Passive Income Avalanche

The Speakers
Scott A. Dennison
Copyright 2009 Five Talents Ventures LLC All rights reserved Worldwide
The Speakers Profit System
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The Publisher has strived to be as accurate and complete as possible in the creation of this report, notwithstanding the fact that I do not warrant or represent at any time that the contents within are accurate due to the rapidly changing nature of the Internet. While all attempts have been made to verify information provided in this publication, the Publisher assumes no responsibility for errors, omissions, or contrary interpretation of the subject matter herein. You are advised to use your own wise judgment and due diligence in applying the information within this manual to your circumstances and condition. This book is not intended to be a source of professional, legal, financial, and/or accounting advice. Where these subjects are concerned, you are advised to seek competent advice from professionals. All content included in this manual, such as text, graphics, logos, button icons, and images is the property of Five Talents Ventures, LLC or its associated partners, and is protected by U.S. and international copyright laws. The compilation (meaning the collection, arrangement, and assembly) of all content in this report is the exclusive property of Scott A. Dennison and Five Talents Ventures, LLC, its subsidiary companies, and its marketing partners, and is protected by U.S. and international copyright laws. Any other use including the reproduction, modification, distribution, transmission, republication, display, or performance of the content is strictly prohibited.
Table of Contents
Chapter No. Welcome Page Introduction Chapter 1 Chapter 2 Chapter 3 Chapter 4 Chapter 5 Chapter 6 Chapter 7 Chapter 8 Chapter 9 The Product Continuum Concept Building your Product Continuum Product Creation Strategies Repurposing your products leads to profits The Attraction and Seduction of your Niche Market The Secrets of Online Video Become an Expert in Social Media Marketing Ensuring a Workable Plan is in Place Joint Ventures & Building Loyalty Through Powerful Offline Marketing Thank you page Resource Pages Pages 154-170 Page 171 Chapter Name Page No. Pages 3-4 Pages 5-7 Pages 9-24 Pages 25-44 Pages 45-63 Pages 64-82 Pages 83-98 Pages 99-118 Pages 119-137 Pages 138-153
Welcome to the Passive Income Avalanche Home Study system

I would like to commend you for taking the first step in investing in your new future and wanting to expand your business. Often time people get stuck in their current mindset and lose sight of the power and possibilities the future provides. First and foremost, this is an implementation program not an information program. Your active involvement in this processes is pivotal to you learning how to become positioned and perceived as the top expert in the World within your niche. The benefit or payoff is that you will be sharing or able to share your unique God-given message with a Worldwide Audience. A further benefit is this positioning can lead to a massive passive income. I don't know about you but I AM EXCITED J about that possibility! The reason this course was created was to meet the demand from Public Speakers such as yourself, whose businesses have been negatively affected by the current Worldwide economy, are seeking additional revenue streams, or who simply want to travel less and spend more time at home with the family without sacrificing income. In the past, most Public Speaking businesses were local or regional and wholly dependent on making presentations from the platform. Companies and associations, who have had their budgets cut, have reduced the numbers of these live presentations or engagements thereby limiting a speaker's access to his/her audience. Also quite common these days, is these companies or associations are heavily negotiating speaking fees and/or cutting the expenses they would normally pick up. Is that your story, does it sound all too familiar? To begin, we will go thru a series of questions that will help you identify exactly what you are seeking (your goal) so please be truthful with yourself as this is a Home study course. This assessment will help you identify strengths and weaknesses of your current speaking business and define your desired outcomes. Although this may sound very elementary it is actually a Critical Step to achieving your goal(s).
I am frequently asked my definition of an Unforgettable Speaker. It is not the best performer on the platform, as there are a lot of very technically sound presenters that are polishing up their resume and looking for work. The Unforgettable Speaker is simply the one that is the best marketer of their unique message or attracts the largest audience with their marketing. So I start and end my message to you by saying that this course prepares you to be perceived and positioned as the Top Expert in the World within your niche. I'm ready if you are. Shall we begin?
Introduction
My name is Scott Dennison and I am going to share with you a number of things before we actually begin the material today. The first is, let me just give you a kind of overview of what this course that I prepared is all about. I am a big, big fan of the personal development movement in the world and everybody that is attracted to this call is a speaker in one way or another. The sense of it that I have gotten in my travels around the country and around the world is that people are hungrier than ever for transformation and change. Speaker's natures, the communicators, are the best ones suited to assist in that transformation and change. Basically I was covering the idea that speakers by their nature are the ones who have the greatest opportunity to transform lives thru the words that they share. If you have read any of the material that I have posted on Facebook or any of my blogs. The Unforgettable Speakers.com, you probably know that I am a believer that everyone of you has been given a God given message, for the lack of a better term. You have been given a gift that you are to give away, and that gift happens to be more often than not the topic that you have chosen and find yourself passionate about. We are going to talk a lot about that over the next ten weeks, is make sure you are in alignment with your passion and with your gift. Essentially, my role here is to not dispense a lot of information. I am not a big fan of information products simply for the sake of creating and offering information products. I have been buying and using them for the better part of two decades. I have literally spent a fortune in information products and yet information products on their own will not transform anyone's business or anyone's life. It is the implementation of that information that I think plays an integral role in the development and change process. With that in mind, let me tell you a little bit about what this program is. As I mentioned before, it is a 10-week course and we are going to cover everything starting with today's lesson, which is the concept of a product continuum. We are going to move from there into how the different ways are available to you to develop a product from easier to the more exotic. Then we are going to get into this idea of repurposing products for all of the different learning modalities that you will run into in your audiences. There are a number of different ways that people choose to learn. Auditory, visual, and kinesthetic are the three most basic ways to look at it and we are going to talk about taking one product and very easily redistributing it in a different format so to speak. We are going to cover in week four the twelve most reliable ways to repurpose your products and it is the master key to bringing your product continuum into full focus. I actually know of at least fifty different ways to repurpose products, but we will focus on the top twelve. I will give you a list of all fifty (at the end of the Chapter) and then you can determine which ones you actually want to do, but we will focus our time mostly on the top twelve. As we go a little further along in the program, we are really going to take this idea of niche marketing to its highest level.
To be massively successful with your God given message, you are going to be speaking to a very narrow band of people. That narrow band may number into the millions of people. There are six billion people on the planet so we don't run short of people, but I am a passionate believer in the idea that every time you have spoken in any room you have been, or any appearance you have made, you have connected on a core level with someone or perhaps several someones. It is rare that you get a speaking engagement where you talk to a group at any level and don't connect with people, someone. Usually, it is evident by just watching closely. What my teacher Jim Rohn used to refer to all the time is you are watching to see when the lights come on. It is really magical to see it, just look out at the audience. Think of a time when you did that, when you looked out and you said something and you saw the lights come on in somebody's face and they connected with you and approached you afterward and talked about how powerful your message was to them. We are in a changing time where the opportunity to speak in a room in front of a group of people are harder to get for those engagements are few and far between. Now we want to take our core message, identify very clearly who the niche market is and take it out to the world in a variety of other ways including, but not wholly dependant upon the stage, if that makes sense. We are going to talk about how we attract and seduce our niche market to build a relationship with us that will sustain us and create massive passive income for everybody that is participating. In chapter 6 we are going to go into the secrets of online video. We are going to talk quite a bit about online video and explain to you how powerful it is to communicate visually in a world that is predominantly visual. The point that you have heard other speakers make, you have heard it and read it in books, that ninety some odd percent of all communication is non-verbal, I have proven it. When we were focused the last two years on a company that I started called Keything Marketing, we were in the visual delivery business, we were in the online video business. When you use video properly to build like and to build trust, when people like and trust you, your chances of doing business with people jumps exponentially. How does video apply to that? It is really simple; people can read your body language by watching you closely on video. We are going to talk about video and show you some easy ways to create video so that your body language is on display and you are really communicating your essence fully to your audience. Moving forward after that, we are going to focus on something that I am still relatively new in, but am finding to be eminently fascinating which is this concept of social networking. By the time that we get there, I am sure the numbers will have changed, but in just a couple of months, I have gone from non existent in the social networks to having met all of you, with the exception of Michael and Tom whom I have met previously. I have built relationships with the others of you predominantly thru social networking. I have actually started with nothing and now approaching 2,000 Facebook friends, I have got a number of connections number in the 400 or 500 range on LinkedIn and several hundred Twitter followers. We are going to focus on how important it is to have friends and
followers, where to find them, touch them, use that as a marketing piece and execute that as a part of your distribution model. Finally, as we get toward the back end of this program, we are going to use Chapter 8 to ensure we have a workable plan. Earlier I said, and let me touch on this as well at this point that this is not an information program, this is an implementation program. We have gone thru each step to make sure you are clear on it and recommend you install it in your business before moving forward. I don't want you to get to the end and find that you have been nodding and agreeing saying this is great information, but my business hasn't been changed one bit, because I have not done any of it. Stop and take time along the way to make sure you are installing these pieces and parts into your business so that you do get the success that we talked about in your strategy sessions. When we get to Chapter 9 we will clear up any confusion, and we are going to build serious momentum. That is going to be an open discussion and Q&A in which we will discuss some JV strategies and ways to leverage other people's resources. I have also been building a private Facebook mastermind group, out of Facebook obviously, and there are so many JV opportunities being presented in that kind of forum and each one of you can do this just very simply by looking at your rolodex a little differently. We are going to talk about different ways of establishing and putting some JV strategies in place and leverage other people's resources to build your passive profit marketplace. Then when we finally get to week 10 we are going to cover something that I have spent a lot of time on that I am very keenly interested in which is the differentiation of your business from virtually anyone else on the planet that would do what you do or touch on or speak on similar material to what you teach. That is using offline marketing in your online business. It is a real tool that will generate and build significant loyalty to you when you use a handful of the tools that are available. Just a few things will make a significant difference in the way that your marketplace responds to you. When you strictly communicate with them online, you have only a semblance of how well they are getting your message, how closely they are responding to your message. When you shift to some offline methods, you get all kinds of additional tracking, classic direct response marketing measurement, metrics are available to you and that is going to be something that we touch on. Just to wrap this section up, this program is not an information program, it is an implementation program and that is really what I wanted to be clear on.
Chapter 1
The Product Continuum Concept

Today's topic, I wanted to do what I call the introduction to the product continuum and I am hopeful that each of you has grabbed one of the copies of the, for the lack of a more graceful term, product pyramid off of the private members area, downloaded that, printed it out so that you have something in front of you that you can see. For our Home Study program participants, you will find this page (Product Continuum in the work sheets section) of your system. There was also an image of one on there that was filled in for you to see as well (Product Continuum Model in the resources section). In starting with this concept of what is a product continuum, let me simply say, I have been working with speakers as many of you know since 1996 and I am going to take a second and kind of tell you how I came to begin teaching this model to speakers. I had actually been a leading salesperson and a trainer in the sales world for several years, up until 1996. In the fall of 1996, I was approached and asked by some people that represented Brian Tracy, whom many of you will know his name, a big time sales trainer speaker. I was approached by his people and asked to kind of change up what I was doing and go into a world where I was teaching sales for the purpose of selling seminars. I did a seminar with Brian's people, I represented Tony Alessandra initially, Jeffrey Gitomer who is another sales trainer who was within that initial group of people that we represented and a gentleman by the name of Art Williams who you might remember from the AL Williams Insurance days, the big, big network marketing company in the 70's and a few others that were in that sort of speaker stable. In that process I was traveling the country, building seminar rooms for public one-day events. Essentially what you do is you go out and give speeches to the local business market. During that speech you build a case for why those people should invest their money to come hear the speaker do his full one-day presentation. Interestingly enough, you had some people that would buy and some people that would not buy a ticket. Now, I learned a lot from studying that, but at that point I really wasn't skilled enough know what to do with the initial set of thoughts I had when people didn't buy. You see, this kind of material had transformed my life. If you knew my whole bio, and I won't go into deep dark secrets here, but I will tell you at one point in my life going way back, I was a successful real estate investor. Several months later I was broke and living in a tent. That was kind of a harsh reality to find myself having lost my home, lost two cars and a boat and was now living in a tent in a camp ground. That all happened by the mistakes I had made combined with economic times, not too different from what we are having right now in America, but it was largely my mistakes. The thing that pulled me through all of that was personal development material. So when I met people who did not respond and did not want to invest in personal development material, I had an interesting set of thoughts, most of which I wouldn't share on a family
Chapter 1 The Product Continuum Concept
friendly phone line. In any case, I didn't yet have the skills to know how to process what I was feeling; all I just knew was people were really making a mistake. Now you fast forward, I worked for Brian in this group for a while, then shortly after that I was invited to go to work for Jim Rohn. Mr. Rohn was my mentor on tape. He was the one person that had shifted me more, changed the philosophies that I operated on and changed my thinking more than anybody. When I first got one of his programs, I started journaling and I wrote in my journal that I would work for this man within 6 months. I said, I am going to work for this guy, six months from now I'm going to be working for him. Well, I don't know how many of you believe in the ability to manifest reality or the secret law of attraction. We won't get into mystical concepts, but six months later I was actually getting a call from these people that represented Jim Rohn saying they were looking for one person, and someone had told them that I was possibly the person they were looking for. Long story short, I worked out a deal and I went to work for Jim Rohn and was now traveling the entire West Coast with Jim Rohn. Then they would send me back east, then back out west and I found myself flying all over the country representing a man that was literally a hero to me. Working with him up close, sitting with him at meal meetings, his thinking was more profound and his philosophies were more transformational than anything I had ever experienced, other than the Bible, and at that time wasn't as important to me. I say all of this for a reason, to simply set up a point. I'm interfacing with people on a day-to-day basis, I'm speaking to small businesses, some people are buying tickets and others are not buying tickets. I got to the point where I was intrigued enough to ask my peers, the people I was traveling with, why did they think that some people would not buy tickets. The most common response was these people are apathetic. They don't do anything, they don't invest in themselves, so don't worry about them, just focus on the ones who do buy. I really didn't believe that was true, so I endeavored to start asking. When somebody would politely say they were not going to go to the seminar, I would explain to them I'm not going to harass them in any way, but I would really like to know why. I'm not going to try to close you, I'm not going to try to change your mind, I just would like to know the thought process. More often than not, the response that I got was revealed in the kinds of questions that they asked me. Things like, before I answer your question, let me ask you, What are you reading? What books are you reading right now? What audio programs have you invested in? What seminars are you going to travel to this year to see because I am actually on the search for something and I don't know where to find it. All I know is from listening to you today is that while what you offer is good, it is not what I am looking for. That was very revealing and interesting to me. People were searching for personal development, transformational material, self improvement, whatever you want to call it and the particular program that I was offering was not what they were looking for. They did not know where to find it. At the same time I'm working with speakers and finding that the majority of the conversation with speakers is where do we find audiences for our message? So I thought, how interesting, you have a world of consumers
out there hungry for personal development and you have a world of speakers looking for audiences, and they cannot seem to find each other. So, why don't I play an important role in this and try to connect them all together. The timing was such that the rise of the Internet was right in front of us and I became a student of how the Internet works and that is where I kind of want to start today. The Internet has literally, in the last 10 years, changed an awful lot of the way people do business. When you think in terms of that, it is probably the most common misconception amongst people who do not do business on the Internet, and frankly a lot of the ones that do, they view the Internet as a marketplace, as a place where, like a giant mall or commerce vehicle and in fact, it is not. The Internet in its most simple format is an information vehicle. The consumer that is on the Internet, the people that spent trillions of dollars last year, I think it did crack more than a trillion in commerce was online last year, I don't have the most recent numbers. The point is, there was an awful lot of money spent online last year but people who went online originally looking for information had spent it. They didn't go online looking to buy something in most cases; they went online looking to learn something. Of course the search engines have been an enormous blessing to all of us in helping people find what they are looking for. The audience that I talked to that couldn't find what they were looking for 10 years ago, they are probably finding it much easier finding things now because we have search engines and we can type in the things that we are interested in and we often times have more choices than we know what to do with. The Internet, by its nature, in an information vehicle, not a commerce vehicle, yet there are still enormous amounts of money changing hands there. So what is the magic? What is the secret sauce of the Internet? The secret sauce of the Internet is relationships and that is going to be integral in everything that we are trying to do to be unforgettable speakers is to always remember that relationship is the key. I guess you could look at some of the trends in the marketplace, what speakers are doing to market themselves and that is going to begin the process of understanding what this whole product continuum is all about. You see, when you study successful Internet marketing, and you study speakers that are doing it successfully, the very first thing you will find them doing is they are giving information away. They are trying to meet the need of the person who is searching for information and they simply come off with a lot of really good, quality information they could actually sell but they are giving it away in mass in exchange of only one thing. They are trying to get from this person some identifiable information; usually an email address but more and more often a physical address so that they can remain in communication with this person who is looking for said information. Now, if you look at the product continuum that is in the resource section of this manual, you will see that if you want to build a really good, rich, passive income base business, we have to figure out how to take your information and
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turn it into free stuff that people can access in whatever quantity they want. We may be talking about one, two, three, four different things, sometimes more, sometimes less but a free report, a free teleseminar, Facebook group, e-course, free audio downloads or free video downloads. There are a number of free things you could offer people in exchange for access to them later so that you can continue a discussion and build a relationship. When we look at how speakers are marketing themselves, the ones who are doing very well with lots of passive income have mastered this simple trend. They understand how to begin to build a relationship, they are not in a huge rush to drag these people to the checkout stand and collect credit card information. They are willing to let that relationship warm over time. Then, enter the age-old rule of all sales and that rule is people do business with people they like. Imagine then, if you will, meeting someone today for the first time and without really introducing themselves, without building any value for you and without building any relationship with you, the second thing they say to you after hello is would you give me your credit card information, I would like to sell you some stuff? Most people would find that to be laughable. They would say that is ridiculous, you have got to wine and dine me a little bit, for lack of a better term. You have to make me feel like I am getting value, you have to make me feel good about what you are asking me to do and this doesn't feel good. So there in lies the issue with marketers that back in 1999, 2000 and 2001 you could find a plethora of websites that were nothing but stores, by in large they are all gone. Very few of those businesses that were started back then, that did not focus on relationship exited the downturn and the dotcom crash that we all went thru. Those of us that were there, it was quite an experience to watch. There were so many business models, and we were studying online business models then and it was just fascinating to watch the ones who tried to build a store, thinking they actually had a store in a virtual mall somewhere. In their minds' eye, they could close their eyes and see millions of people streaming by that would walk in and buy their stuff, and they would be rich. In fact, there was no traffic walking by, you had to generate your traffic to your location. If you did not greet them properly, build a relationship with them they were gone, never to return. Not too long after that the operational expenses of a business like that would pull it under. You go back to this concept that the nature of marketing is now that we have to have relationships. Some of the ways that we have had to build relationship in the past was, like Thomas is a veteran of the seminar business, like I am, he and his partners put on seminars throughout the year and that is really a great way to build rapport and relationships. You stand on a stage, people watch your body language and know if they like you or not. By and large they can tell if they would like you. They have a chance to listen to your material and get a sense if the value is there. Perhaps they even get a chance to talk to you before they hand you the credit card in the back of the room. But if the offer is compelling enough, many times they will wait to talk to you until afterward, knowing they still have the right to tear the thing up and ask to be released from the deal.
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That was one of those things that used to be the greatest way in the world to build relationship, was to go speak on stage. You could go and appear at seminars, but now we have reached a point where seminars are struggling a bit. Some of the other things that speakers do to make appearances, a lot of times they will speak for associations or at conventions. Recently I posted on my blog stats on just relying on speaking engagement. Having great speaking skills Will not make you a living as a speaker, in and of itself. Masterful marketing, not your speaking skills on the platform is the fastest route to earning an excellent income as a speaker.
In fact in the survey of professional members that NSA did in 2007, it's reported that 64% of the speakers who responded earned less than $100K in pre-tax income. Even worse is that 61% of them earn less than 10% of their money passively, from product sales. If you are wondering why I consider that to be worse, it's that these results do not factor in the current state of the economy where more than 40% of engagements are being cut and those that remain have fees that are being heavily negotiated.
I will tell you the stats are grim. The budgets are all being cut. We used to be able to go work for corporations on a regular basis; corporations would hire us to come in. I know Michael still does very well with that, but those kinds of events are harder and harder to get your foot in the door. Once you do, you have a chance to build relationship, audience and rapport and now you have got yourself in a situation. So, if we are going to try to do all of this passively, without all the travel and live engagements, we are going to do this from the comfort of our home office, then we need to build relationship differently and through the Internet. It comes back to niche marketing and using free stuff. So lets talk for a second about niche marketing because I started with that a while back and I said simply that to really succeed as an unforgettable speaker you are going to have a very narrow group that may number in the millions, but it is not going to be an enormous mass market appeal for most of your messages, for most of your work. Most of you are going to be finding that you are speaking to a very narrow band of people. It is the same thing that killed television advertising and other sorts of mass media advertising over the last few years is this endless segmentation of the audience. When you look at the audiences anymore, we started with 3 broadcast channels and a handful of UHF channels here in the states and then as I got through my teens it turned into something like fiftysomething cable channels with a lot of different interests represented. Now we are in the age of satellite and now we have probably four or five thousand channels if you have the full package and more and more these audiences are being segmented. When you realize what is coming and which is going to be television driven from the Internet, there is going to be endless segmentation. Now
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that is good and it is bad. If you are trying to play across a mass medium, you want to be able to reach a mass market and think that everyone you come in contact with is viable, suitable and a good prospect for your message you will probably find yourself basically fighting against wind and water and storms of all types. But if you play along with it and you identify very clearly who your niche audience is, you will be able to make an awful lot of progress. Niche marketing is nothing more than really knowing exactly who it is that is looking for your message and then reaching out to them in ways that they find appealing. When you talk about what an unforgettable speaker is going to do, they are not only going to approach this audience with say a sales letter on a website, but they are going to have video, they are going to have audio, blog posts, articles. They are going to have all of these things in play and you will find as we go through this that it is very easy to actually do all of them at extremely low cost and you will be able to niche market your way to massive, passive profit if you just do it properly. It all starts with market research. For those of you that I did a formal strategy call with, and you saw the questionnaire, one of the things that I asked you was about the five major key words. Does everybody remember that? The five major key words that you had identified which are the ones you were pursuing? That is really what I am talking about when it comes to niche marketing and doing your market research. I am finding in my own experience that I am very clear what my major key words are, but interestingly enough as I watched the progress that I am making in the search engines, the optimization of my websites, I am finding that it is what they refer to as long tail keywords that are generating as much, or more, traffic as the money key words that I had identified. The way that people choose to type those into the search engines is endless. We will get into how easily you can find out what your main key words are. You begin to optimize around those main key words, and slowly but surely start utilizing the long tail key words in a variety of ways and start drawing more and more traffic because those major key words that you identify will be tougher to send to the peak. They will be harder to climb to the top of the search engines with those words because you will find a lot of competition exists for those words. As we go through this, I will show you a very simple process for understanding how to get yourself into the top twenty, or top ten, on any key word that you choose. It may or may not come quickly, it is a process, but it is something that is doable. Largely, it is all based on looking at what the guy in front of you is doing and then doing what he is doing just a little bit better. We now have tools available that most people don't know about, I am going to share them with you. Through those tools we will be able to slowly start working our way up through the search engines. As you do, you are going to start to see that people are using other variations of your key words, phrases and such, that they are using to find you with and in that process you will identify some new ways to connect with audiences. So we are going to do market research and focus on positioning. So really, your
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continuum is where I want to head with this. What I want to do is, I want you to understand that the base line of it is always, always going to be free content. That is where you are going to get the mass buy in, that is where you are going to get your audience to respond to the entree of a relationship with you as we are going to develop some things for them that they will find appealing that will get them to say Yes, Jay, Amanda, Michael, I want to get to know you a little bit, I want to learn about what you do, I want to learn more about what you have to share with me. You will build a list and you will start marketing to that list in any number of different ways, and that will be custom to you. Beyond level 1, it will be entirely customized. There will be no two of you that have the same exact continuum. In two variations of continuums that I have, the first level is always free, the second level in one of my continuums is actually still free, but it is what I would call an advanced free. It is a deeper level of free. They have to share more information with me to move into that second level of the continuum. In another version that we are still working out, we want to enter into the conversation a commitment. A commitment can be, well as Tom and I discussed this morning, can be as little as a dollar. Tom, are you willing to share the numbers you shared with me about how powerful it is just getting a single dollar from people?
Tom : Absolutely. We found that we could get an additional 27% response on an up sale product between offering the product below that for a dollar versus offering it for free. The hop from that point, we were going toward a ninety-seven dollar product at that point, and the difference between going from free to ninety-seven and one dollar and ninety-seven was 27% additional conversion. Scott : Does that make sense what Tom just said? If you can get any level of financial commitment, where they have to put their credit card on the counter and prove with their money that they trust you, even if it is only a dollar, you are going to find one of Cialdini's laws of influence starts to kick in which is now they have made a commitment and in the numbers he just showed, 20-25% of them are going to act consistently with that commitment. So you can ask them for an additional commitment to spend more money with you, and they will to some percentage of the time. Versus to keeping things free and trying to jump them to a higher price point, you may find a smaller percentage convert, whereas if you get that initial commitment, it will be a higher percentage. That number will be unique to your marketplace. It may be one dollar; it may be five, ten or twenty dollars. Now, beyond that, you may find a number of different things that come into play. Continuity models come into play here where you have membership sites. Advanced products come into play whether they be ninety-seven or so. Several of the ones we have worked on in the past, it went from free to a nine or ten dollar item, to a twenty-nine or forty-nine dollar item, to a ninety-seven dollar item and then to a one-ninety-seven. As you get to the higher levels of this, you will find a lot of times that is where live workshops come into play, that is where people start to think about group coaching.
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If you study the most successful marketers out there, they all have some variation of a system like this that progresses from very expensive, very exclusive and goes all the way back to where you can get a relationship with them for free.
What we are going to be doing, and what I am going to be asking you to do, the integration or the implementation part of this process, is going to be for you to spend some time thinking it through from the perspective of a get a very, very tight reign on what your niche is. To get to what your niche is, think in terms of what is your true passion. Often times the way I get to this is by asking what are the three things that you like the most, are most passionate about or do better than anyone else? From there, I simply asked you what your niche market is. If I didn't reveal it to you then, it is fair for me to tell you now, that was a gotcha question because often times I find that people are speaking about something that is not one of those three things. If you are not on target with one of those three things that you are totally passionate about, at some level people will see through that and start to feel that you are not 100% authentic. If you want to have a deep, meaningful relationship with your audience, one that brings you to a point where people are willing to pour all kinds of their money, of their discretionary income, into your bank account, and you are earning a large passive based income, it is going to come because they are clear that you are totally congruent with your message, that you are authentic. That is where I want you to start. On the exercise this week, I want you to think deeply about that part of the process. What are the three things that you like the most, are most passionate about, or do better than anyone else that you know? Then compare that to what you planned, or think your niche is and if you need to adjust it, now is the time. From there, I want you to start thinking in terms of what does a product continuum looks like for you. You don't have to identify the items that you will have in your free, or really anything other than what the conceptual levels of what you are going to be offering are. It is like, okay, it is going to be free, and then I am going to offer my first level of conversion to get my first commitment in the five to ten dollar range and it is going to be a CD, DVD, this that or the other. Think in terms of that, it might be a book, e-book or a number of things, and it will be custom for you. Then begin thinking about what other levels of interaction do you want to have with your audience over the coming years and begin thinking through, this is nothing more than an ascension model. Where, as you continue this relationship with people and you continue to reveal to them these additional opportunities to go deeper, some will and some won't convert. We never get caught up in who did what, whether they did or did not convert. We know that some percentage, it becomes formulaic, will convert. Just think in terms of what those offerings might be. I know one that we are working on, or have worked on just recently, involved licensing. What I mean by licensing in this sense was this particular speaker wanted to develop an army of people who would license their material from them and teach it in local markets. That may be
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Competition Worksheet
Main Keyword or Phrase Times Searched Monthly: Google Times Searched Monthly: Yahoo Times Searched Monthly: MSN Competitor URL Names/ URL of Advertisers Traffic Count: Compete.com Alexa Traffic Rank SEODigger.com Total of Inbound Links: First Impression - What I Like Most First Impression - What I Like Least Use of Audio / Video? Use of Other Social Media? Main Product Prices Secondary Products / Prices Do They Offer Bonuses? Do They Offer Other Incentives? Do They Have an Ezine? Do They Collect Emails, How? Success Stories Or Testimonials Any online resources offered? Special Considerations For My Industry Or Audience Competitive Ranking: What are searchers looking for ?
worksheet
something that you want to do. It may be small groups, where you actually do workshops in a local market or some other exotic destination. I am good friends with an Internet marketer by the name of Yanik Silver who's most popular offer all of a sudden has become his maverick business system, his maverick business adventures if you will, and interestingly enough, it is really what Yanik's passion is. He was a copyrighter, teaching and selling copyrighting and Internet marketing and doing very, very well at it. But if you talked to him behind the scenes, he was never overly passionate about the topic, he was proficient, he was good at it but it wasn't something that made his bells go off. When you talked to Yanik about what he liked to do, I like to bungee jump, I like to drive a car real fast, I like to fly in airplanes over different environments, I want to go dune buggy racing in the Baja, I want to interact with really interesting people at high levels. Once he launched Maverick Business Adventures all of those things started coming true for him. Now he has built an amazing business. People are paying him tens of thousands of dollars to be in Yanik's rare air and enjoy those experiences with him. It is very instructive to see something like that. So think through what those levels are going to be in your case and next section we are going to talk about those levels and we are going to get much deeper into what yours looks like and we are going to talk about it as a group and see if there are any opportunities that you weren't aware of, or see on someone else's and start thinking, well maybe that would work for me. We will have a group discussion about all of it and begin to bring your continuity or your product continuum to life. So, let me wrap this up by asking the group, any questions that you have, now is a great time. Lets not go home with any questions that you really want answered. We are not on a particular time frame; we are not stuck to an hour, although I have used basically the entire hour. We could go another thirty minutes if you have that many question, with no problems. So what questions do you have, lets go ahead and get started.
Jay : Scott, I've got a question. The question is, as we take this 10-week journey with one another, on the side, should we continue to tweak our business model and do things? I am probably, maybe a step behind most of the gang in that I need to establish my website presence. Should I go ahead and work on that, get that up and tweak it on the backend as we go and maybe make some discoveries about what I did right or maybe what I could improve. Or, should I be patient and as we take this step and build a foundation, do it right the first time? Scott : That is a great question, and one that maybe others are thinking about. I would personally say option two is the more viable way to go. Websites these days can be built very quickly, extremely scalable. When you look at, and I know Jay you have spent some time on the Unforgettable Speakers site, from a perspective of someone who just with my inspired life business for example, I paid one guy thirty-five thousand dollars to build a website and he never built anything. I had to fire him, tried to sue him to get my money back, only to find out he was bankrupt. I hired another guy, paid him forty thousand dollars because I had to pay a rush fee to recover all the time the first guy had collapsed in doing nothing. They actually built a very workable system, it was pretty high tech stuff, but it never was really developed for advanced marketing. Now you contrast those days, because that whole process between those
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two individuals was about a fourteen-month process. Unforgettable Speakers cost me three hundred dollars and it was done in ten days. It is built on the free word press platform, so the only part of it that is truly custom is the look and feel of the theme. I have a partner that I work with who does some ongoing refinement of that site for me for fifty dollars here and fifty dollars there and I always argue with him fifty dollars? That's outrageous! But I would be patient and say when that we get your continuum identified properly, and we start thinking about how you are going to interact with your marketplace, we can get a website done quickly and extremely affordably. You won't be missing anything because you are not really going to start pushing hard on the marketing for another several weeks anyway. It really won't take very long to get the thing done. That would be my basic answer. Amanda : I think my question would probably actually follow on from that in that I already have a web presence. My sort of niche, if you like, I have kind of partially got the niche. Our conversation we had was incredibly enlightening I have to say. So, for me with kind of having a presence and having stuff that is there on the Internet already. If I am kind of hearing you correctly, would you say really not particularly do very much more to that in terms of tweaking, messing and fiddling with it but perhaps really just get far clearer in all the plan and strategy and continuum. Perhaps have all of that clearer in my head before I do much more with the site and the presence that I have got. I do all my web stuff anyway, so I haven't got an issue with actually building it and doing it. What would you say in that case? Scott : Well, the easiest way to answer your question is, I'll share with you kind of a concept that I have and it is one of the things that I think is an issue in the speakers marketplace is that speakers are very intelligent people, they are very intuitive, they are good communicators and because they are also selling, they are frequently some of the best buyers, they like to buy things as well. So they go to a presentation, they go to a seminar, they already have a website, somebody is presenting from a stage, or maybe they jump on a teleseminar or they jump on somebody's website based on a recommendation and they see this particular thing, this tool so to speak being promoted and then the testimonials say it is good, the guy talking about it tells you how incredible it is and so they invest in that tool. Then they install it, in many cases they will go ahead and install it and put it into their business and start getting some results. Then they go to another event or they read another website and they buy another tool and they install that, and then they install another one, and another one and another one. Six months later they find that all of these cylinders are misfiring, if you make it analogous to a car, the car doesn't run because you have all of these cylinders firing in different directions and none of it is flowing properly. That comes because they are out of alignment with the strategy or they don't have a strategy that their site is built off of. So when it comes to taking your site, which I would have to look at again to refresh myself, but when I looked at it, I said you are doing some things well and there are a whole lot of opportunities for improvement simply because you have several different strategies going on. The most successful marketers really have one thing that they want people to notice, or pay attention to or respond to on the first page that people see. Depending on what that thing is, then they lead people through that doorway and they present it very clearly on the other side. That first step almost always will be giving me your
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information, and I will give you this thing, whatever it was they were looking for. Because you always have to remember they are coming to you by and large from the search engines. Some 80% of your traffic over the next year will come one way or another from something that somebody did by typing in what they were looking for and coming across you, almost by accident they find you. When they come to your website, you have basically got two seconds to give them a sense of peace that they have found what they were looking for because every browser, on everybody's computer now has a back arrow. If they came to you from a search engine and they have their mouse now positioned over that back arrow and they look very quickly at your website and say, yes, this is it and they move their cursor to begin doing what you are asking them to do, or at least stop, pause and read, what you are asking them to do. Or they immediately click on the back arrow and are gone forever. So we have to capture them and the best way to capture them is with a single point of focus and I think that is going to be a big area of improvement for you and I don't think I would aggressively move to do that just yet until your continuum is clear to you. Once you know exactly what it is and how you want people to proceed through the relationship with you, then to do web work would only lead you to do more web work later. Did I answer your question? Amanda : Yes, yes you did. Scott : Any other questions about this? Michael, have you got any questions? You've been pretty quiet. Michael : No. Scott, this has been a great session. I have got a page and a half of notes here. It was a terrific session, I appreciate the time.
Well folks, I am going to go ahead and say that we are done for the day. Finalizing the list of resources, I am going to add some links that you can use, some additional reference points that we can talk about next week. Next week is going to be more of a free form discussion than it is of a teaching session. We will get into some advanced ideas on the product continuum but we are also going to open it up and talk about all these different continuums that you are generating and what yours looks like, why, how you came to that and how it lines up with your niche and how your niche lines up with your passions. The other thing that I would ask each of you to do, if you are active with me on the Facebook Speakers Passive Profits group, if you get any observations or thoughts about this course that we are taking, please jump over there and post any comments that you have or thoughts about what we are going through for the benefits of others that are probably going to follow you into the next group.
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Understanding the Product Continuum

