Michael: Hi, it’s Michael Senoff with Michael Senoff’s The title of this interview is called how to be strategic with your content and make it have purpose and repurpose. It doesn’t matter what kind of business you’re running, being strategic with your content will save you time, bring in targeted customers, increase your affiliate sales and make you more money and in this interview, you’ll hear how to do that from marketing expert, Stu McLaren. Stu says, “You can create content anywhere.” He does audio interviews, teleseminars, home lessons and consulting all from his home out in the middle of nowhere with just a computer, telephone and microphone. But, it’s actually what he does with the content after he creates it that makes him different from other marketers. When Stu does a typical hour long interview, first he sells the interview to make money off the top. Then, while he’s talking, he’ll purposely section off his information into twelve five-minute chunks. That way, he can go back later and easily repurpose those into bite-sized chunks of information to give to affiliates, to generate leads, to create products and to submit to podcast directories. And, that’s just a few of his tips. Here are some others you’ll learn in this interview. You’ll learn two ways to get inside the mind of your customers and know exactly what content they’re looking for. You’ll hear the simple tricks Stu uses to fill his high-end seminars fast and he only had seven people registered with only four weeks left to go. You’ll learn why it’s so important to establish joint venture relationships before you actually need them and the fastest and best way to do that. You’ll learn tips on pricing products, including how to entice people to jump on a price, when to give your product away for free, and how Stu separates the freebie seekers from those who will break out their credit cards. You’ll learn exactly what to do with your raw content that will quickly get it polished up and ready for the market. You’ll learn why you should never wait until a product is perfect to send it out and how to use an updated version to draw past customers back to you. Stu says that when it comes to content, the most important thing you can do is make sure you’re continuously creating it and moving forward. You should also give as much information away for free as you can. If you leave prospects wondering, “What else could there possibly be?” they’ll likely become customers to find out, and in this audio interview, you’ll hear more tips and tricks from this award winning marketer. Now, let’s get going.

Raven.: Hi. This is Raven Blair Davis, and I’ve teamed up with Michael Senoff’s Tell us quickly about that award.

Stu: I was really honored [inaudible 02:41] over there in the affiliated classroom. They’re starting a whole new certification program, and I think it’s a wonderful thing. You know, it really helps bring some standard to the affiliate marketing industry, and I was really privileged and honored to be recognized as somebody who is blazing a trail in the industry and really making things happen. So, yeah, it was great to be awarded. It took me by surprise when I first found out, that’s for sure.

Raven: Was it four others?

Stu: Yeah, there were four others, and the big one for me was Shawn Collins. He’s a young guy, but he’s more like the grandfather of the affiliate marketing industry, and to be recognized alongside him, it really was a privilege. And then, there was Brock and Caroline and you know, two other great people who have really made a lot of things happen in the affiliate marketing industry. So, I was alongside some pretty awesome company.

Raven: How did you get into creating content?

