Tag Archive for: Monetization

Digital Marketing Strategy: Cliff Ravenscraft on How to Use a Podcast to Attract New Clients

Would you like to discover a way to more easily attract new clients, expand your professional network, and have a lot of fun in the process?

Sound too good to be true? It’s not.

Podcasting, if done correctly, can be an incredibly powerful tool for business development, networking, and positioning yourself as a thought leader (which is what content marketing is all about).

Consider this: in most any niche, you are competing with millions of other websites for attention. With a podcast, you are competing against only 200,000 podcasts in the entire iTunes store – most of which either suck, or aren’t updated regularly.

For the savvy marketer, this spells opportunity.

In this episode of the Bright Ideas podcast, I’m joined by fellow podcast producer Cliff Ravenscraft, founder of PodcastAnswerMan.com. Like me, Cliff is a marketer and avid podcaster. However, in Cliff’s case, his passion for and knowledge of podcasting is far beyond most, and that makes him an ideal guest to talk about a communications medium that we both love.

Listen to this episode to hear Cliff and I talk about:

  • how podcasting can be a very powerful business development tool
  • how to use podcasting to expand your professional network
  • how starting a podcast can help you to massively increase your reach and traffic to your site
  • why he started PodcastAnswerMan.com and how it changed his life
  • how his podcast earns him $20,000 to $50,000 a month
  • his biggest 3 Aha! moments from podcasting

Having now produced over 100 episodes myself, I cannot stress enough how much podcasting plays a role in my business. Thanks to the Bright Ideas podcast, my professional network is the best it has ever been. In just a few months, my show has gained a lot of traction in my niche, to the point where when I meet industry leaders at conferences, they say, “oh yeah, I’ve heard of you”. Trying to get this type of exposure by another means would be far more difficult, I can assure you.

Creating a podcast is incredibly easy and Cliff has put together a totally free guide which you can find at LearnHowToPodcast.com.

He also has a coaching program that sells out every quarter and he’s been kind enough to provide my audience with a $100 discount. To take advantage of his offer, just go to PodcastingAtoZ.com and enter ‘Trent’ as the promo code. If you find that this course is more than you need, you may also want to check out two key courses that Cliff offers: WordPress for Podcasters and Inside the Studio: Equipment Setup and Podcast Workflow Tutorial. Both can be found at http://podcastanswerman.com/products/.

Now that Apple has put the podcasting app onto the iPhone, listening to podcasts on the go has never been easier. Best of all, unlike consuming content in front of a computer, when your audience is driving, walking, working out, or training for their next marathon, they can listen to your show totally uninterrupted, and in this day of information overload, that is PRICELESS!

More About This Episode

The Bright Ideas podcast is the podcast for business owners and marketers who want to discover how to use online marketing and sales automation tactics to massively grow their business.

It’s designed to help marketing agencies and small business owners discover which online marketing strategies are working most effectively today – all from the mouths of expert entrepreneurs who are already making it big.

Listen Now

Leave some feedback:

Connect with Trent Dyrsmid:

About Cliff Ravenscraft

cliff2011

In January 2008, after 11 years in the field, Cliff left his career in insurance to pursue his passion for podcasting full-time.

Today, Cliff is proud to work as a podcast producer and as a Podcasting and New Media consultant/coach. He has produced more than 2,800 individual episodes of more than 20 different shows, and is effectively sharing his life and ministering to tens of thousands of people around the world.

Learn more about Cliff at podcastanswerman.com.

Digital Marketing Strategy: Mark Cuban Wants You to Call Him

If you have a business problem to solve, wouldn’t you like to talk to another entrepreneur who’s already solved the same problem?

For example, if you’re considering raising capital, wouldn’t it be a huge benefit to talk to other CEOs that have already done it?

What about if you are building a SaaS company. Wouldn’t you like to talk to other SaaS CEOs or CTOs? Of course you would!

In today’s episode of the Bright Ideas podcast, I’m joined by serial entrepreneur Dan Martell, Founder and CEO of Clarity.fm, a rapidly growing community of experts who are all willing to take your call to dispense business advice…and yes, you can even call Mark Cuban.

Dan and I had a really interesting conversation and when you listen, you are going to hear us talk about:

  • the two companies he has already built and sold
  • how he got the idea for Clarity.fm
  • the first step that he took to discover if there was a market for his idea
  • some of the big mistakes that he made early on
  • how he overcame some of these major challenges
  • advice for other entrepreneurs on dealing with major setbacks
  • how to find and get introductions to the right investors for your company
  • the pros and cons of taking investor money
  • what Dan did when Facebook sent him an email that essentially put his prior company out of business
  • and so much more…

I thoroughly enjoyed my talk with Dan and you will, too!

More About This Episode

The Bright Ideas podcast is the podcast for business owners and marketers who want to discover how to use online marketing and sales automation tactics to massively grow their business.

It’s designed to help marketing agencies and small business owners discover which online marketing strategies are working most effectively today – all from the mouths of expert entrepreneurs who are already making it big.

Watch Now

Leave some feedback:

Connect with Trent Dyrsmid:

About Dan Martell

dan_martellDan is a Canadian entrepreneur living in San Francisco. He’s the CEO/Founder of Clarity. Previously he co-founded Flowtown (Acquired ’11) and Spheric Technologies (Acquired ’08), and he’s a mentor @ 500Startup & GrowLabs. Dan is an angel investor in 15 other companies. Find his full bio here.

 

 

BI 027: How to Turn Your Blog into a $250,000 Business with Marcus Sheridan

Originally, the ‘pool guy’ behind River Pools and Spas, Marcus has become well known for both his success as a inbound marketer (his pool company is a lead generation machine) as well as the guy behind the popular blog, The Sales Lion. Here’s a short summary of his achievements:

  • Published 3 self-help books in 2001, 2003, and 2006
  • Started my swimming pool company, River Pools and Spas in 2001
  • Pool company grew to be one of the largest of its kind in the world (due to inbound marketing efforts and our incredibly popular swimming pool blog)
  • Because of huge success teaching other pool professionals how to embrace inbound marketing, has become a very successful HubSpot Partner, training inbound marketers  and companies everywhere how to find success.
  • With an incredibly entertaining and educational style, Sheridan has become a highly sought after speaker for many marketing and business conferences globally.

Listen to the Audio

Our Chat Today

  • why content marketing is such a big deal and how you are nuts if you don’t have a strategy in place
  • how to turn your blog into the wikiepedia of your niche
  • why understanding the content saturation index for your niche is so important
  • how he built relationships with the key players in his niche
  • how he transformed his blog into a money making machine that now earns over $250K a year
  • how a 20 minute speech changed everything (and how he got the opportunity to speak at this event)
  • what he did in his speech to blow the roof off
  • what kind of clients he’s attracting
  • what his sales cycle looks like
  • how much they pay him
  • how to build the speaking business into your business and the 3 different ways you can do it
  • and so much more….

Digital Marketing Strategy: How to Build a Profitable Software Business Without Writing Any Code: A Case Study with Spencer Haws

Do you have a great idea for a software but you don’t have any coding knowledge and experience to transform it into an actual product?

Are you looking for an effective means of marketing your software to your target market?

To discover how to create and market a software product without writing a single line of code, I interview Spencer Haws of Nichepursuits.com in this episode of the Bright Ideas Podcast.

More About This Episode

The Bright Ideas podcast is the podcast for business owners and marketers who want to discover how to use online marketing and sales automation tactics to massively grow their business.

It’s designed to help marketing agencies and small business owners discover which online marketing strategies are working most effectively today – all from the mouths of expert entrepreneurs who are already making it big.

In this episode, I interview Spencer Haws of NichePursuits.com.

Watch Now

Leave some feedback:

Connect with Trent Dyrsmid:

Transcript

An Interview with Spencer HawsTrent Dyrsmid: Hey there Bright Idea Hunters, thank you so much for joining me for the Bright Ideas Podcast. I’m your host, Trent Dyrsmid. And this is the podcast for business owners and marketers who want to discover how to use online marketing and sales automation tactics to massively boost their business.And in this episode I am joined by Spencer Haws. Spencer is an online business owner, a blogger and a software developer from Richland, Washington. And back in 2009 he started off by building a portfolio of niche websites that made quite a bit of money with Google adsense. And that led to a successful blog called NichePursuits.com which then led to an even more successful software development business and that’s what we’re gonna be talking about in this particular episode of Bright Ideas.So Spencer thanks so much for making the time to talk about your product Long Tail Pro and how you’ve made it successful. Welcome to the show.

Spencer Haws: Hey thanks Trent. It’s great to be here. I know we’ve chatted quite a bit over the last year too so I’m more than happy to do an interview here to talk about Long Tail Pro.

T: We have indeed Spencer. I started off much like Spencer did. He was very generous with information for me back then. I’m no longer in that business but I definitely appreciate all that past advices. It was very helpful. So for the people who are in this audience which is predominantly small business owners and marketing agency owners they’re probably thinking who’s this guy, why do I wanna listen to this interview. So please just start off with who are you and what do you do?

S: Okay absolutely. Yeah you gave some brief information about what I’m doing now. Before I was a full time entrepreneur which I am now, I quit my corporate job about 2 years ago, it’ll be 2 years in just a few months. But I was involved in the financial services industry. I got my degree in Finance and worked for a large bank after that in business banking.

And so being involved in the internet and building websites was really nothing that I had a background in. It started as a hobby for me. Probably back in 2005-2006 I built my first site just to see if I could do it if I could get something online. And that led me over the next few years sort of moonlighting after my corporate job to building sites and learning and beginning to understand how Google works, how to get things ranking in Google and that led me then to finding niche sites. And that is a big part of my story.

I started building lots of small niche sites that could rank very quickly for small keywords because the big problem that a lot of people have is they see a really big keyword that gets tons of traffic and they try to build the site targeting that one keyword and the problem is they never rank for that keyword because it’s so extremely difficult. Everybody else is trying to rank for that keyword in Google and they’re nowhere to be found.

T: So this is probably that a lot of small business owners do. Let’s say there’s a guy with a plumber or a flower shop or whatever and they make this mistake of trying to rank for that keyword instead of maybe what we call the long tail phrase where if they were to attach a city name or a town name or something so that they’re drastically reducing the number of competitors that they’re against or are competing against rather and have a much easier time getting traffic to their site.