Primary Purpose - The product continuum is the critical core to developing your passive income model. In lesson one, I'll explain it, analyze it and prepare you to develop your own product continuum and plan.
Step 1 : Step 2 : Step 3 :
Listen to CD #1 from the Passive Income Avalance system in its entirety Locate the Blank Product Continuum form (Found in the worksheets section) and the completed example called Product Continuum Model (Found in the resource section). Complete the strategy assessment / questionnaire. As we progress through this course, you will appreciate the importance of this exercise. (Found in the worksheets section) Keypoint #1 : What is Niche Marketing? Niche marketing is nothing more than really knowing exactly who it is that is looking for your message and then reaching out to them in ways that they find appealing. When you talk about what an unforgettable speaker is going to do, they are not only going to approach this audience with say a sales letter on a website, but they are going to have video, they are going to have audio, blog posts, articles. They are going to have all of these things in play and you will find as we go through this that it is very easy to actually do all of them at extremely low cost and you will be able to niche market your way to massive, passive profit if you just do it properly
Step 4 : Step 5 :
Identify what your niche market as a speaker / content provider is? Take time to complete your first draft of a product continuum, based on what you learned in CD #1 about niche marketing, the nature of marketing on the internet, your passions and your chosen niche
Strategy Assessment
1) As you consider your speaking business, what is currently working according to your plan? What's not working as well as planned? Why do you feel this way?
2)
What do you consider to be your greatest opportunity to improve your speaking business? Why?
3)
Tell me about your business model. Currently, what percentage of your income comes from? a) Speaking fees? b) Coaching fees? c) Consulting? d) Back of room product sales? e) Online product sales? f) Licensing/royalties?
g) Affiliate income? h) Advertising? i) j) 4) Other? Other?
Name 3 things that you know about; are passionate about; or can do better than anyone else you know.
continued on next page ...
Strategy Assessment
5)
What is your niche market as a speaker?
6)
What is your website domain?
7)
What is the size of your active email list?
8)
Which social networks are you active on? Facebook Twitter Digg Other LinkedIn YouTube Propeller Plaxo Flickr Reddit
9)
If you are on LinkedIn, how many connections do you have?
10) If you on Facebook, how many friends do you have?
11) If you are using Twitter, how many followers do you have?
12) How often do you tweet?
x/day
13) What are your top 5 keywords to promote your business online?
Strategy Assessment
14) Do you monitor where you are positioned in the search engines? Yes / No If yes, how often do you check? 15) Do you maintain a Blog? Yes / No 16) If yes where is it located? 17) If not why not? 18) Is your blog listed at Technorati.com Yes / No 19) How often to you publish/update your blog? Daily Other 20) How often are you writing articles? Daily Other 21) Where are your articles published? Ezine Articles Other 22) Are you comfortable with shooting online video? Yes / No 23) How many videos have you produced? 24) Where are they distributed? YouTube Other Ezine Article Planet Squidoo HubPage More than 1x/wk Random dates Monthly More than 1x/wk Random dates Monthly
25) What are the names of your top 5 selling products what formats are they available in?
Strategy Assessment
26) How much passive income are you seeking each month? 27) What are your current monthly revenues from your website? 28) What percentage of the great-ideas you've received previously have been implemented? Why or why not?
29) Any other thoughts you'd like to share?
Name Address City Email Address Phone # State Zip
Complete and return via email or Fax to (727) 499-6980
Chapter 2
Building your Product Continuum

What we touched on initially was that the nature of the Internet is that it is not necessarily set up as a commerce vehicle, although it serves very nicely for that, it is primarily set up as an information vehicle. The people that are making the most money are using it to develop relationships with people in a niche market. If you have that part clear, then the rest of this is actually really easy to get your head around and to begin to apply to the development of a niche market for your business. Did everybody get a chance to download the different examples of the product continuums that I put up? (For our Home Study program participants, you will find these example pages Product Continuum Examples 1,2,3 in the resources section of your system). Completing your product continuum is going to be about finding your niche market and getting deep into your niche market and developing a worldwide audience around that niche is going to be built more than anything else on truly understanding who these people are that are typing in these keywords looking for information. Your ability to convert them into having a relationship with you will come from knowing a tremendous amount about them. It will almost be as if you were in their head. There was a funny movie a number of years ago that was called Being John Malkovich and if you ever saw that, it was a movie where basically there were people that found a secret hatch behind a dresser in their house and when they moved the dresser, opened the hatch and went through it, they were in John Malkovich's head. They were able to see through his eyes, hear from his ears and able to influence the way that everything was working in Malkovich's life. It was really a very funny story, but it applies to some degree to what marketers are trying to do, is to get inside people's heads. Here are a couple of things you are going to want to know about your target customer. You are going to want to understand the demographics of who these people are. When I say demographics, what I am specifically talking about is roughly what kind of income do they make? What is their gender? By and large it is probably going to be male and female, so what percentage is male and what percentage is female. What is the approximate age range and when you look at any kind of media demographics, if you look at any rate cards for any media buying of any kind, you will see they have the age ranges by percentage of who is a customer, who is reading their stuff. The closer you can identify those things; you will have a really good sense of who your target customer is. But it goes way deeper than that. Some of the things you are going to want to try to find out, and I'm not just going to give you this information, but I am going to tell you how to get it on the backend, you are going to want to know what does this target customer want? What are they looking for
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Chapter 2 Building Your Product Continuum
when they search for that keyword that they used, what is their desire so to speak. You are going to want to know what their key problems are. Many people searching for information have a problem and they are trying to solve it. The greater they feel their problem is, the more likely they are to want to solve it quickly, with less focus on what it costs than on getting an above average, or ideal resolution to the problem. You are going to want to try and find out what they are buying now because most people are buying something. They are using somebody's product within the range of the product that you offer so we want to know what it is. We want to know some of the things they currently buy. We don't have to hack into their mail to find out, we don't have to go digging through their trashcans to find out. There are lots of ways online to discover this. Where do they go online already? You are going to walk into their world and if you can enter into the conversation that they are already having and figure out what it is that they are trying to do, you will be many jumps ahead of your competitors. Some of the things that I research is I look at online communities. I want to know what online communities they are involved in. I want to know what forums they are paying attention to and we will talk a little more about that. I like to discover what blogs they are reading in my target market. I have a laundry list of all the blogs that speakers are reading and I read a number of them myself and I know what the issues are that are being framed out there and I can then address those issue as well, or from my own unique perspective. I want to do research and find out what kind of articles are interesting to them and there are ways to doing that. I want to know what videos they are watching and we have this wonderful tool called YouTube. While there are a lot of video sharing sites, YouTube is a treasure trove of information and it is all free. It is a wonderful tool for doing your market review and find out who this target customer really is. I want to know what ezines they are reading. In my own experience ezines are fading a little bit from the scene primarily because there is this avalanche of stuff that is out there right now. People are being deluged with free content. I blogged about that today, if you saw the blog announcement that goes out, you may have already read what I said. Essentially I was talking about this idea of people throwing more and more stuff into the box that is free and what they are trying to do is acquire the lead, getting a lead from their customer, getting the right to market to them. They are tipping the scales so heavily with the amount of content that they are giving away that an inadvertent side effect is they are devaluing the content that they offer. It is almost to the point of being unbelievable. You may have at some point gotten an email about a book launch that somebody was doing. This was all the rage two years ago and last year, just an enormous number of authors that decided that it would be hugely beneficial to them to be able to say in print, or online somewhere, that they were an amazon.com #1 bestseller. They figured out a way to game the system. What they essentially did was they got a whole bunch of other marketers to provide a free
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gift, almost like a lead registration type thing, or what you might see referred to as co-registration. If you are familiar with the term co-registration, it is where I sign up for one person's information and as soon as I hit the submit button, I go to a thank you page and they offer me the opportunity to co-register for up to dozens of other ezines, newsletters, reports, or whatever it might be. They were using something similar to that, to get themselves to the top of amazon.com, you got an email that said if you buy this particular person's book on the first day that it is released, you are going to get all of these gifts, most of which were tied to future marketing, in fact I don't think there were any that were not tied to receiving marketing from the person who was giving you a gift. The net effect of it was you are buying a $21 book and they are promising you three, five and even ten thousand dollars worth of perceived value. It almost became ridiculous. It did work for the number of people that did it in the early days; it doesn't work so well now. Nonetheless, we want to know what ezines they are reading and what kind of print magazines they are reading. This kind of information is pretty well available. Next we want to understand who our competitors are, the key there is to know who the major players are. There are always going to be lots of small players that are going to come and go but you will be able to figure out relatively easily who the major ones are. I know in Amanda's case, you can go type in her keywords and see who the major players are, right Amanda? Amanda : yes, definitely. Scott : You can learn a lot just by clicking through, looking at their sites and studying things and figuring out what they do, what they sell and how they sell it. Those are things you want to make notes on. You want to understand their process because if they are successfully selling, in some respects you are going to duplicate that process. Certainly with your own unique slant on it, but a well-researched marketplace is going to lead to predictable results. Predictable results combined with testing can lead you to amazing results. A great way to do competitive research, under the keywords that you have chosen, is to look at who is buying adwords, who is buying the adwords ads, knowing that will be tremendously useful to you. Being able to just see who it is, and in particular, if you find that those adwords are going to a landing page where there is nothing but a place to sign up for something, for more information. If that ad continues to run, if that ad continues to appear, or that company continues to advertise, take it to the bank that they are making money with their ad and in that space, on that keyword. Nobody has deep enough pockets to run the ad week after week and month after month if it is not converting. So that is a really good snippet of intelligence to remember, that when you look at the adwords ads running down the right side of the page on Google, and occasionally you will find two of them at the top of the page as well, highlighted and set apart as advertising, these are people that are paying to be there and in some cases they
are paying a fairly good amount for those positions. If they continue to remain there week after week, then it is because they are producing. You want to pay close attention to the organic searches; those are the ones down the center of the page after any advertising, down the center to the left. In particular, who made it to the top twenty? What are they offering in the top twenty on the keywords that you are interested in? Take a few hours and just poke through all twenty of those sites and see who is doing what and see how they are doing what they are doing. We will talk in a future session about how you can begin systematically climbing your way up the page to where you are sitting in the middle of those top twenty, if you are not already on major money keywords. You are going to want to know who is linking to your competitor. There is a number of ways to do it, probably the easiest way is to simply go into your Google search box, go onto the Google search engine and type in the word link, colon and the name of the site. It will tell you who the links are who is linking inbound to that site and that will tell you an awful lot about the quality and the relevance of their material. Who is linking to them determines an awful lot of how they got themselves positioned on those pages. We touched a minute ago on the fact you are going to want to know what forums these target customers are using. Once you know what your top ten keywords are, you just go back into Google and you type into the search engine list of keyword forums. So, I'm looking for real estate sales people forums, or I'm looking for tarot reading forums. I type it into the search engine; I am going to get back a list of all the different forums that are out there. If you want to find an amazing way of generating leads, nothing could be better than becoming a trusted resource on those forums. Getting in there, you should resist all your instincts to try marketing there until you have gotten at least a hundred posts to the forum. I actually keep tick sheets when I am working on a new forum. I make little tick marks on a piece of paper for every time I answer a question. I have a sheet that I will offer up here soon enough, I will give it to you as a guide for working the forums. (Home Study Students will find Working the Forums in the resources section of your system) Certainly, one of the things to remember is that you introduce yourself into these forums slowly, but aggressively answering questions and being a resource. Sharing your expertise with people but not trying to sell to them until you have become a trusted voice, then you will be able to guide and steer them into your ezines or whatever your free level of information is going to be and you will be able to build from there. You can also search Google groups to find groups or forums of people that are out there right now having a conversation about your topics and you can do the same thing on Facebook. As you know, I have the Speakers Passive Profits group, which started at zero, and as of early today, I think we have five hundred and ten members. The rise has been very fast, and a lot of fun.
When it comes to blogs, you want to find out what blogs people are reading, just go to technorati.com. It will be a page that you will want to bookmark. Not only will you want to have it bookmarked so that you can go in and poke around and see what the other blogs are on your topic, but once your blog is up and running, and you are actively posting to it on a regular basis, you are going to want to be able to go ahead and register your blog with Technorati. They will send traffic to your site for you because people are searching on their site, looking for information on your topic. If you are posting content to your blog, you are going to find there are people actively seeking that content, they will come to you if you become an authority so to speak, is a term that they use, then you will be getting traffic from them for free. It is a wonderful world to play in. They have tens of millions of viewers a month coming to them. When you want to try and figure out what articles your target market is reading spend some time at ezinearticles.com and I have also gone to ezinearticleplanet.com. Both of those have been really good resources. In fact, I post most of my article to ezinearticles.com and one of the reasons is it gives me a quality back link to my site, but it also sends traffic. I find it is probably about 8% of my traffic comes from ezinearticles.com. So 8% of my traffic is a nice number. You know, you will use ezine articles and ezine article planet to not only search keywords, but to review your articles. When you start finding articles, you can see what other keywords people are using and you will be able to build your keyword list all the deeper and wider than most people have one. I mentioned videos earlier. You want to find out what videos people are watching. You can simply go to YouTube.com, 99.97% of all videos being watched are being watched on you tube. So while there are hundreds, if not thousands of other video sharing sites, all of them are basically irrelevant for the purposes of learning about your target market. You can get everything you need to know at You Tube. There is some particular information on You Tube videos that you want to pay attention to. Directly underneath of the video window on the left side of the page, you will see a couple of tabs, most people never even see them, it looks like a file folder. If you click on the different tabs, you will see one of them will tell you how many people have watched that video. You can also see how many people have back linked that video and look to see what sites those are, if those are being shared on other people's sites, then keep in mind that may be somebody you want to get to know. Also, it is useful to read some of the comments. If you are finding somebody posting serious content on your topic, and getting a bunch of silly comments, or getting no comments at all, then taking a few minutes to watch the video, you might learn why. Just pay attention to the videos, see what people are watching, see what they are paying attention to because that is going to tell you, that is going to be like being inside John Malkovich's head, the idea that you will be able to get clear on the conversation they are having right now themselves about your topic. If you can enter into the conversation that they are already having with themselves, you are going to be miles ahead of your competitors.
Moving forward, one of the things that we have to establish pretty quickly out of the gate is what are the keywords? Initially, you are going to want to focus on ten. There are a lot of people that will tell you, particularly if you get into the search engine optimization that you should have hundreds of keywords identified. I know I actually have an excel spreadsheet with about 250 keywords on it. I am mostly focused on ten and when I get those ten optimized to where I want them, I will dig deeper and find the next ten, and I will go for the next ten. I don't always go after the biggest searched keywords and the reason I don't is because the little ones have a lot less competition. They are easier to position yourself in. The fastest and easiest way, there is a world of keyword search tools out there; word tracker has been for a very long time the gold standard in doing keyword searches. You may have used word tracker at some point in time, it is still a great product. It is an increasingly expensive product, in my own personal view. I simply go with Google's keyword tool. If you want to find Google's keyword tool, essentially you are going to want to set up an iGoogle page, which is going to be a customized Google search engine for you. It is a simple, free registration and then you are going to want to search through some of the links that you will find under more. When you see all the ones that are going across the top, that they have lots and lots of choices. If you have never gone in there and poked around to see all the applications that Google offers you for free, it is well worth the time to see all the things that they do to give you research materials and tools. You will find the Google Adwords link, and under Adwords you will see the keyword tool. I can post a direct link to it, but if you don't have an account, you will be required to set up an account. Simply type in the main one or two keywords that you want and then click the submit button, with only one major distinction. When you see it start pulling up a list of keyword suggestions, look in the top right corner of that window and if it says broad match, it will tell you the match, whether it is broadly matching your search term or if it is exactly matching your search term. It is a little drop down box, choose the exact search and you will get a tighter description of the keywords. You will also get a much more accurate count of how many people are searching those words. Then just start copying and pasting over, or saving the whole thing as a CSV file. I have noticed though, and this is something that they have done in the last six months or so, there once was a time that you could save those keywords and it would save the number of counts for you, it no longer does that, it doesn't save the counts. You are almost better to set up your own excel sheet with the keywords in the one column and then take the time to fill in the number of people that are searching in the other columns. They will give you two different counts, the average count and the count for the most recent month. So right now they are showing the counts for October, then they show you the average month and they also show the highest month by just telling you which month it was that they had the highest count.
Then, pay particular attention again to the advertisers, particularly the top ten. The top ten advertisers that are paying for Google adwords are going to be useful to you when you are trying to figure out who the competitors are. Pay particular attention, I mentioned a few minutes ago the top twenty organic searches, the top ten is ultimately where you want to be. If you can get in the top ten, not really if, when you get into the top ten, you will see a tremendous amount of traffic flowing to you and that will be very useful. Finally, if you have never been to clickbank.com, it is the biggest affiliate seller of courses and e-books. It is very worthwhile knowing about them and just doing a search on your topic there to see who are selling courses already. There is unbelievable research there, they will show you the different courses and tell you how many units are selling and what the conversion rate is for the offer. If nothing else you can learn a lot just by looking at the offer and seeing how they positioned it. If it is converting at a high level, you might very well have the basis for how you want to structure your offer to get a similarly high conversion rate. Next, if you want to look and see what traffic is flowing to the different competitors, you identified by domain what the competitor's names are, and then you will go over to alexa.com. You will see across the top a tab that says traffic rankings and you go in there and type in the domain name of whichever competitor you want to know about. It will give you a sense of how much reach they have with their traffic. Another tool that I love to use when it comes to estimating traffic is called compete.com. With compete, what is really neat is you can actually compare your top three or four; they have a free service and a paid service. You can get everything you need to know from their free service. You will be limited to I think three simultaneous searches, so you will be able to type in three names of businesses, three domains and click the submit button and it will graph the amount of traffic for all three of them on one screen. You can see how much traffic these competitors are getting and that will help you a lot. You will be able to start estimating how much traffic you could expect when you have optimized and are doing everything that you are going to be doing. Two more tools that you will want to know about, actually there are a few more here. Google Alerts, if you are not familiar with Google Alerts, you will find that in the list of free Google tools. You set up a new alert, type in the keyword that you want to monitor and it will send you an email on whatever schedule you ask it to, once a week, once a day, whatever you ask for. It will reference all the times that, lets say if there is an article that has been published, or there is anew blog post out there that referencing that keyword, it will send it to you so that you can keep track of who is carrying on what conversations in your marketplace. You will monitor the top three or four of your keywords. Also, it is always great to monitor your own name. If people start commenting about you, either good or the bad, you probably want to be the first to know. If they are saying good things about you, and it is being published on a blog somewhere, Google Alerts will usually catch it. It will send you an email and give you a link to where your name showed up and you can go and see if it is actually you and what they are talking about. It is very, very useful.
There is another tab under that Google tools set called Google Trends. You can type your keywords into that to see what kind of major trends are occurring in your space. If you can get in front of a trend, you can get a tremendous amount of traffic moving to you. I don't want to overly confuse you, you don't have to use all of these things at once, but you want to know that they exist. It is not like you have to do all of this before you can do anything else, let me be clear about that. These are things that you do in and amongst what you are actually here to do which is to generate content, own a big chunk of the Internet and build a big relationship base with your target customer. The stuff we covered in the early part of this call you definitely want to get done, the research, but some of these trends and traffic analysis and stuff like that, you could do those in and around the other main things that you are doing. Two really cool tools that I like are seaDigger.com, which shows the competitive rankings for all the sites by keywords, telling you the position that they have on Google. It gives you an estimate of the traffic from WordTracker and Yahoo. That is kind of a neat tool, they have a free service and also a paid service, of course with any of the paid services you get more stuff. You can learn a lot just from using their free version. The last one is called Spyfu.com. What that does is allow you to spy on your online competitors. If you have identified in your research who your online competitors are, use Spyfu and it will allow you to download their keywords and save them to your excel sheet. You can grab all the keywords that they are using off of their site and that will save you some time in finding the money keywords that are out there. All of that said, taking 45 minutes we have covered researching your marketplace. It all comes back to the idea that people are searching for information and with that information in some cases they will develop a relationship with the person that gives them that information. For you, it is all about finding very, very narrow niche markets that you can drill and you can drill these veins of gold out of them. If you know enough about these markets that you are wanting to compete in, you can compete. You are going to find, as I have done, you are going to be just amazed how little your competitors actually know. Many of them are where they are on the search engines by showing up and just kind of being sloppy. That is not to say that will be the case universally, there are some very, very strong competitors out there. A lot of these keywords, you are going to find people have risen to the top of the search engines almost by luck because it is not because they have really optimized everything they are doing it extremely well. Once you have got all your research, the thing that I tend to do next is I print all of it out. I have it all done in word documents or excel sheets and I print it all out, and I use a three-hole punch and I put it all in a notebook. Sometimes I will even separate it into tabs. Pick up a cheap two-dollar notebook somewhere, get a package of those tabs and slide the different kinds of research in behind these different tabs so you can flip back and forth and be able to look at trends and spot things. Put keywords under one, traffic counts under another, who your major competitors are, these different areas. I promise you, you will have more information about your marketplace than anybody else that
Competitive Analysis Research Form Instructions