Stu: Well, content has always been really important. I mean, when you are running an information business, or whether you’re selling products and services, content is king, because the more educated your consumers are, the more likely they’re going to want to invest in your products and services. So, you know, whether you’re selling hard goods, soft goods, it doesn’t matter. Content is always king, and that was really prevalent for me in the information marketing business, both with my own, but also with my clients. And so, I recognized very early on that creating content and creating products is something you need to do on a regular basis, because if you’re not, then your business is standing still. But, as long as you’re creating and moving forward, then you’re making the kind of progress you want. So, this was something that I recognized very early on, both in my business and for my clients, and that’s why I put such a huge emphasis on creating products and creating content on a regular basis. I live up here in a small town about an hour and a half south of Toronto. So, I’m out in the middle of nowhere, and yet, I’m still able to create high-quality products even with my telephone, and you know, I’ve got a microphone here in front of me as well. So, I get two recordings and the great thing is, you know, you can capture content very easily. You know, we’re doing it here in a simple conversation and I’m doing it from a small town out in the middle of nowhere in southern Ontario, Canada. And yet, that will now quickly turn around and be produced for an online product, an offline product, it can be in book format. There’s so many ways to repurpose what we’re doing here today. So, it can be done literally anywhere in the world, as long as you’ve got a phone and a voice, you’re off to the races. There are a number of different approaches that you can take when it comes to creating products using my phone. My preference is definitely to do interview- type products because they can be a lot more relaxed and it’s a little less scripted, but now there’s a couple of perspectives you need to think about. If you are the person interviewing somebody else, you need to be a little bit more prepared, because you need to have some questions set up and structured so that the call will flow and that you can get through some content. If you’re the person being interviewed, there’s actually a little less pressure because as long as you know your stuff, then you just go with the questions and, you know, give people content based on what you know. So, I find it a little bit easier on the side of the person being interviewed versus the one who’s actually interviewing others. So, if you’re interviewing others, you do need to be more prepared. You need to have questions set up in advance, and I think that goes a long way to show the quality of what you create. Because, if you’re not prepared, there could be some awkward, or I call them pregnant pauses, you know, where it’s awkward silence and things of that nature and the other person doesn’t know which way to go. But, if you’re prepared ahead of time with questions, the call will flow really well. So, interview-type audio products are my favorite. They’re the fastest ones, I think, to get created and get cranked out. Then, you can do all kinds of other products. You can do where you’re teaching lessons of material over the phone. We’ve done several big home study courses that way where we have multiple modules and we break it down and teach the content over several calls. Obviously, with those, you do need to be more organized. You need to have an outline and some major points that you want to cover. I don’t script mine word for word. I find that it takes away from the flow of the call and the personality behind the call. I like to have some major structure, as far as bullet points and an outline, and then go with the content based on what I know. I find that a little more easy for myself, but also, I think it comes off sounding a lot better as well. So, mine aren’t scripted word for word, but there are people that do that. So, you know, it just depends on your preference. But mine, when I’m teaching a lesson, I like to have an outline, some major bullet points, and then I go through and cover those in detail. Oftentimes, you don’t have to work that hard to know what questions to ask. What you need to do is put yourself in the shoes of the people who would be listening to this content. How do you do that? Well, there are a number of ways. If you have the ability to get in front of those people, meaning you have a way to communicate with your target audience ahead of time, you can set up what’s called an “Ask campaign.” Now, I use a tool that’s called the Ask database, and basically, what it allows you to do is collect questions from your audience, and it then sorts it so that you can see the most popular questions and you can see the most popular words that people are wanting to know more about and things of that nature. So, it’s a great tool for collecting and organizing and managing large amounts of questions. When you do