S: Right absolutely. I mean if you take a flower shop in Richland, Washington if they try to rank for the keyword flowers it’s just never gonna happen. There’s too many big corporations trying to rank for that. But if they try to rank for something like flowers in Richland, Washington they have a much better chance of doing that. So it was understanding the long tail keywords for me and I’m kinda going to why this will matter to everybody else as well but that’s what led me to quitting my corporate job. I did very very well with these niche sites. I built a couple of hundred of these, monetized them with Google adsense and that was in March of 2011 that I quit my job. And then I started a blog at almost exactly the same time NichePursuits.com where I blogged about how I was building these small niche sites and what was working for me, how others can rank those sites and all sorts of tactics that you could do to essentially do what I was doing.

And also around the same time I started building Long Tail Pro and so I continued to sell Long Tail Pro. It’s a keyword research tool that I built really for myself because I was frustrated with how long and how slow the keyword research process was using other tools. There’s lots of other great tools out there but for my needs where I wanted to find lots of keywords very quickly and be able to analyze if I could rank within Google quickly I decided to build my own tool and now I sell out Long Tail Pro. So we’ll dive into that a little bit more but that’s what I’m doing now.

T: Okay so for the folks who are listening there’s really kind of 2 main ideas that I’m hoping to get across this interview. One of them is for all those small flower shop owners and whatever type of business that you’re in local markets there’s a great benefit to be had by figuring out a plethora of long tail keywords that you can create content for and individually these keywords they don’t add a whole lot of traffic but they’re very easy to rank for and when you do them in aggregate you can actually translate into quite a substantial amount of traffic and it’s really not very difficult to do. However, you have to know which keywords that you’re going to go after because that’s where the science is. And that’s why you created Long Tail Pro.

The other audience is the folks who are thinking hey I might like to get into the software business. I’ve been thinking about creating an application for a long time so we’re gonna really focus in on that. So let’s give some results so that people who again don’t know you think oh yeah hey man, Spencer’s done really well. So how much revenue have you done with Long Tail Pro?

S: Yeah Long Tail Pro and it’s a long story as well because and maybe we can dig in to this with some of the mistakes I made early on and how I fixed those mistakes.

T: Yeah that would be good.

S: Yeah I created a first version of Long Tail Pro which is not the current version that you see today. That I guess quickly to answer your numbers to get the numbers out then we can maybe drill in to what happened. But I had a first version that I launched in right around January of 2011 and I only sold it for about 3 months from January to March. But it’s sold maybe $2,000 or $3,000 a month. I didn’t do much marketing at all. I didn’t have much of a blog or a list at that point but it was enough for me to know that there was interest.

T: Absolutely.

S: So that first version maybe did $10,000 or so. Then I went back and again I’ll explain why I did this but I hired a new programmer to develop an entirely new from the ground up, a new code, everything, new version of the software which I launched in beta form around July of 2011 and really didn’t launch until October publicly October 2011. So from about, with the new version I’ve done about a $150,000 in revenue. About a $100,000 of that this year 2012. So I get you a rough idea of what I’ve done and I’ve got big plans of course for the future as well.

T: I’m sure.

S: In the future there’s more marketing as well.

T: So we should take into account the cost of the first and the second version because it is part of the reality. What do you think that you spent, coz you’re not a software developer, you don’t write any code, correct? Coz I don’t want people to think I don’t know how to write codes so I can’t build an application coz that’s not true.

S: Yeah absolutely. I’m not a programmer by any way, shape or form like I said my background is business and finance. So I hired somebody else to do the code completely. I just had the idea, I paid somebody to do it for me.

T: And what did you spend to develop this application?

S: Yeah the first version was very cheap and this was my mistake. I hired the cheapest programmer that was overseas and he was able to produce something and I really think that he essentially used some code that he already had which was why he was able to do it so cheaply. But it was about $3,000 to $4,000 to just get that first version up and running. It was pretty bare bones at the beginning. But it quickly had lots of bugs and issues that made it stop working. And I guess maybe now is a good time to explain what happened but it needed lots of attention.

And so I would go back to my programmer and say hey this little parts stopped working, it’s got a bug, can you fix it and he would do the best he can but because he was overseas he didn’t speak english well it was difficult to work with him, to communicate and get things done in a timely fashion. And so I decided I think I just want to hire a different programmer to take the existing code that I can work with that speaks english that I know I can count on for the future. And so when I asked the original programmer for the code he said no, not gonna happen. He said pay me $15,000 and the code is yours. And I mean you have to understand I paid like $3,000 to $4,000 and I thought that was it originally. And also when I posted the job I did this on a freelance website I figured hey I was protected and that’s what I paid for was the source code originally or so I thought. And I probably could have gone through the dispute process on, it was Freelancer.com and perhaps gotten the original code but it would have been a huge headache probably taken months to go through.

And so I was essentially faced with the dilemma of hey I can pay this guy $15,000 and get the original code which I know is kind of buggy already. And then just hire somebody else to fix it. Or I can scrap the project completely, I can just hey I made a few thousand dollars, just tell people sorry you’ll refund them or whatever. But what I decided to do is fire the old programmer and completely start from scratch. Just hire a new programmer, have him create his code from the very beginning and that cost me about $15,000 to $20,000 to do anyways. So I figured I was about even whether I got the old code or the new source code and because I did it from scratch with the new guy the source code I knew was mine. I hired a very programmer who spoke english. Things have been much better since but that was some pretty trying times. I learned quite a bit in those early days. I made quite a few mistakes that made me dig in too deeper but yeah that’s sort of what happened there early on.

T: I think that that is not uncommon at all.

S: Unfortunately.

T: I know personally I never get anything right the first time. I should call myself Captain Do Over coz I always need another time to assess all the errors that I made and try and fix them on the next go around.

S: Yes. So the one point I will make just very quickly that one of the big things that I learned in software development is that hiring cheap usually is not the cheapest in the long run. I would advice what I do now whenever I hire a programmer is hire the absolute best. Even if they’re more expensive they’ll typically get the job done quicker so they’re spending less hours even though they have a higher hourly rate. They do it quicker. It’s done better and there’s less maintenance down the road. So absolutely I would hire the best from the get go.

T: And how did you find the second programmer? Did you go back to the same site and just pick a higher quality person or did you go to like a local meet up and meet someone face to face? What did that look like?

S: I probably could have gone back to freelancer. I actually went back to elance or over to elance. So it’s another freelance website. But I just did a lot more due diligence and paid a lot more attention to the higher quality high end developers whereas before I was just looking to get the job done. I posted a job and I figured hey if they get the job done I don’t have to release my money until I get my product so right, I’m covered but no. So the second time around I just looked at the higher end developers and hired them.

T: Quick side bar for the listeners I have interviewed another fellow by the name of Travis Ketchum who you can find it on the blog. He developed some software as well and his experience is very similar to Spencer’s and the version 1 was unsuccessful coz he hired the cheapest person. So if you’re thinking about doing software in addition to listening to this interview make sure that you go and do a search for Travis Ketchum on BrightIdeas.co and you’ll find his interview.

Now back to you Spencer, you just mentioned due diligence so let’s not skimp pass that because that’s an important part of how you selected your contractors so can you share with us what did you do to do due diligence?

S: Absolutely. And I recommend this whenever you hire any freelancer not just a software developer. Essentially I tried to communicate as much as possible before I hire anybody. The instant messaging, email and I would essentially ask them questions like do you understand the job, can you restate in your words what exactly I’m looking for. And so I would try to exchange at least a few emails so that a) I knew that I could communicate with them, that their english was good and they understood what I was saying.

I ended up hiring somebody here in the US so that’s not a problem but exchanging those emails helped me to know the depth of their knowledge of what I was looking for and you can really see the good freelancers or programmers when they bring up potential problems. They say hey I see your job but have you thought about this, this and this. And those are the people you want to key it out on. Key in on and say no, I didn’t think of that one, let’s discuss. And so that’s great when they can come up with potential problems before you ever hire them.

I actually spoke to a couple of different people on the phone and that’s a big plus to know if you could develop a good rapport and then basic things. I looked at their past jobs, what they were rated on those jobs, pluses and minuses from previous people that have hired them. I looked at resumes and things like that. But I would say the big thing is definitely pre-hiring interview questions and just getting to know them a little bit better and making sure they fully understand the entire project.

T: Did you check with any other references?

S: You know, I didn’t and that is certainly another step that I could have gone to ensure and that’s not a bad idea at all. But just after talking with the programmer that I hired I felt pretty comfortable.

T: And when you say talking did you have a voice conversation with him as well over Skype?

S: I did yes.

T: Especially if you’re hiring someone from another country it’s not to say that there aren’t any good programmers outside the United States but in my experience you really need to have a verbal conversation with them because when you’re trying to explain post production or after the fact issues chatting and skyping and emailing in a non-verbal form can only go so far.

S: Yeah and absolutely. And what I didn’t fully understand the first go around with Long Tail Pro is that I figured software development was a one time deal. I get my product, it’s a package that’s done I sell it forever, right? But I mean that’s not the way software usually works and particularly something as intricate as Long Tail Pro where we’re using lots of different resources any time there’s a small change we have to tweak our software. And so I understood fully the second go around that this was a long term relationship with this software developer. I needed to know that they would be there a year down the road to continually develop and fix bugs or changes that may come up. So that was very important.

T: So coming up over we’re gonna talk about how Spencer marketed and sold his software but I have one last question for him on how he got it developed and that is when you created the scope of the project, coz I’ve been involved now at 2 software development projects myself. One of them we’re just getting ready to release and it’s done and the other one we’re very early in the development phase. And in both of those projects we put a lot of time into screen shotting so that you could have a conversation with your developer that says when you click this button this is what’s supposed to happen. Did you go through a process like that or did you have a different way that you did it?

S: I would say it’s a similar process. I did a lot of referring to similar tools that are out there. So I say hey here’s some similar tools to what I’m looking to have created. Here’s what I like about them, here’s what I don’t like about them. And yes I did take some screen shots. But I wrote out a very detailed explanation of everything that the software needed to do, what was required of the programmer. And just really divided it up into each function of the software. Here is the keyword research function. Here’s what it needs to do and maybe here’s some examples of other tools that do this and here’s what they look like. So yes I did very detailed write up and even more so the second time around.

T: So the interface design that you ended up with, was that really the developer’s interpretation of your detailed instructions?

S: Yes. And it was something that he came up with that we really worked on together. And that was also part of, that’s one of those points where I posted my job and before I hired my programmer that was one of his points. About hey I see a problem here or this is something else we need to talk about is the overall interface. He asked do you want me to do that or do you want to hire somebody else to do that. I ended up hiring him because he also have a lot of experience doing user interfaces. But yeah that’s something that I worked with him to come up with the design and the look.