It is suggested you use the Competition Worksheet as well when doing this exercise. To provide room to write, there are only enough columns for 3 competitors on each page of the Competition Worksheet, so you'll want to print at least three to fully research the top 10 competitors. Fill out one of these forms for each Keyword.
1. 2. Type your main keyword into Google AdWords select exact match and search for the keywords. Export them to a spreadsheet. Type the same keyword into Spacky.com to get the total search count for the top 3 search engines. (Google, Yahoo, MSN) Google Yahoo MSN 3. When your target audience searches your major keywords, what are they looking for? What do they REALLY want?
4.
List the top 10 sites listed on Google for this keyword
5.
List the top 10 advertisers on Google for this keyword
6.
For each of the top 10 sites, see how many inbound links they have attracted
7.
Go to Alexa.com, list the traffic ranking for the top 10 sites
8.
Go to Compete.com, list the traffic count for the top 10 sites
9.
Go to Google Trends, research any trends for this keyword
10. Go to SEOdigger.com to learn the competitive ranking for the top 10 sites
11. Go to SpyFu.com to identify and save the keywords found on the sites of each of your Competitors on a spreadsheet.
you are competing against. The guy with superior information usually wins. Then, once you have all of this and had some time to just kind of poke at it and look at it, you will be able to determine how you want to be positioned in your space, which takes us to the easy part. In the last Chapter, we talked extensively about what the product continuum is and how it worked. What I have attempted to do with these was to show you some different examples of people's continuums. Real quickly we are going to discuss some of the pros and cons of these so you can see what I am talking about. You will see the one called Example 1, so open that one. Example 1 is actually somebody I have worked with in the past, like so many other people, they put together a free report from their material and they also do free Teleseminars. First level of trying to convert somebody into a deeper relationship where there has been some sort of financial commitment is they have an e-book that is $14.95, or a paperback book for $24.95. You can see they offer the free information to try and gather the leads; they use the Teleseminar to do the same thing. Those two are essentially interchangeable, they don't do them both at the same time, they offer them. One group gets one, the other gets the other and they just interchange back and forth to use them But in most cases, they offer side-by-side information about the book that they have and if you want to get it for less, you can get the e-book. If you buy the paperback book, you get the e-book anyway. With your receipt you get a link to the e-book and the other book shows up in the mail. The third level for this person is they appear at seminars and speak here, there and everywhere. Every chance that they get, they will go out and speak. But, if you go up the page, you will see that they have skipped several levels. I don't know if you find it useful to see that, they have left several interaction or relationship opportunities, maybe even monetary opportunities, aside and they go from the live event and from the stage they are selling one-on-one coaching. Does that make sense to everybody? So when they are out speaking at the event, what they will offer you from the stage is the chance to work with them as a coach. From there, when they are in those one-on-one coaching sessions, what they are looking for is consulting clients. That is not necessarily a bad thing to do it that way, but can anybody tell me one example of where that could create challenges for that person? Jay : You are going to have a time limitation at some point. Scott : Good catch, good point. Amanda, do you understand why Jay said that? Amanda : Yes, because obviously one-on-one coaching, and also appearing at seminars and live events, all of that is time consumer to do. Scott : It is a very, very active form of generating your income. Ultimately, you run into
the amount of hours in a day. Kind of keep that in mind. This is an example of somebody that I consider to be, this particular model being less than optimal, for the reasons that we have covered. Lets go to Example #2, this is also one that I would consider to be less than optimal, but strangely enough, it was a model that I was really interested in at one point. This person is a friend of mine, has a Facebook group, very active, very aggressive with his Facebook group, has a big, big group of members. They also speak at events and seminars regularly and most of those events they do for free. They do not get paid to go speak at these events. Now, what they are actually selling from the stage is a free strategy session. So they are going from a free group, or a free event to another level, or what we would call an advanced level of free. Then from there, they are selling a big-ticket item, a very intensive mastermind program. I think for all the same reasons, we won't beat this too hard, but I think after that first example you can both see why that would be less than optimal. Am I right? Jay : Yeah, absolutely. Amanda : It is a huge jump as well to go from free to a big ticket item where you've potentially got hundreds or thousands of dollars that you are asking somebody to invest with you without really having provided anything else, or built the relationship in between. I would say you are going to lose a lot of people here because from the events, if you are going to an intensive big ticket item, the percentage of people than would go through from the free would be very small. The vast majority of the people would have actually got lost between that because the mastermind might well not have been within their budget. Scott : You are exactly right. At this point, we have only covered two of them, but is it useful to you to see examples? I think it will help you to develop a better continuum for yourself when you see how other people have approached it and you diagnosis it. All I am doing is kind of guiding you through the diagnosis of it so you can see for yourself why one is good and one is not so good. Now we go to Example 3, this is actually one I am working on with someone else. This one is a little bit more of an optimal model and it has an awful lot of interaction and a lot of stepping-stones up to the top. You can see in Example 3, there is no actual defined piece at the top because they are still trying to determine how far they can push this audience, how much they can monetize this group. It starts like every other one starts, with a base of free information, a report, free seminar, whatever you think your audience wants. You will probably develop all three of them and you will test one against another until you find a control if you will, it's a term they use in advertising, when you find a control ad and you can tell what percentage of people are converting. Then you can test your
alternates against your control and see if you can improve the number. If you can improve on the control, then you make the new one your control and you start tweaking and trying to top that one. It is a way of testing your way to better success. Then you go on from there, once they have converted, they have got the free information in place, they offer a very nominal upgrade, a CD/DVD program. Usually, $10 if it is a CD, $20 if it is a DVD, but good quality content, just not the whole story. The trick is with these kinds of things, when you record something like this, the number one rule in developing this kind of content is you want to tell people what they need to do but not exactly how to do it, if that makes sense. You can save that for your advanced programs. If people understand what to do, they recognize you as the authority and the expert, and they really want to know how to do it, they will come to you; If they don't, just keep feeding them with your content and they will be fine. When they are ready to take the next step, if you have continued to be accessible and available to them, they will probably be looking to you. You can see from there they went to a $97 program. A $97 dollar program was really taking something that was built of a series of teleseminars and turning it into an audio program and now they are actually redoing it as a series of videos. They will then strip the audio off and have the material transcribed, looking at it a little bit differently. Once it cools a little bit you can look at it objectively, you can develop a manual based on the videos or based on the audios. You can offer that relatively short course, maybe a two-hour course, for $97. From there, they have developed a home study course which was the crux of the real video system that they developed. They have spent time, energy and money creating this home study course but with a big base of people that are searching that particular topic, having a home study program that might be eight hours worth of material. Joe, particularly in your case, a home study program is a natural. In the real estate business, there are lots of home study programs for you to model after and price points. Don't necessarily use the price points they are using here, just keep it in mind that you want to have that step up progression as you go. The next level of conversion was into small group boot camps and then up to small group coaching and then one-on-one coaching. As I have said, there may still be a top level developed and when you think of the top level, that is not exactly the case in this one because he has one-on-one down on the second level from the top. He has some level of interaction way up there. If you use Yanik Silver for example, his top level now is this Maverick Business Systems. Yanik was a client of mine, we did a lot of video stuff for him, we were partners in the video business. We watched him develop this whole maverick system of his. He has really struck a cord with a whole group of Internet millionaires. I think there are about twenty-five of them that paid the rights to join his club.
If you do this kind of process with your niche market, some people are going to want to have an intimate relationship with you. Now I mean intimate from in the nature of husband and wife type intimate, I'm just talking about people want to get close to you, they want to know what you know, they want to be your friend. So let them. If they are willing to join your group, and they are willing to recognize you as an expert who commands certain fees, and access comes with a price. Kind of keep that in mind. One other thought on this one before we go to the next one is that it is not always linear. People don't always jump from one to the next to the next sequentially. Sometimes they will jump over a level because they feel their needs are better served at a higher level. Some people will do a ten-dollar program and never go further. Some people will jump from a free report to a ninety-seven dollar program; some will jump all the way up to small group coaching at that point. It is very interesting to study how different people convert. Don't get locked into the idea that everybody has to take every single step along the path. You are just offering them the different steps knowing that some percentage will convert at each level. As you start to see what your numbers are, different people are going to convert at each level, but it becomes a very strong passive based income. Does that make sense why? Amanda : Yes it does. Scott : Once this step is developed, you don't have to develop it all over again. Now, granted, one of the guys on the Facebook group, Steven Tweed, was clear to point out, in his own opinion a passive income is not necessarily accurate because you have to build all the stuff. But, he and I have had this discussion a couple of times now, Steven is an old friend, he actually attended a class that I taught at the National Speakers Association and we discussed it four years ago. He calls it non-airplane income, but nonetheless, he understands as well as anybody that once it is built, it remains sellable over and over again. The active part of your business becomes marketing, not so much producing all of the content. If you have got a process and a system and it just runs like this, you are going to see some conversions at different levels and it will all fall into place for you. I will show you one last example. Here you will see the first level of conversion comes a lot sooner and gets people to take a small step into the arena.The first level of conversion will be invest ten dollars and join a group of no more than six who will join a small group strategy session. We are going to discuss the major, critical questions that somebody would need to know to be thinking about if they want to have a passive based speakers' income. The next level is a one-on-one strategy session; it is going to be an investment of $249, which is discounted by sixty percent. If they were working as a consultant for somebody one-on-one, who was charging successfully as much as $697 an hour then charging $249 for roughly a ninety
minute session is actually a pretty good value. So, is it reasonable to think that if someone is serious about trying to build this kind of a business, that they would make an investment of that sort? Jay : I think so. Scott : Of course, like anything else that a good marketer would do, that call and that investment is 100% guaranteed. If somebody got to the end of the call and they said I don't get it. I don't think that the value is there, okay, fine I will credit your money back immediately. I am not looking to take money from people that don't feel they got value. There are just too many opportunities out there to be caught up in trying to keep somebody's money when they didn't feel like they got value. Next, there will be a monthly Telecoaching program as well. In the monthly Telecoaching program, this will be sort of like a silver level membership group that we are going to do, there will be two sessions a month. One where I am actually teaching for an hour in a Teleseminar environment and the second one where I am actually interviewing someone on that month's key topic and then everybody that is in that group will receive access to the live call, they will get the CD's from the call and they will get transcripts from the call. So they will get two calls, two CD's and two transcripts as a part of that group. They will also get my newsletter, which by the way we are finishing up that edition and you both are going to get that in your mail fairly soon.Then we will also be offering a home study program, a three-day boot camp which we are looking at doing in March, I am hoping to have everything ready to roll that out in March. The program that you are in, the Unforgettable Speakers Mastermind will be second from the top and then I have had so many people that wanted real services, where they knew they had a whole lot of things they needed to do, and they just couldn't get them done, yet they believed that these were a handful of critical initiatives that needed to be done to build this business for themselves. They were willing to hire my team to actually do it for them. That is going to be a premium level program. I don't have all the details on it just yet, we are still doing some research and finding out exactly what that needs to be, not only from a service perspective, but from what the investment needs to be and how it is going to be structured. That give you an example of how I am adapting my business to adjust to the marketplace that I am in. I am trying to give you some transparency as well. Amanda : Just as a comment three on the done for you Scott, for me, that kind of a service, the most important thing is actually the reliability of the service because I have tried to outsource things. I have used virtual assistants and different people to outsource things and the experiences to date have not been brilliant. Whether that is just me and I have attracted it or not being clear, I don't know, but I think amongst that, there is a real need first I would say real
clarity what the clients are actually looking for to be done. Also, the efficiency and reliability of the people that are actually doing the job. Communication is obviously got to be key to it and certainly that will come at a premium, and I think what happens is for a lot of people when they try to outsource things, they are very much looking at the cost in that they are looking at how little can they pay to get the best possible service. That is really something that backfires every single time somebody tries to do that. I think here, even if it means adding additional to the cost, where you have more built in reliability, efficiency that would certainly be something that I would say to really consider. This is all so helpful for me as well because there are bits of this that I have kind of incorporated myself into my own product continuum. Just kind of seeing how you are taking yours through, comparing it with the examples of less than ideal, I think this is hugely valuable. Scott : Back to the point of the done for you, you are absolutely right. If you focus on trying to get lower price, my grandfather used to say that the sweetness of price is forgotten in the bitter taste of bad service or bad product. So you get a good price, but you get a bad taste in your mouth from the product itself. Probably, the easiest way to phrase it is you get what you pay for. Amanda : Or as somebody said to me once, if you pay peanuts, you get monkeys. Scott : The only people that are ever going to ascend into that pinnacle level of service with us are people that we have already worked with, people that know me and know the level of work that I provide.They are probably people that have been watching me for some time and they see what I am doing and they want to do something like it. Money is not as important as the deliverable, but they just don't have time to do it.There are a number of top level speakers that have expressed an interest in that kind of service, what I am having to do in addition to polling them is finding out what exactly it is that they are expecting. I am also insisting that they go through this program before they get to that program. I want them to know what is going into it and understand what we are going to do because I am going to stand behind it.The result of it is there will only be, I think my wife is actually going to head that up and with me, we are limiting it to five clients at a time. I don't think we can actually, physically provide the level of support and service we need to for more than five people at a time. It will be a premium product, but it will be far more valuable than what they pay. Ultimately that will be something that a select client will use. It is not going to be for everybody by any stretch, but for the ones that do need it, it will be available to them and we will deliver beyond their expectations, or we won't do it.When you go back to this world of going out to www.elance.com, www.guru.com or typing VA into your search engine and trying to find a local VA, you just don't know what you are getting.There is an awful lot of people that go to a seminar this weekend and on Monday they are going to hang their shingle out and call
themselves a guru because the course they bought said you complete this one hundred page manual and now you are a guru. Frankly, I don't want anybody calling me a guru.The bottom line of it is experience is what you pay for. People who have actually done things is where the value is generated from. The last one that I gave you was just a jpeg image, the last example there.This was the one that was actually on the website. This is kind of like a master sheet for you to refer to in putting together your own continuum. As we hurdle our way towards the close here, we don't really have time to do a thorough review of all that we have covered, we covered a lot today. Everything going back to understanding your niche marketing, finding out who your target customer is and what their demographics are, what their needs and desires are. What their problems are, what they are already doing and buying? Where are they going online and what are they doing there as far as your topic. Are they doing online communities and forums and if so which ones? What blogs are they reading, what articles are they reading. What videos are they watching, what ezines do they subscribe to. Then you are going to look closely at your competitors and figure out who the major players are and what their selling and how they do that. Who is buying the adwords ads and who is organically ranked in the top ten and the top twenty. Who is linking to your competitors that will be valuable for you to know? Then you are going to want to find the forums, blogs, articles and videos and just get a sense for where all of that is located on the Internet. You will learn a tremendous amount about competing in your marketplace. Then you will dig out your keywords, you will just go to Google's keyword tool and you will get an awful lot done with just that one tool. Study the traffic of your competitors with Alexa.com and Compete.com. Keep your finger on the pulse of the market with Google Trends and Google Alerts. Particularly remember to set them up with your name because it is fascinating what comes up. I have had all kinds of things come up. One example is a profile showed up for one of these, it was like Linkedin, but it wasn't, it was a different one, and I don't remember which particular one it was. When I clicked on it and looked at the profile that was out there with my name on it, here was this beautiful marketing opportunity, and all the information was dated. It actually showed me as CEO of my former company, had bad contact information for me. Real quickly, I go in and I refresh myself to figure out what my password was and I go in and date everything. It creates a nice back link to my website, fresh information if somebody else finds it, now they know where to find me today. It is extremely valuable to be able to monitor those alerts. Of course the cool traffic tools, SeaDigger and Spyfu. With that we are going to close this up. What I want you to do is by next week, I want you guys to develop a product continuum. You've got the one off the website that you could download, it was blank, or you could just click into it and fill it in. We made fields on there so you could technically fill it in right there online.
Researching your Market and Building your Product Continuum

Primary Purpose - How to choose the levels of your product continuum to achieve total buy-in from your niche audience. As you go along, check off the circles to each step completed
Step 1 : Step 2 :
Listen to CD #2 from the Passive Income Avalanche system in its entirety Identify the demographics of your niche audience. Understand the demographics of who these people are, specifically what kind of income do they make? What is their gender? Are they male and/or female, what percentage is male and what percentage is female. What is the approximate age range? Forum Search : Go to Google and type into the search engine list of keyword forums. What do they want? What online communities are they involved in? What forums are they a part of? What blogs, articles or videos are they watching? When it comes to blogs, you want to find out what blogs people are reading, just go to www.technorati.com. It will be a page that you will want to bookmark. Know who your competitors are, who are the major players. You can learn a lot just by clicking through, looking at their sites and studying things and figuring out what they do, what they sell and how they sell it. Those are things you want to make notes on. Complete part 1 of Market Research worksheet What are they reading? Search the Ezines that exist in your niche market and create a file of these articles. This process is called creating a swap file. Search www.ezinearticles.com also www.ezinearticleplanet.com to start collecting these articles Set up an account with igoogle.com which is going to be a customized Google search engine for you. You will find the Google Adwords link, and under Adwords you will see the keyword tool, type in the main one or two keywords that you want and then click the submit button. Then just start copying and pasting over, or saving the whole thing as a CSV file. The top ten advertisers that are paying for Google adwords are going to be useful to you when you are trying to figure out who the competitors are. Pay particular attention, the top twenty organic searches, the top ten is ultimately where you want to be.
Step 3 :
Step 4 :
Step 5 :
Step 6 :
Niche Market Research Form

1) Approximate age of target audience : 2) Gender of target audience 3) Main Keyword : :
4) Identify online forums that exist for this keyword? List the top 5 1. 2 3. 4. 5. 5) What blogs are being written for this keyword? List the top 5 blogs based on Technorati authority rating 1. 2 3. 4. 5. 6) What articles have been written and posted online at the article sharing sites? Make a list of the top five sites these articles promote 1. 2 3. 4. 5.
7) What do these articles authors sell to this niche audience? Do a search on Google groups to see what groups exist for this audience For each of the top five groups list number of members 1. 2 3. 4. 5.
8) Niche Market Research con't Do a search on Facebook to see what groups exist for this audience For each of the top 5 groups list number of members 1. 2 3. 4. 5. 9) What videos is your target audience watching on YouTube?
10) Are there any YouTube Channels on this topic? Subscribe to stay current, watch existing videos to understand the market better. 1. 2 3. 4. 5.
11) Search Ustream.tv for Internet TV programs on this topic How many are there? How many episodes have been done? Names of Shows 1. 2 3. 4. 5. Number of Episodes
12) Are there any prominent ezines on this topic? Subscribe to them ! 13) Names of printed magazines or newsletters? 14) Go to Google Trends, research any trends for this keyword 15) Go to SpuFu.com to identify and store the keywords on each of your competitor's sites
Your Product Continuum
Chapter 3
Product Creation Strategies

I want to just take a few minutes and double back to previous sessions. First of all see what questions have come up that either one of you would like addressed before we go plowing forward. Amanda : I don't think I had so much in way of questions. I think the one thing I perhaps I had a little bit of a challenge with, the product continuum, was the higher level products and services. Perhaps that is something that we can discuss a bit more in our individual sessions. I found that doing the product continuum has been extremely useful, but I sort of came to a point where it was sort of what do I do from here. I haven't really found much in way of higher end products and services. Scott : Well, I would say Amanda you are going to find a lot to be chewing on this week and next week. Not only in the implementation call, but in today's session we are going to talk specifically about easy product creation. In next week's call we are going to talk about all the different ways you can repurpose a product and it is out of those that you will often times have the material at hand to fill in those higher levels. In essence, in a lot of cases it is something that you already do at a lot more depth and breadth. When you have those two, if you build enough demand for it and you create some level of exclusivity of it, you can have it at a higher price point. Just looking at Jay's for example, he has in here a one-day workshop at a fairly high level of his continuum. That is where he will be teaching his concepts to people. Jay, I don't want to speak for you, but it would seem to me that those people are coming to Atlanta, somewhere in the vicinity, to work with you in person. Just by its nature, that is going to be somewhat exclusive. There are things that he can do to make it ultra exclusive and if there is one thing that he and I will talk about, it is the price point that he has chosen for that. When we start this exercise, it is all about the fact that this is a starting point. This is not necessarily the one that you will go to the market with, it was to get the discussion going and to get the conversation going, mostly with yourself. To get your arms around this model and begin thinking through what your market would receive and what they would want. We will do more work to figure out what the sensitivity to price is, but I would say there is a lot less price sensitivity than most people would think. When there is something of higher value that is somewhat exclusive, price is not as much an obstacle as a lot of people tend to think, even when economic times are stressed. If there is any one thing that is fascinating about these current economic times, they are not selling a lot of Chevy's right now, but they just opened an Aston Martin dealer around the corner from my house. They have actually had a significant number of people
Chapter 3 Product Creation Strategies
come in during the first month that it has been open and place an order for an Aston, which they cannot get for a year. Amanda : I saw that on our news here as well but it was actually the makers of Rolls Royce, which is another obviously high end, luxury car had issued their figures and were basically saying that business is absolutely booming, several hundred thousand pounds worth of car. Scott : There is always a market if you will seek to find the market, it may not come banging on your door, at least not initially. But if you do good research and you know where your market is, you will be able to figure out where their price sensitivities are pretty quickly. It is not always a straight price value comparison that they are doing either. A lot of it just is a level of confidence, a level of trust that comes into the equation that causes people to part with to what one person would think is a lot of money, someone else will spend on a weekend trip out of town going off to play. In fact, my wife and I were watching a new television show last night for a little bit, called the Secret Millionaire. Actually, very interesting stuff, it is almost like the secret Santa concept where somebody is walking around with a lot of money and they are looking for impoverished people to give it to. In this case, they are taking millionaires and dressing them down to look like poor people, forcing them to take off all the jewelry, watches, put the fancy cars away and wear ratty clothes and live in a skuzzy hotel room or cheap apartment, and take on the identity of someone that is poor and in that process get to know other people that are poor, but have good hearts. Their job is, over a period of a week, to find people that they believe in enough to give away more than a hundred thousand dollars of their own money. It was very interesting in the first segment that we watched, the gentleman multimillionaire, in talking with his son who was with him in this adventure, said that one of the people that they met was spending $1,200 a month feeding the poor of their own money. He said in all the people that are fed, all the good that is done from that lady's work, as opposed to he and his son spending two hours flying around in their private airplane, burning off $1,200 worth of fuel, so providing a months worth of food or spending two hours flying around on a private airplane. It was a humbling experience for him to meet such a person, to get to know them, to walk in their shoes, to live in their world for even just a few days. It is a fascinating concept. So what one person might think is expensive, another person thinks is really very affordable. Creating a demand for it and some level of exclusivity of it will put those dynamics in your favor. So why don't we get started, lets go ahead and talk about what the concept is for Chapter 3. The
general idea of what we want to talk about is that we now have the basis of product continuum in place, we are going to need to create product, not only for the continuum but content that can be used to broaden your footprint on the Internet. What I refer to, and I actually borrow this from John Reece, is owning more of the Internet. When you are trying to dominate the search engines, if you go all the way back to where we started, the idea that the Internet is nothing but an information vehicle, and as people go looking for information, there are a lot of places where you could be found. All of those people that started out with a shopping mall, thinking I am just going to create a shopping mall online and I will have all these people come in and buy from me and I will be rich, are long since gone because by the nature of the Internet, there is nobody wandering past your door. But, there are a lot of places where they can find you in all of these information repositories. They truly are endless, there are thousands upon thousands upon thousands of places where people can find a doorway into your business and come to get to know you. To do that, we need to feed that machine on a fairly regular basis. So we are going to talk today about where do we get these products from. I know when I have talked to some people in the past, before this program was more formalized and I was just doing it on a consultative basis, people would get overwhelmed with the idea of having to create a lot of product. They got to this place where they were like, I just don't have that much time and I don't have enough material to create that much content. But they do and we will show you how to do that, and that is what we are going to cover largely today. The first thing is, creating products is easy. It is oh so easy to create a product. In fact, let me just run through a story of somebody that I have worked with. Actually, I am going to back up and start with a slightly different version of the story because there are significant points I want you to get. First of all, have either of you, or have both of you heard this idea that having a book makes you an expert? Amanda : Yes. Jay : Heard it a million times. Scott : Yeah, it helps to have Amazon #1 Bestseller status, but that has been gained, and a lot of people have figured out how to do that without actually having a book that anybody wants. So it doesn't necessarily mean that you are like a New York Times Bestseller, they are two different things because you only get to the top of the New York Times list by actually selling a lot of books to or through bookstores. Amazon, being a virtual bookstore, you can create this enormous network of people who are emailing and promising to give away lots of bonuses if you will only go buy Amanda's book today, because today is the day it is being launched. It is through a systematic leverage that you can shoot yourself to the top of the amazon.com list but don't go look for you at the
top of the list tomorrow because you won't be there. In most cases you won't even be found tomorrow, you will drop right back down again. But it is interesting and fun to be able to do a snapshot of the page while you are at #1, even if you are only there for just a few minutes. Going back to my original point, it is going to make you an expert to create a book. You would be amazed, we have seen the research, that 80% of people today that are asked this question, 80% of the adult population wants to write a book. What percentage of those people do you think will actually ever do it? Probably less than one! I don't think anybody really knows for sure what percentage will write the book, but it is going to be a small percentage. Virtually everyone thinks that they have a story worth telling, and almost nobody is willing to actually do the work. The reason for that is they believe that it is hard. I want to prove to you really quickly how easy it is to write a book. One of the people in my private mastermind actually runs a program called Write a Book in a Weekend. I want to give you a simple step-by-step plan to write a book. Let's just say you are thinking about your topic and you want to do about a 120 to 150-page book, something relatively small and easy to replicate. It becomes like an oversized business card; now I am a published author, here is my book. So lets say you are going to do that and you start thinking through the topic and lets say there are six major parts to your book, six major points that you need to make. It is interesting because writing a book is very similar to writing a speech. I have written a lot of speeches, I've delivered more than 2,000 of them in different parts of the country and in some parts of the world, being asked to speak, and the similarities are amazing. When I write speeches for myself or I work with other people in writing speeches, we develop a list of the points they want to make. In one column you create a list of the points you want to make for your speech. In the second column, you create a list of the stories that you want to use that support the point you want to make. You have points that you need to make about your topic in one column, you have stories that you can tell to support those points in the other column, and they are just notes, they are not the whole story. You generally know the stories that you tell and you generally know the points you want to make, so you have the points and you have the stories. To write a speech, all that you need to do, at least this is the body of the speech, is you need to sit down and simply make the point and tell a story to support that point. I do it with a digital recorder. If I am going to write a speech, I will look at my list and say ok, the first point I need to make is this and then I will tell a story to say ok, my point is it is easy to write a speech. Then I will tell you a story about somebody that I worked with and how easy it was for us to do this. Then you switch it up. As you move a little bit further, you tell a story, so you go to your column of stories and you weave your point into the story. So your story becomes the point. Now you are not specifically pointing to the idea, or the point you are making, you are just telling a story and the point is evident. You keep going back and forth until you have made your five or six points
and you have told stories to support it. Now, we have the body of a speech. The only thing you need to do there to finish up the speech is to go back to the top and say in this next twenty or thirty minutes that I am going to talk, here are the five or six things you are going to learn. The old concept is, tell them what you are going to tell them, then you tell them, then you wrap it up by telling them what you told them and giving them a call to action, something specific that you want them to do. So now you have written a speech. Guess what, it is not much harder than that to write a book. So you could write a book, and the way that we teach to write books is really simple. You take your six points; lets say there are six points that you want to talk about in your real estate course Jay. You take a spiral bound notepad, for a lack of a better example, you grab one of those and you write your major point at the top of each of six different pages. Here is the thing I need to get across in this chapter. Each one of those pages becomes the basis of a chapter in your book. So you have those six major points across the tops of six different pages, then you go back to page one where your first point is and you sit down and think about it for a while and come up with four, five or six sub points, or minor parts, or things that you need to impart to drive that lesson home. A story, or an example, or maybe a warning of somebody that did it wrong, but you have maybe four, five or six different things under that point that you are teaching and they are just listed. Bullet point, boom, boom, boom, these are the things that I am going to cover. Now you go to chapter two, you have your major point, you put your minor points underneath of it, these are the four, five, six things we are going to cover in chapter two. You just keep going until you are done, all six. Now you go back and you tear those pages out of the book, you get a roll of tape and you tape them on the wall. Tape them down on whichever wall is convenient to you in your office, home, wherever you work from. You have all of these taped to the wall. Then you grab one of the handiest devices you will ever own, a simple digital recorder. If you went onto the website earlier this week and you saw some of the links in the lesson plan, I put in a link to a digital recorder, this is the latest version, mine is a little older than this one, but an Olympus VN3100 recorder. This is one of the coolest little devices you will ever see and the price has fallen by almost half in the two years since I bought mine. Mine was like $89; this one is $44. This little device allows you to plug in a little miniature lavaliere mic; you can also get one of those for about $15. You plug this thing in and you fire up the digital recorder, you start working your way down the wall where these chapters are listed. You stand in front of them and you talk, you say ok, here I am, we are in chapter one of my new book and here is the major thing that we are going to talk about. You actually tell the stories as if you were doing it from stage, as if you were giving a speech. You go through that whole first chapter. Then you stop the recorder and you queue up another chapter in your recorder because these recorders are all like creating little files. You queue up file
number two and you move to chapter number two, everybody with me so far? So now you have done all six, you have recorded all six of these chapters and you double back. The way these things are set up is you plug a wire in the side of it, or in my case mine just pops in two, it just comes apart and on the end of it is a USB port that I can plug into the side of my computer and my computer recognizes it like an external hard drive. It is exactly the same as if you just plugged the wire into it and plugged the wire into the computer, your computer picks it up almost immediately and it sees it as an external hard drive. You click into the folder on your hard drive, on this external drive, and it sees those six folders that you just created and you drag them all off onto your desktop. From there, I simply send them off to be transcribed. I use a firm called iDictate.com, but that is by no means the only one that out there. There is frankly a lot of them that you can use that will transcribe these little audio recordings for you at about 1.25 cents a word. So lets say each chapter is ten to fifteen minutes long. You are probably talking about fifteen hundred words, two thousand words, and maybe twenty five hundred words. So you're looking at about $25 or $30 per chapter. Let's say it is twenty five hundred words times .0125, is about $31.25 per chapter. Now, if you wrote all of your notes out in one day. Let's say the next morning you were nice and fresh, and you stood in front of your notes on the wall and you recorded all six of them. Then you queued them up and sent them over to someone like iDictate.com, and then you go about your business for the day. You wake up tomorrow morning and you will have a Word document in your inbox with all of the transcriptions done as a Microsoft Word document. At that point, you simply open up MS Word and begin formatting. You can literally create a book in a matter of hours. If you want to make it a fancy book, you can certainly send it out and have somebody do a professional layout, but if you are fairly familiar with how Microsoft Word is used, you can create a pretty simplified book layout on your computer in just a few minutes. You start copying and pasting these documents that they sent you into your book layout and you are basically done. The first one that I was working on, I went back and started looking at books on my shelf to see what are some of the ways these table of contents look and what kind of copyright warnings and things do they put in the front of it. There is a forward here, maybe I could send this over to a friend of mine and have them write a forward for me, everybody with me? Anybody think that would be terribly hard to do? It is literally one of those things you could do in a weekend. That is why my friend is doing very, very well with her model of write a book in a weekend because I think a lot of people come into the idea, I want to write a book, I don't know how to write a book. You sit through fifteen minutes of what I just covered, and just about anybody could sit down and go I think I better let go of that fear, I think I could write a book in that scenario. The big thing you have to remember is that
good is good enough. You are not necessarily writing to get a literary agent to get you over to Random House where you are going to get a multi-thousand dollar advance for your book. In fact, if you were writing well enough and were able to do that, you might come to regret that you did it in the first place because they own the book and if they spend enough money promoting that book, they own you too. Most authors do it for credibility reasons and not for financial reasons. If you are looking just for creditability, you can get the credibility without having the big publishing house taking all the money from the work you created. In fact, I don't know if you this, are both of you familiar with the concept Chicken Soup for the Soul? Mark Victor Hansen has been a friend of mine for a number of years. I have actually known Jack Canfield just about as long as Mark, but they self published the first Chicken Soup book. The very first one that they did, they had self published, they did all of the editing themselves, I think they had one person in their office that looked over their shoulder a little bit, but they assembled the stories, they put the layouts together, they edited the book and they had it printed and getting them in boxes of five hundred copies at a time. They were doing telephone interviews to sell the book. They basically bought one of these manuals that listed all of the radio stations and they would spend a few hours a day calling radio stations looking for program managers and saying we wrote this interesting book, we would like to send you a copy and if it fits into your schedule, we would love to be invited onto your program and be interviewed about our book. If you do that, we will offer everybody that wants to buy one, we will offer them a really good deal. Almost overnight they sold ten thousand copies of that book. It was at that point in time they got picked up by the publishing house called HCI, Health Communications. They published the first one, self published means they kept most of the money and it became a success story for the ages. It all started with them publishing that first book themselves. We have covered how to write a book. We have covered how to write a speech. Now lets talk about getting other products and the simplest way to do it is by reaching for the handy, dandy digital recorder. So if you have a digital recorder, you want to get into the habit of recording everything you do. If you get invited on a Teleseminar, you want to be recording. If you are giving a talk in town somewhere, somebody invites you to come over and speak to a group, small, medium, large, it doesn't matter how big the group is, have your digital recorder in your pocket, with the little microphone clipped to your shirt or blouse and record. It does not matter whether you ever use it or not, you can't use it if you don't record it. Does that make sense? The process is so simple once you get used to recording, and you will build a huge archive of bits and pieces of things that you can use when we get to next week and start repurposing stuff, you will see how this all fits together with all the different products that you create. The first thing is you record everything. So you record speeches, Teleseminars, if you get invited out to appear at a seminar somewhere and you are going to be on the main stage, definitely record that. See about getting the rights to the video because
most of the seminars are being recorded on video now because they are becoming more and more aware of this repurposing concept and so they all shoot the video now because they are going to create a DVD series out of it. If you are going to appear, particularly if it is on a royalty basis where you are going to split your sales with somebody, negotiate for the right to use your video. You want a master copy of it and you want to be able to use it in building another product or using it to position yourself at a higher level. You definitely want to record that. You could record webinars, there are ways of recording the webinar, a lot of the software that we use to provide webinars will allow you to record as well. So don't ever miss any of those opportunities to record. For audio, a standard digital recorder is all you need. I think it is really a great idea to get into the habit of shooting a video podcast at least twice a month. Podcasting being essentially just a little video, or in the original context of it, it was just a little audio recording but it was not a speech, was not a seminar, it was just a little file that somebody could listen to an they usually ran from three to thirty minutes long. They were released almost like blog posts, but now they were being done as audio and video. It is really a good idea to get into the habit of communicating through digital video. Probably the easiest tool that I have ever seen for doing that is something we actually, in my former company, we became distributors for the manufacturer because we loved the product so much. It was an outfit called Pure Digital and they create a product and market a product in all the big box retailers called a Flip Digital Camcorder. They sell one that records an hour long of digital video, so there is no tape, not a lot of buttons to push, in fact there is only one button. You turn the thing on, you push the red button and it records. Then when you are done recording, you push the red button again and then there is a little tag on the side, you queue that up and instantly you are able to drag that digital file off onto your computer for some minor editing. You now have a video podcast. You can upload that to YouTube or any of the other video sites. You could put that onto your website and you will have a file that is just amazingly perfect for repurposing into a variety of other things. But most importantly, you have it recorded in video. Now why am I a big advocate of video? We will talk a lot about video in week 6. I am a big advocate of video because I have been in sales a long time and the oldest rule of selling has never changed, regardless of the format we sell in, or the medium in which we sell in, people buy from people that they like and trust. You have probably also both heard the expression that 90% of communication is nonverbal. Video captures all of it. If you are passionately leaning in and telling your story, people will feel your passion for your topic. If they like you and they trust you and know you are passionate for what you are doing, you are most of the way there towards selling them something. So we record in video. Video is huge and going forward from here, from 2009 and beyond, more and more and more of online communication will be video.
In fact, 2009 in the US analog broadcast channels are disappearing as of February 17th. So they are eliminating the old broadcast standards, replacing them with digital as a new standard. Let me tell you what that means out at the far end of the technology world. They are integrating high definition television with the Internet. We will reach a point of convergence in about two years, where they will be one thing, one medium. All that really means for you as a niche marketer, as somebody that is marketing in your specific niche, is that we are going to see, and we are actually going to live through a transition from the few channels that used to exist on broadcast, we have already lived through the many channels that exist on cable and satellite. But going forward, we may see as much as a half a million to five million channels available on the Internet, video channels. YouTube already has channels. I don't know if you have searched your niche on YouTube to see how many YouTube channels exist. Isn't that interesting? Oh My Gosh! What happens when you are the first or second one who is recording regularly and posting stuff to YouTube and creating your own video based membership site and you are the only one. Jay : Scott, what I did find is those that did try seemed like it was maybe a good idea over the weekend and they posted maybe once or twice. That was it. Scott : Well that sounds to me like an opportunity Jay. That is one of those things, I borrow this from Mark Victor Hansen, but I put my finger up against my temple on the right side of my head and I go hmm isn't that interesting? Try that with me. Put your finger up against the right temple of your head and go hmm isn't that interesting? Jay and Amanda : Isn't that interesting? Scott : Just think what you can do if you are the first one to build a huge reserve of content on your niche and begin marketing it. Amanda : What I found when I looked on YouTube was on my topic, there was a lot of very bitty stuff. There was a lot of quite wacky stuff and there was a lot of rubbish. But I was kind of watching some things and thinking, literally there were so many things that I watched the first few seconds of it and flicked off. So certainly I could see huge opportunity there because within my niche, there seem to be a lot of the people that were still going down the little bit weird and wacky. So being able to do something from a professional standpoint, I could see a huge market there immediately. It was a very useful exercise actually. Scott : I knew that it would be because I have taken myself and other people through it
and they all find it to be a very interesting exercise because they're seeing areas of opportunity they didn't really know existed and we break it down to a point for them. I am trying to make it so you can get your head around it and say, I could do this. This is not hard. The sooner you do and the more you just simply block out a bit of time each week to take these pieces and repeat them over and over again. Just like you would if you were the programming director of a television show, or a newspaper or a magazine and you had to get that piece to market every single, on a publishing schedule, you would have a schedule set up and you would be cranking this stuff out. It does not have to be elaborate and it certainly does not have to be expensive. You can get one of these flip video cameras that I was talking about for $150. You can go on Google; I could probably look it up and send you some links if you don't find it on your own, two very, very simple lights with light diffusers. We actually bought some here off of eBay and I think I found the two of them, including the shipping, for $120. What that does is that allows me to light up the room I am in as if it was a television studio. I have the exact same kind of lights. Not expensive, not hard to store, it doesn't take up a lot of electricity to run, but when you start using a lot of video, if you want to do it at a professional level, you are going to want to get some sort of diffused bright light to light the environment that you are shooting in and then almost any kind of backdrop that looks professional. You will get the hang of it, you will see a lot of people do a lot of different things, but you could be the first true person in your space recording good quality content on your topic. Just by that very piece of it, without even repurposing the content, you are going to own the niche. You will be the expert that people around the world look to for advice and they will be looking to spend their money with you. So you got that! If you are looking to knock something out really quick, video, and you don't want to light up the room, lets say you just wanted to dispense a tip and you have some reasonable light. Do both of you have a webcam? Ok, webcams, you can get them, I have one built right into my Mac now. The only thing that I did was I added a $27 subscription to QuickTime Pro instead of using some of the other software that was available. I already had QuickTime video on my Mac Book and so I upgraded to their pro version, which allows me to record really an endless amount of digital video right out of the webcam. It saves it right on the desk top and then I can drag it into my Quick Edit suite and I can knock it back out, simple, easy. The trick is just to get into the habit of recording something on a regular basis. Maybe two or three times a week if you take fifteen or twenty minutes and you make something up on your topic and talk about it, then you will have more content than anybody in your space and it is really, really easy to do. How do we go about getting all of these ideas? One of my greatest secrets of doing a lot
of content creation is to make observations of things I am seeing in my niche. So lets say Amanda, we go back to the subject of looking at YouTube videos in your niche and you watch one and you sit down and you fire up your digital recorder and you say I was just watching a video and something that the author was teaching was a bit disturbing from my point of view. Let me tell you why. You don't have to call this person out by name, sometimes if you know the person and you want to have a little fun and cross promote each other, you can call them out and give them permission to call you out on something that you have said. You can create this mock controversy where we have this dispute raging in the marketplace over what we said. But, you are free to observe and comment on anything that is going on in the world, as it would pertain to your subscribers. Amanda : Actually, within my niche, that can keep me endlessly occupied because there is such a load of rubbish and nonsense and things where people deliberately set out to frighten people. I could probably write twenty books on the subject of my niche. I think that could keep me going for quite some time, just on that one thing alone. Scott : Just think about how easy it would be to populate a blog just by watching what other people are doing, clearing up confusion and providing straight, level headed advice and how-to's. Maybe you saw something and you basically agreed with the point they were making, but they didn't do a very good job of telling them how to use it. I saw something today that was interesting, I think the author was spot on, but they left room for interpretation so let me help you understand how to apply this and get value from it. Now you are basically taking someone else's content and making it your own because you are teaching the application map that goes with the product. We have covered a lot of simple and easy ways to create a product, but let's go on, we have a little bit more. This idea of creating maybe a brief power point of five, six, maybe ten slides at the most and then in both Microsoft PowerPoint and Keynote, which is the Mac version, you can do a narration. So you can now narrate over a power point slide and as you go through and you set all of these slides up, and you provide the narration for each one of them, you can now go back and export that whole thing as a movie. If you are doing it in Keynote, it exports as an .avi. If you are doing it as a power point it exports it as a .mov and with a very simple software tool you can flip that over into a flash video or upload the .mov or .avi file to YouTube and instantly release a video teaching one of your concepts. You could do that in a half hour. So now you could take some of the points you are making in the chapters that you developed for your book and make a series of miniature videos. Now, I kind of got off track a little bit earlier, but take all of those pieces of developing the speech, you might
notice the similarities, it is the same material. It is not like you are having to wholesale sit down and recreate something from scratch. Amanda : But you are just doing it in bite size pieces though, aren't you? Scott : Yes. Amanda : I think this was one of the things when I looked at my model and also as we have kind of gone through this, coming back to the blog post, you did it last week or the week before about the free thing. This is the thing where I have really had quite a challenge I look at all my material and think, well how much of it should I give for free? But actually as I am listening to you now and thinking well, just doing these what we maybe call video podcasts, or little short videos, short clips, none of these really need to be more than four, five or ten minutes at most. That is all sort of perhaps little short free productions that could lead onto other things. Or again as you said, it could be repackaged into a salable product. It is almost like they are little kind of snippets really isn't it? Little kind of bite sized chunks of tasters almost. Scott : That is exactly what it is. Certainly when I talk about editing of a video product, all I am really referring to, all I really ever do on my own is I put my call to action on the last screen, which is go to this website and register for this free course. That is the entry point into my sales funnel. If you are familiar with using the service ezinearticles.com, if you are not, you will be because that is going to be a major part of creating the flypaper to attract your audience. But on ezinearticles.com, the last part of the article is the flypaper; it is your bio, your three or four sentence bio and your call to action. It is included in every article that you put out there. Every press release that you do, every one of these different ways that you spin out your material in ways for people to find you, you are building this circle of your Internet base wider and wider and wider and creating more places for people to find you and get attracted to you. All of it is free, you just keep putting the free material out there, but it is not your core product. It is hints, tips, bits and pieces and points from your core product. But you are not actually teaching the whole thing in one place if that makes sense. You are absolutely right Amanda, short is better, less than ten minutes. The reason we do less than ten minutes is because ten minutes will be your limit on YouTube and YouTube will become a friend for getting your content in front of people that are searching for what you do. So we talked about speech development. We talked about easy book development and we have talked about recording, with a simple digital recorder, everything that you do.
About using a simple video cam, a Flip Cam is my weapon of choice but take a few minutes and check your existing digital camera and see what its capacity is for shooting video. Almost every single digital camera made since 2001 or 2002 has video settings on it. You turn the dial to the one that looks like a movie camera and instead of snapshots; it is shooting video and often times that is going to be good enough for what we are going to do with it. We are not creating a motion picture here, it is not going to be displayed or delivered high definition video anywhere. It is going to be spun out on the Internet. Lighting is more important than the camera that you use. Jay : Scott, quick question, techy type questions. With the Flip Camcorder, are you using a tripod to set it or are you just setting it up somewhere and pointing it towards you? Scott : Yes, I use a tripod. Jay : Second question. Are you using a microphone of sort? Scott : The Flip does not have a place to plug a microphone into it. But the Flip actually has a really good, high sensitivity mic. If you are working in a quiet environment, you will be fine. If you go into a quiet room in your house, control the sound, and I am a fan of making sure everything that tics, clicks and rings is turned off before I record, then you will be fine and you don't necessarily need a microphone. If you are trying to produce a full length video product and you are using a higher quality camera to do that, then yes, it is a good idea to find one that you can plug a microphone into and be using that microphone because then you are going to lay down a crystal clear audio track. But for the short little product pieces that you are going to be putting out there, that will lead people to your continuum, you don't necessarily need that. We are actually right on time, what questions do you have about what we covered today other than the ones we just covered? Amanda : I don't think there are any questions, I think it is just the comments actually how easy it is to create content. It is very interesting, the remarks about the video, particularly the analog, and how soon that is actually happening in the US, I think we are about twelve months behind in the UK. This is actually really useful because this is one of the things I had kind of been sitting and looking at and thinking in some ways that I have so much that I could say. It is kind of, well, how do I maybe just sort of break that down, do little bits and I think this has actually be hugely useful both for the kind of for the tiny snippets type of thing and also for the full product. Things like lighting and backdrops and things, anywhere that does photography equipment is also a good place to look for those.
Scott : Is it safe to say that both of you have, your positions have evolved a bit since our strategy session? Jay : Certainly. Amanda : Yeah, absolutely. I think it has kind of virtually turned itself on its head virtually Scott. From our first call that we had, when I filled out the questionnaire, we were talking about it on the strategy session, and where that sort of went from there. I think the whole thing literally has turned itself totally on its head. I have actually seen things that have been so literally blindingly obvious that I have missed, or as my friend would say a BFO, blinding flash of the obvious. It certainly for me, I have probably ended up going in a completely different direction than I actually thought I would prior to us starting the strategy call. That to me is fantastic. Scott : Excellent. If you have followed along with the two lessons prior to this one, you've got your feet firmly on the ground with good research to support what you are trying to do. You are not just stabbing in the dark and hoping that it will work. You have done a bit of poking around and you now have a basis for which to attack the marketplace, and it is a marketplace that is not only ready, but willing and able to receive your material and basically crown you king or queen of that market. And they will if you approach it this way. The second BFO if you will, I like that term, is one most people don't get this early, but I will share it with you now, is that by going through a course that is focused on implementation and transformation like this one, you are doing stuff that 99% of your competitors will never ever consider doing. If it was delivered strictly as an information product, the density of this material would overwhelm most people. Knowing that I want to see what you are doing as we go along and that I am going to check you on it means that you are doing work for yourselves that you might not have done if I wasn't here to keep your feet warm. That is what makes this program unique and what will ultimately make it extremely valuable for you. What will bring the real payoff is going to be that when we are done, you will have a program on the street and it will be growing. As you continue to just run your broadcast schedules, producing new content and laying it out there where people can find it, drawing them back to your product continuum week after week after week, you will start to see your traffic grow, you will fine tune your conversion rates, your conversion process. You cannot fail, but to end up at the top of the heap of people in your space.
Easy & Fast Product Creation Strategies