have an Ask campaign like this, it’s going to give you a ton of information because it really helps you get inside of the mind of a consumer as far as what they’re wanting to know, what questions they have, where they’re getting stuck, and that really gives you a wonderful foundation to really build from when it comes to creating the content or the questions for your interview. The other way, if you don’t have a target audience that you can communicate with, what I like to do is go inside public forums and groups. You know, if you go to Google groups or Yahoo groups, you’ll be able to search and find groups of people who are continuously talking about certain topics, and inside of there, it’s inevitable that you’ll find all kinds of questions or areas where people are getting stuck. And again, you follow the similar model that we talked about with the Ask database. You go in there looking to find questions, looking to find problems and challenges that people are having with your particular subject area. And then, you pull those out and you start working with those because that’s where the market is stuck. That’s the information they want to know. So, not only with Google groups or Yahoo groups, but you can do it with forums. If you go onto Google and you type in your keyword related to your topic plus forum or plus message board, you’ll have all kinds of places and locations that people in your marketplace are going, talking to one another, chatting, and really asking each other questions and sharing information. This is a goldmine, folks, for great questions that you can pull from, and use for your own content. And then, if you want to take it a step further, with the amount of blogs that are being used online, this also serves as a fantastic resource, and you can find, you know, the most popular blogs in your particular niche. If you go to Technorati.com, Technorati is T-e-c-h-n-o-r-a-t-i. There a wide variety of things that you can do. I mean, you can do keyword searches based on keywords related to your industry, and you’ll see the top blogs. What I like to do is go to the top blogs where a lot of people are visiting them on a regular basis, and just see what topics are being covered. Go through the comments that people are leaving on the blogs. That too, will give you tremendous insight as to what people want to know, which again, will help you formulate your questions for your interview. For example, very recently, we were putting together a product and one of the things that we immediately needed was some testimonials. Now, oftentimes, it can be a laborious process for somebody who, you know, put together an audio testimonial for you. What we did was we just called the people up that we knew were raving fans about our particular product and said, “Hey, would you mind just telling us what you think about the product?” And, boom, they gave us a testimonial right there on the phone and we recorded that. Now, you can use testimonials a wide variety of different ways. Number one, you can obviously use it on any sales letter or marketing materials that you are creating to help sell your product, but I want to encourage you to take it a step further. What if you could create some type of a booklet or package or information PDF or report or things of that nature where you profile or give case studies of people who are using your products and services? Now, there’s a testimonial built into a case study, and that’s why calling up your best customers, talking to them ahead of time and saying, “Hey, would you be interested in just giving us your point of view and telling us how you’re using the product, and how you benefited from the product or which ways you’re using it versus some others that you’ve heard?” Just really getting some good case studies and profiling your best customers could be a wonderful way to not only add value to people interested in your products or services, but again, it’s a built in testimonial at the same time. So, that’s another way, and it was very simple and it’s all done through audio again, and the reason it works so well is because people don’t get spooked by just talking on the phone. It’s something that they do on a regular basis every day of the week. So, calling somebody up and just talking to them normally on the phone is a very comfortable atmosphere. When you get into a situation and you ask someone to record you something or do something on video and all this stuff, the amount of technology involved goes way up and therefore the amount of people that get spooked by it or uncomfortable with it goes way up as well. So, that’s why you want to make sure that you keep the complications to a minimum. You want to make it easy and friendly, and using the phone is definitely one of those ways. So, we use it a wide variety of different ways. We do interview products. We teach content, as far as modules. We do teleseminars. We do sales presentations. We do trainings. We do testimonial captures. There is a whole bunch of different ways that we use the phone, but they’re all in a comfortable format that everybody is used to using.

