this book and we did an audio interview and I turned the outline of the chapters of this book into questions and I simply asked him the questions, sat back, listened, I recorded the interviews digitally and that was the start of increasing the value of that $28 book. Now over the years I have still been working on doing more audio interviews on the subject building more and more value. I talk about the more you talk to more you make. The more audio interviews you have the more information you have on the subject the more valuable it becomes.
And we’ll talk about why this is in some of the other questions. But in essence you can find any expert who has a book. You can look at the outline of that book and take that outline or subjects in the index and turn them into forms of questions. Then simply invite them to do an interview or if you have negotiated a deal with them where they understand that you are going to interview them and take their knowledge that they have put into that book or any other knowledge they have and you simply start interviewing and asking questions and canning and cloning it. And that’s a term from the late great Gary Halbert. You’ve got to capture that interview, that audio, that word into a recording whether it’s on one of those old cassette tape recorders or a new digital recorder today that you could pick up at RadioShack for $50.
Once you have that raw material that in the film industry they call the tape you have gold because you can take that information and you can start polishing it and editing it if you choose. You can start packaging it and turning it into transcripts. You can take those raw contents and build value with it. So that is in a nutshell what I have done with the HMA System. We will probably talk more about that in detail.
BEN: You talk a lot about audio why not video or text or something else what makes audio the best format for doing this?
MICHAEL: You know when I interviewed Vic Conant from Nightingale Conant he’s the son of the founder of Nightingale Conant the largest distributor and publisher of audio information products. And in the interview he talks about how audio is so forgiving because you can listen to something and you can press the rewind button and listen to it again. You can listen to the message over and over again. And I have students who come back to me.
Before we got into this interview I had a call from a guy who said he has listened to over 50 hours of my audio content and he took what I said to heart and he created some karate information products and he has some questions and wants some consulting. I have to call the guy back when we are finished with this interview. I have testimonials from people. Greg Perry e-mailed me and I’m going to be interviewing him on Tuesday he ended the e-mail by saying Michael I have listened to every single one of your audio recordings on hardtofindseminars.com. But it just shows you if someone is interested in something and you are giving some value delivering it through an audio and especially through an audio interview because it is the easiest way to get it into their head.
And let me tell you marketing is about getting your information inside the mind of your prospect. It’s about mind share and delivering it through audio in a convenient way for your listener that makes his life easy and convenient where you can still do other things you’re going to have a better chance of getting your information, your sales pitch and your ideas into his head. I started with audio because I’m not really that technical of a guy. In my mind if I was going to be doing video and you are doing interviews with video you need camera equipment, you need to go on location and you need to have a lot more skills in the editing process. It was just way out of my technical league. I didn’t even consider it because there was no way I was willing to work that hard to do video production. And there are also some other reasons. Recording audio is easy.
All you need is your digital recorder and your little device that you get from RadioShack and just like we have done the day before you start talking, I know you are recording digitally Ben and all you have to do is press the button that says record. And I have done the same thing. I’m looking at my Sony Digital Recorder that I picked up years ago for under $100 from Circuit City. And this is my work-horse. This is really when I started kicking butt with my audio recordings because before I realized that these little devices were out there I was using a piece of software online that was a lot more inferior. If anyone has listened to some of the earlier recordings on my site you can hear the difference in the quality. And there were problems with that. I didn’t have a reliable way to record interviews by phone. There is an interview with a guy named Jason Ryan Isaacson who interviewed me and I will have to thank him because he is the one who turned me on to the digital devices and that really freed me up for doing audio interviews without any hassles and without any problems. Also audio is a lot more natural. It’s me and you talking on the phone. You are asking me questions and I’m answering them.
And this is the natural state of conversation. With video there is a lot more production, a lot more scripting, a lot more storyboards and it’s not as easy. The interview style is proven to work since the beginning of TV. You know Eugene Schwartz talks about one of the very first infomercials that was ever done was called The Piano Man. It was actually a video infomercial but it was in an interview style.
Look at Oprah Winfrey and all the top leading interviewers out there is all interview style. And the reason I think it’s because it’s normal conversation. It’s what we have grown up with listening to our parents or our brothers and sisters or people talking. It’s not out of the ordinary so it doesn’t come across pushy or salesy [sp]. It’s just what we are used to in natural conversation. And it is a great way to sell and a great way to deliver information. Another wonderful reason to use digital audio is its mobile. And I wouldn’t probably say this for five years ago but think about it now you see the commercials and all the digital devices; the PDAs, cell phones, the iPod Nana, and MP3 players. These are devices that are getting cheaper and cheaper and cheaper.
Now with downloadable audio and MP3 files and the ability to deliver them to your market as simply as downloading it from the Internet you have a better outlet for distributing your audio. And audio can be listened to wall you are multitasking, while you are exercising, while you are sitting at your desk working. So I believe it gets more listenership than a video would because video you have to have your eyeballs on the screen and your ears engaged and you can’t multitask and do that. Audio can be turned into a CD that can be played in the car and you could have someone full attention and have them listen on CD. These are a couple of the other advantages as well.
BEN: What you are saying about audio is said to have more chances to sell a person on something because you may only watch a video once or twice because the TV is always being used by somebody else. But when you are driving your car around and stuff you’re taking that CD with you and this is for sales pitches obviously that I have been sold on Dan Kennedy’s magnetic marketing thing and I’ve heard that audio probably 10 times. I decided I finally had to buy it. If that had been a video I probably would never have bought it that fast. And something else you said look at the format of a Q&A. Going back to Eugene Schwartz and his book he talks about adopting and borrowing formats for a media that people are already using and trust.
Like a newspaper he would make an ad look like a newspaper article if you don’t want to make it look like an ad. Well if you are putting a sales pitch in the structure of a Q&A it doesn’t look like a sales pitch you are delivering it almost like an editorial style ad in a newspaper.
MICHAEL: Yeah I agree. Look at the news which people are conditioned to trust. You have news anchors delivering direct content to you but when there are reporters on location you have a Q&A style delivery. You have the anchor asking the on location reporter questions. It is an interview between anchor and reporter. And people are certainly conditioned to believe the news. And certainly feature articles in magazines are Q&A style. The question and answer style for delivering information is proven, tried and true. And people are conditioned to trust it and it works.
For information publishers and even for copywriters to gain intelligence in their research, I mean, copywriters, let’s face it researches most your work and if you are not getting the answers to what your market wants around your product and you are going to fail. And there is no other way to get those answers but to ask questions if you are doing the actual interviewing. Questions are the answer.
BEN: Now what if someone doesn’t have a book and maybe they just had an idea can they still used the message that you create your products with?
MICHAEL: The one fear that will stop people in their tracks from creating audio products or creating any products is 1) they believe they have to be the expert and they don’t have to be the expert. They don’t have to know anything. And you want it this way. Just about all of the products on my site except for one I position myself as not being the expert. I find the experts. And I’m just the guy asking the questions. I am just a deliverer of the answers for my potential customers and prospects. Looked at my site and you’ll see that the only subject I position myself as an expert is on how to create information products using audio and using the audio interview format. And I claim to be an expert because I have done it so many times. And it is real important when you’re creating information products that you don’t be the expert and there to get rid of your ego and be the deliverer of the information.