T: Okay. There’s a lot more we could talk about obviously with respect to how to build software more than we could cover in a short interview. So I’m gonna leave the development side alone now and let’s go on and talk about marketing. So you obviously, just walk us through your marketing plan and what executed and maybe highlight a couple of things that worked really well and maybe if there is things that didn’t work well maybe you could talk about those as well.

S: Okay. Yeah my primary marketing plan early on and a big part of the reason that it worked for me is because I am the target market. I was the target audience essentially. I created this software for me so I fully understood the needs, the problems, what was going through the head of the potential market. And also because of that I already started a blog at NichePursuits.com essentially my target audience is for people that are trying to build websites whether they were niche websites or large blogs or local businesses building websites that wanted to do keyword research more quickly and effectively.

And so I essentially started marketing the software to my blog audience. That’s from the get go I essentially emailed out that hey I’ve got this software that’s available and even before it was done I was very open about my developing a software. I made posts on my blog about this. And so that’s essentially how I marketed it from the get go is just to my blog audience. And that’s a big thing for anybody out there is that if they can have a blog that they’re building out and building an audience it makes launching any product so much easier to have the audience built in. And so that was my primary way of marketing was just to my blog that already existed.

I marketed a little bit on some forums like the warrior forum essentially putting up offers on these forums for people to purchase. And then I reached out to a few other bloggers that were in the same niche to do either webinars or get them on as affiliates to help me promote that.

T: So the percentage of your revenue that came from your own list versus affiliates, what would you guess that was?

S: Well early on I mean it was a 100% me starting probably the first several months was essentially just me. I didn’t go out and I probably could have done this better. I didn’t go out and try to do a big launch with other affiliates and all. It was essentially just me. I threw it up on my blog and emailed my lists and said hey it’s ready, go buy it. And that worked enough to know that people were interested. Now the breakdown this year I don’t know the exact number. It’s still the majority is coming from me and my blog but it’s maybe 60% is me, 65% is me and 30-35-40% is affiliates.

T: Okay so people listening to this are gonna know how popular your blog is or isn’t so is there any in terms of size of your list or daily traffic stats or anything that you feel like sharing?

S: Sure I’ve got about 10,000 subscribers to my email list and to my blog so that gives you kind of an idea of that. So it’s a decent amount.

T: Okay so a reasonable amount. And I think that the key take away that I’m hoping that the small business owner, coz I remember when I ran my technology services company prior to this business and this was from 2001 to 2008 when I sold the company, I didn’t blog. I didn’t know what blog was. In hindsight I just wish that I would have understood the power of blogging. You can create so much engagements, so much relationship, you can build that subscriber list and if you’re a small business owner and you’re listening to this and you haven’t started blogging yet you really need to.

And if you’re thinking gosh I don’t have time hopefully this story with Spencer here and the story of other guests and even my own story because the reason that I do Bright Ideas and the reason that I give all of this content away is to build a list for my software application that is in development currently. That’s my monetization strategy. So when you say I don’t have enough time to blog coz I’m doing all these other stuff it can be a really really valuable activity if you learn how to do it right. And there are lots of other guests and interviews here on Bright Ideas that have lots of success blogging. And in those interviews we go into some particular and I’ve got some how you can do that.

So sorry for hijacking a little bit there Spencer but I really wanted and so passionate about it.

S: Absolutely.

T: You wanna talk to so I’ll stop right now.

S: Yeah well I was just gonna say I can tell you 2 other stories very very briefly of people blogging that has really driven sales to their business. And these are both local business owners who own a small company so maybe it will resonate well with your audience. One is Marcus Sheridan who owned a small pool company in Virginia. And I’ve done an interview with him on my blog but he install pools, fiberglass pools and all they had was just a website. I’ll try to make this story short. But essentially they were about to go financially bankrupt. He finally discovered content marketing. He decided to blog about everything and about fiberglass pools. His website started ranking for every single question that the customers could ask about how much does a fiberglass pool cost or everything that his customers were asking. And within a year they completely turned their business around. They’re now doing millions of dollars in sales and it’s literally, and he contracted because he does this very well, that those sales have all come from his blog. And it’s because he’s targeted these long tail keywords, ranked in Google and so literally changed his business.

The other story I’ll tell briefly is actually my cousin. John Haws, who I also interviewed on my podcast, he decided he wanted to build niche sites. He has a background in landscaping so he built some websites about landscaping in his hometown. He was in Chicago, Illinois at that time going to nursing school. He built some niche sites targeting landscaping in Allen, Texas. Within a couple of months people started calling him saying I want you to come on my lawn. He wasn’t even there, didn’t have a landscaping company. He put them off until the summer until he was off school. He built up a customer base before he even had a business. He went home during the summer and he’s never gone back to school. His business now, he’s done like $70,000 in 6 months, his very first 6 months. The majority of it is online that people are typing and finding him because he blogs about landscaping. And he plans to never go back in his nursing degree just to build this landscaping company.

So that’s 2 small examples and I can tell you if I owned a small local company I would be blogging the heck out of it.

T: Yap coz if you’re not blogging you gotta be doing something. And the cold calling while it can be very effective, it’s not a lot of fun. It used to be a bit mind numbing and the direct mails takes and costs a lot of money. There’s a lot of other things that you can do but blogging you can do it from anywhere. You just flip your laptop open. And I’ll refer to another interview, his name is Peep Laja, it’s here on Bright Ideas there’s an interview. He got 50,000 visitors in his first month. He had no list, no affiliates and it’s a very interesting interview because he talks about how he adopted the reporter’s style of blogging. Then again I’m not gonna go down that rabbit hole, just go check out that interview if you wanna learn more about it.

Alright, so in our off camera talks, Spencer, you shared with me that you were getting quite a bit attraction with small business owners. Can you talk a little bit about that and how you think that happened?

S: Yeah absolutely. So you’re right. I’m starting to get a lot of my readers on NichePursuits.com are actually small companies. I don’t know the total variety of types of companies but at least that have emailed me recently have a pest control company and these are people that have purchased Long Tail Pro and are actually using it. Pest control company, lawyers, real estate agents, small printing company and I’m sure there’s dozens of others that I just am not aware that they’re using my software. But lots of them are starting to really understand the power of the internet, content marketing and ranking in Google just like we described those stories of people that are turning their business around. And the reason for that is because customers nowadays go online and they search everything on Google.

So I mean people used to go to the Yellow Pages now they go to Google. And so these small business owners are becoming savvy and so they found out about me probably from reading my blog, trying to figure out how to rank their business websites in Google because I talk about how I rank my niche sites. And those tactics apply directly. I mean it’s the same process, the same thing just different keywords. And so these small business owners are now definitely very interested in keyword research. And they should be because these are the companies that should be ranking for landscaping in Richland Washington and things like that because they provide the service. And so they’re very interested in doing the proper keyword research, analyzing whether or not they can rank in Google and then making it happen.

So definitely lots of small business owners are using Long Tail Pro and I see that definitely as the future for my own company that they are most certainly part of my target market where I may have not thought that originally when I created the software.

T: That’s one of the things that I really love about being in business and I’ve referred to this previously as I called my green dot theory. You have this idea we’ll call it we’re selling green dots. So you decide to start and a lot of people don’t do that. They let fear get in the way and hopefully this interview will help them to get over that cliff. But once you start to be in business you uncover all these other opportunities which you probably would never have discovered have you not first started to sell your green dots.

And those extra little nuggets that you find can often turn into phenomenal business opportunities and yours is a good story of that. You started off building a software product for internet marketers that wanted to build little itty bitty websites to make money with Google adsense or Amazon affiliates or whatever and now you’re tapping into this market of main stream business customers who have these needs and you’re starting to create brand awareness with them and recognition to the relationship there’s so much that you can do with that for the years ahead. That had you not started you probably wouldn’t be thinking about these things and you wouldn’t be exposed to those opportunities.

S: Absolutely.

T: Alright so we’re getting to the end of our time window for this interview so there’s a couple key things that I wanna cover off. No. 1 is I know that you have recently released, this interview will be published after the release but I think that your special would have ended, but you’ve recently released a very updated version of Long Tail Pro and you have for Bright Ideas listeners you can get the product for $77 instead of $97 if you go to LongTailPro.com/BrightIdeas.

And I guess the last thing, Spencer, if people wanna get a hold of you they know that they can do that on NichePursuits.com. Is that the best way to get a hold of you?

S: That’s probably the best way. I’ve got a contact page there. They can certainly use that, that will send me an email and we’ll communicate that way. Or leave a comment, I’m very responsive on comments. They can certainly follow me on twitter. It’s @NichePursuits. So yeah those are couple of ways they can definitely get a hold of me.

T: Okay. And I also noticed that you have a free webinar that you’re doing. I guess maybe you do it every week or something like that on how to get traffic. You can find more information about that on Niche Pursuits. So last question I have for you, what books are you reading these days? Maybe give us one or two if you’re reading any.

S: I am just about to finish The Lean Startup which is a good one. I’m sure you’ve maybe talked about.

T: I haven’t read that one yet actually.

S: Okay. Yeah it’s definitely a good one. Other than that I don’t have any books I’m reading. I enjoy reading my wired magazine. That keeps me up to date with some pretty interesting articles as well. But yeah that’s sort of what I’m reading now.

T: Okay. Spencer I wanna thank you very much for making some time to come here on the Bright Ideas podcast and share your experience with building software and turning it into a business. It’s been a pleasure to have you on the show.

S: Absolutely Trent. I appreciate it. It’s been good to be here. Thank you.

T: Alright, if you wanna check out the show notes for today’s episode go to BrightIdeas.co/17. And while you’re at Bright Ideas you may also wanna go and get the massive traffic tool kit. To do that just go to BrightIdeas.co/massivetraffic and enter your email address. When you do you’ll be given instant access to the tool kit. So what is the massive traffic tool kits? It’s a compilation of all the very best ideas that have been shared with me by my guests here on Bright Ideas and some of those guests or all of them in this case are absolute power houses at getting traffic to their sites. And the really cool thing about the tool kit is that you do not need to be an SEO guru to be able to execute the strategies that you’re gonna learn. Everyone can do all the things that are in the massive traffic tool kit.

So this brings us to the end of the podcast. I’m your host, Trent Dyrsmid. If you loved this episode or even if you just liked it please do me a huge favor and head over the itunes and give us a 5 star rating and leave a feedback of some kind. Whenever you do that it helps the show to go up of the rankings in the itunes and more people can learn about what we’re doing here at Bright Ideas. And the more people that learn, the more people that we can help to massively boost their business. So thank you very much. It’s been a privilege and I’ll see you in the next episode. Take care.

About Spencer Haws

spencer1-150x150Spencer Haws was a business banker with an MBA who quit his job as a Business Relationship Manager at Wells Fargo Bank to build websites full time. He has more than 200 small niche sites that he monetizes primarily with Google AdSense.