Raven: Hi. This is Raven Blair Davis reporting for Michael Senoff’s Can you share your thoughts on what you feel that can assist us in making sure we have winning content with our niche?

Stu: I think the biggest thing is that...we’ve already covered it, and that’s getting inside the mind of your customers. You do that by asking questions and you do that by soliciting feedback. And so, there a variety of ways you can do it. Number one, we’ve already talked about, using the Ask database, and that’s a great way because you’re getting people to submit questions. Another way to do it is by creating surveys or contests. Now, let me explain. A survey could be where you have a general idea of what the marketplace is thinking. You have a general idea of the main issues that they’re dealing with. But, what you can do is really drill down further and identify exactly where the biggest hurt or where the biggest pain is for your marketplace, and you can do that through surveys. You know, “Of these five major challenges, which one would you say is most prominent in your life or which one is holding you back the most?” Things like that. Now, what you’re doing is you’re really identifying the big problem areas for your marketplace and that’s where you should start when it comes to creating products. Solve the biggest problem first, and you’ll have people onboard for a long time afterwards. So, help them get through their biggest challenge and then, they’ll keep coming back to you time and time again. The other thing you can do from surveys is doing contests. I’ve done this many times when you solicit feedback from your audience by asking what is their opinion about this? How would they do this, or how would they name this product or things like that? You know, involving your customers or your audience in the development of a product is extremely powerful because there’s a psychological element where they implicitly take ownership of the product and its development because they’re a part of it. They’ve helped contribute to the development of that product. It’s very, very powerful when it comes time to actually selling the product because you know that they helped contribute. They are a part of it. They want to see it succeed and therefore, they’ve already got an interest in the success of that particular product. So, there are many ways to really make your products a winner, but the number one way for sure is engaging your audience in the development of the product, whether it be through an Ask campaign finding out their big questions, whether it be through surveys, whether it be through contests. The main thing here is you want to involve your audience as much as possible ahead of time so that they can be a part of the product as you’re developing it. It creates anticipation. It creates excitement. And, the thing that a lot of product owners make a big mistake, where they make a big mistake, is that they want to keep everything secret. They want to keep it closed. They’re afraid that somebody’s going to steal their idea. It’s the complete opposite. The more you involve people, the more successful you’ll be because they’re a part of the process. When they’re a part of the process, they believe in it. They want to see it succeed and that’s why you’ll see a higher response rate. Now, with that being said, are there people that are going to, perhaps, try to rip you off? Absolutely. It happens in every marketplace. But, the good news is the tremendous success you’re going to have, by involving the marketplace ahead of time, will far outweigh any of the naysayers or any of the people that will try to rip you off. So, the good news is the benefits far outweigh the negatives and it’s definitely a strategy I recommend. Don’t wait for it to be perfect. You know, I’m definitely a victim of this one because I find myself wanting to cross every T, dot every I, make sure every single element is perfect. But, the reality is that it will never be perfect, and the best example of this that I can give is Bill Gates with Microsoft. Okay? Let’s take a look at this. When he first released Windows, it was way, way back when it was MS Dos. Now, if he had waited until now, which is Vista, Windows Vista, he would never, ever have the market share or the company that he has now. But instead, he released it. He got it out to the marketplace. And then, what did he do? He worked on it. He improved it. He made it better and released...I think it was Windows 3.1 or one of them. And then, from there, he went to Windows 95, and then 98 and XP, and now Vista, and it’s going to continue to develop. So, the key here is you can always have Version 1 of your product, and when you make it better, when you upgrade it, when you improve it, there’s nothing wrong with going back to your 15 customers and say, “Hey, we’ve made it even better. Here’s a free copy.” So, they feel like they’re getting something extra, but you know what, it’s giving you the chance to make some money, get into the marketplace and develop relationships with those customers. That’s the most important thing in the beginning and so many of us get hung up on that. I’m guilty of it just as much as the next guy, but I will tell you, it is a major mistake holding a lot of people back. You know, it’s funny, when I look back at some of the early products that I created, I kind of get embarrassed. I kind of, smile and you know, think to myself, “Wow, if I only knew what I know now back then, you know, things would have been totally different.” But, it’s part of the process. You know, you’ve got to put one step in front of the other first before you can run a mile type thing, and the good news is your first product is probably going to be your worst. Your second is probably going to be your second worst. But, they’re just going to keep getting better and better the more you learn about developing products and the more you develop your own style. And, I think that’s really important too, that a lot of people don’t develop their own brand and their own style. There are a lot of “me too” and copycat products out there, and unless you find a way to differentiate yourself, you’re really going to be stuck and I think it’s going to be an uphill battle for you. But, once you zero in on how you want to market your products and how you