All you have to be is the guy who asks the expert the questions. Just like in this interview you are bringing expert content to your listeners. But you are just Ben Settle and you are asking the expert the questions. And I am sure you will agree he found some magic in that when it comes to maybe promoting a product that your expert offers in the magic is you interviewing the expert elevates your expert status even though you are not positioned as the expert people perceive you as being more of an expert on the subjects of the people that you are interviewing. Wouldn’t you agree?
BEN: Oh yeah.
MICHAEL: That’s the trick. That’s the magic that people don’t understand of what will happen. But the reality is I’m not much of an expert at anything except asking good questions and creating and editing good audio content. But because I have so much of it the magic is I am perceived as the amazing, world-class, marketing expert.
BEN: I would say that you are perceived as an expert because you told me about this before that as a celebrity actually people will call you up and say whoa I’m actually talking to you I have heard all of your interviews.
MICHAEL: This is just the magic of good marketing. This is the result of good marketing. I view myself as a somewhat average guy. I work hard. I love what I do. In the audio that I create I wanted to be the best. But this is nothing that any of your listeners can’t do. And you are absolute proof of this than. You are doing it and doing a great job. And you are going to be amazed as you continue to pile on more audio, better content at the results that it brings.
BEN: May I ask the question to if you don’t have a book or just an idea you mentioned the barter thing that you had joint venture with and we sold for what $1500.
MICHAEL: Yeah.
BEN: And that’s a 45 minute interview. It’s basically the system. That’s not like it takes you years to create that. It was like a day was that?
MICHAEL: It was a day. I’ll tell you exactly what it is and there are some good points that we can talk about that product, Barter Secrets.
This is a product that teaches people about the barter industry. It’s like a trade club. There are members all over the United States and all over the world who join this common club. It’s kind of like eBay anyone who signs up with eBay is a member of the eBay organization and they choose to buy products from each other. What’s great about that for eBay is that every time somebody buys a product on eBay, eBay makes a little piece of that action right? They make a percentage of the gross sales depending on how much the products sold for. And they make money on listing fees, subscription fees and products and services that they sell.
Well barter is the same thing. Look at the barter industry. There is a company called ITEX. ITEX is a trade organization; kind of compare them with eBay. ITEX has tens of thousands of members all over the country and they are inclined to buy from each other. And with barter you buy with trade credits which are kind of like dollars. They are dollars that can only be used within the barter organization. I had learned a couple of different lessons, one playing a monopoly game how valuable these dollars were and then I had learned how to buy these dollars at a discount because the dollars didn’t have as much value as a regular US dollar where you could spend a green dollar anywhere in the world and it’s got value, it’s expendable. But in a monopoly game I was playing you can only spend your monopoly money with the other three or four people you are playing with. So there is not as much value.
But I learned a little trick from someone when I was asking questions from someone who had more experience in the barter industry than I had. And she said something; she said you can just buy these trade dollars from other barter members at a discount. And I said really? And I had her turned me onto her source for trade dollars and sure enough it was true. I was able to buy trade dollars for up to 80% off the value. And I had a free recording on my website that explained the concept on how to do it. And I had a gentleman out of Washington who contacted me and wanted consulting specifically on how to do bartering. I think he paid me $700 for consulting and I explained to him in detail exactly how to do that. And one recording that he paid me explaining to him this technique became the foundation of our Barter Secrets Product. It’s just one 45 minute recording. Remember Rob from Washington?
BEN: Yeah.
MICHAEL: But how did I use audio to increase the value? What did we first start selling at? $297
BEN: It was really cheap I don’t remember the price.
MICHAEL: I think I even had it for free up on the site right?
BEN: You did originally.
MICHAEL: It went from being a free recording on my site to a product that sold for $297. And then we began to increase the product. But before we increased the product we had to increase the value of the product. What is the simplest way any of your listeners can increase the value of a product without too much time and without a headache? By adding more audio interviews. So when we sold the product for $297 it came with a one hour consultation with me. So as we started selling the product people were calling for a one on one consultation. They all had different questions things they didn’t understand. They all had different ideas and I did consultations. With their permission I recorded each one of the consultations and I think we have about eight hours of our best one-on-one consultations on this one concept.
So now a one 45 minute interview recording turned into eight additional one-on-one consultations on the subject of how to buy these trade dollars at a discount and how to do barter. I also did additional interviews with experts in the retail barter industry. So every time I did an interview I increased the value of the product. And then we increased the product to $497 and now we have increased it to $1497.
BEN: And I am sure it will probably go up as you add even more.
MICHAEL: You’re right. As a matter of fact and I just had a call from, I don’t know if you remember Marcelo he was one of the students and he contacted me. I haven’t talked to him in years. He is one of the one hour consults. He had a lot of questions. And I remember that consult because he didn’t understand. And he called me yesterday and I have an additional 20 minutes of consulting that I’m going to tack onto the end of that original recording that we did years ago about a successful transaction that he did and some problems he had as well.
BEN: So this just proves you can start with something that’s only a half hour consultation on getting a client and you can start selling that and build on it and just keep increasing the value.
MICHAEL: You’re listeners are talking on the phone every day and if they are not capturing and cloning and not recording their calls. If they are not recording their questions and answers, the same ones that they are giving over and over again if they are not recording their free advice they are going out for no money and their consulting that they are probably doing for free automatically they need to go to Circuit City or go on eBay and buy themselves a digital recorder and get the thing from RadioShack said they can start recording their calls even if they turn their recorder on and to start saving and collecting their recordings. Now you always want to get permission to record the calls from the people that you are talking to. But just by pressing that will record button you are capturing gold. You are capturing value today you can use and create into information and products.
BEN: Another thing that I wanted to ask you and I’m really glad that you were talking about that was how do you arrange it with people that you are interviewing so that you can keep the rights and you don’t have to pay them a royalty or anything?
MICHAEL: When I first started I had this audio release agreement that he used to use but I found that it was a real pain in the butt. So if you contacted me and said Michael you want to do and interview and let’s say we didn’t know which other and I said yes. You are going to be all paranoid because you want to market and maybe sell this interview down the road or repackage it and you want to rights. And that’s going to be a deal killer 50% of the time because little agreements and contracts like that scare people. So the way I handled it I didn’t even mention anything about rights unless you’re getting into larger products that something that you want to discuss. But on the day of the interview when he first talked to get ready to do an interview you say I’m going to start recording now, press the record button and then I would say something like Ben you understand that you are being recorded and you say yes and you understand that I am going to interview you on this subject and you understand that I have a full rights to do what ever I want with this interview. I can sell it. I can market it. I can repackage it. And you understand that you do not have the rights to do anything with it. You make the terms.
BEN: Does anyone ever get mad and ask why can’t they use it?
MICHAEL: Anything’s negotiable. I’m just saying depending on what you want to do, whatever you want you can negotiate it right there before the call and you have it recorded. And you have an agreement, a legal agreement between two people. Now we can talk about negotiating rights and how to do that a little bit later on if you’d like.
BEN: Yeah I was just thinking if worse comes to worst you can say we both have the rights to do whatever we want.