Primary Purpose - Easiest way of creating products for your continuum model
Step 1 :
Listen to CD #3 from the Passive Income Avalanche system in its entirety Major Key Point #1 : When creating product remember there are buyers for any price point you can imagine just as there are buyers for Chevy's and Rolls Royce. When there is something of higher value that is somewhat exclusive, price is not as much an obstacle as a lot of people tend to think, even when economic times are stressed. There is always a market if you will seek to find the market; it may not come banging on your door, at least not initially. But if you do good research and you know where your market is, you will be able to figure out where their price sensitivities. It is not always a straight price value comparison that they are doing either. A lot of it just is a level of confidence, a level of trust that comes into the equation Major Key Point #2 : There are alot of ways to get content that won't take time to convert into a product. By far the simpliest method of creating product is getting into the habit of recording everything you do. If you get invited to a teleseminar, Record it, If you are speaking in town somewhere, Record it. If you get invited to speak to a group Record it. If you are going to be on the main stage. DEFINITELY RECORD THAT!
Step 2 : Step 3 :
Invest in a Digital Recorder you can carry around with you at all times. Most seminars are recorded (Video) for the purpose of creating a DVD Series about that particular seminar. See about getting the rights to the video. If you are going to appear, particularly if it is on a royalty basis where you are going to split your sales with somebody, negotiate for the right to use your video. You want a master copy of it and you want to be able to use it in building another product or using it to position yourself at a higher level. Record your Webinars or Teleseminars Record Video or Audio Podcasts at least twice a month.
Step 4 : Step 5 :
The trick is just to get into the habit of recording something on a regular basis. Just two or three times a week, take fifteen or twenty minutes and choose something on your topic, make some notes about it and then talk about it, then you will have more content than anybody in your space and it is very easy to do.
Chapter 4
Repurposing Your Products Leads to Profits

Well, I tell you, this program is picking up speed, don't you think ? We are getting into the part now where everybody really begins to seriously think about and activate a lot of the plans that we have talked about up to this point. By way of a very brief review you know that we started in chapter 1 just talking about the nature of the Internet, really how it all works together, that people buy from people they like. We touched on that just a minute ago, but people are on the Internet looking for information and ultimately the people that they buy from are people that they built relationships with. So it is critical to have a lot of content for them that is available in what is probably most commonly known as today as moving the free line, the amount of information that we are willing to give before we openly try to receive, or to transact because people are looking for information and then they do business with people that they like and trust. We talked at length about market research and positioning. Then we started into this concept of developing a product continuum and I have seen the product continuums and I can tell you that everybody that I have seen one from is really getting their arms around this concept and they understand how important it is to see the market in this way. To be able to develop a base of materials that people can get access to with no risk and no fear or any of the other concerns while they get a chance to build that relationship with you within that very narrow band or niche that you are the specialist in. Now, as you have developed your continuum, you are probably starting to see that by doing this properly, we are positioning you, or you are positioning yourself is probably more accurate, as the expert on the globe, the one person in the entire world that knows this subject better than anyone. Really from this day forward that is the feeling I want you to carry around in your chest is that you are the one who knows this material better than anyone. You are the source and as all of these pieces come online for you, you are going to be found in so many places, you are going to be so visible to the world marketplace that is searching online for your niche topic that you are going to be perceived as the one, as the top person in the world on your topic. We all know that perception is reality so what you believe in your heart, so shall you be is the way one book puts it. I tend to believe that book quite a bit. We went into chapter 2 and we started talking about finding the niche market, targeting the customers, knowing what they want, what their key problems are. We looked at ways of understanding who the competition was and how everybody else is ranked. Hopefully by now you have some of the research and you have started to figure out where the forums are, the blogs that
Chapter 4 Repurposing Your Products Leads to Profits
are on your topic, what articles are out there on different sites like www.ezinearticles.com, what videos, we talked about that a little bit last week. The learning experience you are having by doing this research is probably pretty eye opening. Then in Chapter 3 we really moved into the subject of recording everything. Literally recording everything that you do so that you can fill a product continuum in a relatively simple fashion. The next piece of this is being able to take one simple recording and repurpose it in so many ways that it becomes unrecognizable to itself, that it all started with one piece of content. I could take Michael's workbooks for example and having looked at those just this morning, I could tell you that there is so much material in there, there is literally a wealth of materials that he could build relationships with people around the world, feed them content on his topic for years on end without ever really having to go down to the drawing board, revisit the topic and try to come up with something new. All you have to do is continue to repackage and reshape the material that is already there and redistribute it in all these different ways. Week 4 is very simply about that subject, repurposing. In your resource section there is a PDF document that shows my favorite fifty-one ways of repurposing something. Repurposing your products for maximum leverage is what it is called. What I have done there is I have done an exhaustive study of the marketplace and I have looked at all the different ways that products exist. I actually had a nice long discussion with a friend of mine who was a specialist in repurposing, that is really all he does, and while he's got some pretty esoteric and wacky ways of repurposing content, he agreed that these were fifty ways that were relatively at hand. He actually claims to have over two hundred ways to repurpose a single piece of content, unbelievable. If you could take something and reshape it two hundred different ways, you never really run out of ways of gaining leverage in your marketplace. But fifty one will keep your market fed. You are both sitting on a niche market that people are hungry for, are searching for they are buying now and it is just a matter of feeding them yours, building a relationship with them as you go and then becoming, through positioning, the preeminent leader if not the single authority in the world, the most credible authority in the world on your topic. What I want to do is I want you to keep this list of fifty ways for reference purposes. Put a three hole punch in it and put it in a book somewhere where you could find it because there are going to be some ways, you will have opportunities to repurpose things and you are going to want to have some ideas at hand that will make it easy for you to think them through without having to sit and try to figure out how to make a wheel. You know, the wheel has already been made, all you have to do is figure out how to stand the wheel up on its end and then roll it.
That is essentially what this list will do is help you to kind of see how other people have done it in the past and how people are doing it currently and pick the ones out of there that most apply to you. I have thrown a lot of different things in there that probably no one, not any of you have thought of all of these. We are not going to spend a whole lot of time going through it other than I want to focus on the top twelve and ways that we could take a single recorded session and spin it off in a dozen different ways. In so doing easily fill up anybody's continuum, then you could go from there in any direction that you want, as much material as you want to create without having to rewrite your topic and research and try to come up with something to say that hasn't been said. A lot of this comes back to the point that you have different learning styles in the world. You have visual learners, you have auditory learners, and you have kinesthetic learners. When you can repurpose your material to feed it to people in ways that they want to receive it in, then you have something for everyone. You know, creating that buffet line of content. So let's just take a quick look at the list and see if any of those are completely new to you or things that you never would have thought of ways of taking a single recording and going in all these different directions. Scott : Amanda, what are your thoughts on this list. What jumps out at you as something that you never would have considered? Amanda : I think the first one on the page is the cruise ship. It was something that I had seen and thought I never would have thought of that. I think there are quite a few of these here. The way you are teaching it in an online university is another one. Ghost writing for others and sort of industry training programs. I suppose taking it on the trainer type of things is something I would have never really have considered. There are quite a few things here, looking at and thinking oh, that looks interesting. Michael : Yeah, the home study courses, it was interesting, I have never done something of that nature to that extent so I thought that is very interesting. Just kind of looking through, I am always intrigued by YouTube that has become quite the sensation. You can find anything on YouTube. It is interesting that now, I admittedly have not watched too many training videos on there, I have seen a few that were training based, but I image that would be kind of exploding. Is that the case Scott? Scott : It really is. Because of the nature of the most recent updates to Google, what they refer to now is universal search. Universal search means that they are incorporating all of their different companies into a single set of search results. So where before video was one place and documents were another place, now when you type in a search term, you will frequently get blended results. You will see videos
ranking very high. Now, what is lesser known, or to a certain extent at least at my level is unknown how much credit do you get for having your own YouTube channel. Most people don't even realize, we talked about this a couple of weeks ago, is that you can have your own channel. When you put the time and energy into shooting enough video to create your own YouTube channel, you very quickly start taking over the search results for your keywords. Amanda : Does Google own YouTube now ? Scott : YouTube is owned by Google, yes, and they paid over a billion dollars for it. That was almost two years ago they paid 1.6 billion dollars to buy that and they actually had no revenue model at the time. YouTube is now the place where 99.7% of all the videos being watched online are being served from. They have jumped into the dominant position, no one is even close to challenging them. During the time that I was with KeyThing we saw YouTube as a useful tool, it has now become an essential tool. In my own opinion it has its limitations as far as how much you want to use it, but it is indisputable that you want to use YouTube to drive traffic to your main business, to the landing pages on your websites that move people into your free level of your continuum. YouTube is absolutely a fabulous thing, particularly when you consider all of it is free. It is nearly impossible to get a more generous offer than that. To have them provide you with world class infrastructure and tens of millions of potential viewers and all you have to trade to play on that space, to dominate in that field is to understand the opportunity and be willing to pay the opportunity cost, which is not in dollars but in time and effort, to position yourself there. It is like positioning yourself in a number of other of these web 2.0 places and we will try to bring all of those pieces together for you in I think it is week 7 when we talk at length about the social networking environment, YouTube fits there as well. YouTube channels is going to be a big thing and in the meantime placing a video here or there on YouTube is fine, but the sooner you get three or more and start creating what appears to be a series built on a common theme and having your own channel and then having that linked to everything else you are doing, start sending a healthy funnel of people your way who can evaluate from there what kind of relationship they want to have with you. What others jump out at you, we kind of got stopped there. What others stick out as far as ways that you could repurpose. Michael : We kind of just go through here, and interestingly enough Scott you and I talked earlier today about #43, the done for you implementation service, we had some pretty extensive conversation about that and I just think that is a great, great thing. And then of course we had talked about that other company, on a fairly large scale doing that and doing exceptionally well. I think that is a great way to really position yourself
in terms of revenue generation for sure. It would depend upon what the area of expertise might be, but I really like that a lot. Scott : Well, it applies in certain cases and in other cases it really doesn't apply at all. Unless Amanda wanted to create a whole series of spinoffs of people teaching how to learn and teach tarot, I don't know that she will be offering a done for you service to other tarot instructors any time soon. But it very well could be the end game of what she wants to do five years from now. That is the beauty of this list, it is essentially evergreen. It doesn't change, there will be some things that come into the forefront, or into the mainstream that doesn't exist today that will be added to this list. No question the vast majority of these things will be around for a very long time and you will be able to do them at various points when you need them. But again, it comes back to looking at your continuum model and saying ok, we've got the baseline of materials that we are creating from our core message and those materials are free in exchange for getting people into the relationship, getting them into the model, get them on your list is probably the easiest way to put it. Then from there it is critical that we make some level of conversion to get these people in our free model to spend something with us, even something as little as a dollar. One dollar means that they have now made a commitment to us. Ten dollars is actually been tested all over the place as really a critical milestone. If you can get somebody that is reading your stuff, listening to your audio or watching your videos to spend ten dollars with you, just using Robert Cialdini's principals of influence, there becomes a part of that relationship where they are going to act consistent with the commitment. If you have not read the book called Influence, I highly, highly recommend it. Robert Cialdini's book called Influence and it is the science and practice of influencing people. He speaks extensively about this topic of commitment and consistency. Once you get them to make a commitment, then they act consistent with that repeatedly, over and over and over again. It is in that sense that you want to get them to that first level of commitment where they have to break out their credit card and invest with you regardless of the amount. From there, all the other levels of your continuum are going to be based on what you feel and what you have learned from your market are the needs of that market. Know that at some level, or at each level, some will convert and some won't. It doesn't matter which ones do and which ones don't. All you want to do is fine tune the mechanism to get them to convert at higher and higher levels and each time they convert, they are spending more money. Once they have made that first ten dollar commitment, it is not uncommon to see a $97 commitment next. And to have some percentage of the people that pay you ten will now spend $97. Beyond that it is often times $397 then $997 and then it goes into the multiple thousands from there. Having a list like this makes it much, much easier for you to pick and choose what the products are in your offering. Let me double back and
just make a point that two weeks ago I asked everybody to develop their first continuum. At this point, by giving you this list and taking you through week 4, you now have the freedom to re-choose. You are not locked into the continuum you first cut out, that you first sent over. Having this list should get you back to the drawing board a little bit and thinking through is my continuum reflective of what my market really wants? Is it reflective of what I want to offer them? Are there some things I could have put in there that I didn't? Amanda, you and I talked a little about that the other day. Amanda : I think certainly, looking at this list and following on the conversation that we had, the continuum has actually changed quite a lot in how it looks now. Looking at this list as well, there are other things on there that I am thinking, oh yes that would be good; I could do that that would work well. The continuum very much, even from the very first free levels, if you like, coming into the paid ones, has actually changed quite considerably during the course of this week. But that is absolutely fantastic because I am looking at this and thinking where is some, before our call earlier in the week, I was still kind of thinking what do I do with the higher levels and I've got to create more stuff. Whereas, the more I am looking at all of this, the more I am actually thinking that I've got enough now that I could do several of these on this list here that are all at different price points. So this is just, I think what this is doing for me is it is actually expanding my thinking outwards and sideways. I am seeing it all much more now, more like an intertwined mesh or an intertwined netting rather than I think I perceived it as something very linear. I think I was looking at it as well, maybe $10, $97 or this, perhaps a monthly membership and I was seeing a linear progression. Whereas in actual fact what I am seeing now, it is much more like a grid of things, it is far less linear although we kind of got a starting point and I've got more of an end point now. But there is lots more meandering and lots more weaving in between which actually for me I think is good because I can see all the different possibilities of all sorts of different things opening up. Yes it has changed enormously from when I wrote it last week, it is a completely different thing now. Scott : That is the advantage to having somebody to look over your shoulder and you know show you things like this because it does open up the possibilities and it is very nonlinear. What we are describing here is extremely nonlinear. Without picking on you Michael, the idea that your material exists in two manuals is extremely limiting to you. If somebody doesn't want that and they don't want to spend $97 for that, they are faced with a simple choice, yes or no. Instead of yes or no, it could be well maybe this, maybe that, maybe this other thing. Someone could say, I am a visual, not an auditory so I don't want the audio program, I want the video program. I like to read a little bit, but not too much so booklets would be better than manuals or a white paper on your topic
might make me really intrigued enough to want to come to see your seminar. It opens an enormous amount of opportunities. But it is all still, you know, pieces of the same puzzle. It's not like you have to then take yourself as a speaker and become expert in nineteen different subjects, we are talking about taking over the world stage in one of them. Being perceived as the best of the best and when you are considered the preeminent teacher on any topic, you can also safely say there is a chance that you will be one of the most, if not the most expensive to work with on a private basis. Michael : Yep. Scott : That is another one of these things is I am firmly in favor of not getting limited by what other people in the market are doing as far as price points. You see, if you want to be just another speaker, then you are subject to the meeting planners and the bureaus that say we have an opening for a speaker and I saw it on your list of topics, but we've only got $2,500 to work with, we don't have any expense money and we won't allow for you to sell from the stage. But if you want to come and speak, we will pay $2,500, you pay your expenses and blah, blah, blah. Sadly enough, there are plenty of people that would jump at the chance to go do that and I have done it. I have grabbed those opportunities in the past and said, ok, I will go do that because I could use the money. When you position yourself well enough and your marketplace for one is buying from you on a passive income basis, they are buying these materials while you sleep. And two, you have freed up a lot of your time because you are not doing so much active work, you have staked out a lot of time to choose what you want to do. When you are positioned as the best speaker in your topic, you won't attract those people that want to call you and say well, you know we really want you but we can't pay you what your rate is. Peter Lowe's events come to mind. He always sold an enormous amount of tickets whenever he had General Schwarzkopf or General Powell speaking on those bills, particularly if he was anywhere near a military town. He didn't call those guys up and say, Well Colin Powell, you were one of the great Generals and then you became the Secretary of State and you have done all of these amazing things. We would really love to have you come speak to our audience, but we've only got $1,000 for you to come out. We don't have any money for expenses, so it might be good if you drive over. Colin Powell looks at them and says Pal you are reading it wrong, my sheet says I get $50,000. If you want me, you better get your check book warmed up because I'm not coming for $1,000.It is a mind set and it comes through positioning and perception becoming reality. So keep this list handy, it will be useful to you as you go forward from here and it will cause you to keep your continuum in motion. It will cause you to reevaluate and think through and test some things at different levels and ultimately gravitate your price points up so that doing what you do at an expert level pays better than it used to. That is certainly a good thing.
So let's go through my favorite twelve, they are all on this list by the way, but I will explain to you each one of them as we go so we can knock this out and turn your day back over to you. This all starts by the way with what I refer to as a single recording. So we are talking about taking a single recorded session, could be one hour, could be two hours, could be three hours, whatever the length is not important, then beginning this process of repurposing. First, one of my very favorite ways of doing something with it, because I think that every expert needs a book is to have that recording transcribed and edited down and turned into some sort of book. It is amazing how much mileage you can get out of something as simple as 120 pages. In terms of converting speech to text, 120 pages of a size 12 font, trade paperback size, is about an hour, hour and ten minutes. If you speak for an hour to an hour and ten minutes, you have about 120 pages. Transcribing that recording into a book is one of the best, most reliable and will get you a tremendous amount of mileage. Particularly if you are out speaking live to have a small stack of books on a table at the back of the room and to have one in your hand that you hold up and show people, willing to sell or even in some cases give away in exchange for relationship, to get them on your list. How you choose to do that is ultimately up to you. That is my first favorite, to transcribe it as a book. Second, from there, once that thing has been transcribed, all kinds of fun starts happening. I will take that recording that is now transcribed into a word document and start creating things from it like an e-course. Just as a simple, I could point to it because it is there; on unforgettablespeakers.com is a reference to an e-course. That e-course came from a transcription of a recording that I did. I made my six or eight points on a white board and then I recorded each one of the segments and then I had it transcribed and from there I created within a few hours I created an e-course based on the transcription. Third : I then turned around and took the same recording, or took the same transcription I should say, shaped it just a tiny bit differently and made a special report out of it. What would be a white paper or a special report? Same exact material presented in a slightly different format. Somebody is going to respond to the idea of a white paper more than they would an e-course. You don't have to create all new material; you just offer it up in a slightly different format. Fourth: Take that book and offering it as an e-book. There was a lot of debate going on two years ago. I think it is pretty well, the argument has been won that, I am trying to think who it was first, I think it was probably Seth Godin, brilliant marketer, if you have not read any of Seth Godin's books on marketing, incredible stuff. Seth Godin was the first one to take some of his books that were currently in the bookstores and offer them up on his website as e-books for free. There were people in his circle who said you're killing your sales, nobody is going to go into the bookstore and buy your book if they can download it off your website for free. When the argument was over, Seth
made his point that yes they will; in fact they will buy more books. The reason for that is, most people, particularly because his books were fairly large, 300 or more pages, he found that most people did not want to use paper and ink to print out 300 pages. Michael : They would just rather buy from the store, yeah. Scott : So they start reading the e-book and they are thinking I really need to be making some notes on this as I go, circle, highlight and stuff. My gosh, well let's see, that is a ream of paper and four cartridges to be able to do this I am going to need at least one cartridge and a half a ream of paper, some at $15 worth of materials, I could buy the book for $20. It will take me no time at all, in fact I am going to be over there by the bookstore today so I think I will just run in there and get a copy of it. Actually sold more books. Taking pieces of your book and putting it out as an e-book is an interesting way to do it. In fact, one of the best stories I ever heard about using e-books to drive sales was Stephen King. I don't know if either of you ever heard that story. Stephen King wanted to experiment with the Internet and he put a message out that he was going to write three free chapters of his next book, or he had started on his next book and he would put three free chapters out. You had to sign up for chapter four and all future chapter for a dollar per chapter per person. Interesting idea and one that anyone could grab and use by the way, it is not limited to Stephen King. These ideas are out there and you can grab them and use them yourself. Guess what happened. Anybody want to guess? Amanda : He had a huge amount of signups at a dollar per chapter and he also had huge amounts of physical book sales for the physical book as well when that was ready so people were actually reading the same material twice. Scott : Enormous. The numbers that I saw were that he had 3.5 million people signed up to buy these chapters at a dollar per chapter. He was cranking out a chapter every month or so, every four or five weeks. Get another email from Stephen here is your next chapter and they would bill their cards. Now the publishers were you know selling physical books, but they are not paying him money like that, not even close. It's a very, very lucrative idea and something that anybody can do. Michael : Now the Stephen King thing, I remember that. It was amazing and it was really an interesting fore by a huge name into the Internet that at least to my knowledge had never been done before. I do remember him doing that. It created a huge buzz. Scott : When I came across the numbers I was floored. 3.5 million people signed up to pay him a dollar per chapter roughly once a month. I mean, hey, why not? Let's say it is 500
people that agree to pay you a dollar per chapter for some work that you are producing. I mean, if you could bill that once a month, that would be okay. Michael : Can you imagine 3.5 million dollars a month basically for one chapter of a book? Scott : See, the one thing that I take away from that, any of the stories that I use, or really any of the stories that I have come across in the world that we live in is that it makes it possible, it is no different than (Roger) Bannister running the four minute mile. Prior to him believing that it could be done and proving it could be done, there were legions of people out there, doctors and accredited people saying, you will die first, you cannot do it, it's impossible. Bannister goes out and breaks the four-minute mile, proves to the world that it can be done and the next year a hundred or more people did the same thing. I like to use stories like this to just plant seeds in your mind that it is possible to do things like that. So keep that in mind. That is a great way to take your material and cut it up is by the chapter and offer it out to people in that way. You will attract a whole different audience than you would with it some other format. Fifth : The audio recording, we are going onto the next one, taking the audio recording we first made, the single recorded session and taking it through a program called audacity or taking it through Sony Sound Forge and making it into a finished CD with some music and that kind of thing. A single CD is another fast and easy way to create same material, different format. I'll tell that you when you take the time to edit it and put a little music in an on ramp, an introduction, and you send off for a local graphics person or you use the Internet to find a graphics person that designs packaging and have them create a DVD case that your CD will ride along in, so it looks like a DVD box but it has an audio CD in it, we have proven this over and over in the Inspired Life.com days that we are taking cassette tapes that speakers were selling for five and seven dollars, turning it into a CD, putting a finished face on the CD and putting it into a four color box that looked like a book of some sort and they were able to sell it for twenty-nine dollars. So from a five to seven dollar cassette tape now becomes a thirty dollar CD album, you know a single CD product, and that tends to shatter paradigms. It tends to make people rethink what they believe is true. But people buy based on what they see often times. If they like you and trust you and they see this pretty package, they go wow, I really liked his presentation, or I really liked their material or I liked the sound of their voice, yeah I'll spend thirty bucks for something like that and then now you've got a single CD. Sixth: The next thing that you could do is take that material, reshape it a little bit, now we are talking about using the transcription in this case, and turning it into a workbook. How do you make a workbook? Well you go through the transcription and you pick out action items and you present
those on a couple different pages. You break it up into chapters and you pull out things that you need people to work on. You take other parts of the workbook and you add a lot of space, a lot of carriage returns into your word document and you increase the size of the font. Then you remove certain words so that now they have to fill in the blanks so to speak and you have created a manual, a workbook; a very, very tried and true way of repurposing that recording. If you pair it up with your CD and now you have a CD bundled with your workbook, now you've got a nice little bundle and the value of that is substantially higher than either one of them by itself. Now, one of the other things that we do, or that I did when I recorded the initial sessions for Unforgettable Speakers, was I took my single recording as I have already said, I took that and I created the e-course and the special report out of it. Seventh : I also took that material and I laid an outline from it and made it into a Teleseminar. So I created the content for a Teleseminar out of it. Eighth : Now, with a little bit of revision, I could take that same Teleseminar script, massage it a little bit and turn it into a script for a speech. Now instead of a dialog, I can make it more of a monolog and present it from the stage as a presentation with some more stories woven through it and make a point driven 30-40-60-90 minute keynote speech. Same piece of material, presented from a slightly different perspective grabs a little bit different listener than it would have in its original format. Ninth : From there, or really just going back to your original transcript, you spin off a series of articles. Taking one snippet out of each one, or off of each page you could pull off a series of articles and start sending them off to article distribution sites and very quickly and easily start taking over your niche from an article writing perspective. Having people come back to learn more because they found you on some article site. What happens a lot of times is you put these articles out there and self growth is a good place to do it or ezinearticles.com, ezinearticleplanet.com there are probably at least a dozen different places you could drop articles. A lot of times, what ends up happening is those people who find you there are actually looking for content for their ezines and that was the whole idea behind the concept; to create a place where you could distribute your materials and attract new users. Well, a lot of times those users are now going to, or the people that read you originally are going to share your article with their list, attracting a whole bunch of potential new people back to you. So you spin off a series of articles. Tenth : By the exact same process, with a tiny bit of massaging, you turn that same article into a blog post. Now you are back to more of the dialog instead of the monolog. The article resembles the speech in the sense that you are telling. In a blog post now you are communicating, or you are conversing. You are asking people for more feedback to comment, to critique or to challenge you on what you are thinking. I will tell you it works very, very well when you get a good blog post going
and you put it out in front of a big enough audience, and you get people discussing it, it sort of takes on a life of its own. It is very, very interesting to watch. About three weeks ago I wrote an article on passion as an element of public speaking and I did it because I had run into a number of people who were not so passionate about their topic. They had chosen their topic because they felt like they could make a lot of money at it. I smashed some hot buttons in the speakers world because the tried and true or died in the wool, you got to be passionate about your topic; they came out in droves to support that idea. All over the blog, all over the Facebook group comments everywhere from it. I picked up a lot of momentum and a lot of new readers as a result of just throwing that one thing out there. So, from there, so now we have articles and blog posts, what if we took the single CD and sat down and maybe merged it with another recording that we have, maybe a live recording. Eleventh : So let's say now you've massaged your recording into a speech, you've taken your material, you've turned it into a speech and now you take the speech audio that you recorded, because you are recording everything you do and in some ways you merge it back to the stuff you recorded in the studio that single session and use a little musical transition. Now you have created what really goes back and forth from a live setting to a studio setting of you giving your talk and explaining it and teaching it. One of the biggest selling audio albums of all time is one that Jim Rohn put out, and I know, I sold a whole lot of them for Jim is called the Art of Exceptional Living. The Art of Exceptional Living was actually recorded as a video. It is available as a DVD; well it was originally available as a VHS tape series repackaged as a DVD. Nightingale Conant pulled the audio track and did one thing with it. They pulled Jim into the studio and said ok Mr. Rohn, at certain points in this, we would like to be able to take the audio track and cut it and have the live track go back to the studio and have you embellish a point or two. Then when you are done, we will merge it back out to the live audience. It became one of the best selling business albums ever. So you are listening to Jim and he is in the studio and he is talking he says ok, well lets go out to the live audience where I was sharing some ideas on this topic. Bang, now we are, the audio just goes straight out and merges with the live track. Then it is ten minutes of live material and you hear it fade and it is like hi I'm Jim, I'm back in the studio. I just wanted to add one point to what we were just covering there. Can you see how you could do something like that rather easily? Scott : Anybody? Michael : Oh yeah. Scott : And it becomes a whole new way of experiencing material and it is still uniquely you but it is a whole other product that you drop into your continuum, whole other thing
that you can throw past your audience and say who wants to jump on this one? Who wants to send me some money?Just know that anything you create on this line, somebody is going to buy. Some percentage of the audience is going to convert to every single one of these things that you create. You are further and further and further positioning yourself as the expert. So now maybe you create it into an expanded CD series. Twelfth : Finally what I think one of my all time favorites, and I think this is one that Amanda, your contemplating and certainly is one that would fit for you Michael is to rearrange your material as a weekend event, a retreat of some sort. You know, in fact I know you are Amanda because you were talking about how good it would be to have people come and spend a few days in the south of the UK with you, enjoy some of the history and things there. So you could build a retreat around the area you live, weave it all together with your material and create some true memories for people. So some of those, those are my twelve favorites and I don't know if you were putting little stars next to them on the sheet as you went, but I can run through them again real quick just to give you the names so you can check them off. Even if you are just keeping notes on a piece of paper, just write the numbers down as you go. My first one was the transcriber edit as a book. Two is to create an ecourse. Three is to repackage the transcription as a special report or white paper. Four is an e-book or chapters of an e-book. Five is to edit that audio into a single CD. Six is to develop a workbook based on the material, which comes strictly from the transcription. Seven was to create content for a Teleseminar. So you take your e-course and maybe beat it down and now you have an outline for a Teleseminar, could be the white paper too. Eight: Massage that Teleseminar material into a little bit of a monolog and call it the script for a speech and rehearse it and get yourself prepared to go to the platform and present it from the stage. Nine is to take that transcription and spin off some articles and place those out on the article sites. Ten: is to spin off stuff from there and call them blog posts and post them to your blogs. Eleven is to take the material in your recordings and create a live/studio audio CD series. So multiple CD's, three, four, five, six CD's. I have seen people do as many as twelve CD's off of one. Twelve: Finally, the last was to rearrange the material as a weekend retreat which requires you to look at all of these in the macro and figuring out how do I expand it out to where we've got enough material to work for three days. Really it's not that hard, a lot of it is from just taking each point that you make in your material and creating some exercises around it that are interactive that you have the group working together to solve problems and build processes right there in the room with you, you are just leading the whole thing and you are wrapping it around some meals and some networking. Now all of a sudden you have the material for a weekend retreat.
Now, I've come across a tool that I want to share with you and then we will wrap this up. I think is just one of the neatest things I've seen in a long time. When you are recording a lot of material, you go back and look at last week's lesson plan you will see a link to the audio recorder and you are going to want to get something like that. That one that I happen to recommend is an Olympus, you can get it at RadioShack. It is just an amazing powerhouse of a tool to carry around with you. Everywhere you speak you are going to want to have that in your jacket with a second lavaliere mic clipped to your jacket or your shirt somewhere so that you are getting a clean recording of everything that you do. Say you are giving a keynote somewhere and one of the things most keynote speakers do is they have an evaluation form. Am I right about that Michael? Michael : Yes. Scott : So what if you took a portion of your evaluation form and put a little order form at the bottom and said if you would like a copy of the CD from this presentation, fill in this information and leave this with me at the back of the room and I will be sure to send out a CD. Do you think there is some percentage of the audience that evaluated you well is going to say Yeah, I really loved that talk, I want to hear it again. There are, there is always going to be some. The cost of producing it is next to nothing. If you tell them it is $19 and you can get the CD's done for $1.75 in units of one. The production cost is low and you are telling them it is an unedited version of this talk we did today. The only down side of it is if you don't have the recorder with you, if you don't record the talk, you can't possibly make that offer. I highly encourage that anywhere you speak, every time you speak, you record first and think about what you are going to do with it later because the options go away, the options don't exist if you don't record it. So record first, think about what we going to package it up and how we are going to deal with it later. If for nothing more you have an archive of things that you can go back and listen to for self evaluation purposes, which is how I got into the business of recording a lot of stuff for myself. So I started by saying I found a new tool that I think is one of the coolest and I headed into that by asking if you had an MP3 player. There is a company out there in southern California called myseminarplayer.com. What this guy does is he will create a customized MP3 player for you to sell with your content on it. So now, instead of distributing it in these bulky cassette packs, you could sell somebody on the value of having all of your material electronically, all on a little ride along MP3 player. It is ultra affordable depending on how much material you have, how big a drive it needs memory wise, it is ultra affordable. Bottom line of it is, it is another tool that is out there that we can use to expend our presence. If you did an hour worth of research, or half an hour worth of research you would probably discover almost immediately that no one in your space is doing anything like it. But it has your brand on it, it comes silk screened with your information on it. So every time they pick
it up to use it for something else, they are still seeing your name. It is a very nice little thing to sell whenever you give a talk somewhere because people are going to pay a bit of a premium price to get one. The cost to you is fairly nominal. I think the last time I asked about it, they were less than $50 a piece for me to buy them and yet they had a perceived value in the market place of $99 to $199 plus the content. So the one that is doing knockout business with one is Alex Mandossian, his Teleseminar secrets course now comes on a myseminarplayer device. You get the whole course on the little pocket size player. He hands them out at the end of the event where he is speaking. He sells you one, he processes your $2,000 charge and hands you this recorder. It is beautifully packaged for him; it's got his logo and his picture all over it. Then you tear it out of the package and all your materials are there including all of the printed materials are all now on this little hard drive in your pocket. Plug it into the side of your computer, open it up and there is all the material, all of the workbooks are there, all the recordings are there. Now you could deliver an entire library worth of material in something people can carry around in their pocket. So you can see there is a lot of flexibility; that is the whole idea of this is to demonstrate how much flexibility you have and freedom you have to create new and different ways. I encourage you to keep your process in motion. Keep playing with it, keep massaging it and keep coming up with new ways of presenting your material to your audience. As you go, you are further moving yourself away from all the other players in your space. That is the whole idea. I started by saying my favorite twelve were based on a single recorded session. But I didn't point out that session gives you even more flexibility if that single session is recorded on video. If the cornerstone of all of your repurposing starts with a video, the opportunities are double what they are if the single session is recorded as an audio. So with that, we are going to wrap this section for today.
Repurposing Your Products