want to create products and how you want to design them, and so forth, I think it really helps you to make a lot more progress. Well, once you’ve got your content created, it’s probably going to be in a raw format. So, you want to polish it up and you want to turn it into a professional product. One of the things that you should start to do is look for some vendors that you can work with. Now, depending on your budget is going to depend on how many vendors that you’re able to work with. In the beginning for me, one of the first people that I hired was a transcriptionist, because I did not want to sit down and type out word for word the recording of the interview. So, for me, one of the first people I looked to hire was a transcriptionist. Now, there was a website that I used to recommend called CastingWords.com. They have a very simple process where you can upload an audio file and have it transcribed and turned around fairly quickly. They’ve got three different levels of pricing and their budget transcription is 75¢ per audio minute. Now, that’s pretty good, but the thing that I don’t like about it is there’s no turnaround time guarantee. So, it can take sometimes upwards of a month or more. They used to be a lot faster and a lot cheaper, but I think they’ve just gotten so much business that they’ve really expanded it out. So, what I’ve done recently is gone to websites called Guru.com and Elance.com which are free websites that you can sign up to. And, what it allows you to do is post a project and that project then goes out to thousands and thousands of freelance entrepreneurs and they then bid on how much it would cost you to do that particular project. So, for example, very recently, I posted a two-hour transcription project. I said, “The audio file is two hours long. I would like it transcribed.” And, this is a very key element and I would highly recommend people write this down. You want to make sure that you ask for their rate per audio file. Here’s what I mean. When you have a transcription, a lot of transcription services like to charge you by the word but unfortunately, I don’t know about you, but I don’t know how many words I speak in an hour. You know, the reason I don’t like working with companies that charge me by the word, is I never know what my final cost is going to be for that transcript. So, it’s a guessing game and I’ve had situations where, you know, I spoke a lot more words in an hour than I thought and my transcription prices were through the roof. So, I like to hire a transcriptionist and the first thing that I ask is that they give me their rate based on a per audio hour basis. That way I know if I have a two-hour or a 120-minute audio file, it’s going to cost me X. There’s no guessing. There’s no situation where I don’t know what my file expense is going to be. I know to the tee what it’s going to be. Now, on Guru and Elance, I’ve been getting bids for anywhere between $25 dollars for an audio hour up to as high as $95 for an audio hour. Now, the varying degrees is based on how much somebody’s willing to do that transcription project for you, but also the quality of their transcription. Some people will take the time to edit and will proofread and go through the transcription thoroughly before handing it over to you, and obviously, that’s where the higher price point comes in. But, it still is a lot more affordable than some of the other services out there. So, I highly recommend that you go to Guru.com or Elance.com and post your transcription projects on there and be very specific about just what I’ve told you, that you would like the bids based on a per audio hour basis. That way you’re going to know exactly how long it takes. Now, one of the big tips is when you find somebody, a transcriptionist that you enjoy working with and that provides good quality transcriptions, pretty good turnaround time, you want to make sure you maintain a relationship with them, because they’ll become a vital asset in your business as you start creating more content and doing more interviews and getting them transcribed. So, that’s the first place I would go to is just getting it transcribed, because now that opens up a whole other window of opportunity for you. Because, one of the things that I love doing with any type of audio product that I create is repurposing it. I do this from the onset especially when I’m creating the content. Even before I create the content, in the way that I create the outline, I create an outline for an audio product so that I can repurpose it very easily afterwards. Here’s what I mean. Let’s say I’m looking to do a 60-minute lesson and I’m going to be teaching it over the phone. Well, number one, I would sell it to people so that I’m able to make some money in creating the product, and then number two, I would do it probably, in a fashion where it’s chunked up into sections. So, I like to do 12 five-minute sections. So, that would make, obviously, 60 minutes. And, the reason I do it that way is because five minutes is like a nice bite-sized piece of information that I can use afterwards when I’m repurposing the content, and I use that content, not only to sell those products afterwards, but I also use it to help me generate leads. I use it to help me generate traffic to my website. I provide it to my affiliates and affiliate tools so that they can help drive traffic to my site. I use it as bonuses and there are many, many other purposes that you could use that same content for. So, when you’re creating content, if you structure it in a way, knowing that you’re going to repurpose it afterwards, you really set yourself up well to be able to do it quickly and easily once the raw content is created. So, that’s how I go about doing it and then, once I’ve created the raw content, I get it transcribed, and now I’ve got a lot of options available to me. And from there, it’s just a matter of refining the content as to how you want to use it. So, if I’m going to turn it into a professional product, I tend to hire designers to help create the graphics for the CDs, the CD covers and cases. I look to create, when I’m using the transcripts, I get them looking really nice as well. And so, I’m looking to create a real professional product that meets with my brand and then I start creating the sales materials.