MICHAEL: You know as you get more experience under your belt and as you become more confident and as you have more successes you are going to ask more for what you want. A lot of people who don’t have the confidence and start doing interviews they are viewing it as a person they are interviewing is doing them a favor. The reason the interview process works if they are agreeing to an interview because they know that they are going to get some potential exposure. It’s no different than the press and the media or when Oprah has on stars. They come onto a show not just to come onto her show that they come onto her show because they have a new movie coming out. Like Sean Penn has a new movie coming out. You doing the interview there needs to be something in it for the person who is doing the interview with you and that is going to be that promotion; more exposure of their name, you may want to agree to do a joint venture where you promote their products. So there does have to be something in it for them. What is really important is you need to have the attitude from the start that you are doing them the favor they are not doing you to favor and that will take you a long way. Does that make sense?
BEN: Yes it does. You mentioned the HMA System and the Barter Secrets, can you give us some more examples of how you created high ticket products like this?
MICHAEL: My highest end product is when I’m actually working with clients to create an entire information product. Now I did an interview with a gentleman named Joe McVoy and he is a marketing expert and he had tons of experience of selling products into Wal-Mart. And after the first interview we were talking and we said we should create a product on how to get into Wal-Mart. And he said I have an entire outline for a product already written up in outline form on how to do that. So he and I negotiated a deal and on the negotiating partner I’ll tell you exactly how we did this in a nutshell. I agreed to co-create this product with him. I would be the interviewer. I would do all the production of the audio interviews. I would do all the editing. I would create audio transcripts and that the entire package together; the CD artwork, promotion, his copy and the sales letter.
He agreed to participate as the expert and to be interviewed. And what we negotiated was he would have total rights to the product to market and sell and then I would have total rights to the product to market and sell. We agreed to private label the product where he called that one thing that I called it another thing. And basically we would both be rewarded based on our ability to market. And that was a great negotiation. So this is a perfect example of how to negotiate a win-win deal. And as your confidence increases and you realize that you can interview anyone and be able to create any kind of information product that you want you’re going to want to get paid more for your own time and for your performance.
So I would tell you again and I keep coming back to confidence and imagine that you have the confidence already and that you really are an expert at interviewing because all that you need to be able to do is ask the questions and you will make more money from your negotiations because you will negotiate a right. Plus I have a great recording on negotiating on my site which any one of your listeners should listen to.
BEN: Okay. Can you give me another example of another product?
MICHAEL: Now here’s another product and I marked it on my site. I’m going to tell you the story of how this all came about. It’s kind of similar to the HMA.
About four or five years ago I was selling products on eBay and I was looking for seminars on eBay to sell. I found this guy selling his business buying course. And I contacted him and I said I’m really interested in this business buying course how many of these do you have? And the guy’s name was Art Hamel. Now back in the mid-80s, 1985 this guy was all over TV. He was in the seminar business putting people through a seminar. He put over 100,000 people through a seminar in Southern California area on how to buy a business. He was traveling on the seminar circuit with Robert Allen and E. Joseph Cossman and this guy was a big wheel back in the mid 80’s.
But he had just turned 70 and he was dumping his entire remaining inventory and I was looking for products to sell on my site. That very first time I talked to him he allowed me to interview him and anyone can listen to that very first interview on my site. I met him through eBay, he already had a seminar product, he was clearly an expert and I bought his remaining inventory on cassette tape. And for years I must have sold a couple hundred of them in its original form until we ran out of them. And then I got the exclusive rights to re-master those cassette tapes into a digital product. We had it put on CD. We turned his workbook into a digital workbook. We had transcripts made. Out of his 12 cassette tapes I had them transcribed and increased the value of his product by having the audio transcripts of cassette tapes. I took his cassette tapes and turned them into digital products so they can now be digitally downloaded from the internet. It was now a more convenient way for the customer to absorb and digest the information rather then listening on cassette tape or rather then listening on a CD, therefore increasing the value again. I then put them in a binder and had them digitized into a PDF which made it more accessible for people with a laptop or people online to go to the audio therefore increasing the value again.
Now I increased the value three times right there without doing one interview. But I did start doing interviews with him. He sends 2004 I have done an additional audio interviews with Art Hamel but here’s the catch or we give away specifics on how to buy a million-dollar business for free. And I give them away for free in the form of audio interviews up on my site. Then you and I worked on this and you created a sales letter for the product which we have pasted right under all those three audio interviews.
Now if I had the chance to gain some mind share and get into the head of those people interested in owning their own business and they want to learn from an expert and I have given away 12 of 13 hours of free audio interviews, transcripts that they can download. I’m getting mind share I have gotten their attention and there is no resistance for them to listen to the information from my expert and I have a better chance of selling them that product, that workbook or that course and then some additional bonuses which they don’t get for free. And we started selling a product for $297 and we increased the price to $497 and now we are up to $1497. This is a $1500 product which is making us more money then when we were selling it for the lower price.
BEN: You know me another good thing you did but that was when we first started selling that we were getting questions from people about business plans. So what you did was found some more experts and added that the course just using audio.
MICHAEL: That’s right. If you’re creating information products and you are using an outline of a book or stuff that expert has there is another way which we describe in detail in my audio marketing secrets products. Let’s say Art Hamel didn’t cover some subjects that we were getting questions from students about. Then all I had to do was find another expert and interview them and include that in the package. So another great way of increasing and bumping up the value of your existing product is still additional interviews with other experts other than your main expert of the product that you’re selling. So we did. We did interviews on financing with a bank financer. We did two additional interviews with Angel Investors, from the UK and one from Australia.
Another thing which I thought was the question you’re going to ask which is really valuable for online marketers is when I would get questions about the course from students I would get lists and lists of questions. I would save up all of these questions and in three of the interviews I have questions and answer Part 1, Part 2 and Part 3 with Art Hamel I would have all the questions from the students and I would call Art and I would say I have some more questions from students why don’t we just record these and we’ll have them and we don’t have to keep answering them. And then I would just ask him questions directly from the students. And those became question and answer interviews. Answering the specific questions from the specific students of exactly what they wanted to know. So answering the questions about your products that you’re selling can become interviews that will help you sell your product but more importantly it puts your sales process on automatic because those questions and answers are sitting right there for your prospect to listen to in the form of an audio or to read in transcript form.
And I want to remind your listeners the whole point of this audio interview and delivering audio interviews online is to free up your time. You don’t want to be sitting there answering the same questions over and over again. There are a lot of other things that you could be doing like going down to the Bay, going running, having lunch with your wife or playing with your kids. The whole point and the most valuable thing piece of audio interviews have done for me is to free up my time. And again I’ll go back by you not having a recording device to record the things that you’re saying over and over and over again wasting time is a shame. You need to start capturing and leveraging your time by delivering the answers to things that you’re dealing manually in the form of digital audio on a website.
BEN: The next question I have for you is, and I know a lot of people are probably thinking this is how long it takes to create these things?
MICHAEL: That all depends. It depends on the price of the product. If it depends on how detailed the product is. It depends on how much time you want to put into it. We’ll use the example of the first Barter secret recording when I did that 45 minute interview with Rob. That only took 45 minutes to do that audio interview and I didn’t have to edit it. It could be raw and unedited and could have still sold for the same price.
I’ll give you another example. I took on a client and a guy named J.D. Miller who is a CPA and he approached me to develop a full on information products on all his teachings on financial mastery in investing strategy. And I will tell you if you are creating products with clients using audio interviews of yourself twice the time that you think it’s going to take. We started this time last year and we agreed that we would have it finished by January so three or four months was the ETA for the time and we are not even finished yet. It’s almost a year later. So when you are developing full on information products it can take several months, maybe even half a year it depends on how much stuff you are doing.