Primary Purpose - The Master key to your product continuum - The 51 (including my favorite 12), fastest, most reliable ways to repurpose your products. As you go along, check off the circles to each step completed.
Step 1 :
Listen to CD #4 from the Passive Income Avalanche system in its entirety Major Key Point #1 : Now, as you have developed your continuum, you are probably starting to see that by doing this properly you are positioning yourself, as the expert on the globe, the one person in the entire world that knows this subject better than anyone. You are going to be so visible to the world marketplace that is searching online for your niche topic that you are going to be perceived as the one, as the top person in the world on your topic. Major Key Point #2 : The next piece of this is being able to take one simple recording and repurpose it in so many ways that it becomes unrecognizable to itself, that it all started with one piece of content.
Step 2 :
All you have to do is continue to repackage and reshape the material that is already there and redistribute it in all these different ways. Repurposing your products for maximum leverage. See list of the 51 ways to repurpose although we will focus on the top twelve ways that we could take a single recorded session and spin it off in a dozen different way and easily fill up your continuum. The table below shows my top 12 1. Transcribe it to a book 3. White paper or a special report 5. Single CD product 7. Teleseminar script 9. Series of Articles 11. Multi-CD Album 2. 4. 6. 8. Convert it to an E-Course E-book Create a Workbook Convert to a speech
10. Blog Post 12. Weekend event or retreat
Repurposing Your Products
Major Key Point #3 : That is the beauty of this list, it is essentially evergreen. It doesn't change, there will be some things that don't exist today that will be added to this list. The majority of these things will be around for a very long time and you will be able to do them at various points when you need them. Major Key Point #4 : From there it is critical that we make some level of conversion to get these people in our free model to spend something with us, even something as little as a dollar. One dollar means that they have now made a commitment to us. Ten dollars is actually been tested all over the place as really a critical milestone. Know that at some level, or at each level, some will convert and some won't. It doesn't matter which ones do and which ones don't. All you want to do is fine tune the mechanism to get them to convert at higher and higher levels and each time they convert, they are spending more money.
Chapter 5
The Attraction and Seduction of Your Niche Market

We are now in week 5 of the Unforgettable Speakers mentoring and mastermind group. Essentially we have reached kind of a turning point and so we are going to have a bit of a review and then move forward with what I refer to as the attraction and seduction of your niche market. Essentially what this particular week is intended to do is to make sure that you have gathered your resources behind you to know where all of the Internet searchers in your space are spending their time. To be sure, in any niche that is on the Internet, people are investing their time and their resources somewhere. Our objective in moving forward positioning each of you as the expert in your space is to at least initially level the playing field so that you are playing on the same space or the same level as those people that have been established particularly in the search engines before you got there. Then very quickly turn the tables in your favor to be able to start dominating your niche. So with that in mind, I want to take just a second and share with you guys some interesting news that has come about recently. Let me pull up a sheet that I have been working on, I do a little tracking every single week which we are going to talk a little today about tracking. Every single week I track the major key words that are driving traffic to my website. This is the unforgettablespeakers.com website. I won't go through the list of the key words, but I track them, it takes me about thirty minutes every Friday to go and hunt them all down on Google and see where I am currently sitting. It has been a fascinating thing. If I graphed it, it would be really interesting to see the graph or to show you the graph, but I will just run through the major highlight and a couple of the sub highlights. Each week I am increasing my presence on the major search engine, which is Google, yahoo is still a little behind but yahoo gets such a small percentage of all the searches I am not as concerned about that one. As of last Friday, of the top thirty keywords that I keep track of driving traffic to my site, of the top thirty words, I am in on the first three pages, on twenty of those thirty. I've got twenty of my top thirty keywords in the top thirty search results. Michael : That is remarkable. And that is against Tom Antion too I would imagine. Scott : Yes. Now I also found last week that I hit number one on one of my keywords for the first time. When you look internally to that, I have let's see, seven keywords in the top ten results for their respective, on the first page. I have another six keywords on the
Chapter 5 The Attraction and Seduction of Your Niche Market
second page, in the top twenty. The rest are on the third page. They are climbing methodically. We are going to talk a little bit today about how that is done. It is much, much simpler than all of the other SEO gurus and info peddlers would make you think. There is not that much that goes into it and it is more just spending a little time and looking and tweaking than it is anything else. So I wanted to share that with you because this is something that will be useful to you over time to understand where your rankings are and who is still in front of you. The interesting thing is, when you get into the top ten, well let's say the research shows that nobody really sees beyond the top twenty. The vast majority of searches end at the twenty results. They will look at the stuff on page one; they will sometimes look at the stuff on page two of whatever they typed on. Rarely do they get into or beyond page three and so then you go back to page one and the vast majority of clicks from search engine result page to a website occur in the top five spots. It is staggering how high the percentage of the clicks go to the person in the first, second or third spot. By the time you get to the fourth or fifth spot, you get about ten percent of what number one gets. So it becomes really, really imperative that you try to figure out what is it that can put you in the number one spot and get there. We are going to talk a little bit today about how you do that. That is part of the concept of attraction and seduction of your niche audience. By way of review let's just go back and talk and make sure that everybody is on track with this concept of keyword research. The keyword research is where it all starts. It is knowing what the major keywords are in your marketplace and usually we start by picking out a handful that we think are going to be useful based on how we would describe the market. Then we let some of the tools give us feedback as to whether or not those are good keywords or not. Good keywords would not only be reasonable traffic keywords but whether they convert or not, whether they are so called money keywords. My favorite overall tool for doing this is the Google keyword tool. Wordtracker was a tremendous, tremendous tool, it still is a great tool but Google came along and took all the great stuff that word tracker does, added a few things that only Google could do and one of those being they took the price point away and made it free as a part of their AdWords system. The Google keyword tool is by far and away my favorite for doing keyword research. What I want to validate or cross reference, I will still use word tracker. They have a nice little free trial that you can use for 30 days. Keyword discovery, the Trellion Business Intelligence tool is another really good tool to cross reference and make sure that you have got keywords that will ultimately produce traffic that can be converted into sales or at least can be converted into that free level of your continuum and work from there. As a general point of view, when you use Google's keyword tool and then verify it or validate it with the other tools, you are probably going to build a list of about 200 or 300 keywords relatively easily.
There will be phrases, there will be different configurations of similar words and you will have a broad list. Once you do, you are going to look at the top producing or the ones that generate the most traffic and I am actually optimizing keywords at about ten at a time. I don't begin to pretend that I can optimize 200 keywords in any particular timeframe. So I go out to the top ten, then I go out the next ten, then I go out to the next ten and ultimately by the time you have 30 keywords in play, you've got a lot of stuff going on. That is what is starting to emerge here and that is what will happen for you. Keywords are where it starts. The next thing is Social Media, because social media is so important to people, talking about your content and talking you up as the content provider of choice, blogs are huge. You will use blogs as a way to communicate routinely to your audience what is going on in your niche and from your unique angle. If you do nothing else to check in with me on a regular basis, I really encourage you to read what I am doing in my blogs on Tuesdays and Fridays. I really try hard to dig something out and write about it that is a topic of conversation in the speakers' community right now. What I'm doing is something I was shown some years ago; try to enter the conversation that is already going on in the community. By picking some things out and writing about them, you enter and in some cases you lead the conversation. I have been a little bit confrontational with the speakers community and particularly the other coaches, not so much to be irritating to them or degrading to them but to just stir things up a little bit. I have taken two shots at it in the last week where I was basically saying that most of the other public speaking coaches are focused on better stage presence, overcoming your fear, having more confidence, saying the words correctly and ultimately the culmination of that is you become a technically sound speaker with no one to talk to if you don't have marketing out front. So I was having a little fun with it, but I have stirred up the community in some very interesting ways. The response rates on the speakers passive profit page of people jumping into the conversations have been really interesting. I had fifteen, sixteen people adding to the topic last week. I think I had twenty something people comment on something I put up on Facebook the other day. It was really interesting to watch as the community sort of took over the conversation but it started with me throwing an idea out there that they were either already talking about or should have been thinking so we are starting a fire that way. You are going to want to take time and go through Technorati and see what blogs come up under the keywords that you are finding are your best keywords. Technorati is going to tell you what blogs are out there and you are probably going to want to find the top four or five of those based on authority rankings. Just check in with them on a regular basis. In fact, if they have RSS feeds that you can click to join and go on to Google and find a free RSS reader and install it on your computer. Then just spend fifteen or twenty minutes every couple of days reading though what the other blogs are saying about your niche. You will find some very, very interesting conversations going on that you can either play off of or steer. You will also discover where the traffic is going because with
some of these other tools you could figure out how many readers they are getting and find ways to get your message to those readers as well as the ones you are finding strictly off the search engines. You are also going to want to do something similar and see what forums exist on your topic. I had meant to post a PDF document that I created on how someone goes into and begin to use the forums to steer traffic to you. It is a very useful tool to be able to understand how to communicate using forums and the timing and sequence of things so that you can go ahead and begin siphoning traffic off of those forums because if you run the different forums through compete, or something like compete, you will probably find that they are getting a reasonable amount of traffic. A lot of that traffic, as long as you don't rush the process a lot of that traffic will respond very well to the first time you put a little signature in your forum posts inviting people to come to your site and get some free gift on the topic of which they are discussing. That will draw them right into the base of your continuum and draw them right into the beginning stage of a relationship with you. That is a major piece of the attraction, which as we go through this today you will see how attraction becomes seduction. It is very, very similar to dating. You will also want to look at article sites, article sharing sites. There is really only a few anymore that are relevant. The main ones are going to be ezinearticles.com is probably the primary one. There are two others that are relatively new that are going got be useful to get familiar with. One is called hubpages.com and the other one is called squidoo.com. Squidoo, hubpages and ezinearticles are places where you will be eventually starting to repurpose some of the material you have as articles, making small changes to an article and placing at each of these different pages and using that to siphon traffic back to your free offers and get people introduced to you. Just by going to those pages and familiarizing yourself with them you will come across other sites that are generating a good bit of traffic on your niche. You will be able to figure out who is reading those things, what is going on or you could also uncover joint venture opportunities with people in your niche or parallel to your niche that would want to work with you and partner with you to introduce your stuff to their audience and vice versa.That becomes a nice additional revenue stream if it is laid in there properly. A tool that I really love is relatively new, maybe a year old, or not much more than a year old is Google trends. Google has so much free stuff to us that it is really almost unbelievable that they give all of these things away. If you go into a regular search box, I am going to pull it up so I can give it to you exactly straight; you go into Google and across the top. Well, first of all, when it comes to Google, you are going to want to set up a Google account, what they call an iGoogle page. If you just use that as your homepage, your iGoogle account, it is a free account, you will be able to set up a page for you to run your searches off of. Right now I am looking at mine and it has a calendar on it, it has a world clock on it, I've got the weather up here, I've got the top headlines and a variety of other bits and pieces that I have been able to drag out and place on this little desktop tool that they have given me. But up across the top there is a link that once I am logged into says my account. When you go into my account there is my profile listed there and then there is my products. My products
are all of the free tools that I have accounts with them for. Everything from Ad Sense and analytics to Gmail and notebook, calendars, groups, readers, webmaster tools and alerts. All of these are free tools that make your job managing your website or managing the traffic in your business easier. One of those is Google Trends. Google Trends is an absolutely killer tool. You type your major keywords into it and it shows you what the trends are in your industry. It maps it right out for you. That is going to be one of the searches you want to make sure you check every once in a while. When I worked with Jim Rohn, one of the most profound things he ever said, and I've written it in my journals and I've kept track of it, I now find myself using it in conversation like I am going to use it now which is he once said if you want to be brilliant, and most people want to be brilliant, they want to be perceived in the marketplace as being pretty sharp. So if you want to be brilliant, figure out how things are going to be and then go around and tell people this is how things should be. When they turn out that way, they immediately perceive that you are brilliant. Does that make sense? So if you want to be brilliant, figure out how it is going to be and then say this is how it is going to be, this is how I think it is going to come out. Michael : Scott, when you figure out how it is going to be, what are some of the steps you might need to take to make that happen in order to get that perception of brilliance? Which I would agree with 100%. Scott : Well Michael it is largely, a matter of being able to spot a trend. You see the number of people that are searching trends when they are making business decisions, those are things that happen intuitively at the Fortune 1000 level, but at the small business level they don't happen at all. People run their business on instinct, on gut feelings. They are not paying attention all that often to the trends in the marketplace, the steering winds in your industry. So if you happen to know which way the wind is going to blow tomorrow, you've got a leg up that the others don't have. They are out there holding their umbrella in the wrong direction wondering why they are getting wet. But because you have gotten a little bit of intelligence going in and you are using your own skill sets combined with information on what is going on in your marketplace. See, if you know all the great keywords that are driving traffic and you know what people are saying on the blogs about this or that and you see what the forums are going and the value of the forums really more than anything else to me is to see what people are stressed out about. People go on the forums to get help for things. They have questions and they go Does anybody know how to solve this problem? If you take all of those things into account and then you start reviewing articles and you will see what other people are out there trying to provide solutions and you match that up against the trends, then you've got some real solid intelligence. The beautiful thing is once you set
this whole thing into motion, it is managed in about an hour a day tops. It is no different than if you were running a stock picking business from home, a day trader or something along those lines. Once you set the system up, it is a bit time intensive to set it up, but once you've got the momentum going, the ball or the stone rolling down the hill rolls relatively easily on its own. So all you have to do is check in with it occasionally and just keep it moving. I spend about an hour a week monitoring keywords but I take about ten of those minutes and just look at the Google analytics for the week. Analytics is another free tool that is available and you will learn a little bit later on how to embed that right into your website and how to read it and see which way the traffic is moving through your website, what words people are using to find you, where they are going once they get to your site, the average amount of time they are spending on your site, how many people are hitting it and leaving immediately versus the ones that are sticking around and drilling in. It is all really, really useful information when you are trying to establish conversion rates that are measurable. That is all that really matters, that you establish some ratio and once you can measure it, you can improve it. You know that the personal development world, you can't improve what you can't measure. We have to get some basis on which to measure and establish an opening ratio and then we can say ok, these are the five things that drive that, how do we tweak and fine tune it? What things can we change? You make little tweaks. They don't take a lot of time; it is just a matter of having your information gathered up beforehand. So checking trends. Then the last of the tools that I think everybody should be using is to set up Google Alerts. You set Google Alerts on maybe the top three keywords and then also on your own website, the name of your own website, and then your own name. That will show you, you will get an email based on whatever time frame you tell them, I get mine every day because if there is somebody talking about me or talking about my website, I'd like to know. That email comes in at about two o'clock every morning. Well I am obviously not up to read it, so it is in my box first thing in the morning and it is one of the very first things I read. I want to see what is going on with the alerts. Those six things are very, very useful ways of beginning the process of attracting an audience to you. Using those in conjunction, a little of this a little of that, making up a recipe to do those is going to drive traffic. It is all intended to drive traffic into that free level of your product continuum. We have covered that so many times now I don't want to spend a lot of time there. I think everybody understands once we know exactly the niche, we are going to start dissecting existing content and creating a free level of product that can build a database full of prospects. That is really all it is for, developing a few free things, a free audio, a free report, a free e-course of some sort. It is not like you have to sit down and wholesale create something new, you essentially repurpose something you already have. You take it apart and put it back together a little differently and throw it into a website where it can be retrieved in exchange for an email address or in some cases, like in my case I actually require people to give me their name, address, phone number, email
everything. I do that because I am offering them the free gift of my monthly newsletter. We will talk more about that concept and why it is so important I think it is actually in week 10 that we cover that. You've got people moving towards you from all these different sources that you have identified. You are playing in the forums, you are putting articles up, you got your blog going and you know where the other blogs are and you are getting some keyword traffic. You are driving people into that free level of your products offerings and you will be using some sort of auto responder. Probably the two most common are the one from aWeber, which is a very popular product, an amazing tool. I think that one runs about $15 a month, maybe $20 for their auto responder tool. I am currently using the one from getresponse.com. I have been evaluating that, I like it but I think that aWeber.com is actually more intuitive. I was just simply evaluating it because it was available as an alternative to aWeber. I had used aWeber, liked it, but wasn't 100% loyal to them and so I am trying the other one for a time. But an auto responder is going to make it very easy for you to communicate regularly to those people who have accepted your free content with something as simple as hey, I have updated my blog. Here are the first two lines of my blog for this week. You could click here to read it. It is an incredibly useful way of just reaching out and touching your audience on a regular basis. Reminding them of your name, letting them know that you have more content for them because if you go all the way back to the beginning of this, we established clearly that people are on the Internet looking for information and in the process to building relationships with people who provide them that information and they build likeability, or they start to like the person, they begin to trust the person they are getting the information from making them susceptible to buying something. Thus enters the process of them moving or ascending through your continuum. It all starts with a very simple process of getting them into your continuum for the first time, at that free level. Another useful part of seducing if you will, after you have been attracting audience, the process of seducing them is through regular email communication. If you haven't already done it, I highly encourage you to read a book by Robert Cialdini called Influence. When I look back at all the books I have read on becoming a better sales person all those years ago when I was out in the field making sales calls, his book helped me understand the process of human behavior more than any other. Essentially it is a science book so it is a little bit heavy. You have to kind of take it in small doses, part of a chapter at a time, that kind of thing. Essentially what Dr. Cialdini is writing about is the six major things that drive human behavior. The first one is reciprocation, the give and take. If I give you something, there is some level of you that wants to give something back to me, age-old concept, works extremely well in business. You give and you get. The one that will be most useful when you are trying to move people through the ascension model is commitment and consistency. Where that comes into play, we talked about this a little bit in the continuum piece, is this process of getting your very first conversion. Whether the first level of your continuum is a $1, $5, $10 or $20 item, something that is very low cost, very low risk getting them to make that first
commitment to you with their credit card is enormously helpful because from there they are going to act consistent with that commitment. Some percentage of the time they are going to continue to convert simply in alignment with this commitment consistency principal. Next is social proof. Social proof is just simply following the leader. What influential people are doing, other people tend to follow suit and do as well. Liking, the concept of making friends as a part of influencing people, this is where the social networks are enormously helpful. You can build liking just simply by being out there regularly and commenting. We will talk a lot about this in the week on social networking, which is actually Chapter 7. In general, the main rule is as you establish a whole bunch of friends in these various social networks, you are going to want to keep in touch with a percentage of them, a small percentage, five or ten percent. So let's say you have a thousand friends, well you know there is going to be about a hundred of them you are going to watch and you will just say hi to from time to time. Or you will comment on something that they are saying. It keeps your name in front of everybody, it reminds them that you are out there but more importantly, whenever you are commenting, your comments not only show up on your page and on that friend's page but on all of their friends' pages as well drawing attention to you from circles that you are not currently in. Next is authority and the whole premise of doing this material is to establish you as the authority in your space, as the go to person on your topic. Last, but certainly by no means least is the concept of scarcity. But it has to be a smart level of scarcity. In 2005, I wrote an e-book and my business partner built the website, we put a report out on how to maximize a particular business opportunity and how to really play well in that space. The E-book was released and included a series of MP3 recordings. Just being audacious more than anything else, I suggested that we were only going to sell 180 of these reports and not a single one more. Nobody ever really thought to say what is there a worldwide shortage of bits? There are no more MP3 files available? They are all used up? When everybody that has ever distributed them knows you make them and distribute them for free so there is no real reason to limit the number of copies and there is no way to verify that you did. It was a cheap tool to influence people to move quickly. When we looked back at it, we got a good laugh about it, no one actually ever asked if there was going to be a shortage on this particular pdf file, was it going to disintegrate after we sold 180 of them? It didn't because it still exists on my computer. Just one of those interesting things, you don't want to use scarcity in that way. A smart way to use scarcity is to say we are going to do a special offer for the first ten or twenty that respond. We are going to be doing something a little bit different for you. You are going to get a little extra bonus if you are one of the first few people to respond.
That is a method of scarcity that works extremely well, creates urgency and gets people moving. Those are the tools of influence. How do you use all of that is you just want to simply take some time and understand that material, understand how the human mind works and then file it away. Keep the book somewhere nearby but don't get yourself crazy about it. Apply as many of those concepts to your copy as you possibly can. When you write a little five paragraph email let it cool for a day and then go back and read it and say, ok, how did I score on those six things? Am I likable? Have I established myself or reminded people of my authority? Is there a bit of urgency or scarcity implied in here? In your resource section you will find a checklist to score your copy with. Use it every time you communicate to your niche market. Use all the tools of influence to your favor as you write. When you do that you will get higher response rates and you will deepen the relationship with people. Really I think last on this list here of ways to kind of keep track of all of these things is to use Google Analytics. I touched on that earlier, briefly, but once you set up a Google Analytics account and you tell them what webpage you are going to be using it on, they give you a line of code that you will imbed in your website. All you really need to remember about that is you go ahead and you get the line of code from them and enter it into your web pages and it will from there, it is intuitive to read what the different stats are, it will post them every 24 hours and just check them every few days or once a week. Just look at the report that it spins out. It shows you the actual traffic counts and then an amazing break down of information on how or where that traffic is coming from. Every keyword that is being used, every path that someone takes to your website, where are they going, what are they doing, how long are they staying? How many of them are bouncing off the page, basically leaving within twenty seconds, which is considered a bounce. They come in, they take a quick look at your site and leave right away, that is called a bounce. It tells you all of that and it becomes incredibly useful for tweaking and fine tuning the performance of your site. That goes back to the point I made a little earlier which is you can't improve something unless you can track it. Google analytics is a tool to track and then tweak and improve your results. That is essentially how you go about seducing your marketplace is to attract them and then just continue to have this relationship with them, knowing that just about everything is intended get them into your free level of your continuum and then slowly but surely build a relationship with them, host free events, Teleseminars and things like that where the ultimate point is to move them up your ascension model. Offer them some sort of course or something you are offering. Amanda, you and I talked about how powerful it is when someone comes in, put a onetime offer in front of them,
what some of the conversion rates would be, sort of what the potential is. Michael, we should be looking at that in your case as well. There are so many ways of moving people along, but for me to try to cover them in group is harder because it is somewhat of an individualistic thing and it applies more to your business in one way than in a different way. There is another tool I came across this week that I think is just fascinating and you want to check this out. This is something that you can use as another way to attract people into your business. Go to sproutbuilder.com. This is a free tool used to build living content is what they call it, to create living content. You can build, publish, and manage widgets, mini sites, mashups banners and even more. You can build any size, any number of pages; include audio, video, images, and news feeds. This is something to just file this away and play with it and one day you will wake up and you will realize how you want to use it. I have not yet decided how I am going to use this; I just know that somehow I am going to. I think if you just have it in your consciousness, you will figure out how you might want to use something like this. These mini sites are really useful, but one of the things that is says right here on their page is you can imbed your sprout on any website or on your social media sites. So if you are trying to draw traffic from your Facebook page, MySpace page or any of those over to your website, this would be one way to do it. Just an interesting tool I have come across and find very interesting. Last week I mentioned something, and Amanda, I think you pointed it out as one you had never really thought as a repurposing technique which was to speak on cruise ships. I came across a guy this week who contacted me who publishes a website, a blog site that is called cruisespeakertips.com. He runs a system, helps speakers find cruise ships that are always hiring speakers. So you get to travel the world for free in exchange for providing educational events to their other passengers. If you are interested in that as a repurposing concept, look into cruisespeakertips.com. I would really like to get you to the end of this 10 week period and have a good bit of this in play for you so you are able to begin that twin track. Amanda, what questions do you have? Amanda : Scott, I am sort of taking all of this in and making a lot of notes here and thinking actually these are lots of really useful places, useful things to start to get all of this into motion. I think I am far more able now to really kind of fine tune this and actually perhaps do more exploratory planning, preparation, finding people, maybe more with the keywords, more of all of this before I actually sit down and switch on the video camera and start recording myself. So while I haven't really got any questions I would say this huge amount of very useful but very systematic background research, information I am actually putting it all into place. So I think really, certainly over the next couple of weeks I am going to be kind of hitting the ground running with all of this. Knowing I think in a way exactly what I am going to put out, who I am targeting, where I am going, what forums and things, so I think the universe at the moment is probably
doing me a bit of a favor. I just think the whole of this is really, really excellent. I feel very confident with what I've got coming together. The whole thing is going to be able to make me some money quite quickly and to do very well. Scott : I certainly second that motion. I think you are right simply because you will find it easy Amanda to establish yourself as the authority of record in your space. As you said, on the forums there is a lot of silliness and people's self deprecating humor and that type of thing. While there is a purpose or a place for that, I don't think it is a way to position yourself as the authority of record. Amanda : No it's not. Scott : If you want to be positioned as the class clown, then fine. I don't think that will long term be a great business model. You are going to find yourself in a position to really enter the conversation that is going on in that niche market's mind and they almost think you are genius level clairvoyant because you will have gathered so much intelligence before you started your conversation and you will have targeted your content to the needs that are most pressing. Amanda : That makes total sense. I think what this is making me do is much more look at what the market wants. What kind of things are they really coming from, are they interested in? So I think when I actually do come to sit down and start doing this, it is coming much more from a place of strength and knowledge. Like you say, it is like coming into that market and people almost kind of looking at me and you are some kind of psychic or something which taking aside the joke half of that, I think this is where all the research properly done now is really going to help me that much more over the next couple of weeks. I think this is where this whole process is very systematic and very much fine tuning, sifting and sorting through to actually really find the people that are interested in me that I can build a relationship with and this is where this whole thing is tremendously valuable.
Attraction and Seduction of your Niche Market