Spencer is the owner of the popular blog nichepursuits.com, where he details his methods as well as his results. He is also the creator of Long Tail Pro, a keyword research tool that niche website builders can utilize to create the right content that targets the right keywords.

Digital Marketing Strategy: How To Create Stunning Information Products with Greg Rollett

Would you like to discover the power of the information products business and how you can use it to generate revenue and/or leads?

Would you like to sell products to customers around the world and have those products delivered automatically so you can earn profits 24×7?

To help you discover how to use information products in your business, I interview Greg Rollett for this episode of the Bright Ideas Podcast.

More About This Episode

The Bright Ideas podcast is the podcast for business owners and marketers who want to discover how to use online marketing and sales automation tactics to massively grow their business.

It’s designed to help marketing agencies and small business owners discover which online marketing strategies are working most effectively today – all from the mouths of expert entrepreneurs who are already making it big.

In this episode, I interview Greg Rollett, a Best Selling author, Marketing Expert, and the ProductPro.

Watch Now

Leave some feedback:

Connect with Trent Dyrsmid:

Transcript

Today’s guest has created over 100 information products and today he’s gonna tell you the 3 most important steps on how to get it done. Don’t think you have enough expertise to create an information product of your own? Not necessarily true. In my interview, in today’s interview rather, my guest is gonna show you his best kept secret for how to create very high value information products even if you’re not the expert just yet. And finally, if you’re thinking “well, you know this is great but I don’t have time.” Well, he’s got a solution for that too. All this and more so stay tuned.

Alright, Greg, thanks so much for making the time to do the interview with me. It’s a pleasure to have you on the show.

Greg Rollett: Definitely man. Thanks for having me. Really excited to be here.

T: So I’ve come to know you as the guru of making information products and I found the research that I did on you really was interesting and it was kind of an eye opener for me coz I always created all my own information product up to this point. So here in this interview what I wanna walk people thru is kinda of a process as you have come to become an expert in it and the creation of information products.

G: Alright.

T: So on your blog when I was doing my research on you, I read a post and it said the 5 rules of ambitious marketing. So can you tell me what this rule, tell us rather what the rules are and then in particular what you meant by no. 3?

G: Hopefully I do them in the right order that you were talking about. But rules of marketing, the first one it’s gonna be direct response marketing. Anything that you do you have to have something that you want someone to take action on and then a way to track that action whether that action be committing to a sale to becoming a lead to becoming a follower even on Facebook, whatever it is, you have to say I did this and it produced this result. That way you can go back and you can test it, you could tweak it, and you could say “hey that worked let’s do more of it. Or hey that didn’t work let’s no longer spend money there.” The key ingredient to that is you need to be able to track all of this marketing and we can talk more about that in depth if you want to. So it’s gonna be direct response, right? And I’m a huge fan of Facebook, Twitter, all that fun stuff. You just do stuff and it’s fun. You’re posting “hey I’m hanging out at the zoo this weekend.”, whatever it is. But at the heart of it if you’re trying to run a business, you’re trying to make money it’s gonna be direct response marketing. I send out this email and that email produce this result. I send out or I put up this yellow page out and it got me this many calls. So it’s rule no. 1.

Rule no. 2 and this is gonna be personality driven marketing. What I mean by that is just like we’re doing this video today Trent, it’s us, right? You’re getting my personality, we’re getting your personality. We’re not hiding behind the white powerpoint slide. We’re not hiding behind a brand. We’re not hiding behind a cartoon character, whatever it is. Because this is what builds trust, right? People seeing my face and that’s why I’m on this show today. You saw me doing other interviews, other things, you’ve researched me, you know who I am really before we even got on the phone talked the first time because you’ve seen videos I’ve done. You’ve seen interviews I’ve been on. You’ve read blog posts. You’ve seen Facebook, whatever it is. And it’s that personality that creates this relationship. You’re like “hey, Greg’s probably a cool dude. He seems nice in the video. He seems very informative.” And that creates a relationship that you can’t get without the personality so it’s gotta be you, it’s gotta be your face. If it’s your business you have to take ownership of that. So that’s rule no. 2.

This is where the rules get out of order so hopefully I’ll hit your no. 3. But you cannot rely on the power of one and that’s what I’m gonna call rule no. 3. And this is really a big one for me because so many people just rely on “well I’m gonna write one book and this one book is gonna become a bestseller.” And then when it doesn’t they have nothing to fall back on, right? Or I’m going to only use Facebook ads, facebook ads is the only way I’m gonna drive traffic and all of a sudden clicks what from 50cents to $4 and all of a sudden you’re out of business overnight. Or I have one jv partner, one jv partner drives everything for me. That jv partner stops doing business with you and that relationship ends and it kills you. And the rule of one for me came I come from a music background, I was a rapper in a rock band which is always the fun story to tell. But in the music industry you always hope that one person is going to see you and they’re gonna make you a star. They’re gonna sign me this record deal and that’s just not the case. You need multiple products, you need multiple ways for people to get into your business, multiple advertising channels. You just can’t rely on the power of one because you put all your eggs in that one basket well, we all kinda know that saying and that adage. So that’s the 3rd rule right there.

The 4th rule of this kind of marketing style is that you need to know your market better than anyone especially your competition. And what I mean by that is in the context of talking about products today a lot of people create the product without knowing who that product is going to be for or what it’s gonna serve or what its purpose is. That’s the biggest issue I see with people that come to us. They’re like “Hey Greg, I created this product but no one wants it. I haven’t sold any.” It’s the worse thing in the world coz they didn’t actually know who their market is and what their market wanted. It really goes in creating an avatar for their clients I always say that people know their favorite TV characters better than they know their actual market place. I could tell you that Homer Simpson works in a nuclear power plant, his boss is Mr. Burns, his wife is Marge Simpson. I can tell you all these things about this yellow character but I can’t tell you anything about my client. Well then how are you gonna help that person. So you need to know who that person is.

And then the 5th and final rule is that you need to out hustle everyone all the time. I mean today more than anything else in marketing is worth fighting for people’s attention. So people could be watching this interview now but they can also be cooking in the kitchen, they could be playing with their kids, they could be checking email, they could be working. There’s just so many things going on in the world today that if you are not infront of your market in every way that you possibly can, audio, video, text, putting something in the mail, sending something in the inbox, send them on social media, well they’re not hearing your message coz they have so many other things going on. So do the hustle.

And so that was a long way of saying the 5 rules of the ambitious marketing. They’re really the rules that we live by in everything that we do.

T: And I couldn’t agree more. I think those are an excellent set of rules. And so you’ve become, and I wanted to kinda preface I guess our discussion on information products with what I thought was a valuable tip on marketing. And I hope that people will go and check out your blog and learn more about that. But we’re really gonna dive deeper into information products. So how did you become this information product guru as it were? And I don’t know if you like that term or not but you’ve turned it into, I mean for people who don’t know you just give a quick little bit about what your business is and how big it is coz it surprised the hell out of me.

G: Yeah so the business today, the business is called the product pros and really it started out I was creating my own information products. It did very well, 6 figure business selling info products to musicians. I was selling marketing advice, fixing internet marketing for musicians. How musicians can build squeeze pages and mining pages and their email sequences and get bookmarked and things like that using all that stuff that internet marketers do in their business. And that grew and people really started to take notice. Obviously a lot of relationships in that business and I partnered with my partner now, Nick Nanton here in Orlando. He had all these clients who were doctors, lawyers, chiropractors, financial advisors, real estate investors, agents and he was like “why don’t you do what you did for yourself for my clients?” And I was like “well what do they want products for? What’s a dentist need a product for?”

Literally just everything changed when I started seeing how people can use information in their business and today, over the last year, we’ve had over a hundred information products for everyone expanding from doctors, dentists, lawyers, chiropractors. I just created a product for dealing with menopause using ancient chinese medicine techniques. We’ve gone dating relationship products. We’ve run the game on fun stuff to do. And then we’ve been really fortunate to work with some real industry giants. We just created a product for Michael Gerber, with Brian Tracy, Tom Hopkins, we worked with Allan Cosgrow who is men’s health’s top rated gym and all of men’s health, we created his last information products. We worked with Dax Moy, the highest paid personal trainer in the world who lives out in UK. We’ve done some really, really cool stuff and it all stemmed from me selling $47 ebooks to musicians to kind of the company that we have today.

And the great part of this is we do it all for our clients which is really cool. We’ll talk about that later because it’s really formula, right? Whether I’m selling a menopause product, a dating product or a business product, it’s formula. You’re taking someone from here where they are now, the think point that they have and that’s why you need to know your market really well which is I think rule no. 4 that will call us tonight, to where they wanna go, right? So what’s the end result? And that is the only reason you should ever create a product is because you wanna take someone from here to here in the quickest way possible through the things that you know, the experiences that you’ve gone through and that’s why you need to create products.

T: So and this wasn’t on my sheet of questions but it’s popped in my mind and I wanna ask it anyway and that tends to be my interview style, there will be some people listening to this who barely know what an information product is. There will be other people listening on to this who have purchased information products and then there’d be some other people, we’ll call them maybe the skeptical crowd and they think that they should get everything for free. So if someone is thinking about creating an information product and that could be an ebook or a membership site or any other, there’s a variety of formats but at the end of the day you’re packaging up information that solves a problem that someone has.

G: Right.

T: If someone’s listening and they’re debating “should I make an information product or should I just give it all away for free on my blog?” do you wanna address that thought with what your opinion is on the pros and cons of both.

G: Oh totally. Alright so I’m gonna address it from 2 different angles, right? So there’s 2 ways that we create products both for ourselves and for our clients. One is we create it with the intent to sell it, right? So we’re creating a product and we intend to charge people to go through that information. The other way to do it is, going back to the personality driven marketing side, is you’re building these products with the intent to give it away but with the intent of teaching people something that’s going to allow them to make an intelligent purchasing decision to buy what you really want to offer. And what I mean by that is the dentist, right? The dentist does not care about selling a $27 ebook. What he cares about is giving great information in a way to his patients to tell them about healthy living and how healthy living starts with the mouth and how clean living is, whatever, starts to help. But if he gets his point across then someone might bring their kid in to get their routine check up. That routine check up turns into braces or something a few years later. So that free research paper for this dentist, this free report product, whatever you wanna call it, is now turned into a lifetime guide to maybe 5, 10, 20, $30,000 based on the service. And the service based in it is the same way. So in our business we sell, we’re in the product pros. We have a free product creation manifesto that we give away for our website. We have a product that we sell right out through app sumo which is $77 which is our product creation basically teaching you how to create a product. And at the end of the product if you like this but you don’t want to do the work, call us and we’ll do it for you. And so it’s an attention for us. Again, we don’t really care about making the $70, we care about the $3,000 – $5,000 – $10,000 we’re gonna get on the backend actually created for them.