And I guess the mistakes that I made and that I would do differently when committing to a big project like that is 1) I would always get at least half your money up front before you start the project. 2) I would get a schedule that they can commit to of what we are going to do, win and I would get a time of when the product is to be complete. And I would get an agreement in writing. See I am always ready to go to create the product on time enter copywriters can probably relate to this when they are hired to do copywriting. You are probably ready to go to the copywriting but you’re at the mercy of getting all the information you need from them. They have to prepare and they’re the ones dragging their feet. So is reported to get half the money up front and to get a time commitment. And if they can’t to fulfill on the time commitment and they are on-time payments that they have to pay you on a certain time schedule then they have to have some leverage or money in the game to keep from dragging their feet.
BEN: This is if you were going to do this for someone else at the service.
MICHAEL: Yeah that’s the high end or the longest ever taken could be a year. I just completed a product with Nick Gilbert called Gorilla Internet Marketing Tactics. It’s a product on Internet marketing and that took us probably three months to do. It consisted of about 10 hours of audio recordings and audio interviews. But I want to tell you your product is really never done because you can always keep increasing the value of it. For instance with Nick maybe today or maybe tomorrow then, if I had an idea, you note your minds always thinking and I’m always thinking how can I bump up the value of this product. And I had some problems online where someone hacked into my michaelsenoff.com site. A phishing scam you know, those eBay phishing scams.
BEN: Yeah.
MICHAEL: Well there was a phishing scam on my michaelsenoff.com site and I started getting e-mails from people saying hey what’s this you are trying to get my username and password for eBay and I don’t have an eBay account. And I would ask for the league and they would send it to me and you could see that it came from michaelsenoff.com. Now Nick Gilbert, the host of my site, fortunately I have a great relationship with him and he handles my server and everything. We got on it right away and took care of the problem but it just made me think how vulnerable curse of servers and people who are running websites really are. It made me realize how people can take any website and really destroy your business so I said why don’t we do an interview and add value to this Gorilla Internet Marketing course that we put together and let’s come up with 15 Internet security blunders that most people are making and how to avoid them. And you should see the stuff that we have on this is amazing. And it is all about how hackers can destroy your site and how you can protect yourself. You simply won’t find information like this anywhere. And this is extremely valuable information that I had to dig out of him because he is so knowledgeable about all of this hacker stuff and Internet security and that is very valuable information. And we are going to add that to the product.
So you are always going to be thinking about how we can increase the value of the product. The more you talk the more you make. The more audio you have, the more transcripts you have the more you can sell your product for. So you should always be growing your product or at least thinking about how you can increase the value of your product by doing another audio interview. If you just dedicated yourself to nailing out a product and that’s all you did you could do 10 or 15 hours of audio interviews in a week and you could have a full on product. I have a lot of other things going so you just want to pace yourself and if you really needed to get a product out you could do it within a week a full on product. If you have other things going you just have to schedule it.
BEN: You were talking about that. You hear the seven dollar reports going on. Well you could probably do that with every interview while you are building your product. You could sell the first one while you’re building the rest of them and every time you do a new one you could sell it by itself and then put it all together into one big course later. But you would be making money the whole time.
MICHAEL: You could do that. As you’re building a product you could sell it. You could give it away free. You can have the little advertisement at the end of each interview that directs them to a call to action for more information go here and direct them to a sales letter. It’s all about packaging. It’s just like I have 117 hours of audio interviews on my site. You’ll notice that I have started packaging them. I have gone through the ones and I have created categories.
For instance I have a category called Fast Cash Audio Interview Series where there are interviews on how anyone can listen to one of these interviews and go out and make $100 a day. For instance there is an interview with a window washer and I get specific information and we do three-way calls where we go get window washing accounts. You will hear us do it over the phone live. Anyone can do it if they are really motivated. It doesn’t take a lot of money to get started. There is an interview with the guy who does a cleaning business where you can start your own cleaning business just by using your phone and getting other people to do everything for you. I have an interview with a guy who is in a lawn care business. These are labor intensive things but if someone needed to make some fast cash. We interviewed him on how to make money cutting yards, how to make money cleaning gutters and how to make money delivering mulch. There are two or three interviews on how to install door viewers. Where you go around with your drill and installed the little peep holes in the door and you provide that as a service. I have a whole category of audio interviews where I have taken all of my interviews related to sales and sales training. I have an interview with Tom Hopkins. I have an interview with a master sales trainer out of Australia.
BEN: This is the end of part one. Please go to part two.
If you would like to order Michael’s information product creation system now at a substantial discount especially prepared for my listeners you can go to:
MICHAEL: So now I’m creating categories and packaging my audio interviews. And they can be packaged a thousand different ways. In this interview Ben we are talking about a lot of different things. We can market or package this interview and gear it towards copywriters on how to do better research using audio interviews for your copywriting clients. But we could also take the same interview and you can include it with a package of interviews for information on marketing to publishers, people who create information products. Each one of your interviews is very flexible. It’s all in the headline and the description of how you position the audio interview. So it can be repackaged. I can take one interview and package it for 5 or 6 different products. Does that make sense?
BEN: Yeah. The number things that you can do with it are unlimited.
MICHAEL: It’s endless and it’s easier and faster then writing it all out. That’s the bottom line. Writing is painful. It’s hard work.
BEN: And that’s one of the reasons the transcripts help so much. All your research as far as the product is concerned is in there.
MICHAEL: Well for copywriters and you know this, you have been a copywriter for a long time. There was copywriting before you used audio interviews to write copy and there’s copywriting after you started using audio interviews to write your copy. You tell me from a copywriters standpoint which one do feel is more effective, better research and easier to do.
BEN: The interviews easily cut the time and effort in half if not more then that.
MICHAEL: Now I’m not the first person doing this and neither are you. Eugene Schwartz in the board room, this is exactly what he did with Marty Olson. He interviewed him. They met in person he sat back, shut his mouth, and Eugene Schwartz listened to the dreams and ideas of Marty Edelston. And he just took notes.
BEN: And then he just asked the right questions.
MICHAEL: He asked the right questions and that was 90% of his letter. You know copywriters need to be better listeners. They just need to listen when they are doing their research and they need to use those exact same words in their sales letter. But they also need to use their copywriting skills and their headlines to create the transitions and everything. But any copywriter listening, hiring someone to interview their subject would be extremely valuable in the form of saving time, in getting better quality research. You really need someone who knows how to ask questions. The copywriter should really dig deep and do audio interviews, more so by phone using audio in an interview process one-to-one rather then just writing questions down and submitting them through e-mail because you are able to dig deeper when you are on the phone with them one-on-one with them.
BEN: They won’t answer anything in an e-mail. Most people don’t want to write and I don’t blame them.
MICHAEL: You have to make it easy for them.
BEN: You’re right. You have to ask them and dig it up. This is why I don’t like e-mail interviews. You have seen those before and what people say I’m going to denote the guy some questions and he’ll send me back the answers. But he is not going to give you detailed answers in writing.
MICHAEL: No because it’s hard and no one wants to work but it’s not hard to talk. That’s what makes it all work. It is not hard to talk. Everyone can talk and everyone’s got ideas that they want to share and everyone wants to talk about themselves. And if you are the guys it’s a good listener and willing to listen then they will tell you everything you want to hear and they will tell you for free.