Primary Purpose - Learn the best ways to convince your audience to experience the magic of your work for the first time As you go along, check off the circles to each step completed
Step 1 : Step 2 :
Listen to CD #5 from the Passive Income Avalanche system in its entirety BLOG, BLOG, BLOG! You will use blogs as a way to communicate routinely to your audience what is going on in your niche and from your unique angle and make sure you post content to it regularly. Try to dig something out and write about it that is a topic of conversation in your niche market right now. Have a little fun with it! Set up a Facebook group or Fan page : This is in addition to the personal or profile page you may already have up there. A group page or Fan page allows you to set up a community within your niche market and lead the discussion. Begin Forum Marketing : See the worksheet in your resource section. This allows you to serve as a resource to your community on these forums without directly Marketing to them at first. Follow the process outlined in the worksheet to begin attracting people to the free line of your continuum. (BE PATIENT) Get active on article sharing sites : Focus primarily on ezinearticles.com; ezinearticleplanet.com; hubpages.com and squidoo.com. These sites will generate significant niche or targeted traffic to the free area of the continuum over time. Major Keypoint #1 : Make sure your offer is in alignment with the Trends in your niche market. Utilize Google Trends found in google.com. You'll find it as part of your igoogle acct we discussed earlier. Major Keypoint #2 : If you are clear on your major keywords and understand the trends, and you know the issues people are searching for on the forums (What they want or What stresses them out) then you've got some real solid intelligence to attract and seduce a niche audience.
Step 3 : Step 4 :
Step 5 :
Step 6 :
Set up Google Alerts : Setting up Google Alerts on your major keywords and your name and your business name is very important so you can monitor any buzz (positive or negative) about your market (what everyone else is doing and saying) and your own marketing. Major Keypoint #3 : Those six things are very, very useful ways of beginning the process of attracting an audience to you. Using those in conjunction, a little of this a little of that, making up a recipe to do those is going to drive traffic. It is all intended to drive traffic into that free level of your product continuum.
Chapter 6
The Secrets of Online Video

So we are talking about how unique your message is and how you can connect with a world audience from a stage that largely exists in your office at home. Where I was headed was this idea there is a terrific book that was written a number of years ago, I think I first read it in the late 80's, maybe early 90's, it was called The Celestine Prophecy. Well there is a line, I couldn't tell you a whole lot about the story anymore because it is been a long time, but there was one line that was like it was written for me, I will always remember it until my last breath I'll remember the line from this book and it simply said that there are no coincidences. Everyone you meet, every single person you ever cross paths with, they either have a message for you or you have one for them. One of the things that Jim Rohn taught me when I worked for him was to look at things a little differently than most and when you hear something, some people may hear a statement like that and say, well that is obviously not true because so and so crossed my path and this was the reason, or there was no reason, they just happened to be there. Jim Rohn's point of view was to ask yourself in any scenario like that the one question is, what if they are right? All I could tell you is that when I started to see life through the eyes of someone who either, had met you specifically at that moment on purpose that there was a purpose being played out at a higher level that I would never understand. But you had something for me or I had something for you and that we were put in each other's path for that reason. When I started to see it that way, everything started to shift and change because I would ask myself the question, what if that is true?. How would I treat this person differently? What would I say, what would I do, how would I act if that were the case? That is a little bit of a start in left field as we frame this up. What we are here to talk about today, the core message of week 6 is the secrets of online video. There is real shift going on in the marketplace. Enormous changes going on as a result of online video and yet I would venture to say that less than 1% of all of the speakers that I have worked with or know are using it even remotely well. The vast majority of them haven't even begun to examine the power of online video. So when you are positioning yourself as the niche provider of choice, if you go back really through the strand of pearls that we have covered so far, the different lessons probably conclude that all of these are
Chapter 6 The Secrets of Online Video
interrelated. I wrote them with the idea that they would all be interrelated. The first piece that we covered all those weeks ago was this idea that people are online looking for information. In that process of looking for information, they build relationships with certain people and it is through that relationship that you have the opportunity to do business and in a lot of cases, or at least in some cases a lot of business, sometimes at very high premium prices. The thing that makes that possible is the core concept that people do business with people they like. People do business with people they trust. So to frame up the concept of online video, let me start with a premise, and this is a writer downer, this is something you will want in your notes, it is not even anything that I am originating, I am repeating something that we have all heard. How many have heard this idea that ninety some odd percent of all communication is non verbal? Everybody here heard that? Amanda : Yep. Michael : Absolutely. Dr. Albert Mehrabian from UCLA, the big study that he did. Scott : At some point in time you have heard it. So, you know, again, now I have read some things that challenge that assertion, but the concept is what if it is true that ninety some odd percent of all communication is nonverbal. I think whether the percentages are correct is less important than the fact some level of communication is done nonverbally. The beauty of online video is that it captures the nonverbal part of your communication. If you passionately believe in what you say, it comes screaming through the camera. People can see it, they can feel it, they can hear it in your voice and it causes them to deepen the relationship with you. If we are dealing with people who coming into our sphere by use of the Internet, they are all over the world searching for a particular thing and there you are. They go through and start clicking through to these various pages. We have gone through a major shift in the last two years or so, three years, where the Internet was originally, if you referred to it in the context of web 1.0 versus web 2.0, I don't know that it was formally called web 1.0 but the original Internet was very text based. Then it became graphically based, a lot of pictures and images. We all remember the first time we came across somebody's website that had a lot of picture on it that hadn't been optimized for the web so the page took forever to load. Well now people are not as patient for that. They want something that loads immediately and begins dispensing the information quickly.
We live in a world with a two second rule. If I am coming in from a search engine and I am looking for a specific thing and I come to your site, you have about two seconds to capture my attention. One of those things that have been tested repeatedly in the past two years and proven to capture people's attention and get them moving into your process is online video. As we move from here going forward over the next number of years in online marketing, there is no doubt in my own mind that online video will be front and center. It will be the driving force for an awful lot of commerce to come. There is no other way of engaging people faster and better and beginning that relationship than online video. Really, I think if you look at it the broader context, the reason for it is that it is very similar to television. We particularly in America tend to stare intently at the television and if the guy on the television tells us to do something, it is amazing, particularly the later in the day it gets, how pliable we can be. If you watch the evening television and the infomercials in particular, there are so many dollars worth of commerce rung up by people on television telling you to dial this number and order this thing right now, and people do. Now there is an awful big amount of science that is being applied to using the same exact process on your website. It is called online video. You see, the technologies have come far enough that we can actually pull it off. I can speak to this with confidence because I was there, we created a company built around a couple of core technologies that delivered online video better than anybody else in the marketplace except maybe YouTube and we had significant advantages over YouTube from a control standpoint, controlling the experience of your visitor. So we are going to go a little bit into that. We are going to talk some about online video, about its background but really the primary thing we want to start with is just why use video. I think we have already covered some of it but in a nutshell the primary reasons to use video are really to capture the attention and to direct people what to do next, what you want them to do. You can deliver a call to action with a video and build relationships with a video better than any other medium that we have ever seen on the Internet. Start with that, that there are a number of reasons to use it. I have actually got a report here that I'd be happy to send you that I wrote really, and then just recently repurposed it specifically for the speaker market. It is called the Online Video Secrets a Speaker's Guide. I think you will get a tremendous amount out of it. I wrote it for the work I was doing at KeyThing Marketing and then because I owned the copyrights on it, I sat down and read through it a few weeks ago, kind of adjusted a few things, brought some new research in and polished it all up, got rid of a lot of the references to my other company and its products because I am not against the product we made, I am just not actively selling it. Some of the most important ways that you can use online video, first of all is on the landing page, or the squeeze page or what might be considered an opt-in page. A lot of the marketing that you are doing is going to drive people to a specific place. If you view online marketing as a process where
we have got to get them into that free level somehow, what is better than to send them directly to a page where you give them the four or five top reasons why they want to do business with you. You use all the good copyrighting skills, you know such as headline, bullet points, call to action and benefit statements. You do all of that with a video as well so it is there in copy but it is also there in the center of the page is a nice big window that I can click on and watch. That brings the second piece in which is relationship. You see, think about the last time you went somewhere to buy something and you ran smack into a salesperson that you did not like. Can everybody picture that crossing, that occasion? Now, there was something at an instinctive level at the meeting that made you not like the person. If you saw that person yakking at you on television or you met them face to face, chances are your emotion would still be very similar. By comparison, when you met someone that you liked in the sales arena, you were out somewhere looking to do some business and you met someone you liked very well, it was also probably at an instinctive level. Now interestingly enough, you can replicate that fairly well. If you are a likable person, you could replicate that feeling for an awful lot of people with online video just by being the person that you are. I've met you a number of times Michael and we have sat down and had meals together and you are an eminently likeable guy. When you do something using online video and you are greeting me face to face, let's say I come to MichaelStahl.com and the first thing I run into is a welcome page and you are standing there, you are greeting me. You are telling me I am Michael Stahl, I created this business and these are the things that we are best known for. Let me show you where you can find what you are probably looking for. You probably came here looking for one of these three things, let me show you where you are going to find them. Think about how effective that would be. It is very similar to another, picture this other scenario, you go out into the marketplace, you are looking to buy something. We have all walked into a shop where we ran into the actual shopkeeper, the person that owns the store. Am I correct? Michael : Yep. Amanda : Yep. Scott : Usually they are very congenial, they are very gracious, and they are hungry to earn your business. They go over the top to serve you. Am I right? Now picture the time that you walked into a similar store and you ran into the 18 or 19 year old gum chewing clerk who is on the phone. You walk in and you are a big distraction. You are interrupting their conversation about their boyfriend and the movie they are going to go see on Friday. Can you picture that? Because they have no skin in the game, it is not their store, they are not concerned about whether you buy or don't buy, whether you like the
shop or you don't like the shop. Whether you come back or you never come back. Frankly they want you to leave, and they want you to leave now and they don't care if you spend any money because they are going to be paid their minimum wage either way. The less people they actually have to interact with often times the better from their own perspective. When we take that whole concept and review it about how we want to do business online, what better than to replicate the experience of the shopkeeper greeting you at the door when I first walk through the door of your online business. Hi, this is Amanda. Chances are you came to this place from the search engine and most of the people coming in have been looking for one of these two or three things. Let me show you real quick where you are going to find them. If you do a quick around the dial because you know where that video is going to be placed on your web page, you can tell them where to find things. We did one for a company that I run called Acceleration Audio. Although the site is offline at the moment, the original video that was done was a young woman who was perfectly suited in the demographic audience. She simply had a series of commands to explain. If you are looking for this, you will see the link over top of my head and she is holding her hand up in the air pointing at it. If you want to get involved in our free information, it is over here to my left and she is pointing to it. If you are not here for either of those two reasons, we encourage you to give our service a trial, the first 14 days are free anyway and you will see the button right underneath my feet. It is amazingly effective to do that in about twenty or thirty seconds and give people a real sense of what they are experiencing. Online video is powerful and we are just now getting to the very beginning stages of all that it can do. You can use it on the landing page or the squeeze page and you can use it on your website as a greeting. Another way that we have used it that is unbelievably powerful is when you have an information product. I know all of us here are going to be developing various levels of information products. As they get more and more complex and there are more things that would conceivably be in the box so to speak that you would get if you put your money on the counter, you would get a box with stuff in it. In the old days we used to lay all of that stuff out on the table and take a picture of it. You have all been to a website where somebody was selling a big box information product. There were manuals, CD's, DVD's, books and everything was all displayed in a fan on a table with a picture. Then there were some words underneath of it to tell you all of the stuff. I had a premise that it was time to do the infomercial treatment on a big box information product and I convinced my friend Yanik Silver, who is one of the premier Internet marketers in the world, to do this on his Brain in a Box campaign about a year ago, maybe just a little bit more than a year ago. Yanik has a unique style about him; he is very charismatic, very congenial, communicates extremely
well and has a whole kind of sense of humor, Yanik feel about him that makes him who he is. He is very unique. He was also selling this enormous box of stuff that was two huge binders, four or five spiral bound manuals and two huge books of DVD's that were from two different seminars that he had created. He was calling it his brain in a box. I suggested to him that he play on the strengths of what he knew to be true about the marketplace. First of all that they were buying this thing and it was going to be shipped to them. UPS would bring it and it would arrive in a huge box, they would have to walk in the house with it. When they set it down it would go 'thud'. We know all those things are true so why don't we play to those strengths. What came after that was actually pretty funny, it was classic Yanik Silver. So what he ended up doing was he walked into the room, we talk about shooting video, and you could do it on a low budget. We talk about doing things on a low budget; he did this on an absolutely low budget. His wife Missy had the camcorder and Yanik walks into the room with this giant box under his arm. He looks straight into the camera and he says Hey, tomorrow we launch the brain in the box campaign and I know if you have been reading the different sales letters, or the different information pieces up to this point, you are probably thinking seriously about ordering this. If you do, in a few days UPS is going to deliver it and I want you to see what you are going to get and really understand the value of it and why I created it. And then he sets this huge box on the table and it is like, thud, you can hear the weight of it as it smacks onto the table. Then he looks back at the camera and he says, and this is going to take a few minutes, so while we do it I am going to enjoy a nice glass of Pinot. With that he reaches for a wine glass and he pops the cork in a bottle of wine and pours himself a glass of wine. He looks at the camera and says Cheers. He takes a big sip, sets the glass down and starts un-boxing everything. With the box blade he cuts the box open and tears into, takes the paper and throws it out and starts pulling all this stuff out of the box. Much like you or I would do if you ordered that system. As he gets each piece out, he is explaining to you, first you are going to get these DVD's. I shot these at this seminar; tickets to this particular event were $5,000. We only had twenty people, whatever the number was and we sold tickets for $5,000 a piece. So we videotaped everything and we created these DVD's out of it and you are going to get all the DVD's. Now some of you are going to listen to it in the car, so we also pulled all the audio off of these professionally, had them saved separately as CD's, in this book you are going to get all the CD's. Then we transcribed everything, which is what is in this huge binder. Then we have the action manuals, all of this stuff over here. He is flipping through it, showing you things and explaining and sipping on his glass of wine. You could tell he is just having a blast. Does that sound effective? Amanda : Very. Scott : What happened when he released that program? Was he sold out of a program that he was valuing at I think $7,900, he was offering a first day discount of $3,995, I think is what it was. He sold over 200 of them in less than 72 hours. We had twenty
thousand people watch that video in five days and he sold out of this system faster than he sold out of anything before. Now directly on the heels Frank Kern turned around and started using online video and launched his mass control product in January and sold out of, he did two million dollars worth of business in twenty minutes using online video. Throughout all of 2008, every single major product launch has been driven by online video. The days of the long form sales letter are passing away and they are being replaced by video shorts, ten minute clips, maybe fifteen minute clips where you are telling a story, you are engaging people in the feel, you are building the relationship and you are setting them up for what you want them to do next. Michael : What you just said is huge. The days of the long form sales letter are kind of on their way out. That is huge because of all the copyrighting, manuals that I have read and studied, all of those things that you have looked at and that I have certainly studied over the years and I know you have too. You really believe that it is going to be the online video that completely replaces that. I can see the practicality of that for a variety of reasons, not the least of which people want instantaneous gratification. They don't necessarily want to pour through a long form sales letter. They want to watch something and be engaged by something and get the information really as quickly as they can. That makes all the sense in the world. Not necessarily just the age of information but really the video age, where people want something visual. That is huge, that is huge right there. Scott : It is shifting the marketplace Michael, it absolutely is. I have written a lot of copy, I have written a lot of long form sales letters, as I know you have and Amanda you probably have as well. The sense of it is, the good instructors, the people that are teaching people like me to write good copy have in essence taught me to manipulate the market with words. To build relationship, to build value as I go, to bring up, brag about and cancel out any objections as I go. So that at the end, if my call of action is clear and I have got some sort of penalty for delay, you know I've got incentives to move ahead now and I've got penalties like due dates or deadlines very clearly spelled out that it is going to cost me something. I've got the fear of loss coming into play. Then I am supposed to move ahead with it. But the things that copy doesn't do well, and really never can is give me that nonverbal communication. Michael : Absolutely. Amanda : That person's passion for the product. Scott : Right. So somewhere in my mind, I also see another stat coming into play, just
from our current day in age, is that only 3% of Americans have a library card. I have always found that to be fascinating. But ultimately, Michael you touched on the point, people don't want to read this stuff anymore. They would rather watch and be engaged. If you watch some of the stuff that Frank Kern is doing, and continues to do is embracing online video and has just exploded his business with it. John Reece did a series of videos for his traffic secrets when he did Traffic Secrets 2.0 six months or so ago. John is not naturally as charismatic on camera, he is a little bit stiff and robotic, but he delivered tremendous information. Frank Kern is like a beach bum comedian, he is funny and he is witty, smart and you watch him and you want to know more. You know he is going to sell you something, but you just can't help watching. He did this whole thing a few months ago that was just tremendous. It was basically like a movie, one of the characters was like some Internet cop. It was a twenty minute long or thirty minute long video and it was like this little television show almost. The one character that was an Internet cop and then Frank playing the other character, he actually played both characters. It was like an old television show in that sense. The Internet cop was talking about how he was going to bust that information guru, the guy that called himself Guru was trying to catch Frank Kern up to his old tricks. Frank Kern has got this ongoing relationship obviously knows this Internet cop. When the cop comes in the front door, he is running out the back door. It was just hilarious. Now he puts out one the other day, I will just tell you the subject line. Watch this new video with my weirdo cousin. Frank plays both parts. It is Frank and his cousin. His cousin's name is Trey according to this and he shows you how he increased his sales by 500% from just two hours of work. Bottom line of it is, this stuff is making an enormous difference in the way that marketers are positioning themselves. The big thing to remember is the ones who are doing it now, will dominate their niches in a few years if not really almost immediately from the time they start doing it. Michael : This is absolutely enormous. This information, right here, everything has been fantastic. This piece of information right here is worth the entire program. That is like an ah-ha moment, like a light bulb above my head has just gone off. Huge, huge important stuff. I would like to talk to you when we have our implementation call offline about that and kind of how we move forward with the execution of that. Huge, absolutely huge, I am so excited about that. Scott : Well, it certainly is going to be something that will change your business Michael. I know it will change your business Amanda. The hardest part for most people to embrace is just to be you, just relax. I struggle with it every time I shoot a video I struggle with it.
Amanda : I think in some ways I have approached my whole business far too seriously. Just listening to what you were saying there about Frank Kern, I remember he did the thing in the summer, was it the mind movies, I think the mind movies. Which was kind of making videos of the picture and things of your goals. I actually did an affiliate thing with it, but I was very late coming to it. I literally sent out one email and I was just absolutely staggered by the response. I sat and watched some of those videos. I think if people are informed and entertained, and like you say they can see you with your passion for the subject, they can hear you, see you, and feel you. It literally, it is being in the presence of somebody. I am just thinking, I have sort of noticed myself more and more as I go where there is a video plus a sales letter, I watch the video first before I scroll down over and read the letter. The one or two people who are starting to effectively use video, Joe Vitale springs to mind, he did something, it was something to do with his hypnotic marketing program. I remember thinking with that that was very effective with the video literally underneath with nothing much more than Buy Now. And then went on to an up sale and I was actually watching that and thinking that was incredibly effective as a short, sweet and simple sales process. I think this is absolutely fascinating. I am really glad we are doing this call. Scott : I will tell you, I know a little about that particular hypnotic marketing process because in the earliest days of it, they were using the system that I sold. I was the one that provided that technology through Yanik Silver to Kevin Wilke and Matt Gill. The very first piece that came out about Hypnotic Marketing was a story, it was a guy that they showed up close and until they panned back and showed you the scenario the rest of the way, he was a guy that was telling his story about being broke, unemployed and living on the streets. And that somebody had encouraged him to buy a copy of Joe Vitale's Hypnotic Marketing book eight years ago. The point of the story was that we are now celebrating the eighth anniversary edition of Joe Vitale's Hypnotic Marketing. Newly updated for today and it is available to you now as an ebook for only $27. Then as they panned away from the guy you could see that he was standing in front of a mansion, he was leaning up against his Mercedes Benz and he was describing the millions he had made as a result of coming across this work. That video was produced using our delivery system. Kevin was also the first one I had seen that got with Joe himself and put a series of videos together for up sale. Long story short, it is a game changer. Online video is changing the way the game is played and the ones who embrace it, the ones who put it into play are going to walk away the big winners while everybody else is still trying to perfect their copying techniques; the marketers are embracing television techniques instead.
Another way that we can be using this extremely powerful for using online video, very easy to do is for video testimonials. When you have a chance to come face to face with someone that has bought your stuff; and is willing to discuss it with you on camera, then all of those factors that make online video effective now work in your favor even more because it is your customer testifying on your behalf. People will know if it is true or not. I did a talk last spring at a seminar in Los Angeles. I showed people that were in this audience the evolution of testimonials. So I put the quote on the screen, in quotations, nice font, very easy to read, as it was in the context of a web page. I said this is how we used to do testimonials. Then it transferred over to an online audio product. So we clicked a little button and we played the online audio version of it. Then we showed the online video. All the exact same quote, from the exact same piece, it was the same piece shown three different ways. I simply asked people at that point which one is most effective? 100% chose the video. When it was a video, particularly if it was shot on location, if it was at a seminar or something that you were doing its extremely powerful. All you need to do something like that is a simple digital camera. It doesn't matter the quality of the camera. These little Flip Camcorders are unbelievably powerful for capturing those video testimonials. Literally any digital camera that has a movie setting on it will work. The quality of the audio will be just fine, if you are in a room that has enough light, you will have no problems capturing it and using that. Now we are starting to see more ways of using online video. One of the biggest ones now is to promote or drive traffic, to promote your product or drive traffic to your website. There are great ways to use it. You will see me begin using the video that I have been working on, built around some of the comments that you made a couple of weeks ago in the implementation call. That will be finished; hopefully I will get it done this week. That will be up on Facebook. It very well may get released on YouTube as well. That will drive traffic to the various parts of my business that I want people to see. It is rather simple to do; I don't over complicate it. That was done with a Flip Camcorder; a $120 Flip camera, a $20 tripod and mount it on the seat of my car and then edit it on the free software that comes with a Mac; they call it iMovie. Amanda : There is a moviemaker in Windows. Scott : Yes, there is a moviemaker in Windows. Again, free software right there on your computer. It is on every Windows box that is out there. Rather simple to do. The biggest secret to it is just to experiment and practice a little bit and then it will go fine. Once you have created it, you can place up to ten-minute videos on YouTube. Frequently what you see some
of these other guys that are doing very well driving traffic from YouTube is the video appears to be longer than twenty minutes. The last scene is a thirty second screen shot of what amounts to a PowerPoint slide telling you to get more, go to this website. They are driving traffic from YouTube to the website. We are able to do the same thing now with Facebook. You can upload video shorts to a Facebook page, promote them actively with the share mechanism so that it comes up on your Facebook page and links of it go out and it is available not only to your friends but to all of their friends. So it gets pretty wide exposure. You can drop it in your status update that I just posted this new video; you could tweet about it on Twitter and get the link exposed even more. You will get some traffic from it. If it is a short video and certainly with Facebook, ten minutes is not a good length, it is probably more of a two to three minute video type environment but the final scene saying "we've got a lot more of this stuff available, it is over here at this website". You will get some traffic and you will get some optins. You will find more of your niche audience than you would believe. Then you have things like Mike Koenigs' Traffic Geyser system. Trafficgeyser.com is a terrific way of getting a little video that you have shot posted on all the different video sharing sites relatively quickly. The way that technology was designed; you can blast your video out to thirty-two different sites simultaneously. Because video gets gobbled up by the search engines, it gets indexed very quickly and it can start appearing in organic search engine results literally within hours from the time that you posted it out there. That is a technology that I like, I have known Mike for some time and he is a terrific person, a real heart on his sleeve kind of guy and their product is excellent. I know him and Frank personally at a good level, I like them both an awful lot. I think they have made a terrific product. It is one that I use as well. I will be using it more in 2009 than I have in the past. Again, my partner with KeyThing had this belief system that we did not need it. Now I look at it and say it is a product I don't think I should live without. When you go one step beyond all of this, the biggest game changer is still to come and that is live streaming. I have been reading a lot about live streaming. Just for example, Ustream.tv is a new platform that is out, well it isn't completely new; it has been around for almost a year and a half. Ustream will allow you to have your own television show on the Internet completely free. Best example I can give you of somebody that is doing it regularly is Joel Comm. Every Wednesday Joel is doing his show and what Joel has done is brilliant. He actually took a corner of his office, set some lights in place, set some cameras in place, wired them all together and built himself a studio. Every week he hosts his own live weekly television show. In many, many respects it resembles Johnny Carson, Conan O'Brien, David Lettermen where he is sitting around and he is discussing topics with people relative to Internet marketing.
Because of the way Ustream is set up, it is completely interactive. People have a live chat function right in front of them. They can throw questions at Joel while he is on the air. He is able to look at his monitor which is setting in front of him and talk specifically to people around the world that are watching him. You are able to look at technologies like that and the thing that I would encourage you or anyone else is to sit down and start thinking, how can I use this? Because once you figure out how you can use that, I can assure you that you will be the only one in the world of teaching tarot who is hosting their own live weekly, biweekly, daily or whatever it might be Internet based television show. If you choose to do it, somebody within a year or so will invariably come running up going I do that too. It will be too late. You want to corner the market. First one wins. Let me give you an example of why this is all terribly important. There is a subject of conversation that I get involved in now and again, something I read about quite a bit, it is referred to casually as convergence. Malcolm Gladwell wrote a book called The Tipping Point and in there he mentioned the concept of convergence. But convergence in the world that I am in is known as the point in which high definition television and the Internet are married to one another. What that really means is that we are very, very close to the days, and it could be months away, but it is more likely eighteen months to two years away, when cable television and satellite television have a new competitor. In fact they already have one, but they are just not afraid of it yet. Trust me, they will be. That competitor will become the big bully on the block and it is Internet television. You see, on cable we are pretty well limited to 500 channels. On satellite they are pretty well limited to about 1,000 channels. On the Internet, there are no limits. In fact, I have read projections where there will be 500,000 to 5 million narrow niche television channels on the Internet. Today, you can go into the big box electronic retailer in your town and you can pick up an Apple TV box if you use Apple technologies. Or you could buy a Tivo digital video recorder; the one that was released in November of 07 was fully network capable. All that means is that it would plug into your Internet connection. Tivo is designed, it is just like a cable box, it is like a VCR, it is designed for you to record television shows. However, when you plug your Internet connection into it and you add a small browsing capability to it, you can now search the Internet looking for your favorite video clips, record them and show them on your television set. YouTube is all over this. You are going to be able to sit in your living room and search and watch your favorite YouTube videos on TV. Very, very soon you are going to be dividing at least some of your watching time between things that you would normally watch on broadcast or on satellite or on cable to searching for things that you like that are within the niches you are interested in on the Internet. Just like you would record House on Tuesday nights or American Idol on whatever night they show that, Tuesday or Wednesday night, just like those shows are recorded and sometimes watched later, you will be able
to scan the Internet, find the shows that you want, record them whatever time they are broadcast on the Internet and watch them later on your television set. Amanda : That is actually very close isn't it? Scott : We are there, we are actually there. It is going on all around us, it has just not been widely promoted just yet. Some of the savviest marketers I know have built these little studios like Joel Comm and they are creating programs now. They are starting to build a fan base around the world for what they do. It is becoming the new form of television, very narrow, niche specific, delivered on the Internet. If you are set up technology wise, you can watch it on your television set in your living room. The beauty of it is, if you go back to what I originally said was that where this is all headed is that high definition television and the Internet are getting married. They are going to become one form of medium. You are going to want to push away from this call and really long after the ten weeks are done Amanda, you are going to be thinking about the application, really for years to come. What I am hoping, when I created a course that I saw as transformative, what I was hoping is people would go back and listen to these and look at what is going on around them at the moment and figure out the application of some of these technologies. These are not going away. Amanda : No, they are not. Scott : Online video is just now scratching the surface of what is possible and what is going on has just barely begun. So you have a long, long road in front of you of ways, means and reasons to apply online video to what you do. Think of all kinds of different ways in which people would benefit from it and how you can position yourself through that medium. It is truly a game changer. The better we become at this, the more untouchable, unassailable our position becomes, if you are not afraid of the camera. I can tell you there are a number of people who will listen to this recording almost instantly conclude that doesn't apply to me because I can't do that. Amanda : This is just massive really, isn't it? It is huge. Scott : Yes. There are unlimited numbers of ways in which people will apply it right now we are just getting started. Just a couple of quick points and then I am going to wrap this up. I think it gives everybody an opportunity to sit back, to push back and think about how this applies. We really discussed two different kinds of online video technology. One is recorded and served and the other is
livestreaming. The recorded stuff you could do with virtually any sort of online camera. So as far as equipment, you could do it with a webcam, you could do it with a digital camera that has a movie setting on it. You could get a little Flip Camcorder for $120 or you could go get an inexpensive to decent camcorder. The only one that is going to be usable for the live streaming is going to be the camcorder because you actually have to be able to feed; you have to have a wire plugged in. With most of the cameras, I have not seen a whole lot of them other than camcorders that can be used, networked right into your computer and do live streaming. The streaming aspects of things, you want better quality audio gear, better quality microphone and you are going to want to have that microphone plugged into the camcorder somehow. There are little packages that you can get for less than $1,000 that will give you a good quality camcorder, a microphone that is plugged in or wirelessly connected to that camcorder. I am going to dig some resources out and show some people some different packages. I don't really want to get into the recommending of equipment other than you just go to your local retailer and tell them what you are trying to accomplish and they will be able to put a package together. You could do it from the very inexpensive cameras to record video which is then served up on an as needed or on demand basis to the live streaming which is produced live. There is the middle ground there where that is live streamed is also very easy to record and serve later in an on demand environment. Ustream is recorded, it is hosted on their box and people can watch it anytime. You can do live streaming without Ustream. Another one of the things that we did was create an online streaming technology and we actually used it in some seminars. We were streaming live around the world from the seminar hall. Amanda : I remember seeing that. I remember seeing, I can't remember who it was though, the figures for it, the numbers of people that they had listening in and watching in on the live streaming as opposed to the people who had actually made the effort to go and travel. It was phenomenal. I remember looking at the numbers and just thinking wow. Scott : That was us. We did Yanik Silver's event last March in Los Angeles. We provided the live streaming in that particular venue. We provided clips, they were shot live and they were streamed live. I think we had 11,000 total viewers and 7,000 of them were unique. So a good percentage of them came back and watched more than once. They were on six continents around the world. When you can go and speak on the stage, when you can bring in the people who didn't have the money to travel or who couldn't arrange their time to be able to get to where it was and they can now attend virtually and see it as if they were there and get access to the package that is being sold from the stage as if they were there.
It makes a big impact. Yet again, this is one of those things you see people fumbling around with, two years from now it will be very common but the ones that are doing it now are cashing in. So kind of keep that in the back of your mind too. As far as hosting your online video, there are a number of different ways to host it. I am not a big advocate of putting it on your own server. Even though most hosting companies will give you plenty of bandwidth and plenty of storage space for your online video files, ultimately what happens is if you have a lot of traffic you will end up with simultaneous connected user issues. Most of the time, the number of simultaneous connected users is limited to five. Particularly when your users are all trying to stream video at once, you will end up with video that buffers and chatters because you have too many people trying to access it the same time. Amazon's S3, what they call their simple storage solution, or S3 is actually the most affordable way I have seen to do it yet. You simply get an account with Amazon.com; it is called Amazon S3. It has unlimited bandwidth, you have unlimited connectivity, you pay only for the number of times the file is served. It is very affordable, pennies per play. So if you are serving up a video and a lot of people are going to watch it, you will have no issues getting it served up to a large audience with no connectivity issues. Every time it is played it is only going to cost you a few cents. Amanda : So you just take the code they create and basically embed that in your website? Is that what you do? Scott : Embed right into your website and save it and then your video will play. Perfect is not necessarily the standard, good is good enough. The people are buying you and not the video itself. They buy your attitude, your belief system, your body language, the tone of your voice; it all comes screaming off the camera. That is what people are interested in. So do it good enough and that is exactly how I look at it, which is how you should look at it. It is how everybody that listens to this course should look at it. Good is good enough. We have gone a bit over but I think we have shared some good ideas and some good information. Amanda : It has been brilliant.