So those are two different schools of thought on thinking about creating your product. So people that have an actual business service based high fees on the backend, products yes they should be used as a way for people to know you like they trust you. Educate them as to why you are the solution to their problem. On the other side creating the products and going back to your question, should things just be free, well I can just google that and find it, and again 100% it goes back to personality, right? Coz we all learn in different ways and yeah I can go google and learn how to play guitar right now and find a whole bunch of cheesy youtube videos and figure it out but if I don’t relate to the guy that’s playing and I can’t learn from his style it doesn’t matter if it’s free or not. Coz if he starts playing like Mary Had a Little Lamb and then starts doing like Jimmy Hendrick’s solos on the back of his head, he didn’t organize an information in a way where I can get the results that I want. So I’m paying to find someone that has the solution that I want and has packaged it in a way and I’m just like I like this guy. I’m gonna go and hang out with him. You’re investing time in this so there’s entertainment value along with it. There’s a process of information in the flow and there’s a trust with the person that you buy the product from. So yeah, information is free, literally you can learn how to do anything online. There’s no doubt in my mind that you can’t, but going to like there’s somebody doing commercials now, I don’t remember it’s like ask.com or something. Just ask it any question you’ll get any answer but do I want an answer from Mary Jane who’s a house mom who’s trying to give me business information, she’s never run a business before but she goes on ask.com and she answers a bunch of questions, right? Or do I wanna go with the person that I’ve seen their videos, I know them, I like them, I trust them. I think that they have a great information, they packaged it in a way they have the experience, they have the social proof. And then 99% of our finished products, 30-60-90 days money back guarantee. If it didn’t work, get your money back. It helps why we offer it.

T: And that was the point that I was hoping you were gonna get to, is there’s this element of what I call the brand experience. And I’ll use for anyone who’s listening to this who may be either unfamiliar, maybe even skeptical about this whole thing for information, but what do you make colleges? College is a brand experience information product. Because I think anyone who’s listening to this will agree, you could go and learn everything you need to learn just by going to the library and buying some books or scouring the internet. But the reason people pay to go to college is because they want structured learning from step 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 coz most people need a structured learning in order to be able to do it and they also wanna have some expectations as to the level of the quality information that they’re gonna get. That’s the brand experience that I was referring to. So I just wanted you to get to that point and I thank you for that.

G: No problem.

T: Because especially in the internet marketing space there are people who think that if it’s not free it should be, and they kinda get their noses out of joint, and I’m kind of not in that crowd. I think that when people pay for information they’re more inclined to use it and then they’re actually more inclined to get the results that they’re looking for.

G: What I’ve said, I’ll pick it at that really fast. And go to the next point. But again coming from the musician world, a real simple analogy. A lot of people go to concerts, right? And when they walk out in concerts there’s the local band that’s just giving away free cd’s. They’re just passing them out hoping that people will put them in their car on their way home. 99.99% of the time it’s either a coaster or it’s in the garbage right away. But inside the concert, for the band that you just saw that just rocked your world and you just paid $20 for their cd you’re going right to the car and you’re playing. Same exact case with information marketing and you know, honestly, honest to god, you go and you download the product creation manifesto from my site and you buy my paid course, they’re exactly the same. Really it’s just different format, different style, different kinda trim but it breaks down in the exact same thing. And the stuff that we’re gonna talk about tonight is the same stuff that’s in my paid stuff but when you pay for it there’s a sense of well, I’ve paid for this, I need to get the results that I paid for. So there is that factor with it. So you’re exactly right.

T: So for the folks who are listening who regardless of the business they’re running they’re at this point they’re thinking to themselves “yeah I think I wanna make an information product.” But they don’t know what to do. So let’s use and you can draw any kind of example you like, maybe it was a recent client of yours. I loved if we can talk about it instead of in theory, if we can talk about a little bit more with an actual case study or someone in mind.

G: Sure.

T: Can you think of a recent client, you don’t have to name any names if you don’t want to? But what, pick someone in your mind and what business were they in?

G: Alright so I have a really, really cool client right now. He runs a community basketball league which is kinda right below semi-pro and he has a ton of atheletes all across the country that are trying to play semi-pro to professional basketball, whether it’s in another country, whether it’s in the development league in the NBA and he really want to create information product to teach them the things that they needed to know before they got to the next level. So it’s a really great example because he comes to me, he’s like “I got all these people, they play basketball and they all have these dreams and ambitions.” And I was just like “that’s great!” But still we have to start at square one, what do these people really, really want, right? And he’s like “well they wanna get signed to a deal, they wanna play professional.” I’m like “great, but what do they really, really want? So in order to get there where do they need to go?” And he’s like “they just need to get the attention of a scout, or they need to get the attention of an agent.” I’m like “well then that’s the product we need to create because that’s the thing that’s gonna give them the results. You know Jamar, you’re awesome because you got me to get seen by someone without actually paying attention to my market.” So the first thing for this guy and this client and for you is to just really figure out what the pain point is in that market. These players have gone unnoticed, they’ve gone unnoticed in highschool. They probably played division 2 or division 3 in college. They obviously did not get drafted in the NBA. They’ve been overlooked their whole career so all they wanted more than anything was to be noticed for what they did, for their skill level, for whatever it is. That was the real pain point. The dream is to get signed, play professional basketball, make billions of dollars, you know the whole fantasy, but that wasn’t what they really desired because they knew that NBA is a pipe dream but if they can just get noticed for what they did.

So we had to find that pain point and whatever market Trent, you have to have to have find that pain point, what keeps them up at night. Again if he didn’t consult me he would have created the how to get signed to a deal. He would have a bunch of people buy the product, no one would have got signed to the deal because they weren’t ready for that. And the product would have been a failure, right? And that’s how most people create products. They say “hey I’m in sales. I wanna teach someone how to make a million dollars next year in pharmaceutical sales.” And that’s hard thing to do and hard thing for people to grasp. Is that the real pain point? The real pain point might just be getting more leads, getting more prospects, figure out how to cold call, how to close more to people you got, how to sell to more people. Find that pain point. What pisses people off and keeps them up at night. And that’s really the first step in this whole process is find that pain point.

T: And what are some of the ways that people could go about finding that pain point?

G: Alright cool. That’s actually an awesome question coz most people, so if you have a market, a herd, a niche, you ask them, right? And this is again a poll apart that people fail. I mean you have survey monkey, right? Free service. Go and create a quick free survey, they’re up to 4-5 questions. People will tell you anything. If you don’t, I mean if you have a blog, you obviously ask people for comments, things like that. If you have a blog and you already get comments people are probably commenting about this pain things, right? In the case of Kyle and in your site, you do interviews, what are your most popular interviews on, right? It’s just got the most comments, the most retweets, the most likes, that’s probably something that your market really cares about. So if you did more on let’s say, making up something, you know analytics and numbers and conversions, it gets a whole lot more likes, comments, tweets, all that fun stuff versus the goals and visions stuff that probably I wanna go the other side. So that’s if you have a herd. If you don’t have kind of a list or a following which is where a lot of people start out at he had to go find out where this people are interacting.

I mean the best place I like to go right now coz it’s instant feedback and there’s a lot of people is Facebook. And in Facebook on the top there’s a big search bar just like it’s google and you can just type in whatever your market is. Let’s say real estate, right? So your real estate investment and you wanna teach people how to invest in real estate. You wanna figure out what they really care about. Do they wanna flip houses with no money down? Do they want to buy and fix up houses like the TV shows in HGTV whatever it is. So go on facebook, do a search for real estate investing and then it will give you on the left hand side a breakdown of kind of advanced searching and you wanna click on groups and what’s gonna happen is you’re gonna see a list of all the groups about real estate investing. And these are people who are obviously interested in real estate investing. They go, they’re kind of in a club together, they hang out, they talk, join the group. Once you join the group what you could do is you could create a poll or survey in the group. The cool thing about facebook is when you do that it announces it to everybody in the group that says “ding! Greg just posted a new survey question. Go and answer it.”

I don’t know the numbers off the top of my head but I have a slide when I normally do a similar presentation to this. In the real estate investing niche I think there’s 4 or 5 groups right at the top that have over 20,000 people in it. So if you join the group, get invited, you hang it, and you say “hey, I’d like to ask a question. What are you having trouble with flipping houses?” All of a sudden 20,000 people get ping with that message saying “ding! Greg just asked a new question.” And it is a fast way to get feedback.

T: Yeah no kidding. I didn’t actually think, I have a list so I’ve been using survey monkey and I’ve been using it very successfully but it never occured to me. That’s why I love doing these interviews. So there’s my little take home for the day.

G: So I mean that’s the fastest instant feedback way to do it.

T: Yeah absolutely. Just find groups and put surveys in the groups and that way you can benefit from other people’s list. There was another, well I won’t go off on the attention coz people tell me sometimes I talk too much in my own interviews so I’m gonna keep this and go to a new question.

G: Yeah go for it.

T: Basically the idea and I stumbled across this, and this is kind of a list builder, if you don’t have a big list find some people, go out and find some people who are in your niche, put up a survey and get everybody to send their list to the survey so that everybody gets the insight of the kind of the niche in general. And then there was, I forgot the exact strategy, I was reading this on the airplane the other day. And there was some way that you could basically make them an offer in the bottom if they wanted to get more information. They could put their email address in and then you could never email that person again unless they actually re-opted into another list. So it was a way that build a list and it was a way to serve a team up and get a bunch of really valuable research data. I know I haven’t done the teaming up thing yet but I have done survey monkey and I tell you I learned a ton about my list for one of my sites, in my Online Income Lab blog, as a result of that and it really was different than I expected that it would be. There was a few areas that were like big light bulb moments where I was like “wow! Didn’t think that they would have said that.” So I’m a huge advocate in doing that research.

Okay so now someone understands or they should at this point understand what it is. By the way, I got a construction site going next to me, are you hearing the bang, bang, bang of the nail gun right now?

G: I’m not. But really funny when I recorded this morning I have a construction going on outside and every 2 minutes I’m gonna have to mute my phone.

T: Yeah okay well it doesn’t take up stuff that’s far away. I apologize everybody if you’re hearing bang, bang, bang, bang like I do right now. Alright so we’ve got a clear idea of who our audience is, now what? What do I do now? And first of all, I guess this I should back up, we have to have an objective first. Like why are we creating the information product?