BEN: Yeah. I’m thinking about the scooter report we interviewed the guy for about an hour at the most and that was the whole letter. I didn’t have to research the whole subject it was all there.
MICHAEL: Right in major job a lot easier. If I said Ben do you want to do a copywriting project here’s this guy’s name Buck Gladden and he has this invention and here is the link to the site and you can go ahead and whip up the sales letter.
BEN: Yeah that would have been hard.
MICHAEL: You would have said hell no.
BEN: That wouldn’t even have worked because you are getting the stories.
MICHAEL: I’ll tell you this quick story. This is the story you and I had an idea to sell a high ticket product from this guy with an invention on eBay. He was selling this thing called a scooter port. It was sort of a kickstand for a kick scooter like those little razor scooters. You put the front wheel in this plastic device and it holds the scooter upright. Normally these razor scooters don’t have kickstand. So this guy developed this thing with a classic injection mold and he had sales in some of the big catalogs like Front Gate and QVC and he was selling the business on eBay. So I contacted him and I asked if we could help sell the business and in you and I were going to help create a sales letter and we were going to sell it using a sales letter and using audio interviews to promote and sell the business. So you agreed and I called him up and I did an intensive interview and then I gave you the interview and that’s how you created the sales letter.
BEN: Yeah there was very little outside research. I think I had two questions or something and that was it.
MICHAEL: This is a great example of another way you can use audio to sell something. Just like every copywriter knows you could use a sales letter to sell anything from BMW’s to Rolls-Royce is to million-dollar mansions. Well you can use audio to do the same thing probably just as effectively may be even better.
BEN: There are the two mediums and you have a powerful set up there. For anyone who would like to see the actual sales letter that I wrote for this invention directly from the audio interview that Michael did with the guy that invented that scooter port I will show you where to get it at the end of this interview.
MICHAEL: Now let’s talk about that for online marketers something that I just started doing and it did in the economy. I have all kinds of sales letters all over my website. Well now I’m actually reading the sales letters into a digital audio recording and offering for download. I say if you don’t have time to read the sales letters here download the MP3 file of the word for word sales letter. You know the whole idea of the sales letter is if you can get opened and you can get it read you have a better chance of selling what you’re selling.
But a lot of people don’t have time online. They are at work, the phone rings, they get distracted but if I can give them the option to download the word for word sales letter in the form of an MP3 file they can take it home and put it on their iPod and listen to it on the way home or burn a CD real quick and put it in their car. So I had increased my chances of getting in their mind, getting my sales pitch into their head by offering a downloadable audio.
BEN: Well you think about it selling by voice is way more powerful than reading it.
MICHAEL: Right.
BEN: And you’re just adding extra layer of persuasion.
MICHAEL: There is definitely another dimension when you’re selling by voice compared to paper absolutely.
BEN: Now I want to shift into more of the technical. We have talked about what we can do with these things and all that but I want to get down to the nitty-gritty here as to how we start preparing here to do these interviews whether you’re creating a sales letter type interview or a product. First of all you outline what you say? Do you ask the questions first or do you just kind of wing-it?
MICHAEL: You know when I first started I used to wing it. If I said to any of your copywriters listening to write a letter and asked them if they just wing it or do they prepare before they write a sales letter obviously preparing and doing your research is the most important thing.
Now it depends on the type of interview I do and they are different formats of interviews that your listeners or anyone interested in creating audio information products can do. If you have a list of customers by far the easiest and one of the most powerful ways is simply by asking your customers to submit questions. So anyone on my list has probably in an e-mail that says I’ll be interviewing Vic Conant CEO of Nightingale Conatn and this is your time to ask him questions. All questions will be answered and I will be doing the interview this Tuesday so go ahead and reply to this e-mail. Ask as many questions as you want about Nightingale Conant, about how to create winning audio information products and I’ll submit that to my list and I will get dozens sometimes over a hundred questions from my subscribers. And then I know that I’m going to get my listeners exactly what they want to know. So I’ll take those questions and I’ll remove the duplicates and I will prioritize them. The best most compelling questions are put in front. So I will go to this question and I will list them and I’ll organize them in a way that will make a great interview. And this from an interviewing standpoint is cake.
This is easy because my customers have already done all the work. And I know that I’m going to be delivering exactly what they want to know. So it’s a question and answer style interview. So I call Vic Conant I don’t have to dream up anything. I just say Vic how are you doing. Are you ready to get into it? I have questions submitted from my listeners at Hard To Find Seminars and the first question is from Ben Settle who is a copywriter and he wants to know, and I read your question. And I listened for his answer. Now when he gets the answer a good interviewer will really be listening and I can dig even deeper. And I can sample why is that or if he talks about certain aspects in the answer to that question than I can go off on a tangent. So once I get the ball rolling I can keep expanding on that question. It’s just like when a copywriter start writing once he starts writing he can get into a mode where he never stops.
BEN: You’ve been doing that right now. I’ve been asking you questions based on other questions that I wasn’t even an intending on asking. So that is a perfect example.
MICHAEL: That’s right. You’re the interviewer. You’re doing the interview. This is a little different because I’m the guy being interviewed. I’m usually the guy giving the interview and its much easier being where you are and being the guy answered the questions. That’s also what’s great. I am right now positioned as the expert and it’s a lot harder on me than it is on you Ben. I would rather not be the expert and just be the guy asking the questions and just get all that free marketing benefit.
BEN: Milk all the money from the expert without doing any of the work really.
MICHAEL: That’s right. I don’t know anything.
BEN: And that’s probably the best way to do it because if you’re amazed or astonished by something you didn’t know it’s going to come across. I mean you’ve been saying things that I didn’t know you’ve doing. I didn’t know you were reading sales letters into the mp3. That’s a great idea.
MICHAEL: So that question and answer interview style is the easiest and just one format. Now there is another interview style and I’ll give you an example. I just did a 2 hour interview that was like a mini-seminar with a guy named Paul McCord. And he has a best selling book called Million Dollar Referrals. It’s all over Amazon and I was referred to him. I was approached to do an interview to promote him. I negotiated a 50% affiliate deal where I would do the interview and I would start creating audio interviews around his expertise similar to what I have been doing in the past based on referral marketing. And he has a high end referral coaching program which is multiple thousands of dollars per year which is what my intentions are to promote. Now in that interview there was a lot more preparation.
But I’m going to show your listeners how easy that is to do especially, with Amazon. The first thing I did was I went to his website. He has a great website with questions and answers. So I can take those questions and answers where he’s answering the most common questions that he believes visitors to his website wanting to know about referral marketing need to know. So I’ll look at his questions and start reformatting his questions for my interview. I’ll look at the products he has. He has a couple of audio products he sells and he has a book. But first I’ll look at the products, I’ll look at the headlines he has and the descriptions with all the bullets so I can form more questions from those bullets of the descriptions of the products he is selling on his website. Then we have his book. I go over to Amazon and search for his book. Amazon allows you to look inside the book. You can look at the table of contents.