Raven: You can take that hour and you can break it down into small chunks, so that it’ll be easier to repurpose it.

Stu: Yeah, because what you can do with those chunks is submit those to podcast directories, and pick out five minutes and that probably would be a nice little article for you, like you know, two or three pages, and you could submit those to the article directories. You could use those as blog posts on your blog. There are many, many things that you could do with that. But, if you don’t think about it ahead of time, you don’t have distinct sections where you can break that content up. It becomes a lot more difficult to go back through and really find areas where you can say, “Okay, my thoughts end here, so I can take this and use that as a section.” Whereas, if you think about it ahead of time, you chunk it up and create sections of content, it’s really easy to go back through, divide it up, and start using it for other purposes.

Raven: What’s the most effective way you’ve found to market your product, once it’s all done?

Stu: Well, hands down, the fastest and best method of marketing the product is with joint ventures. But, the hard, cold truth about joint ventures is it’s based on a relationship and if you don’t take the time to build relationships with people, you’re going to find it very difficult. So, that’s why I attend a lot of seminars every year. That’s why I’m constantly looking to build relationships with people, meet them. And, I find seminars are the easiest way to do that because meeting somebody face to face, shaking hands with them, having lunch or dinner with them is a very quick process when it comes to building relationships with people, and they’re much, much more likely going to want to work with you down the road if they’ve already met you, hung out with you, got to know you, and it makes that whole process a lot easier. Now, even still, if you aren’t able to attend seminars and things of that nature, there are ways to build relationships with others, but just know that joint ventures are based on relationships. You have to invest time when it comes to building relationships with people in your marketplace that you want to work with. But, hands down, joint ventures is the fastest and easiest way to market your products because just think about it. If your joint venture partners, if they’ve got a way to communicate with your target audience and they can do it very quickly and effectively, aka email or through a podcast or something of that nature, then what happens is your marketing messages are able to get in front of thousands and thousands of people very, very quickly, and it’s coming from somebody that they trust. They know them. They like them. They trust them. Therefore, their recommendation has a much higher value than somebody just coming to your particular page cold. I’ll give you some quick things to look for and then I’ll give you some more personal details based on experiences that I highly recommend people follow. Number one, just some quick details. Obviously, we want to get and formulate relationships with joint venture partners who are getting a lot of traffic to their website, and/or have a large email list targeted to our products or services. So, how do we find out what kind of traffic that they’re getting to their email list? Well, there’s a way to do that on Google. Obviously, you can look at their page rank, their Google page rank. The higher the page rank, the better. Now, the Google page rank is based on a scale of one to ten. Any websites that are four are higher are very good, so take that into consideration. Any website with a page rank of four or higher is actually quite good, so you have to pay attention to that. The other thing that you can do is look at their Alexa ranking, and their Alexa ranking will determine how much traffic they’re typically getting to their website. Again, that’s another way, and then one of the other new tools that I really like is a website called Compete.com and this will give you a general overview of the traffic that their particular websites are getting. It’s a fantastic tool. Really opens your eyes as far as how much traffic a website is getting. So, that’s traffic. Now, what about email list? Well, email list is a little more difficult to find out. There are some strategies. One of the strategies I highly recommend is that you actually sign up for the email list yourself. I’ll perhaps, relate a story in a minute about how that really helped me when it came to forming a relationship with a joint venture partner, but just signing up for the list itself will give you insight as to how that person markets their list, the kind of things they’re saying, how they position themselves and so forth. But, furthermore, a lot of ezine owners or newsletter publishers will give you and publish openly the number of people that are on that ezine. It’s a social proof element that they’re saying, you know, “Over 50,000 people are reading this every week” type thing. So, it’s something that they’re proud of and rightly so, but again, that gives you insights as to how many people are on their list. There is one other tool that I use on a regular basis. It’s called the Online Ezine Directory; OnlineEzineDirectory.com. Now, this is a paid service, but here’s how it works. Once you pay for a membership, and I think the lifetime membership is around $197 or $250, somewhere in that neighborhood, but it’s