G: Right.

T: We have to decide are you gonna sell this to generate revenue or are you gonna give it away to generate leads? Or is there another option that I’m not thinking about? Or is it just a or b?

G: Everything really plays into those two essentially. So in our model we have the free report, the flow in product, the high end back service, right? So but you do always wanna have kinda that back end goal so to kinda backtrack what I always tell people to do is when you’re thinking about releasing this information product is that why question, but also the what you want the outcome to be, right? So a lot of people have this pipe dream of selling $27 products and making a million dollars a year and I’m just like “well, you need to sell freaking lot of $27 products to hit that number.” And so you really need to think about how are you going to get to that, whatever that number is. I don’t know what everybody’s listing. Find that number. So if it’s simple math, a $120 grand that you wanna hit you have to make $10,000 a month to hit that number, right? It’s simple math again. To hit that $10,000 number I need to sell 10 products at a $1,000. That’s a heck of a lot easier than selling a thousand products at $10 in one month. And then having to do that again the next month. And again the next month. Very, very difficult. So you need to put those things into place and you need to create a product that has enough value to where you can charge enough money in order to hit those revenue goals. And what I mean by that is there’s certain things that people will spend a lot of money for obviously business advice, you’ve seen marketing products and building business products this and that at $500 – $2,000 – $5,000 in up level because it might go to this program and I implement it I can make X times more than that in my business.

Where you have a problem are the businesses where you’re teaching someone and it’s no offense to this niche coz we have people in it is that grow a home garden niche, right? I’m not gonna make any more money by growing a couple tomatoes in my backyard, it’s just kind of that personal affiliate, you can’t sell a how to grow tomatoes product for $500, right? It’s probably in the $20-30 range. So you need to think about what you can do to supplement that. And that’s where you’re gonna think about maybe partnering with someone to sell them the seeds or to sell, whatever that next level is. You have to think about that because I don’t want to sell a pipe dream.

That’s not why I’m on this interview today. I don’t want to tell you that you can sell $27 products or even hundred or a $1,000 products if there isn’t a real business behind it. A lot of people think that I’m just gonna build this thing, people are gonna come and I’m gonna get rich just because I’m smart. And that’s not the case at all. You have to build somethign that people want that has inherent value that people will pay for and they can sustain a real business. Again, rule, it was one of the rules, can’t rely on the power of one. One $27 product will not make you rich. 10 $27 that all lead into a $500 product that lead into a $1,000 coaching program that lead into a $10,000 mastermind group, that is a business model. But $27 ebook that you just sell on your site once because you have a blog with a couple of subscribers is not a business model. It’s a very, very important distinction that I wanna make coz again I’m not here trying to sell pipe dreams. I’m here to help people create real businesses that affect people and impact lives. That’s really what we’re both here for.

T: And I wanna jump in on this point because again this kind of piggy backs on what I said earlier about this decision to just give all your stuff away for free on your blog versus creating a ladder system of products. If you’re giving all your stuff away for free you don’t really ever have customers. You never really have an upsell opportunity. And you’re putting all your time and your effort in and you’re just giving it all away. And I don’t think that’s the greatest business model in the world because do you really wanna have, for example, I can think of a blog and I won’t mention its name coz it’s very popular with the traders, the guy that owns it makes a lot of money but he’s got 8-9,000 people a day coming to this blog. Do you think he can provide any personal interaction with that many people? No. So it’s an inherent limit of business model. His avatar is someone who really loves to read the blog and he makes great blog posts and he gives away a lot of really good information but if somebody would benefit from having a coaching program or a done for you program and that kind of stuff, that model, what do you think? Doesn’t work with that, does it?

G: Well it can. So I like and I love to draw in music industry examples but you pay in the ascension model, the ladder model that we were kinda about just talking about, you pay for levels of access, right? So someone comes to the blog, in this case he’s got 9,000 people coming a day. People leave comments, maybe he replies to a few, probably doesn’t. There’s no access there whatsoever. You read it, you get the information, there’s no back and forth communication. The next step is maybe he has that but I don’t know what blog we’re talking about so maybe he has that $50 ebook that you buy in the site, right? That’s a different level of access coz now you’ve given him money, he’s giving you something in return, there’s probably some, even if it’s not him, there’s some level of customer support or a community or a password protected, there’s something to pay for that level of access. With some point of access to the guy so now you pay $500 to be in maybe a 4-week telecoaching program where he delivers a new module once a week for 4 weeks. Well now you’re getting him with maybe a hundred other people live on a webinar or something. So now you have a different level of access. Still not you two hanging out. You’re not going to get coffee together but you pay for that level of access.

The next is come in and hang out with me for a day, one on one consulting but that’s more expensive coz now you’re paying for more levels of access. So same thing in the music industry, you buy someone’s CD you have no access to that person whatsoever. You put it in your player, you hear the music, good to go. You buy a concert ticket, it’s a little more expensive than the CD, you get another level of interaction with someone, right? But you still don’t get to hang out with the band, they’re still behind the stage. You get the VIP tickets, you get to go and do the meet and greet right before. You give a little more money and you can afford to bring them in your birthday party and have the Jonas’ brothers rock it out but you paid for that. So same thing you’re paying for levels of access in that situation and that’s really the ascension model because our time is all worth money. So if you want my time and attention you’re gonna have to pay for it. And if you develop that level of expertise that people really want and you can deliver value on that it’s worth the money. We pay, if any of the listeners are fans of like Dan Kennedy, we’re in his bottom coaching group. We pay the guy almost 50 grand a year but it’s worth 7 figures to our business every single year so I’ll pay the guy whatever he wants. So you have to be able to provide that value on the back end.

T: And I wasn’t trying, I’m a huge fan of the ascension model. It’s the model that I use. I just was trying to speak to the people who are maybe thinking they can build a business by giving everything away for free and hoping to make it out in affiliate commissions or that kind of thing. I’m not gonna say it’s impossible but the sheer volume that you’re gonna need to do that is gonna be more challenging to attain. Plus you don’t have that engagement. If people are just reading your stuff and maybe they’re clicking your affiliate links and maybe they’re not clicking your affiliate links. I think you have a whole lot more risks there than if you actually have a list of customers who bought $50 products or list of customers who bought $1,000 products or list of customers who are in a $10,000 or a $50,000 mastermind. And you’re gonna get more satisfaction too because you’re gonna engage those people who are paying for that higher level of access. They’re gonna be interesting people. Those are the kind of people that I wanna be around. Those are the kind of people that I wanna hang with. That’s why people join mastermind groups because it’s so much about the guy running the group, or the gal, it’s about the other people who could afford to be in that group. That’s where the real benefit for your buck comes in.

Anyway we’re getting like way off tangent here.

G: Totally off track.

T: So let’s get us back on track. So we know why we’re doing it. We know who we’re doing it for. We understand what the pain is. What’s next?

G: Yeah so we know where they are now, right? So go back to the basketball example we were using earlier, they’re playing in this community basketball league which is just one step below semi-pro. So we know where they are now and we know where they wanna go. They wanna get the attention of some kind of a pro scout, right? So now all we need to do is create a bridge to go from the community league to being scouted. And how do we get them there as quickly as possible.

Another common mistake that people make is they think they need to do a 12 CD, 12 DVD super huge product. The reality is if you can tell me in 30 minutes what to do and get that, that’s more valuable to me coz you get more fighting for time and attention. So get people here as quickly as possible. So the first thing, the absolute first thing that you wanna do is you wanna give them some type of result immediately. And so what I mean by that is the fitness industry always give this example, a P90 extra insanity. You can’t turn on the TV without seeing one of those infommercials these days. When you actually get the DVD and you put it in your DVD player and you’re in your living room, you get your Tshirt on, and you’re looking at it and 45 minutes later you’re on the floor, you’re sweating, your whole living room stinks and your wife comes downstairs like “what the heck have you been doing?” You’re on the floor, you’re on your back. Well when Tuesday comes around and you go to pop in the DVD you’re like “hey you know what? I don’t know about this.” You don’t put the DVD in, right? You do not want that effect happening with your products, right?

So you want the first step to create motivation so that they continue on the path. And so you do this by answering the question what’s the first thing they have to do in order to achieve the result and you’re gonna give me an answer and then you’re gonna wanna say what is the first thing I need to do in order to do that and what’s the first thing I need to do in order to do that. And it’s really repetitive but you’re gonna come up with an answer that is really simple to do and it’s going to cause a result.

So I was at a live event working with real estate agents and I was talking to a gentlemen who coaches real estate agents and I was like “alright so you wanna sell a product where someone wants to teach people how to sell more houses in real estate.” So how do you sell more houses? Well you gotta get more listings. So that’s the first thing you need to do in order to sell more houses, you gonna get more listings. That’s how many houses they have available for sale. Like alright great, so how do I get more listings? Like we gonna go meet more people. I was like “alright great.” So how do I meet more people? He goes “alright well you can go to networking groups and there’s this event that you can go to in our city. I’m like “great. How do I get signed up for that event for that city?” And he told me how to do that. So that was the first absolute step. So this first module, this first step, this first whatever it is, is click here, sign up for this thing, go to this meeting on Tuesday and you’re gonna meet people. Now we’re gonna teach them how to meet people, develop the relationship they’re on but you have to take that first initial step where someone can go “oh I can do that. I’ll just sign up for this thing. It took me 3 seconds. I have this gratification. I have this result. I have this positive brain juice going on. It’s like cool. You know Greg’s a cool guy. He taught me how to do something. I did it, kinda worked. Sweet.” And they’re ready for an A2 coz now they’re like what do I need to do next? What’s the next step in the process?

And really that’s how you build your product. You start with that end and you figure out what do I need to do in order to get there. And then what do I need to do in order to get there. And what do I need to do first. And what do I need to do first. And you’re gonna come up with that first step. When we create products we like to create products in four’s so four modules is typically what we call it. The reason why we do that is because if you release your product in weekly amounts, that’s 4 weeks, 4 weeks is about a month. Can you see your target prospect going through something in about a month? A lot of people again, going back to the 12 CD, 12 DVD issue, that’s 12 weeks. That’s 3 freaking months that you want someone who’ll listen to you and keep doing stuff over and over again. That is very, very difficult to do. But if you can get people to commit for 4 weeks, about a month, about 30 days and get that given result, that’s what we like to do when we create products. So we say this is the here, what I need you to do there, what I need you to do there, what I need you to do there, what I need you to do there. I got 4 steps. Those 4 steps become your product.