Now you better believe when someone produces a book that they put a lot of time and thought into creating that table of contents. And now I have additional content for more questions as an outline for my interview. Then what I’ll do is print out that table of contents and I can reformat more questions for my interview. Then I’ll look in the index. In Amazon.com you can usually see the index in the very back of the book. There is even more detailed stuff. So I will look through the index and try and find, kind of like when you are writing copy you want to look for hooks and bullets. You want to look for really cool stuff that you can talk about and I’ll write that down and include that in my list. If I wanted to do additional research I may Google referral marketing. I may look at other people who are marketing and selling information products based on referral marketing. I’ll look at their sales letters and look at their bullets. So it’s not hard to do the research on the internet and find plenty of content of people who have already done the research before you and to put that in the form of questions for your specific interview and start with that. So you are never going to be drawing a blank. You will have plenty of questions to draw from on the interview. Another thing that is really important and you and I talked about this recently is story sell. I now make it a point before I do the interviews and with Paul McCord I said Paul this is what I need you to do to prepare for the interview. I want you to think back and write down 10 case studies, 10 stories of students that you have worked with for your referral coaching and in the interview we are going to interject these stories all through the interview.
So stories sell. People like to listen to stories. And this worked really well in the case of the Paul McCord interview because we picked 5 case studies to include in the interview and what I found when I was doing this interview with him we started off with stories from the very beginning. And it was kind of cool because I positioned him as the expert but when I said Paul can you tell me a case study of some stories of people you know or worked with who have really increased their income using referral marketing or using referral’s. So he goes into this story about some of his clients. So he’s talking about another guy who used referrals to increase his business so it’s almost two people away. I’m listening to this story, he’s listening to this story, the listeners listening the story about someone else in the interview and then as he’s telling the stories I had all these additional questions in my research with all the bullets but I found that in the story I was already answering the questions from the bullet and the research that I found from his site.
So as I ask more questions about that story and by the time we got through all 5 of his cast studies and all his stories. I was able to get through most of the content in the questions that I already had prepared for that interview. Does that make sense?
BEN: Yeah it just cuts your workload down even more at that point.
MICHAEL: You just want to be prepared and never run out of anything. If you’ve prepared and read though your questions and you’ve don’t your research. You really don’t have to look at them. Like before we were doing this interview I prepared answers for your questions but honestly I haven’t even looked at it. But it’s like a just in case because I don’t want to leave anything out and I want to give your listeners as much values as possible.
BEN: If you would like to order Michael’s information product system now at a substantial discount especially prepared for my students. You can go:
You just talked about getting people to do video stories and that can carry the interview. But some people are scared of the internet and web. I don’t know, I guess some people are really different. Some people you really have to dig those stories out. What do you do when you are interviewing somebody who is quiet and it’s hard to get them to elaborate on anything?
MICHAEL: Well it depends on why you are doing the interview. And there is another thing that your listener’s should understand. All your interview subjects are not going to be dynamic interviews. It depends on what the interview is for. Are you building value to an existing product that you are already selling? So for Art Hamel I interviewed an expert named Barry on bank financing. He was not the most exciting guy but he didn’t have to be because the people were already buying the product but I had additional valuable information on how to get bank financing. He didn’t have to be exciting. He wasn’t really selling anything. I was using him to increase the value of my Art Hamel product. Along that same line if you have a product that you want to increase the value of a big name in the industry would be very valuable.
That’s called marquee value. What you want is his big name. You want to be able to say included with this package is an interview with X. It doesn’t even have to be a long interview because that interview’s purpose isn’t to sell anything the purpose for that interview is to increase the perceived value of your information product. Are you with me?
BEN: Absolutely. It’s like you have someone who is the super star but you just have that name to put on the actual interview or sales letter. It has done its job.
MICHAEL: That’s right. It has done its job. That’s called marquee value. Now another thing to keep in mind is that you need to ask yourself why am I doing this interview? So from my sight HardToFindSeminars.com I needed an interview on the subject of negotiation. So I sent out a couple of e-mails to experts in the field and the purpose of me doing an interview on negotiation was to round out my portfolio on my website on different subjects. So I found a great guy in negotiating that I interviewed and the only purpose of that interview was to increase the variety of the interviews. So now I can say I have an interview with a master on negotiating. Now I want interviews on my site to be kick-ass so I want to make sure that interviews on the stuff I am giving away for free are great because if you’re putting out boring interviews for free that aren’t on a backend for a product that people are selling. It’s going to hurt your brand. It’s going to hurt your image. You don’t want to publish anything that is boring. If you are picking interviews and you are creating a product which you are selling and it’s a collection of interviews. You really do want to find the most exciting and best interview subjects because no one wants to listen to a boring interview.
BEN: All these people who are willing to tell us a couple of stories they can’t be reserved and tell back.
MICHAEL: Yeah if you get into an interview like that and it’s to build an information product that’s okay. But I wouldn’t publish 3 interviews that are really, really bad because you only have one chance to make a first impression and your listeners may believe that your other interviews are really that bad. It just all depends on what the purpose of your interview is. You have to ask yourself that question. And another thing that I am always asked is how do I get these interviews with these experts. And in your special offer at the end of this recording I’m going to provide for your listeners the exact e-mail and letter that I use to get these interviews. Any one of your listeners can take this letter and modify it and use it to set up great interviews with experts just like I have done. Does that answer your question?
BEN: Yes. In fact you just led into the next question. I assume that’s one of the mistakes that people might make when they are making audio products like this. What are some of the other mistakes people might make?
MICHAEL: My current interview is that at least for the last couple of years I edit these things meticulously. Now I used to edit them all myself, the entire interview. I have built up to where I have an editor that does all the preliminary editing.
Now when we are talking about editing what are we talking about? When we do this audio interview it’s sort of like when a producer shoots a movie. Then it goes to editing and probably 80% of the film is destroyed and you just have what’s left, the finest of shots. Copywriters can relate to this. Audio editing is like your final draft compared to your first draft. You get rid of all your mistakes, all the um’s and ah’s, the double talks and beeping of the phone. You want to clean that recording up. And why are you doing this? You want to make the listening experience for your listener as enjoyable as possible. They don’t want to hear you telling jokes and laughing. They don’t want to hear um’s or ah’s. They want to hear a clean recording. They want to hear the information delivered to them as cleanly and efficiently as possible and they want to hear it in a timely manner. They don’t want their time wasted. They want the good stuff, the information, the valuable stuff.
So I would say that one of the biggest mistakes is people developing and putting out audio that is unedited. First a copywriter would never put out a rough draft to sell a final product. Those final sales letters are polished. They are meticulously checked for spelling mistakes. Words are edited and added. That is a lot of hard work to edit audio. One hour of audio can take up to 5 hours of editing so one mistake is not editing your audio. Another big mistake I see if people go to a website they may read a description of an audio online and then they may download it. And that audio, you have to keep in mind is shared and passed along. It is burned on CD’s and uploaded for friends. You need to have an introduction to that audio. You need to have an introduction that says who you are, who is doing the interview, who are you interviewing and what is the listener going to here before that interview starts to play because you put everything into perspective. Doing audio recordings without an introduction is a big mistake. If you’re marketing and selling you also want to promote yourself in the audio. You’ll notice that throughout all my most recent audio interviews 10 minutes into an audio you’ll hear a blurb that says “Hi you’re listening to an audio from Michael Senoff’s HardToFindSeminars.com” and then 30 minutes into the interview “For more interviews on sales, marketing and advertising go to HardToFindSeminars.com”.