Primary Purpose - Using online video to develop products and expand your authority position in the market. As you go along, check off the circles to each step completed.
Step 1 :
Listen to CD #6 from the Passive Income Avalanche system in its entirety Major Key Point #1: Its well established that 90 percent of all communication is non verbal. The beauty of online video is that it captures the nonverbal part of your communication. If you passionately believe in what you say, it comes screaming through the camera via your body language.
Major Key Point #2 : We live in a world with a two second rule. If I am coming in from a search engine and I am looking for a specific thing and I come to your site, you have about two seconds to capture my attention. Online Video will be the driving force for an awful lot of commerce to come. There is no other way of engaging people faster and better and beginning that relationship than online video. You can build relationships and deliver a call to action with a video better than any other media that we have ever seen on the internet
Major Key Point #3 : Some of the most important ways that you can use online video, first of all is on the landing page, or the squeeze page or what might be considered an opt-in page. You can use it on your website as a greeting or to demonstrate your product. You can tell a story, engaging people in the feel, you are building the relationship and you are setting them up for what you want them to do next.
Step 2 :
Establish an account on YouTube.com - Begin monitoring videos that use your major keywords. Also determine who has YouTube channels built around your keywords. Assess strength and weaknesses of the videos and of the channels to meet the needs of your niche market.

Step 3 :
Establish an account on Ustream.com - Determine when it's the right time for you to have your own Live TV show on the internet via Ustream. The way Ustream is set up, it is completely interactive. People have a live chat function right in front of them. They can throw questions at you while you are on the air. You'll be able to talk specifically to people around the world that are watching you allowing you to engage and continue to build relationships with your fans, followers and viewers. Major Key Point #4 : The biggest game changer in online video is live streaming. Ustream allows you to have your own television show on the internet completely free. You are going to be able to sit in your living room , search and watch your favorite programs via either YouTube or Ustream on Television.
Step 4 :
Establish an account with Amazon's S3 for video hosting - It has unlimited bandwidth, you have unlimited connectivity, you pay only for the number of times the file is served. It is very affordable, pennies per play. So if you are serving up a video and a lot of people are going to watch it, you will have no issues getting it served up to a large audience with no connectivity issues
Bottom line, online video, and streaming video is making an enormous difference in the way that marketers are positioning themselves.The big thing to remember is the ones who are doing it now, will dominate their niches in a few years if not really almost immediately from the time they start doing it. Long story short, IT IS A GAME CHANGER.
Chapter 7
Become an Expert in Social Media Marketing

This week we are going to talk specifically about what it takes to become an expert in social media marketing. This is the biggest trend that I have seen in marketing in the last fifteen years and it is literally changing the face of the way business is being done in industry after industry. If fact, I read something today that I thought was fascinating. Does anybody else on the call know who has more Twitter followers than anyone in the world? Amanda : No. Michael : No, who? Jay : No, no idea. Scott : It would be President Elect Obama. Jay : So there is probably a guy making a pretty handsome salary Twittering for President Elect. Scott : I would think so. I seriously doubt he is sitting there, got his thumbs going all day long because he has got some pretty big fish to fry right now. Jay : Well, according to one of the recent interviews I saw, I think maybe the Barbra Walters special, he is not even allowed; imagine that, to do a lot of that kind of stuff because of all the intelligence leaking and so forth. They were discussing how was he going to break his Blackberry habits. Scott : That will be interesting, they will certainly be monitoring his traffic in and out for certain, trying to see if there is any cryptograms or any other kind of hidden intelligence in any of the Twits that go out. Yeah, maybe the instant messaging that he would do on a private basis is going to have to go away. That is certainly going to be an interesting thing to watch.
Chapter 7 Become an Expert in Social Media Marketing
A year ago I might have said that this is a bit of a fad or a bit of a trend, and now it is clear that it is not. It really is something that is very, very real in our society. If we all want to be unforgettable speakers and be positioned in the marketplace as experts, my premise is if you do these things that we have been talking about the last six weeks, in no time at all you are going to be positioned as the top expert in the world on your niche topic. I say that word positioned, or perceived, because at the end of the day it really won't matter whether you are the smartest or the brightest or the most innovative person in your space, it only matters what people think you are because what they think you are, You are! When you have more followers and you have more friends and you have more people passing along your message to their friends who are also interested in your niche topic, you very, very quickly take over. Because we are out of the gate fast in 09, we have a chance to sprint right past everyone who is still trying to figure out what is going on. They don't understand what is going on in the marketplace, particularly with these new trends. It really is fascinating to talk to an awful lot of marketers who are simply struggling with the concept that the marketplace has changed right before their eyes. Now, is there anybody on the call that is surprised that some people are tipped upside down by change? Michael : No. Amanda : No. They don't embrace it at all. Jay : No. Scott : No question. Interestingly enough there are an awful lot of people who think that if they dig in their heels enough they will slow down the progress of change or the process of change. They will slow it all down; it will go back to what it used to be. I am not so sure it is every going to be what it used to be. There are an awful lot of things that were big when I was younger and now they are gone, you couldn't find them if you wanted to. With that, kind of as the frame up, we are going to talk about, the top fifteen social media tools. I am going to jump around on my page a little bit, no particular order except for maybe the top four or five. I've got number fifteen; I am listing as Word Press for websites and blogging. There are a lot of platforms out there, there are a lot of different ways to put a website together but I have now been working with Word Press for the better part of a year and I have to tell you, I've never seen anything like this. For prior businesses of mine, we built websites that cost many, many thousands of dollars to build content management tools and systems that do not work this well. The core code of it, the code that it lives on is free. For anybody who has a budget for something really great that is free, we
are talking about the right thing. The thing that you really ever need to pay for is somebody that will help you customize the look and feel that will make it ideally your own. I have partnered up with a guy who is one of the top Word Press guys in the country who is going to be re-skinning or developing themes and in many cases he will end up putting together a new website for people that will be just amazing quality, look and feel, with all the tools built in that it takes to really make it optimized so it can be the number one site for the keywords that you have chosen. My favorite platform, and I am using it as number fifteen in the web 2.0, or the social media tools kit is Word Press. The next one I have listed here, and I am not using this one yet but it is on my short list of things I need to experience a little bit more is a site called Squidoo. The guy that is behind this is the legendary author and marketer Seth Godin. Seth was looking for a web 2.0 way to promote books and other content and you can actually launch your own what he calls a squidoo lens. A squidoo lens is nothing more than a webpage that is keyword rich and it is there for you to tell the story about your niche topic, tell it from your perspective. What happens an awful lot is, the search engines pick up these squidoo lenses rather quickly. Other people who are interested in your niche will often times link to it and share that with their readers. We don't really have it in this ten week program, but if we were covering optimization strategies a little bit deeper, optimizing your website for the search engines, you would know that one of the major, major factors is the number of people that link to your site, that link to the pages within your site, to specific content that you put up. Squidoo lenses have this really, really high tendency of being linked to creating inbound links to your website and to the pages that you are referencing. That is certainly a big one and it is one you should play with at squidoo.com. One that I do use, these next two that I actually use virtually every single time that I post to my blog is Reddit and propeller. Reddit is really just a social networking site. It is, I guess you could say it is a news-sharing site. The whole idea is you can share your stories. Whenever you post to your blog in your sequence of things that you will do immediately afterward, you go to Reddit and you give them the link to it. Is everybody with me so far? If you post a page to your website talking about the changes in the real estate market in Atlanta and how a new agent can jump all over it and get a head start toward making $100,000 in their first year. That is something that people may be searching for so you post it to these news-sharing sites. Reddit.com is a really excellent resource there. Another one just like it is called propeller. Propeller, spelled exactly like you would see it, p-r-o-p-e-l-l-er.com is part of the AOL network and it is very similar to Reddit. It is a great place to post your news and I find very, very interestingly that when I look at the inbound links to the unforgettablespeakers.com site, I find virtually every time that I have posted to Reddit or to propeller, I find that link has been picked up by Google and by Yahoo as a link pointing to my website. Unless you want to budget for and spend advertising dollars, you are going to want to become reasonably good at optimizing your site and getting organic search traffic. To that end, I
mentioned last week that I had started to see some really interesting turns on all the work I have been doing on all my search engine optimization. I told my wife on Saturday morning I actually had gotten an extra Christmas gift that she hadn't thought of or had to buy and that was from the search engines. As of Friday morning I had five of my keywords on page one of the search engine results. Five of them were in the top ten; I had twelve more that were on page two and three more on page three. In total, twenty of the top 34 keywords that I am following were all in the first three pages. Now it is not a surprise to me that all of a sudden 16% of my website traffic is coming from search engines. It is just doing some very simple things over and over, week after week, until it starts to grow. It is just like growing a garden. You plant the seed, you tend to the seed, you fertilize it and water it and all of a sudden you discover it is growing, same thing. Inbound links is a big part of that and that is where Propeller and Reddit come into play. Another, probably two more that fit into this same general category, they call them news sharing sites so to speak. I guess probably the more correct term is a social bookmarking site. Those two would be Technorati and Digg and I guess if you wanted to throw an extra one in there it would be Stumbleupon. Digg is more of a news site, so much like when I post to Propeller and Reddit, I frequently post to Digg as well. Occasionally if you have read some of my blog posts you will see me mention in there if you like the story, Digg it and I put a link right in there to Digg. I have not gotten a lot of response to that, but the point is you have got to ask if you want to receive. When people start to Digg your story, it gets a much, much greater chance that you are going to start showing up higher in their results on Digg itself. There are actually people that sit around and read the stories on Digg all day long. Digg is a place for news and then Stumbleupon.com is a site that is considered a social bookmarking site and that is a place where you just list your website and you list some of the keywords that you are built for. You don't have to do anything else to it after that. What happens is that people who are members of Stumbleupon get a link, most of the time it is installed on your Google toolbar and when they are bored, lonely or looking for something to do, or learn something different or interesting, they click on the stumble button on their search bar. Based on their interests, Stumbleupon shows them websites that they probably have never seen. Stumbleupon is just going to present your information to people who might not have heard of you any other way. They have expressed an interest to Stumbleupon about your niche topic but they don't yet know you. Maybe you are not showing up high enough in the search engines just yet. They click this button and all of a sudden the browser changes to something that stumble is feeding them and it might be your site. If you have done a good job of isolating what people see on that first page and it is very, very clear what you want them to do, that single response that you want on your homepage of your website, really narrowing down the choices that people have when they come
to that landing page, driving them into a single response. If you are using that in combination with something like Stumbleupon, you begin picking up some subscribers pretty readily and it is all free traffic. Stumbleupon is another social bookmarking site that I think will be useful to you. Technorati.com is a blog referral site. It is an incredibly useful tool for finding blogs within your niche marketplace. I have probably got six or eight blogs that I check in and read regularly. I will spend half an hour to an hour sipping on a cup of coffee and I will be reading what the other people in my space are blogging about. So that my name gets out there to a circle of people that don't know me yet, I will comment on their blogs. When you get up to speed on this idea that you can comment on these blogs and you have an actual signature file that you use that includes a link back to your site, you get two benefits out of it. One is you get your name exposed and two your name and your website address. But two, unless they have set up their blog specifically to say there is no following of links within comments, and most of them are not savvy enough to turn that off, you will end up with a link back to your website which is useful when Google is trying to find you, decide what page rank to give you and all the other nice things that Google can do for you. That is where Technorati is useful. You will learn a lot about your competitors there by just going in and typing in your major keywords and seeing which blogs exist on your topic. I even will get an idea for an occasional blog post from there. Blog post that I did about public speaking coaching, my view, was written on something I read in someone else's website in Technorati. I was sort of raising the bar a little bit because I thought what they were putting out there was really great information if we were still in 2004. But in 2008 going into 2009 it was a little bit dated. You will see me do that a little more maybe than I should. I tend to challenge the people in my industry to get with the program. These are the kinds of tools people really, really need to be on top of. The kinds of things we have been teaching are useful if you really want to be a marketer of your speech. If you simply want to be a technically sound speaker, I am not the guy you want to talk to, I am not the guy that you want to train with. If you want to become an excellent marketer of your speech, there is probably nobody else out there that can do what I am doing. I am not shy about telling people that. Technorati is a great resource, and I think you will find that to be useful. I think I skipped over one that is called Mixx. Mixx.com is very similar to Digg. The description that I have here says that Mixx is your link to web content that really matters. It is like Digg but it is a more open environment and it is not as technical or as techie as Digg is. I should probably throw that in there, if there is a downside to Digg it is that it was originally envisioned as a site where all the tech geeks would share their tips and their news. They are not as open to business news or maybe a little bit of the kind of material you are teaching Amanda would not be as well received on Digg as it would be on Mixx. Mixx.com is another one that you will probably just want to remember, when you are blogging just have an account bookmarked, just log in real quick and post a link to your new
blog post and let the people who live in the world of Mixx learn about you. Really great, anything you can do to get your message in front of world audiences and just get your name out there over and over and over again is going to be useful to you somehow, somewhere and always a good idea. I would say next in my list, I am going to switch to Flickr. Flickr is probably the best known image sharing site and certainly a, I guess they call it a social photo sharing site. The interesting thing about Flickr is that you can easily plug this in to your website and what they refer to as they call building a badge, it shows Flickr photos on your website. You upload your photos to Flickr from all the different places you have gone and all the different places you interact or network and as you are uploading them to Flickr you want to tag them with the names of the people in the pictures. Now the reason that is useful is because there are people searching those names. All of a sudden up pops a photograph because Google spiders over the Flickr page all day long, grabbing all the new photos and indexing them in Google images. Now all of a sudden your picture with, well the picture I took with Matt Basek, the picture I took with Joe Sugarman have both been indexed in Google and right there where everybody can see them. So if someone types in Joe Sugarman in Google Images, they will find a picture of me. Sometimes they go, well who is that guy and why is he hanging out with the great marketer Joe Sugarman? Then they Google your name and the next thing you know they are finding the rabbit trail that you live on and they are stopping by to say hello and you grab yourself another user. Flickr is extremely useful. You can upload an unlimited amount of photos for free. You can build this badge and imbed it right into your site. Rather than use up your own storage on your own server for all these photos, you use the one they have. It is going to be very robust; the pictures will not slow your website down a bit like they would if they were stored on your own server. You also get the advantage of having those photos indexed regularly. As long as you have taken the time to tag all the photos, when people are searching names if you are in a photograph with someone of that name, well there you are. People find you as well. I think you will find that to be extraordinarily useful. Two more that we covered last week, and gosh, as I sit here looking through my own notes, and my own lists I could probably easily stretch this list from fifteen to twenty. YouTube has got a lot of neat stuff going on. Not only are they the number one most visited video sharing site of I think there are now at least 400 video sharing sites, but YouTube gets about 99% of all videos being served worldwide are being watched on YouTube. So if you are going to be creating videos and posting them to promote your site, to promote your business, where do you suppose you want to put them? Amanda : YouTube. Scott : I would think. Everybody agree with that?
Michael : Absolutely. Jay : Absolutely. Scott : You know I covered, I think we talked a little bit about this last week and I know I have blogged about it in the past, that the number of people who are doing YouTube at a high level is very, very small. What I mean by that is there are, if you just go into YouTube and look at YouTube channels, and type your keyword in under YouTube channels, and see how few people, you will find very, very few people. In fact, here is an experiment for everybody. Type your main keyword into a Google search engine, the number one word that you have dug out that you want to rank for and make a note, in the top right you will see how many pages reference that word. Then go to YouTube and go to YouTube channels and type in the same keyword and see how many YouTube channels exist on your main keyword. In the one example that I came up with it was ridiculous. There were like fourteen channels for public speaking and there were like six million pages for public speaking. Now if you are trying to get your message to the masses, you want to be one of the fourteen or one of the six million, when you think of it in those terms. Amanda : Just on that Scott if I could perhaps give you an example. I haven't really started using YouTube yet, but just to give you an example, a friend of mine is a marine, a yacht surveyor. Just messing about a couple of weeks ago, she had a short video of her and a group of friends went on a sailing trip last summer. She just kind of put a short video together with some stills and different things, literally just kind of messing about just trying to see what she could do put this ten-minute video up on YouTube, really just this kind of very, very experimental. When you talk about this indexing it, literally within 24 hours, every time you typed in her name in Google, there were that many links and references and the first sort of page and a half was this YouTube video she had done. She hadn't even got the channel properly set up or anything else, she just kind of put this video up. That then linked to her, linked to her name, linked to her site and also as well within 48 hours there was a couple of other sites to do with yachts and boats different things that had picked up, linked and referenced this video and actually got that on their own site as well. I mean, we were absolutely staggered with it because we had no idea what to expect with it. This was literally from messing about with it. I think if we are approaching it from an actual planned marketing perspective, and I think that is what is going to differentiate us from a lot of these people, is that there are videos and things on YouTube in all of our respective channels, much of it is a lot of unprofessionally done rubbish or certainly in my field it is. I think if we can actually approach this where it is planned, organized and we have actually professionally kind of planned the series
of what we are going to put out, where you have talked about us kind of ruling the world in our niche, I can quite see how that through YouTube, just having seen the results of my friend got, is very, very possible, very, very feasible. Scott : Certainly it is. In fact, I am going to pick on you Jay for a second because you have missed the last couple of weeks so that puts you in the target. I am just kidding you Jay. I have typed in to Google search engine real estate trainer Georgia. There are 2,230,000 pages that reference those keywords. Now, granted that is a broad match, so let me add quotes and see what happens if I make it more of an exact match. Jay : You may want to add agents in there too because that overlaps with the investment type trainers and coaches as well. Scott : Okay. There are no results found for real estate trainer Georgia but without quotes again 2,230,000 pages. We are just doing this as a quickie but you go over to YouTube into the channels and let's see. Under channels there are exactly none. Jay : Look up real estate coach and you may see a few channels. I mean I say few I mean under half a dozen. Scott: Alright, under real estate coach Georgia. Jay : Oh, you are using Georgia, yeah, zero. Scott : Yeah, in Georgia there are, well three video results and I think in channels there were none real estate trainer in Georgia channels. There were a grand total real estate trainers in Georgia videos, a grand total of sixty two. An awful lot of them are from one group, North Metro REIA. They have the most videos but interestingly enough they have not organized them into a channel. A guy named Rick Duda. Atlanta Home Staging, vacant home stager. Maybe he has a lot of key words stuck in his headlines. The point is, it is relatively easy to dominate these search results with something like YouTube. Now, the other thing that we covered last week that I think is still in a lot of people's minds is going to be very leading edge, I think by 2010, it is going to be more mainstream that anybody would believe, maybe even than I would believe. We also talked about Ustream. Ustream is a tool that allows you to host your own live, streaming television show on the Internet and to do it for free. Now, I don't have all of that queued up to search it for you here, but I would bet you there is nobody doing anything remotely similar to any of your niche topics on Ustream and doing it on a regular basis. You might find somebody that has
done one time but there is nobody that has made that a part of their broadcast schedule and we talked a little bit about that early in the course and we are going to touch on that more next week as we start pulling all these pieces together is making sure everybody is taking the time to literally get a twelve month calendar and mark out the dates you are going to broadcast certain things. In my case it is Tuesdays and Fridays I add to the blog. Three times a day I put something up on Twitter. Once a week I am going to be putting up a podcast and soon those are going to be video podcasts. Once every two weeks or so, I am going to be adding a new video to YouTube. These are all things that are on my calendar and once they are on your calendar and if they are weeks in advance, they are scheduled, you can start sitting down and thinking through what you actually want to cover weeks before you get there, it can be a powerful tool. Ustream is one that is still on the edge, it is on the outer ring of the radar but keep your eye on that because as we cross over this point in February where all television broadcasts come down and they are replaced by cable, or digital cable. I don't know if you have been following that but the broadcast signals, you are going to have to have a different kind of receiver if you receive a television broadcast because all signals will be digital as of February 17th. The old broadcast spectrum is being returned to the government for their use. Everything will be digital at that point. That is the first major shoe that had to fall in this concept called convergence. Convergence is a point when high definition broadcast and the Internet become one medium. That is when we are going to start seeing hundreds of thousands is not millions of channels of Internet television. Your cable box or your satellite box will be connected to the Internet and instead of watching the limited number of choices on your television that they offer you, you will be able to search niches and find whatever you want and watch it on TV. This is all coming, you can mark it down, it is coming. In fact, you can already do it if you are so inclined. Apple TV will allow you to do it as will Tivo. They both have a box that can sit in your network and connect to your television. You can search clips and watch them on your television now. You want to be one of the big players in three years, five years, begin broadcasting that stuff and building archives of it now and you will be so far out in front that you will have a library of things that will feed you and your family for a generation, in my opinion. That is Ustream and a big one that I think you should keep in mind. Now I just read the other day that Google, or YouTube will have their own live streaming deal, just like Ustream. They were supposed to have it out of the gate in December but it doesn't look like they got it done. It is on the watch list and I will report to you as soon as I see it. It will be a new competitor to Ustream and if it comes from the house of Google, it is probably going to be good. It is going to fit
their advertising model and for that purpose alone it is going to be free so very, very useful. My last four, one that you don't hear much of anymore but you should is RSS Feed. Has everybody heard the term RSS at some point? Amanda : Yeah. Never quite got the grips with how to use it or what to do with it, but heard the term. Scott : It stands for really simple syndication. What it is, is a tool that you could build right into your website and you put this little radio signal type button right on your website in plain view of everybody and you mention it from time to time in your communications that people can essential subscribe to your feed is what they call it. Once they have subscribed to your feed, without you doing anything else, anytime you post something that is in your RSS, it will automatically show up in the RSS reader of every single person that subscribes. So you don't have to notify them about blogs or articles or press releases or any of the other things that you are doing, pictures you have added to your Flickr account, videos you have added to YouTube.You don't have to go out of your way to tell these people or send a broadcast announcement links to it and the little bit of information that you share about it will automatically be disseminated to everyone who has subscribed to your feed. Can you see the usefulness of that? I mean, imagine that there are a hundred thousand people a month who are interested in your topic and you get just 10% of them that subscribe to your feed. These RSS readers by the way were something that was a huge, huge part of what Vista was all about.It kind of got lost in the wash when Vista landed with a huge thud as maybe the worst operating system for a computer ever to be devised. Michael : I would agree with that. Scott : One of those mean old things that was built into it was the desktop reader. Microsoft was all excited about this idea that your reader for RSS was built right on your desktop and you could just simply be browsing web pages and click a little button in the browser and it would automatically add these feeds directly to your desktop reader. So once a day, just like you would grab the newspaper off the front porch and peruse the headlines, you would simply click a button, open your reader and see all the latest stuff that has flown into your box overnight. These are not emails where people are scamming you, these are actual content. So it is very much like your own customized newspaper with all of the things that you are interested in. I feel it is very, very useful and it is one that few people have begun to use well. I am
just going to suggest that you do a little homework on that and kind of put that off on the side of your map as to how we are going to continue, we are going to find ways to entice those people are in your free section of your continuum to subscribe to your feed. We are going to create incentives for them to do that. When you can give them enough of an incentive to say yeah, I'd rather just receive it as a feed, then you are going to get a big list of readers. When you put an occasional offer in front of them, they will see it, a spam filter won't filter it out, it will be a part of some other communication that you are doing. When you become a trusted sender and they are actually opening their reader and they are reading your stuff, you will be miles ahead of what anybody else has even begun to think about doing in your space. Again, there is very, very few people that are savvy on this stuff so this is a chance for you to drive your roots deep and get to it while everyone else is still stumbling around trying to figure out what to do. So RSS, is a big one. The next two are both social networking sites. I am active on both of them, one much more than the other, LinkedIn and Facebook. LinkedIn is very similar to Facebook. It is more of a professional base, I am sure everybody here knows what it is. You probably all have a profile on it. The big thing I want you to remember about LinkedIn is to keep your profile up to date and begin to interact with the people that are in your circle. Probably the most overlooked secret to using Facebook and LinkedIn is to identify 20% of the people in your friends list or your network and interact with them, build relationships with them. It is actually pretty simple, you spend maybe a half an hour twice a week going through that list and visiting some of these people's sites so that you touch them maybe twice a month. That is how you keep a social network social. So many people have gotten this whole social networking thing so vastly wrong that they see it as a chance to dump some advertising on you. We have all experienced it. I got one last night that I saw somebody had figured out how to game Facebook. Facebook has some holes in it and this is one of them. I will just tell you, what she did was she launched a group and then went out and did a series of invitations, must have taken hours, to invite everybody in her friends list, she had over 2,000 friends. You can only invite them to join your group 100 at a time. So she launches a group, invites all of the people in her friends list to join that group and whether they have responded yes or no at this point doesn't matter, she is able message the group. She spammed everybody with this thing of Get my free DVD, it is 100% free. I only read it will a little bit of annoyance because I knew I had not opted into her group. So I looked at it long enough to try and figure out how she did that, then I deleted the email and I officially said no I am not joining this group which makes it, she can't communicate to me any longer as a member of that group. I was actually thinking about launching a campaign on the public wall of Facebook to say everybody that received one of these should request their free DVD because if it is truly totally free and she is going to burn and mail all of these DVD's, it would be very, very nice Happy New Year's surprise for her to have to ship 5,000 of them at
her expense. That would be one of those things that would be an expensive lesson. She was probably hoping to get twenty or thirty people that would opt in, or maybe 100 but not 2,500 or 5,000. When you have to burn and mail that many DVD's well you are going to get a hefty bill in the mail for the expense of that. Nonetheless, interact with the people in your networks, roughly 20%. Just kind of figure out how many friends you have. On both sites I actively go and try to add people to my network on a regular basis. I don't do it as often as I could, or as often as maybe I should. I am pretty judicious with Facebook because you are limited to 5,000 friends, LinkedIn has no limit, and you can have as many people in your network as you want. In Facebook you can only have 5,000 and I am trying to reserve most of those spaces for people I actually know or people who are speakers. Very powerful tools. How many different ways, everybody here probably with the exception of Michael is actually working Facebook pretty straight forward. Am I right about that? Jay : Correct. Amanda : Yeah, I've just got a profile. I haven't really done anything else with it. Scott : Well, as you begin to roll out your marketing, I think you are going to find it to be an incredibly useful tool. But as far as the Facebook friends goes, just understand what the impact of having 5,000 of your own friends could be because when you post something to the board of, well you post it let's say to your status, what you posted to your status goes on all 5,000 of your friend's status as well. But it also goes out, when they comment on your status, which a lot of people do, it now pushes your status report out to their friends and I tried to do some math on it one day and it was astronomical how many people could read your status report if only two people commented on it. You know, 5,000 times 5,000 times 5,000 and it is off the chart. It is very powerful. How it is all being used at this point, there are a thousand different uses for it. The biggest thing that I try to do is I still try to keep it a social network. So I want to be actively touching certain people in m circles and I use the share regularly to let people who are reading my status or who are in my friends group know when I have done something that I want them to see, updated my blog, added a page to my website, scheduled an event. The third thing that I have done inside of Facebook is I have built a group. A niche group of people that are actively interested in discussions on your niche topic will be hugely valuable. When I started the group, I created my Facebook profile for the first time in January or February of 08. I did nothing with it until September. In September by whatever means, and I have no idea how it happened, I had about 300 friends, high 200's, low 300's somewhere in that range. Now I've got almost 2,500 friends and then in October I launched the speakers' passive profits group, which everybody here is a part of with the exception of Michael.
The speakers' passive profits group now has as of earlier today, 787 members. If you look at the discussion board, when I post topics for discussion, we routinely are getting ten, fifteen, twenty people commenting on the actual discussion. Which might seem like a small number, but it is actually a fairly high number if you compare it to all the other discussion groups in my space, in the niche markets that I am in. There is a number of speakers oriented discussion groups. I think one of the reasons why I've got a lot of people discussing things is we give value, we talk about real things, real issues, we solicit people's opinions, I want to know what they think and more importantly I am really militant about people spamming the discussion board. If they put a link to something that is irrelevant to the discussion in any post that they do, it immediately comes down. I take it off the board immediately. If they are trying to promote a JV of some sort, I remind them that we have a JV board and they can go there and put it there, then it is harmless. If they try to post it in the middle of a discussion that we are having, what it does is it shuts down the discussion. The other thing that I do with the group that gets even more interactivity is I comment back to some of the people that have commented. I will read through those comments that people are making and then I will jump in there and add to the comment and stir it up a little bit more. Send another message out saying hey, this discussion is really taking off, have you had a chance to comment. It is what happens; you get some really good discussions going. When you are positioned as the thought leader in your space, people are expecting you to lead these discussions and they are kind of counting on you to take that role. That is Facebook and LinkedIn. We didn't cover much on LinkedIn, but the bottom line of it is, it is more of a professional network, Facebook is much more of a social network and they are in my top five. Finally, my number one is Twitter. Really all it is, is a micro blogging platform. Its premise is for you to build relationships with people and answer the question what are you doing right now? The whole idea is for people to see that other side of your life. It is okay to show them your business side of your life and to tell them what you are doing in business, but just like you would in real life, you throw things out that you are actually doing. I am eating a meatball sandwich. I don't know why that would be something of interest to people but it is. I posted one a few weeks ago or a week or so ago, we were at Universal Studios. Universal Studios Florida has this ride that is the Popeye's Barge. They post this cute little sign as you are walking through the line that says you are going to get wet and in some cases you are going to get soaked so smile. They are not kidding. This thing, you are going through this river ride on this circular barge where the sides are all open. There is water coming at you from every imaginable direction. I posted on Twitter that the next day my shoes were still wet and I ended up with like 25 people that commented on that. People that had been on the ride and knew what I was talking about and people were saying :
I wish I was in Florida and able to do something like that. I love that theme park. Isn't it too cold for that? If you didn't want to get wet, why did you do it in the first place? All kinds of things, but everybody that commented stopped long enough to acknowledge or recognize that they were commenting to me. We live in a big, impersonal world and when people can learn a little about you as a person and what you are doing right this minute tells them an awful lot. You throw out there that you just updated your blog, it is fascinating how many people will jump on that, they will pop right over there to read it, particularly people who are interested in your topic. Twitter is a micro blog; you can add 140 characters per post. So it is not a big, long message. It keeps you very, very tight and it is extremely useful in just building relationships with your market and letting people know things that you are doing right now and the idea is to post to it regularly. In fact it becomes almost addictive to post to it many, many times a day. So that is a tool that you are going to want to use. You have no limit on the number of followers. With Facebook you have friends, with Twitter you have followers. You can get your message in front of the masses very, very quickly. When you look at this most recent election cycle and how Senator Obama won the election, I can assure you he reached people with Twitter and shared messages with them, John McCain will never understand Twitter in his entire life. That is the generation that came out in mass to vote for him. They voted for him in a big way and they follow what he is up to. If they don't take it away from him for national security reasons, it will be probably the most interactive Presidency we have had and maybe will ever have until the next guy takes social network to the next level. It will be interesting to see.
Become an Expert in Social Media Marketing