T: So let’s bring this to the example of blogging because regardless of who’s, I’m trying to make this as applicable to kinda 2 audiences, people who have a business and they wanna get more leads from the web and there’s maybe people who are still working for somebody else blogging is a great vehicle for either of those audiences. As you know to create a successful blog there’s a lot of steps. So if I’m hearing what you’re saying correctly, are you saying that I might wanna come out with a course first of all and you’d, I don’t know if I’m gonna get this right or not so you can tell me if I am, of how to pick a market for my blog coz that’s like the first phase of blogging. And then you gotta figure out how do you set the actual blog up coz not everybody knows how to do that. And then you gotta fill it with content and then you gotta drive traffic to it. And then you gotta build a mailing list. And and and and…. If you were making a how to use blogging to benefit your business product how many places would you chop that up?

G: So it depends on again what you want the end goal to be. So it’s the end goal. So is the product, you’re gonna buy this product and at the end of the product you’re just gonna have a blog up? Is the end product going to be that you’re going to have a successful blog up and running with 10 posts to tell your course story that whatever it is? Or is the blog, I”m gonna go from zero to your first dollar online? So again you have to know what that process is. And you also want to know who your market is because is your market completely no idea tech savvy? Is it like mommy bloggers who are not yet mommy bloggers who barely not check their email? Then your product needs to be go to godaddy, buy domain, go to hostgator, get some hosting, use fantastico in one click. That’s a different product than the 20 something, just out of college, trying to blog about gen Y or whatever it is who already is on Tumblr or whatever and you just now need to teach him what to write about.

So again it’s around about waving answering your question but you have to know your end goal coz then you just need to take a step back. So I’m gonna teach moms how to blog, how to get something up. Product no. 1 is gonna be here’s how to get your freaking blog up and running. It’s online, you can tell your kids to go visit it and leave a comment. That’s probably product no. 1. That’s probably the $27 or $47 product. Right after that is again you can’t rely on the power of one, they go to the product now they get this blog up. They trusted you, they’re like “wow, Greg showed me how to get a domain, I got my blog up, I send it to my kids, they think it’s awesome, they gave me these cool themes I could use, whatever.”

T: And that feeling of accomplishment too.

G: Right. Now the blog’s up. I paid for this product. Greg promised me and told me that if I went through this step I’d have a blog up and running. He didn’t promise me I was gonna get a million dollars. He promised me I’d get a blog up and running. Now you say “hey Jane, you got your blog up and running. We have our next level program. It’s a little more expensive. It’s about $100 but now it’s gonna show you how to write posts that whatever. This course is gonna tell you how to find advertisers. Or it’s gonna find me how to write sponsored posts. So again don’t rely on the power of one. Find that product that solves the first step, the first magic bullet in your market and then get right on to the second one. Because after they go through it, if you’ve done it correctly, they’re gonna want more from you, right? And that’s again the business end of it.

T: That’s such a good point because when I created my first information product I gave like the whole deal. All the modules.

G: And that’s what we all wanna do.

T: Yeah

G: Because we wanna create that super product that solves everything to everyone.

T: Exactly. But in hindsight as I’m listening to you I’m thinking to myself hhmm, might have been a whole lot more successful because especially for the people who are listening to the show right now, who don’t have an audience, they don’t have any blog traffic, they don’t have an information product, I know the objection that’s going in their head. They’re like “well, I’m not an expert yet.” Okay well wait a minute, if you’ve built or if you’ve put up a really good looking blog you’re an expert in putting up a really good looking blog. It doesn’t matter that you’re not getting any traffic or it’s not making money, if you’re not promising, if I’m hearing what you’re saying, if you’re not promising the customer anything more than step by step by step by step here’s how you build a really awesome and you told them how to get a header and fiverr and how to get graphic artists and all the stuff to just make a really good looking blog, that’s a product. And for the right customer that’s a product that people are gonna buy because they’re gonna have to google and youtube and get scraps of information all over the place which for someone who’s that the avatar is the new person who doesn’t know anything, wow way way way confusing.

So I kinda hammer this point home for the people who are listening to this, don’t let that I’m not an expert yet limiting belief thing hold you back from starting to make products. Because I think your point is excellent. Break it up into really simple steps. Make sure that people, that you make a promise that you have proof that you can deliver and then you’ve got a customer. And now when you have a customer I call it the three legs of the table. To have a business you gotta have a product, you gotta have a customer and you gotta have a way to get paid. Well guess what your next product is? You can teach people how to get paid coz you just got paid. You know how to do e-commerce and pay out and deliver and all that kind of stuff.

So that’s awesome. I’ll have to take that. I’m in the process of redesigning some of my own products right now. Like I’ve got one site that is the list is growing like 50-60 subs a day. And these are all, I surveyed them. I’m trying to figure out how do I monetize this list. And they’re all women 50 years old and older, married, still working with grand kids. So I don’t know if there’s a market for grandma bloggers but it’s something to think about.

G: So I’m tangent again I’m sorry. Coz this is applicable again so you’re getting 50-60 subscribers a day, you did this survey and you’re seeing that they’re 50 year olds trying to get into blogging for the first time. Here is the absolute coolest way to make a product the fastest way without you having to know anything about 50 year old mom bloggers coz you don’t, right? Coz you’re a dude. You don’t know what 50 year old mom bloggers want, right? So this is a strategy I’m using for a long time now. Once you find out that need and you’re not yet the expert in that market place go find one.

Here’s the secret to finding them. On Amazon.com go for the book search, on the left hand side there’s an advance search and you can search for books that are coming out in the next 30 days, books that have just launched within the past 30 days and books that have just launched within the past 90 days. What do you think every single one of those authors wants within either 30 days of their book about to be released or 90 days after it came out. They all wanna talk about their book.

T: Absolutely they do.

G: Every single one of them wants to talk about their book. So in this case you could go and you can find baby boomer marketing or baby boomer blogging or whatever, I’m just making up terms. You can find all the books that were released in that area in the past 30 days or past 90 days, whatever it is and just say “hey, I’d love to interview you. You’ve got about a 30 minute interview creating this product for moms or bloggers who are your exact audience. At the end of the interview we can talk all about your book, you can tell them where to get it, whatever you want and at the end I’ll give you that interview, you can use however you want but I’m putting it into this package, right? You find 4 people that cover 4 different areas. Well there you have a 4 module program that you didn’t have to know anything about mom bloggers and now you have a product. So this is creating the product real fast. You find 4 people like that. You jump on skype. You get a program called skype recorder, it’s like $10. You record and interview this person. You get the interview transcribed. You go to fiverr, people will cheerfully transcribe about 10-15 minutes for $5 so if it’s a 30 minute call it cost you $10 to get it transcribed. You do 4 of them it’s $40. And now you got a big manual and you just create a couple of workbook that like fill in the blank questions on stuff they need to do. Well now you have 4 MP3’s, you have a huge manual and you have an action guide and boom! Now you got a $47 product. Didn’t cost you a lot of money. Didn’t take you a lot of time. You know met 4 experts that have books out and you can say that you’re associated with and now you’ve got a product. And you can test the market place really quickly without you having to spend a 100 hours filming and worrying about lights again. Who cares? Just get the freaking thing out, see people really relate to it. Fastest most effective way to create a product without being an expert in that market place. So hopefully that tangent was helpful but it’s part of my favorite ways to create products.

T: I’d actually heard you talk about that tangent before but I was listening to the interview on the go and didn’t have a pen with me to write it down so I forgot it. So now it’s written down and I love it. I think that’s an excellent tangent. Now that made me think of a question I wanted to ask about testing products. I did this with my last launch. I launched a mastermind group. It was a $1,000 product. It was a 12 week long coaching program, in hindsight I might switch that to a shorter period of time. But anyway my point is I didn’t create anything. I simply put up a video that said here’s what I’m gonna offer, there’s the buy button, if you want in here’s an early bird price and you can get in. And a bunch of people bought. So I knew, I mean I brought in about I think it was $10,000 of revenue before I’d ever lifted a finger to create the product. But then of course you’re motivated to really make the best product you could possibly make.

G: Definitely.

T: But what about this? What if they’re not like me, they don’t have a list and why not just put up a get optimized press, it’s a wordpress theme, makes beautiful squeeze pages, put up a little video and buy some facebook traffic and just hit that squeeze page and see if people are even willing to opt into it. Do you ever do anything like that before you build products?

G: So now I agree with you but the mindset of I’m now spending money in advertising is a tough concept for people to get on their first product.

T: Yeah that’s right.

G: So I agree with you but here’s the work around for that because I know finances are usually a barrier to people when they’re first getting started out. They don’t wanna go and spend a couple of hundred bucks on facebook traffic because if it doesn’t work then they’re out of a couple hundred bucks. Even though they’re gonna go and buy a $1,000 course that’s gonna teach them how to do facebook ads but they won’t spend any money on facebook ads. But that’s another story for another day.

Alright so the work around for this is go find somebody who does have a list, offer to do a free webinar or a teleseminar to their list and sell the product on that, obviously giving them 50% affiliate commission or whatever you wanna give them. You know if you can go and find another blog who maybe has a list of 1,000-2,000 people and you can get 50 people on the phone and you can close 10 of them, you split the revenue or whatever it is.

That’s the way to test it if you don’t have a list. It’s doing the teleseminar or doing a webinar. And again if you wanna go the free way, no money whatsoever, freeconferencecall.com will give you a free conference line, do it on the phone. I think people are very attracted to the sexiness of webinars because there’s video and it’s the hot crazy talk but so many more people can just jump on the phone if I’m on the car I can just jump on the phone. If I’m driving my baby to daycare or whatever it is I can just jump on the phone. I don’t have to be in front of my computer to watch this up. So don’t think that teleseminars are less powerful than webinars. Or that you’re limited because you don’t have the webinar technology. You don’t want to spend the money and go to webinar, whatever it is. That’s the quick work around to doing that.

And I completely agree with your model. Don’t create the product in that instant especially if it’s a bigger one. I can tell you it doesn’t work. That’s how I created every single one of my music products. I sold it first and then I would hold a live class every Monday for, I did one for 4 weeks, one for 12 weeks. Similar to how you did it. That way you’ll not have to work.

T: Yeah absolutely coz it can be when I created my first product I spent 6 weeks just cranking it out. Now I knew that it was an outsourcing type product and my own outsourcers it would benefit me if no one ever bought it but in hindsight I didn’t know what I was doing. I just wouldn’t want anyone to do it that way.

T: Okay so some people listening to this maybe the dentist, doctor, lawyers, whatever they’re thinking love this, love the idea “man, don’t have any time, already working too much.” And not even those people, even maybe people who are employed and they’re trying to create their own business so they got more time and they have money and they wanna get going and they ‘re thinking “man, those 4 people and 4 modules and interview, yeah, I can do the 4 calls but then what? I mean transcriptions and graphics and hay yay yay. So how can you help me do that?”