And then you want an ending. If you have a two part interview you want to end part 1 by saying something like this ends part 1 please continue to part 2 because you need to assume that the people listening to your audio interviews are stupid. You have to tell them exactly what to do. A lot of my interviews are all posted on i-Tunes so I’m using these audio interviews on i-Tunes to get people to my site.
Another costly mistake people make when they are doing audio interviews and they are posting them online is to not have the ID tags. Now when you put a CD in your player when you are listening to radio you see who the artist is and what the song it called. These are tags that you can code your audios with. Now I have my assistant do all of this for me so I can’t explain exactly how that’s done but I have over 200 audio interviews that are available through i-Tunes. If you search Michael Senoff on i-Tunes you will see them all and you will see when it holds that listing you will see the artist is Michael Senoff and you will see my url from HardToFindSeminars.com. And also the iPods can alphabetize their play lists, their song listings. So you need to keep in mind that it always goes back to paying attention how the end user is using your audio and there are fortunate people using the audio. They are downloading it and they are sharing it with their friends. They are organizing it on their iPods, cell phones, PDA’s, Blackberry’s and on multiple devices that are coming out. So that’s a mistake not doing the ID3 tags.
Another mistake like in copywriting is not having a call to action at the end of the interview or even through out the interview. If we are doing an audio infomercial designed to sell a product I may want to direct the listener several times through out the interview “for more information go to” and you give them a url. Or for more information call 1-800-982-6487. Give them a call to action throughout the interview but at the very end of the interview you want to thank the listener for listening. Thank you for listening to this audio recording with referral expert Paul McCord. If you would like more information on his coaching program please call and then you give the number. Now I have a whole series on the call to action and this is really, really important when you are creating and developing information products.
I have a proprietary way that I learned based on an experience how to get paid for what you are doing. If you negotiate deals with somebody and you are using audio recordings to promote and sell them. With the internet you don’t want other people using your audio to sell a similar product they are using. And I’ve got ways and tips and tricks that will show you how to keep people from stealing your audio content and from profiting from your audio content which we can talk about later maybe. Ben here is one of the biggest mistakes. When you are doing your audio interviews, yes you are there to ask questions.
But the biggest mistake is not listening. And because you are doing the interview you’re ego is going to get in the way and it’s going to say ask the question, talk more, I’m doing the interview, I want to be heard more. You’re going to want to pipe in and talk more in the interview. And I think that’s a mistake because you’re doing the interview and you’re really just the guy asking the questions. They don’t want to hear you they want to hear your expert. And by you piping in and talking more I think that’s a big mistake. I think bad language in an interview is a mistake. I think joking and laughing in the interview, in my opinion, lessens the effectiveness, the selling power in the interview. There is nothing funny about making money. You know, ask the wife of the guy who’s having a hard time paying the mortgage and he’s trying to make some money if there is anything funny about that. It’s not. I would edit out any kind of giggling, laughing and jokes during the interview.
BEN: When I was going through your audio marketing secrets course what I thought was one of the highlights was when you show us how to make multiple sales from that one sale of that one product. You show us how to make multiple sales once they buy that one product without doing anything. It’s just automatic. Can you explain that a little bit?
MICHAEL: Sure. I’ll give you 3 examples of how this can be done and 2 examples of exactly how I’m doing it in current products that I’m marketing. Let’s say one of your listeners wants to create an information product on information publishing and it’s going to be a collection of 10 different audio interviews with experts in the information products publishing industry. Well let’s say that I’m putting that product together and I’m going to set up 10 interviews with experts on information products and I do those 10 interviews. Those 10 interviews are my product. That’s my product, 10 audio interviews that I have on CD and on transcript. It’s a complete expert’s guide on Developing and Creating Information Products. So there is my product that I’m selling whether in digital form for $97 or $497 or I could build the value up and it could sell for $1,997.
But if you really want to be smart about it before you agree to interview these 10 experts because there are probably 200 experts on information product developing. You want to negotiate back end deals with each one of these experts. You can bet that these information product publishers have an inventory of information products. They have sales letters already developed. They may already have audio content that helps sell their information products. And you want to negotiate affiliate deals with them. You want to say I’m going to interview you, your interview will be part of a product that I’m going to sell but if I direct people to this product that you have I want a deal where I make 50% affiliate commission or you could negotiate a product that they are currently not doing anything with. You want to talk with them and get to know what they have that they have not done anything with. You might be able to negotiate rights to a product to where you can pay them 20% of the gross sale and you make 80%. So at the back end of each one of the interviews that audio interview is going to be designed to give real good value to your listener but you are also going to be selling, pushing and promoting that information product that you set up an affiliate deal with each one of those 10 experts. So now your 10 audio interviews not only can you sell them and make money but you can also give those away for free still with the potential of making you money. Does that make sense?
BEN: Yeah. You can basically sell the product and then there is instant built in back end sales within the product itself without having to do anything.
MICHAEL: That’s right. And some can be very high end. And example of one of my products that I sell, I don’t want to mention which one but there is a product that I sell and it’s a product that sells for over $1,000 on my site and I make good money from selling that initial product but there is a back end potential on that product that can make me anywhere from $30,000 to $100,000.
Here is another example: As you create products out there and audio interviews. You have to understand that if you are getting them played you want to be able to create different products and services that you can sell. Now as you go through any of my interviews on my site and all the different products you will hear me promoting on the end of my audio interviews some of my higher end services. One is an audio infomercial service where anyone who has a product sitting there and they want a hard hitting audio recording that’s designed to sell the product, and I charge $2,000 for that service. Then there is the audio creation product. This is where someone wants me to work with them and create an entire product from start to finish. Now I can charge anywhere from $20,000 to $40,000 for something like that. Now here is another tip and it has to do with tips. At the end of each one of my free recordings you will hear “Here’s another tip from Michael Senoff’s HardToFindSeminars.com. If you go to Page H on my site you’ll hear 20 hours of free recordings on how to become a marketing consultant” or you’ll hear on another recording “Here’s another tip from Michael Senoff’s HardToFindSeminars.com. Go to the section on my site that says products”.
So I am directing the listeners of these audio recordings. I am informing and educating them about different parts of my site designed to sell them something. I have said in other interviews that my site is like the monkey maze at the county fair. You know when you go into the fun house and it has all the mirrors and you go in and it’s like a maze of mirrors and you get lost in the mirrors. You know what I’m saying?
BEN: Yeah.
MICHAEL: I want people to come get lost in my site. And as they start listening to these audio interviews I want them hooked. But make no mistake my site is designed to yes give away more value then anyone else on the internet is but it is also designed to create a sale. And I’m using every part of that real estate which is my audio recording; the beginning, middle, end, empty space on a 70 minute audio CD is real estate. If you are putting out audio recordings on a CD that are only 40 minutes then you have 30 minutes of additional listening time that you can fill up with additional sales material in the form of audio.
BEN: You could put a bonus audio on there couldn’t you?
MICHAEL: Absolutely. And I have on the end of CD products added “here’s a bonus recording.” Because when someone listens to an audio on the CD they are in their car and let’s say that the recording is only 30 minutes and it comes to the end, that’s it. But you’ve got their attention. You have them listening. You can say “here’s an unexpected bonus for the last 20 minutes of this CD and it’s a recording about”. It could be one of your other audio recordings designed to sell one of your affiliate product deals. Don’t ever put out a CD that isn’t filled up with all 70 minutes of listening time.