lifetime, and what it does is it enables you to go into their members area and search for ezines based on keywords that you type in. So, obviously, let’s say that you’re involved in the health niche. You would type in keywords related to the health niche, and it would pull up all of the ezines in their database that match those keywords. But, the great thing is it gives you insights by telling you how often they publish their ezine, how many people are on their ezine, what it costs to advertise on their ezine, the contact information of the people that own the ezines, and much, much, more. So, it really is an extremely valuable tool when it comes to finding joint venture partners because you can find out exactly how many people are on an ezine, how many times that thing is published, schedule-wise, whether it’s weekly, bi- weekly, or twice a week, or what have you. So, it really gives you a tremendous amount of insights regarding that particular newsletter. So, traffic and the size of the email list, those are the two key important factors. Now, one other thing that I want to mention, is that even though a website may be getting a lot of traffic, even though it may have a huge email list, it doesn’t necessarily mean that you want to partner up with that joint venture person, the reason being is because you may find that their philosophy, their approach to business, isn’t a good match for you. And, I highly recommend that you do that as far as understanding how they market and the types of products that they market because you don’t want to align yourself with people that one, you don’t feel comfortable with, two, doesn’t meet or fit your particular brand. Let me relay a story to kind of demonstrate this. A few years ago when I was first starting out, I was doing my first idea incubator seminar, and we’ve done them every year since...You know, you can always find out information about it by going to IdeaSeminar.com...But, it’s a seminar geared for entrepreneurs who are looking to take their ideas from the very early stages all the way to building it into a big business. And so, what we do is we create this small environment where we bring a lot of high-level experts together, and they teach and assist and help and support the people that are there in order to help them take their ideas from concept to cash as quickly as possible. But, the problem with my first seminar was I only had seven people registered with four weeks to go. So, the panic button went up, but the funny thing is I find that I’m most creative when I’m most desperate, and that’s what exactly what happened. I started coming up with all kinds of ideas on how I could generate more traffic and how I could get more people registered for the event, and joint ventures was one of them. And, one of the people that I approached was a gentleman by the name of David Fry. Now, the reason I approached him was one, I knew that he had a list that was targeted to this particular event. I was on his email list. It had over 50,000 people at that time, small business owners and they were all interested in learning how to better market their products and services. So, it was a good fit. Now, just before I contacted David, one of the things that I did was read his most recent newsletter, and the great part was he had just published it literally, about five, ten minutes prior to me calling him. So, what I did was I took the time. I sat down and I read his newsletter thoroughly prior to calling him. Now, that’s important, as you’ll see throughout the rest of the story because when I contacted him, we started talking. He’s a great guy, really open and we were chatting about business, and I was telling him about the event and the ideas. And then, I asked him if he would be open to promoting it. Well, unfortunately, at that particular time, he was not promoting anybody else’s publishing services. He was solely focused on promoting his own to his own web, so he wasn’t open to joint ventures. But, he said, “Stu, you know what? You’ve got a great product and it looks like it’s going to be a great event. Unfortunately, I just don’t promote other people’s products at this time.” I said, “Okay, well, thanks for the time you took here today, and by the way, have fun on your speaking trip in Mexico.” “What did you just say?” And I said, “Well, have fun on your speaking trip in Mexico.” Now, the only way I would have known that is if I had read his newsletter, and in the beginning of our conversation, I mentioned that. I said, “Hi, David. I’m not only a subscriber and an avid reader of your newsletter, but I purchase many of your products. Now, when I brought that right back full circle and said, “Have fun on your speaking trip in Mexico”, that signals to him that I actually do read his newsletter and that impressed him. And he said, you know, “What did you just say?” And I said, you know, “Have fun on your speaking trip to Mexico.” He said, “Wow.” He said, “You actually do read my newsletter.” I said, “Absolutely.” And, I said, “Well, thank you for your time and we hung up. Well, literally two minutes later, I received an email from David. He said, “Okay, I’ll promote.” He said, “Send me the links.” And that just goes to show, you know, it doesn’t take much. It’s the little things that count, and when you’re on somebody’s email newsletter, when you show an interest in them, in their business, they’re much more likely going to want to promote you.