G: Yes so literally work done for you product creation company. Everything we talked about tonight from figure out who your market is, the initial ideas, developing that business model, we start there. And we really decide, a lot of people come in with the idea “hey I wanna create a product on this.” And we end up creating a product on that because that’s really the product that we wanna create. So it’s a consultive process so whether you have an idea or you have no idea, we start there. Then we obviously develop your product, the outline, the framework which is getting someone from A to B like we talked about earlier. We develop all that for you. We create the outline for the whole products. What we do is we act as the interviewer. Similar to how Trent’s been tonight, asking me the questions, I do the same for you in a systematic way to get you to solve the problem with the market place. We do that and interview some, coz there’s 2 different ways. One is because I can present you as the expert in that market place “but hey what’s up? This is Greg and today I’m joined by Trent. Trent is the leading blogger for entrepreneurs looking to do xyz and he’s been featured here and there.” And I position you as that 3rd party expert.

Second thing the interview does is it’s really conversational, just how Trent and I have been talking tonight. This is conversational. No one should feel like I’m speaking at you like I’m on a stage and I’m like pointing down. Very conversational, very low key and customers really like that because I don’t want to see a guy like on a pedestal like just shooting pellets at me telling me what to do. I wanna have that conversation. That’s why interviews are very effective. That’s why Trent is really successful with his model and we do the same with our process.

And the third is that you don’t have to do anything. You don’t have to prepare anything. You don’t have to prepare powerpoint slides or bullet points or write paragraphs or script anything out. You just answer questions that you already know the answers to. And you get the questions in advance. So we record it, pretty obviously edit everything, we take out all the ums and ahs, awkward pauses, anywhere we slipped up, messed up, make you sound like the expert that you are. We’ll get everything transcribed but we don’t just transcribe it we actually turn those transcriptions into something that people wanna read because if people read a transcription the word for word how it was transcribed they’re like “this is like gibberish” because we speak and run on sentences, we switch directions and so we edit all that and make it look good. We create an action guide. This is the coolest part of the whole thing because you don’t want people just to passively listen to the product. You want people to take action so they change their life or change their business. And so an action guide it’s a fancy word for a workbook but here’s a quick free tip for you in the end. You never wanna sell a workbook, right? Because that means I’m buying work and who would in their right mind wants to buy work. They only get paid for the work that they do. So you wanna sell an action guide or a resource guide or users manual, whatever you wanna call it. We call them action guide coz that what you want people to do. You want them to take action. These are fill in the blanks. These are charts, graphs, things that they can circle, things that they can draw, things that they can answer, bullet points that we break out. We do all that for you creating this really useful guide that when someone fills this thing out and they actually do it they’re gonna be a customer of yours for the rest of their life. Really, really powerful.

We do all the graphics, we get it designed both for digital and physical so I know in the online world people really get a custom to just selling stuff and optimize press, just downloads MP3’s and stuff like that. But we get ready for physical too because there’s a huge mark up and margin for physical stuff. The same if you had 4 MP3’s versus 4 CD’s, the 4 MP3’s you might not only be sell for $47 but now put a 4 CD’s I’m gonna mail you, now it’s a $200 price or $300 product just because of the medium and the fact that this box of stuff gets shipped to my house. So we get it ready for both physical and digital. We hook you up with our for filming company which is print on demand. Going back to my again music industry analogies we used to buy disc makers, you get a brand new CD and you print up like 10,000 of them, right? Well these closets have like 9,000 of those 10,000 sitting on them. We don’t wanna do that to you so we offer a print on demand thing. So if Joe from Albuquerque buys one we print and ship one just for Joe, you just pay us for that one and you obviuosly make the mark up and all as if you own the product. We don’t take any ownership of it and you get it done and completed 30 days from the day that we rock it out.

It’s one of the coolest products and programs that I’ve seen and like this I’m biased coz it’s mine but it’s for the person who kinda has the idea but they don’t really know what they wanna do. They don’t know the direction but at the end we jump on and we have a marketing call and that’s how we’ve created over a hundreds of this. We’ve sold tens of thousands of our own products and we get on and we say here’s how you can find some joint ventures, here’s some advertising opportunities. So if you’re gonna do some mailer or if you’re buying ads or whatever it is here’s what you can do. To give you a clear path because the last thing that we wanna do is just make this thing and it just sits on a digital shelf or a real shelf. You don’t sell any coz then you’re not gonna refer anybody to us, you’re not gonna help us grow our business. If I’m not gonna help you grow your business you’re not gonna help me grow mine. So we really got your back the entire way. And that goes my long windid pitch there. So I hope everybody enjoys it.

T: And my little endorsement, Greg hasn’t said it in this interview and I haven’t asked him directly but this is not some little small time business that he’s running. This guy is doing millions of millions of dollars a year and sales of this stuff and he’s helping a lot of clients and I’ve never found anybody, and that’s why I wanted to interview him and why ask him to create a master class, I’ve never found anybody who was just like so completely focused on making high quality information products. And it’s a fantastic business opportunity. I mean just that getting 4 people and doing the interviews and like you could knock out an information product, a high quality expert driven information product and you don’t have to know anything. You don’t have to be that expert. You just need to know how to tap into those experts and we’ve covered some of that tonight in the interview and we’ll cover even more in the master class.

So I wanna thank you all very much for watching this. Now if you’re at Bright Ideas watching this, down below the video there is, you can download the MP3 and you can download the transcription but you need to be a subscriber. It’s free. You just click on that, it’ll take you to the opt in page, you give me your email address. I don’t ever spam you. I’m never gonna share your email address with anyone else but that’s what you give me and then coz I pay money I use speechpad and it cost me a $1 a minute so this is gonna cost me $60 something to get this transcribed. But I pay my VA and so forth so I figured out that’s a fair trade. An email address for those downloadable items if you want.

Alright so thank you all very much. Greg, thank you for being on the show with me. I’ve learned a lot. I was reminded of a couple of things I heard from you in another interview so that was really good. I’m super stoked to do the master class with you and I’m gonna be hiring you to help with an information product here that some are on my drawing board right at the moment. So what you haven’t given is how do people get a hold of you and then we’ll close off on that.

G: Yeah definitely. So again rule no., I think it was 2, is a personality driven business. So luckily we’ve got to hang out, if you like what we have talked about today, I actually do wanna talk to you. I don’t wanna hide behind walls so just shoot me an email greg@productprosystems.com. If you wanna go to the website it’s just productprosystems.com. Get back to you. We can set up a time to talk and see if we can help you out man. And make sure you say that Trent sends you coz he’s a good guy. And I wanna be able to tell him that he’s got a great audience so.

T: Alright you’re too kind. So thank you very much everybody. We’ll be back with again another interview soon. Bye.

Here are some of the things you’ll discover in this episode:

How To Create Stunning Information Products with Greg Rollett

Creating Stunning Information Products That Generate Massive Revenue

If you’re like most of those considering creating information products, your dream of generating massive revenue will likely remain just that, a dream. Greg Rollett is one of the few people who has tons of experience in this area. He’s created hundreds of information products for both himself and his clients.

Through the course of this interview, he shares exactly what it will take for you to turn this dream into a reality. If you’re serious about generating quality information products, you do not want to miss this.

Listen now to hear expert advice on creating stunning information products. 

It Begins With 5 Rules of Ambitious Marketing

Greg shares 5 Rules that you need to follow if you want to get the most from your marketing. Since your information product is part of your marketing strategy, you’ll want to begin by looking at the big picture.

You’ll hear Greg talk about how to take mediocre marketing and make it great. Greg shares questions to ask that will help you get to know your market better than anyone else, especially your competition.

Greg also outlines how important it is for your marketing to have immediate, measurable results, so that you can track how well you’re doing.

Listen to the show to hear Greg share more details on these and all of the 5 rules.

Greg’s Proven Product-Generation Formula

Once you have your overall plan in place, it’s time to create quality information products that will sell like hotcakes.

In the interview, Greg lets us in on the key to creating quality information products – having the right formula. Using a proven formula will keep you from wasting your time or spinning your wheels. Greg’s formula creates information products that people want to purchase, without taking a lot of time or effort on your part. Who wouldn’t want that?

Listen now for Greg’s proven product-generation formula.

Finding the Right Pricing for Your Product

How do you determine how much to charge for your information products? Does it ever make sense to give them away for free? How on earth can you get people to pay top dollar for information that they could find online for free?

Greg shares how you can tell if and when you should give away products for free. He also divulges how, using one of the 5 rules of ambitious marketing, you can get people to pay handsomely for your information product. The amazing thing is, these rules apply even if the information you’re sharing is readily available for free elsewhere!

Listen to the show for expert advice on pricing strategies for your information product.

Taking the Pain out of Finding Pain Points

One secret to developing information products that appeal to your clients and fly off the shelves is to make sure the products address the client’s real pain points.

This sounds simple but Greg shares examples that demonstrate that the pain points aren’t always what you think. And if you target the wrong pain point you can waste countless hours and dollars developing information products that no one wants to buy. Identifying the correct pain points up front can save you massive amounts of time and money.

You know you’ve found the pain points when you find out what keeps your clients up at night.

If you want to effectively and efficiently locate your clients’ pain points, listen to the show now.

About Greg

information products businessGreg Rollett, the ProductPro, is a Best-Selling Author and online marketing expert who works with authors, experts, entertainers, entrepreneurs and business owners all over the world to help them share their knowledge and change the lives and businesses of others. After creating a successful string of his own

Greg is a front runner in utilizing the power of social media, direct response marketing and customer education to drive new leads and convert those leads into long-standing customers and advocates.

Previous clients include Coca-Cola, Miller Lite, Warner Bros and Cash Money Records as well as hundreds of entrepreneurs and small business owners. Greg’s work has been featured on FOX News, ABC, NBC, CBS, the Daily Buzz and The Wall St. Journal. Greg has written for Mashable, the Huffington Post, AOL, AMEX’s Open Forum and more.

Greg loves to challenge the current business environments that constrain people to working 12-hour days during the best portions of their lives. By teaching them to leverage technology and the power of information Greg loves helping others create freedom businesses that allow them to generate income, make the world a better place and live a radically ambitious lifestyle in the process.

A former touring musician, Greg is a highly sought after speaker having appeared on stages with former Florida Gov. Charlie Crist, Chris Brogan, Brian Tracy, James Malinchak, Mike Koenigs and Nick Nanton as well as at events such as Affiliate Summit, The Best-Seller’s Summit, Putting America To Work and many other events across the country.