Another great idea and it’s kind of an advanced marketing tactic, and Ben I was going to ask you about this. When you put out all of your audio recordings why don’t we do a deal where you give me the last 20 minutes of each one of your CD’s to put my stuff on.
BEN: Yeah.
MICHAEL: You know what I’m saying. I’m kind of joking but it’s serious. You have people putting out CD products with this empty real estate at the end of their CD.
BEN: It just adds value to it.
MICHAEL: That’s right. It adds value and you can buy that piece of real estate. You can buy that chance to get your products message and get ahead of the listener.
BEN: If you were putting these on your website you could actually sell that as advertising space to other people doing audio.
MICHAEL: Yes you could. That is audio advertising space.
BEN: And you could change it every month whenever you want.
MICHAEL: Yeah if you wanted to, as digital download you could.
BEN: So you have given a lot of information away in this interview, probably more then enough for someone to at least get started. But you and I both know that these types of basics only get you so far.
But when you want to get into the upper level and make a lot of money doing it the way you have $5,000 product and such you probably need a little more instruction on this. So I know you created this product called audio marketing secrets and I know you have agreed to give my subscribers a very, very huge discount on that, probably more than anyone else is getting, even those on your own list.
Can you tell us a little about that and where they can find it?
MICHAEL: Sure. Audio Marketing Secrets like I said earlier in the interview, every other product that I market on my site, I am not the expert. This is the only product that I position myself as an expert.
And it is a product that I developed called audio marketing secrets. And in a nutshell it basically gives you a systemized step-by-step way of turning your $28 book or just an idea in your head into a $3,900 informational product. Now it could be a $5,900 informational product, it could be a $100 informational product, $497, $297, $1,497. It all depends.
The more you talk, the more you make. And this product goes into detail and step by step of exactly how to do it. It is a digital product where you download the MP3 audio recordings and there are word for word transcripts and some of the topics we talk about are how to turn the $28 book into a $3,900 information package.
We cover 7 fatal mistakes that will kill the creation of your audio program dead. You get the full report in audio downloads. There are front line secrets from the trenches, break through audio creation report, 17 road blocks that can stop you from making your information product and how to get around them fast. There is fast track audio creation guide. These are 17 secrets to planning your audio in the fastest possible time.
And also with your paid order you get a half hour one-on-one audio informational product consultation. That’s worth $350. I charge $700 an hour for consulting by phone and you’ll get a full 30 minutes with me to discuss anything you want about an idea in your or any information product that you are trying to ad value to or you’re trying to market.
Now the real value in this is I have been selling this product for a number of years and I have done a lot of these consultations. And I have gone through all my audio consults that I have done with people with ideas of information products and I have picked out 15 of the best ones. So you get 15 hours of me consulting one-on-one with people on ideas on creating their information product.
Now I’ve given you a lot of information in this audio interview Ben but you have an additional 15 hours of me giving my best advice when I’m really on my game to help these people create and develop information products. So by the time someone studies these 15 hours of consultations they are going to really have all the knowledge, every trick I use, how to do the editing, the software, what to get from radio shack and you will have step by step of exactly what I have learned based on my experience developing and creating all these information products in this product.
BEN: You have been really gracious enough to give my subscribers what I think is an extremely generous discount of what I believe is 67% off. And you can get that only by going to:
Now he’s not even giving this great a deal to his own subscribers.
MICHAEL: You can go to my site and go to my products page and look at how to turn a $28 book into a $3,900 information product and you’ll see how much I am selling it for and I’m not lowering the price. And you can see this special offer that your subscribers can get it for. And you’ll see quite a savings.
BEN: It’s a no-brainer I believe. Thank you Michael for doing this a lot of people are going to get a lot of value out of this.
MICHAEL: Ben it was my pleasure and I hope I have educated and answered questions on how to create audio and turn them into information products. I would just encourage your students who have thought about doing this to just go for it. Why don’t you tell Ben, I know for years that you thought about it? What were your fears and what finally kicked you in the butt to actually do it?
BEN: I have to tell you it has taken enough hassles with writing copies for other people to get to the point where you realize that you have all this talent, you’ve been reading all these books, you’ve been writing all these ad’s and you are pouring all your energy into someone else’s stuff. And for me at least it has been an awakening and I decided why am I not doing this for my own stuff and how do I start creating my own product. And I don’t know if every copywriter looks at it that way but I think you are going too eventually. I guarantee it because it takes a lot of time and effort and you are only getting paid peanuts compared to what you could be. If you sell a $5,000 product twice you will make more than what you would in an upfront fee. And as you have proven with your HMA thing you can just sell this thing over and over and over. And it’s like as you said a vending machine.
MICHAEL: Right. One of the funniest things when people call me and they want to talk I’m telling you 9 out of 10 times this comes out of their mouth “oh Michael I really appreciate you talking to me I know how busy you are”. I know how busy you are. And many times I’m picking up the phone and I don’t have shit going on. And the reason is my audio online is doing all the work. Michael Senoff’s recordings are talking 100 times at the same time to people all over the world. The audio is doing all the work. It frees up my time and gives me a life to do what I want. You do the work once and it can pay you for your life.
BEN: You asked me before what was the hang up though as far as if there were any fears or not. So yeah there’s that fear of how do I get started? How do I know I’m not going to screw this thing up? What do I do if it doesn’t sound right? How do you find someone to do the edit? All these things are things that you cover in your course. It’s not hard at all it’s as simple as picking up the phone and pushing record and that’s it. All the technical stuff is no big deal. You can find someone on Elance or something if you really need to.
MICHAEL: Yes, absolutely. If you are so fearful that you cannot do an interview then I tell people all the time that you need to pay someone else to do it for you because what you pay for them to do your interview, if you get it out there and do a little marketing with what you have will make you much more then what you will pay that other person. So hire it out. One of my secrets is outsourcing. I have a team around me. I have an editor, copywriters, webmaster, and writers. There is no way you can do it all yourself. But your audio interviews are like your letters, your copywriting. Those are just as powerful sales forces as your sales letters. And you have to do that right. If you don’t do that right it can hurt you. So in this course I show you how to do it right or what I believe is the right way to do it.
BEN: You have done enough of them that I think the proof is in the pudding.
MICHAEL: Another thing I want to know. I continually add to this course so as I learn more and develop more and get more ideas I will add to this audio product. So it is never ending if you want to keep checking back with it.
BEN: Once again I just want to say thank you. And Michael is giving a very big, big discount to my subscribers and people who are listening to this interview.
You guys out there because Michael and I have been working together for awhile and we made this deal. I’m telling you it’s almost a no-brainer to get it. You can only get by going to:
Anyone who orders this special offer from Michael’s audio marketing secrets Michael will include a special link to a sales letter that I wrote for the scooter port invention directly from Michael’s interview with the inventor.
And once you see this you will have a blue print and see exactly how I took 95% of the copy directly from the transcripts that Michael did. And you will get a link to those transcripts as well. So thank you for listening to this and once again for the discount on Michaels audio marketing secrets product go to www.BenSettle.com/audio and he’s giving you almost a 70% discount on the course. So thank you very much and Michael take care.
MICHAEL: Alright Ben thanks.
If you would like to order Michael’s information product creation system now at a substantial discount especially prepared for my listeners you can go to:
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