Raven: Hi, this is Raven Blair Davis, interviewing for Michael Senoff’s I have this winning content of how to transcribe that value package, but now I’ve got to sell this thing and I don’t know where to begin with pricing. So, what can you offer as far as tips in that area?

Stu: Well, pricing is always a tricky element, and there’s no one set formula, and I would encourage people that this is a work in progress. But, I will give you some tips and tricks to really help you hit the ground running. Number one, you have to decide what the purpose of the product is. Now, that may be causing some confusion because people are probably saying, “Well, Stu, I’m creating a product to sell it and make some money.” Well, yes and no, because sometimes you may be better off using a product as a lead generator and that in and of itself can change the dynamics of how you price a product. Here’s an example. Let’s say I was conducting a teleseminar series and what I was interested in doing is not only creating products from that teleseminar series, but generating qualified leads for a backend product that I was looking to sell, a higher priced product. What I would probably do is give the teleseminar away for free so you satisfy the freebie seekers, the people who aren’t sure about you but they are maybe slightly interested in what you have to say. This gives them a risk-free way to kind of test you out, if you will, and gives you an opportunity to demonstrate the value of what you can provide. Then what I would do is have an upsell, and the upsell would be for the transcripts and/or the mp3 file. Now, I like to make it so that it’s irresistible. It’s an impulse buy. Typically, I price mine, on the time that I do a call, right around $10 to $15. So, it’s an impulse buy. It’s something that somebody is just going to quickly purchase because they want the comfort of being able to listen to that audio again. They want to be able to read the transcripts. But, what it also does is it gives you a chance to separate the freebie seekers from those who are willing to pull out their credit card and invest in your materials. Those people are a lot more qualified when it comes to backend products, because again, any time you can create a situation where your customers are putting in some money into investing in your products versus getting it for free, it is a much, much better situation and those are much, much more valuable customers. So, I typically have a free teleseminar and the only challenge with the free part is it’s inconvenient. People have to show up at a certain time and they have to listen to it, and they do not get the replay or the transcripts for free. That’s important. That helps me set up the second component which is the upsell, and that is pricing it in a way that it creates an impulse buy. There’s not a lot of thought going into it. It’s very affordable and it’s very valuable at the same time. So, a free upsell is $10 to $15 and then, typically what I do is after the call, you can no longer get the mp3 from transcripts for $10 to $15. They immediately go up in terms of price. It could be anywhere from $27 to $47 to $97, depending on the content that is covered on the call. And so, anything that deals with making more money, helping a business generate more revenue, save money, things of that nature, typically have a higher price point because the value can be extracted very, very quickly. If it’s a softer topic, like helping somebody lose weight or helping them with their relationships or things of that nature, their price points are typically lower. But, what I want to emphasize is the model here, free teleseminar to help you generate the leads, an upsell for the mp3s or transcripts which helps you generate more qualified leads, and then you can sell your products afterwards. And now, that list of qualified leads that you generated from the upsell are much more likely to buy your products and services down the road and that’s why you want to segment them out and position it accordingly.

Raven: When you do the teleseminar that you give away free, does this have to be a full hour or can it be just a portion of your content or three minutes that will be a great lead-in to the rest of the package that you’re trying to sell?

Stu: Definitely. I mean, it could certainly be a portion of the package. It just depends on how you want to deliver it. I like to give people as much value as possible, demonstrate what it would be like learning from me, investing in my materials, working with me, and so forth. I actually like to favor the side of giving them too much versus too little. You want the conversation, in the minds of the consumers, to be, “Wow, if I’m getting this much for this price or I’m getting this much for free, you could imagine what I’d be getting if I paid the full price for the product” and so forth. And, that’s the conversation you want them having and it just gives you an opportunity to really wow them and over-deliver.

Raven: For more interviews like this, go to