Primary Purpose - Accelerate your attraction model by becoming an instant expert in Social Media Marketing. As you go along, check off the circles to each step completed
Step 1:
Listen to CD #7 from the Passive Income Avalanche system in its entirety Major Keypoint of this lesson : Listed below are my top 15 Social Media Marketing tools. 1. Wordpress free platform for blogging, websites and content management 2. Mixx.com News sharing site 3. Squidoo.com article platform 4. Ezinearticles.com article sharing site 5. Reddit.com - News sharing site 6. Propeller.com News sharing site 7. Digg.com News Sharing Site 8. Flickr.com Photo Sharing Site 9. RSS Feed Really Simple Syndication, an easy way to syndicate your content. 10. Technorati.com Blog Directory 11. YouTube.com Video Sharing site 12. Ustream.com Free Streaming Video platform 13. Linkedin.com Professional Networking site 14. Facebook.com Personal Networking site 15. Twitter.com Micro blogging platform
Step 2 : Step 3 : Step 4 : Step 5 : Step 6 : Step 7: Step 8 : Step 9 :
Set up profiles on Linkedin, Facebook and Twitter actively begin building connections on Linkedin, adding friends on Facebook and followers on Twitter. Share, share, share (not sell) ! For every blog post you make, share or notify mixx, reddit, propeller and digg of your updates. Utilize the share function on your Facebook page, update your Facebook status and notify your Twitter followers of your new post. Establish a Flickr account : Utilizing a free wordpress plugin, add your flickr photos to your web/blog site. Set up an account on Technorati.com and make sure your blog is listed in the Directory. Repurpose your content into articles and submit to Ezinearticles.com and Squidoo.com (See lesson 4 on repurposing). Set up accounts on YouTube and Ustream: Begin sharing video with your Niche Market.(lesson 6)
Ensure that your website has RSS Feed setup and encourage your market to subscribe to your feeds. Encourage your readers to share your content. Utilize the free wordpress plugin called Sociable to make this process effortless.
Chapter 8
Ensuring a Workable Plan Is In Place

This week we are going to cover probably one of the most critical pieces of the whole process, which is insuring that a workable plan is in place. Amanda, have you downloaded the form off the website? Amanda : Yes I have. Scott : Up to this point, the drawing may be somewhat familiar to you but this is an advanced version of the drawing, of the product continuum. We have added a whole lot of information to the bottom of it because now we are at the point where all of the pieces, with the exception of two small parts have been presented. All the students have all the information they need to put a workable plan in place. What I was trying to do here was create a real depiction of what the actual process is. As we have covered in weeks past, the first and most important element of this whole process of being positioned as the number one expert in your niche in the world is largely a perception process and then it is a positioning process. It requires that the person who is behind it completely understands the Internet is by its nature an information vehicle not a commerce vehicle. Yet there are billions and billions of dollars of commerce done over the Internet but almost without exception sales go to people who have relationships with their market. In other words, people buy from people that they like, people buy from people they trust. How do we get someone who comes to us for the very first time to like us and to trust us? The easiest way to do it is to find a very clear value proposition and the value initially being free. So when you come to my website, I am going to give you some information that is extremely valuable just simply because you are trading your time to come there, I am not going to charge you anything for that information. We have talked at length how we create those things, how we create that level of content that is free and virtually every single speaker out there is going to have their own twist on it. Some are going to offer free e-courses, some are going to offer free Teleseminars, some are going to do free webinars, some will do MP3 recordings, some will do videos, some will really do all of it, white papers, reports, any number of things that people are going to create on that base line, that initial level of relationship building. The fact of the matter is we have to use free content to establish relationships. In the process of maturing those relationships through having conversation
Chapter 8 Ensuring a Workable Plan Is In Place
with your marketplace, slowly but surely that relationship matures to one where trust is established. The point where trust is established is what we call the first level of conversion. The first level of conversion is the very first time you put an offer in front of that audience and some say yes with their money. When they break out their credit card and they put their money on the table and they say I like you, I trust you and I want what you have got and they give you the money. Then you have got yourself a customer. Up to that point you've got somebody who is just keeping an eye on you and they may or may not be engaged in the process. They may or may not be really seriously interested in what you do. But the very minute that they go ahead and put their credit card on the table, you know that is somebody you can work with potentially for years to come. It is really a valuable thing to study a business over time. I am a little bit out of context here, but just as a side note, scribble this in the column somewhere, as your business matures, you are going to want to try to understand or figure out in some way what the lifetime value of a customer is. That revolves around two things; what the average lifespan of a customer is, how long do they remain on your list before they hit the little unsubscribe button at the bottom and how much money do they spend during that period of time. You start to establish some numbers here; you will begin to see patterns. You will know within a year or two what their life spans are, unless they continue to run longer than two years. Then you know you are really hitting it out of the park because people's interests change over time. Somebody that may be interested in your topic today might find themselves moved on to something else in a year or two. There is some urgency to work that relationship a little bit and to earn their trust to sell them a few things along the way provided they are hungry for your content, why not put your offers in front of them. Which is why, it is really, really important not to sit back and casually develop things over a long, long period of time because the thing that I might want, you haven't developed yet. This is where the repurposing of your content is so valuable. You can see in this picture, even though all the pieces are not shown there, you can imagine where the piece about advanced product development fits in. The idea that we are going to record everything, everything that we do we are going to record it. You can see where the idea of repurposing everything fits. Then you can see how the promotion begins to feed that (free) base level. If we have got a very clear and established continuum, we know what the products are and we have aggressively begun to record those products and then we have repurposed out of those products a whole series of other products that fill in the continuum, then all that remains to make a workable plan out of it is putting all of the marketing pieces on the table, sorting through them and deciding which ones belong to your plan, which ones don't, which ones you are going to start with, which ones you will add later. You will begin testing and tweaking and experimenting with all these different models. Every single one of them will have one purpose and that is to get a relationship established with somebody who you can do business with over a long period of time. Does that make sense?
Amanda : Yes, that makes absolute sense. Scott : So, you know what I have tried to do here is provide a visual format that makes it really clear what the mission is and that is why the only two things that are filled on the continuum now are the free content level and the first level of conversion. It just shows what the job is, establish a relationship and establish trust. From there, then your continuum combined with, you don't even have to be a really good copyrighter at that point because you are dealing from a place of relationship. One of the marketers that come to mind when I think of that is Mike Filsaime. Mike is by no means a great copywriter; adequate at best is even how I think he would describe himself. My gosh because he is so likable, he piles up the sales People like Mike and they trust Mike to have sorted through lots and lots of different things and to present the ones to me that he would use. They have a relationship with him, they are on his list and they trust him, they bought something from him and now they trust him to buy something else. It works in every case. In fact, on the training call we did today, the intro call we did today for the people at Facebook, I made a statement that when you get that first level of conversion, the game is over and you have just won. What I meant by that is that from that point forward, everything else in your continuum, some percentage of your readers, some percentage of your fan base will buy no matter what you put out. Some will and some won't. So it makes perfect sense to have your continuum in place and to keep deepening and widening that relationship with your audience. As you will see in week 9, JV strategies also fit nicely into this mix as well because it is through that trust based relationship that you are in a position to start partnering up with other people who have products that would be useful or valuable to your audience and introducing those people to your audience and earning rightly so a commission for that when they choose to buy. It all comes as a function of your relationship. That is the last piece that gets overlaid on top of this is the JV strategy and at that point you have got a rock solid deal. You are in a position to monetize your niche audience. Let's just walk through the different points in case there is any confusions about it, you can see we have laid in here blogging and websites. Now, I have made a decision now to bring to the table the guys that I have been working with for a while, for many months now and after doing my own internal research I would have to say the guys at WPCommunities.com are in the top two or three WordPress people in the country. Let's just say they are really, really talented at what they do. You see, because we have one of the partners there is absolutely and expert at the technical side of WordPress. In fact, he has been through every WordPress meeting that comes through Florida and he has been certified by WordPress as an expert in their platform. So he knows the ins and outs, the ups and down how that whole platform works. Then you've got his partner, who is more the face of
WPCommunities, who is by trade an optimization expert. So he knows how to take a well constructed WordPress website and optimize it for the marketplace that they serve. Routinely he can show off one example after another of people that they have done business with that are sitting at the number one spot in the search engines for their major keywords. That is impressive to me because the vast majority or web designers know nothing about convergence and sales, they know nothing about optimization and therefore they are able to sell you something pretty and something that looks nice and it is wonderful to show your friends. They can all pat you on the back and tell you how great your website is just before you leave for your job in the morning or when you come home in the evening. Because you are still not free of your work, you still have to have outside work to pay your bills. These guys really understand it. Blogging is just such a critical piece now because instead of carrying on a monolog where we are just telling you stuff, the blog offers people the opportunity to speak back and to tell you if you are on track or off track with what they are thinking. Therein lies some real value to understand what your market wants. In fact, one of the things you will see in my new site, the Unforgettable Speakers site, it will be revealed what we have done to it. It will look significantly different from the one we have now and there is a reason for it. First, I have not established enough optimization. The second thing is there is not enough conversation going on back and forth between the parties. I found a plug-in for WordPress, which is extremely useful that allows me to create surveys with a couple of clicks. Amanda : Actually on the blog? Scott : On the blog. Amanda : Ok, that is useful. Scott : I can add survey questions right to the middle of the blog post if I want. In this case, it is always going to occupy the top right corner of the page. I want it to be one of the most visible things is what we are currently asking our audience to consider and to talk to us about it. To choose from a series of responses and tell us what they think of these particular poll questions so to speak, survey questions. I am beginning to formulate the basis of the next level of this kind of content and I will tell you what I am seeing is that the next level up from this is when your material gets syndicated out to other sites and then only about half or maybe a little bit less than half of all the people that are following you are actually doing it on your website. The rest of them are doing it through your syndicated partners' websites. They are hearing about you, reading about you, they
are listening to you, watching you, your videos and such. They are drawn back into and joining your list as a result of seeing you somewhere else. Amanda : That makes sense. That is powerful isn't it? Scott : Oh my goodness. I was asked a question by a trusted friend not too long ago who said would you rather have a hundred people come to your blog and read your article or would you rather have your material appear on a hundred different blogs? Amand : Well the latter has got to be better, right? Scott : I would certainly think so. If you have a hundred people coming to your site, or if it is available in a hundred different places, well by its nature syndication is powerful. It expands your reach to places you could never go, to places you would never think of. Amanda : Or even know about probably. Scott : Exactly. These may be people who are interested in your topic but only read magazines, they don't use the Internet much. Then all of a sudden your material is appearing there because it is not at all uncommon for some of these online presences to also have print presence, they often times repeat the same content. You could find yourself in a syndication deal having your material republished in other places and even for a fee; those are all things that are possible. When you are positioned as the number one expert in the world on your topic, doors are going to open for you that you may not even realize exist. The next one over from blogging and web sites is Forums. We have talked in weeks past about finding the forums but the key to a workable plan is following the formula. We have also provided everybody in our group a formula for using the forum. Essentially, that formula allows you to go ahead and really just drop your name out there over and over and over as a trusted advisor on a topic. Essentially all you want to do in any given forum scenario is just hang around the forum and leave comments and try to be helpful to other forum visitors up to a predetermined point. When you get to about thirty or forty postings and then your strategy shifts a little bit. At that point you go back and you upload a very carefully written profile about yourself and a signature file. The way most of these forum software programs work, they automatically update and they pull in your signature file to every post that you have already made. At the very least every post going forward will have your signature file in it. That signature file will include an invitation to come to your website and enter into a relationship. Come get my free stuff, you will find it here. Once you have gotten a
little street credentials on that particular forum, you are not going to be considered just a marketer, a spammer if you will. Some people are going to take you up on that. They are going to click through and they are going to visit your website and they are going to get your free stuff. Right away they become part of your continuum and then you just continue to talk to them until you can establish trust with them and they make that first level of conversion. Article marketing would follow the exact same process. You are putting articles out, there are three or four different sites that are predominate. Ezinearticles.com is probably the biggest. Selfgrowth.com is a great vehicle now for article marketing. The beauty of sharing your articles in these places, occasionally somebody will pick one up and put it in their newsletter, in their ezine and run it there but by in large the value of that is that people are reading these article sites and when they read an article that is of interest to them, in the base line of it is your offer. Your little signature file includes your offer to come to my website and get some free stuff. People click through, they register for your free stuff and there you go, you have got somebody into that continuum again. We have talked a lot about social media last week. In any case, the social media space is hot and getting hotter. There are more and more and more ways to use social media as a way of driving your positioning across the planet. Facebook just totally fascinates me because I have been able to establish relationships with people, I don't even think I could count all the countries that I have Facebook friends in. But the one thing that stuck out for me was the diversity of the friends that I have established Scott : Here in the social media space, we establish certain things that we have common ground on and we frequently overlook those things we don't have in common, they don't enter into the conversation in the social media environment. I would not be their first provider of choice in almost any other environment. In fact they overlook their own issues and my issues are overlooked in doing business with people around the world through these social media spaces. I made a comment on my website not too long ago that there once was a time that public speaking was defined by the amount of miles that you flew and the number of engagements that you appeared at in a year. Now, the number of friends and followers that you have defines it. That is a significant shift. Social media made that possible. Online video is another piece of that. We talked at length about online video a few weeks ago in this course and nothing could be more powerful. In fact Amanda, you were telling me before the call that you are now in the process of filming, for lack of a better word, shooting the videos and your husband Greg has come up with the techie part of it to create a very visual representation of the material that you are teaching. Amanda : I think the thing with it, I had very much kind of viewed it as one, it was going
to be very difficult and it was going to be very hard and I think in a way where that cleared itself up was a friend of mine a few weeks ago with no techie knowledge at all got a video up on YouTube and I think that was part of it. I think the second part of it was myself, was looking at myself and thinking I am going to look fat on the video and all of this kind of thing. Actually then, I think through the course of these calls is realizing that yes, I need to look reasonably presentable but at the same time, it is more the message that I have got and my energy, my passion and enthusiasm. Actually today when we were messing about doing a bit with the videos, Greg put it on the screen for me to have a look at and I actually kind of looked at it and thought, oh, that doesn't look too bad. Looks as if a bit of the double chin has evaporated. Scott : That is a beautiful thing. Amanda : It actually is nowhere near as hard as I thought it was going to be. He has helped me set it up today and I just sort of; I was surprised at the quality of it from just the little camcorder that we have got. He set it up on the tripod for me so it was still and he got the photographic studio lights, which obviously helped. We got a clip on mic with a long cable. I think just the ease of that and the ease of sort of, he put it on the software and kind of fiddled about with it and tweaked about with it and it didn't really take very long to do. I think that is something that is so powerful. Actually when I looked at myself on the screen, what was more important that I was looking at was the topic I was talking about. He managed to set it up for me so I was kind of in the corner talking about what I was talking about and the actual images of what I was talking about were prevalent on the video. Now he kind of tweaked about with that to do that, and that made me feel even better because I was feeling that I wasn't the focus of the video. But what I was talking about and what I was explaining to people was the focus of the video. The modern software that you can get allows you to tweak about with that to be able to do that. I think I am literally now just beginning to see the power of it but also noticing the number of sites that I go to that don't have video and kind of noticing the few that do and how they use it. I think this is something, I mean you have said the video is positioned right at the, still very much at the forefront of it and the more I have kind of looked about on the Internet, the more I would very much have to agree with that. Scott : We have reached a unique point in history when it comes to how content is being shared. We have by in large, I mean the largest part of the learning styles if you will, if you broke the population down by learning styles the largest percentage are going to be visuals. They are going to describe themselves as people that respond better to what they see than to what they hear or what they read. Second would be the number of people that would listen and get it and then the third is that kinesthetic population that
gets more of what they are reading. But we are also for a number of reasons become a very short attention span kind of people in the world right now. So when someone presents us with this really long form copy and ask us to read it, there is a whole science that goes into writing copy that is supposed to make each paragraph stand on its own so that I read the next paragraph. I have studied the masters on copy writing. At one point I fashioned myself as a copywriter and wanted to become known as a great copywriter. The more I thought about it and studied where the world was going, I said I would rather be a great videographer than a great copywriter. The purpose of copy is to get each paragraph is designed to get me to read the next paragraph. Amanda : I tend to skim read long copy and I think I am probably not alone in this. If you see the little tiny thing at the top of the page, you think god this is going to be lengthy. As I skim down over them and probably just glance at the headlines or the bullet points, if there is anything that particularly catches my attention, and usually scroll right down over to see what price is at the bottom. Actually I have found there are a lot of things I don't and haven't done for some time read the long copy unless there has been bits and pieces as I have gone through that have maybe caught my attention and I have perhaps gone down and looked at the figure at the bottom and if the bits and pieces that I have read, which might be a couple of sentences, a couple of headlines, a couple of words here and there, in all of that long copy, then I will go back and read the whole thing, unless of course, it happens to be something that is particularly complex. Somebody sent me a thing the other day, it was a long copy sales letter for a software that does online forex trading with the currency markets because that is something that I don't really understand, that was something I literally read that kind of a paragraph at a time to try and get to grips with what it was saying. But most things I will just literally I'll scroll down over, look at the headlines, look at the keywords and I think a lot of people with long copy now are the same. They have kind of seen so many long copy sales letters that all follow the format. When you have got a $20 product with $2,000 worth of bonuses, you kind of scroll down over the same sort of format with it all, I think for me certainly I have kind of tuned out to it and I think a lot of other people have as well in my view. Scott : Yes, I completely agree with you that most people have tuned out of it and they are now much more in tune, and when you pick on something like a technical product, you mentioned Forex software, how much more powerful would it be for you to be able to see maybe a moderator in front of a small group audience as he is discussing the topic, literally following the format of the sales letter point by point, but he is able to clearly be seen in front of an audience of people that are watching, listening and when
he gets to something technical, the camera comes in close to the screen and he explains it and demonstrates it for you live on camera. How much more powerful is that? Amanda : Because I ended up, I bought the software. However, I have subsequently struggled trying to figure out what I am supposed to do with it. Scott : Well this is where video as a way of demonstrating product is unbelievably powerful. You can actually show people how it works, which is essentially going back to what you are doing now with your teaching product. You are demonstrating to people how it works and yes you are on camera, but you are up in the corner in an unobtrusive place. You are able to keep the focus on the actual learning and you are able to point to different things in the shot. From what you have described Amanda; you are now down to a place of where getting your major course recorded is nothing more than a function of time. Amanda : Yes it is. Scott : It is a matter of time until it is done. Amanda : I think you called it the hinge product wasn't it? Yes, it is because I can see that sort of hinge product, that major course. I can actually see a plan for it, I can see how it is then going to break down into other parts of the smaller products, other price points. I can see from this whole big product, which is going to give me numerous hours of recording. I look at that and think; well I actually have got enough material in there to keep me going for several years because the topic doesn't date. Scott : One more point about online video before we move on is one of the people that I am friends with from my time in owning the previous company where we specialized in online video is the guy that created and owns a company called Traffic Geyser.com. Traffic geyser is a software program that allows you to blast out your video to 32 different video sharing sites with a click of the button. Google rapidly and regularly indexes all of these sites. When you put a video let's say on YouTube it is mere minutes later that the spiders come, index that video and place it into the index in the search engines. When that effort is multiplied across 30 different video sharing sites and the spiders are indexing your video over and over and over on all the different sites, you very quickly start to take up a lot of space in the search engine is what you do. You may very well find yourself in fifteen of the top twenty placements in the search engines because of it.
The conversation that I had with Michael and then an article that he just recently wrote has gotten me locked in on his new formula, which I think, is just brilliant. Every one of the students of this course should consider using Mike Koenig's' formula, which is called the ten by ten by four video promotion strategies. In essence here is how it works in the shorter sense. The first thing that you do is you take a legal pad out and you write down the ten questions that people routinely ask about your product or about your service. So you've got ten questions. Then you compare that to in your own mind you come up with ten additional questions that you think people should ask. I think we all know the questions that they do ask and maybe the few that they should ask are not always the same. Now come up with another list of ten questions that are the ones that people should ask. Each one of those questions then becomes a ninety second to three minute videos. You shoot a video to answer every one of those twenty questions as a separate piece. Those get archived as a course of sorts, as a twenty part training on your topic with the last few seconds reminding people that you have all of these other products and services, we have an ongoing blog, we have this, we have that, we have the other, visit my blog and keep up with this and that and the other, listen to my podcast regularly, whatever it might be. We have got the ten and we have got the other ten, so that is the ten by ten. The four is you actually create four videos that are between five and ten minutes long that are specifically designed to place on YouTube, and really any other major video sharing sites, that are to talk about the ten part course that you are giving away for free on your website. So you are talking about your product and you are reminding people that if they go to the website, they can get this twenty part video series, all they have to do, it is free, just go to your website and sign up. Then you use an auto responder to deliver those links to the videos. Every few days or once a week, twice a week, three times a week, every single day, whatever format you choose to deliver them in, now they are going to get access to your message and hear your name day after day after day until the sequence is completed. During that process, you also have a significant number of opportunities to convert them from the relationship which is established from getting the free videos to that trust relationship where they spring for the first level of conversion. You have got plenty of opportunities to take a shot at getting that conversion done. That is a powerful way of using online video; it is one you will see me doing in the next few weeks. In fact we are shooting a lot of the video this Saturday. It will be brought into play very quickly here in 2009 and one that I would think everybody that is in my course or orders the information program should try. The ten by ten by four strategy and I give all the credit to Mike Koenig of trafficgeyser.com. If you are looking for a way to distribute your videos, go see Mike, trafficgeyser.com and he will take care of it and tell him you heard about it from me. Finally on this workable plan worksheet there are two boxes left, one is SEO, search engine optimization and the other is pay-per-click and both of them deal with opposite sides to the same
coin which is the search engines. Search engine optimization is the organic searches and pay-perclick is the paid advertising part of the search engines. It is useful to understand both of them. Payper-click has an instantaneous return on your investment, or not, it is instantaneous response anyway. If people are clicking through on your ad, you have gotten a big part of the job accomplished. If they are not converting into the relationship at that point, then you have really an excellent view of the conversion process needs to be looked at. The pay-per-click is usually a fairly low cost way of attracting people into your model for the first time and then beginning to develop that long-term relationship with them. SEO is simply the process of optimizing your site, fine-tuning it and studying the people that reside in those spaces in front of you to figure out what they are doing that allows them to be positioned ahead of you. I will give you an example of that, when it comes to unforgettablespeakers.com, I have been optimizing the site now for many months and one of the things that I found was that there is a guy under one of my main keywords who has consistently occupied a space in the first three spots for some time, as long as I have been trying to get into that first page. I kept seeing him show up everywhere. I didn't really understand why based on the various factors that influence SEO, why he was doing so well. It wasn't readily apparent to me why that was the case. Then one day it hit me, I started looking at it one day and all of a sudden I realized it is a particular page that has been indexed, not his main site in most cases, but one of the interior pages that had been picked up by the search engines and was optimized to a degree that it was showing up number one all over the place. That little bit of insight caused me to go out, really look closely at that particular page, and create a near identical page on my own site, based on my content. Within a week, I had jumped from being in the 60's or 70's, on page six or seven, to being on page two and now have moved on to page one with that one page. SEO is not as complicated as the wizards with the black hats would make you believe. There is a fairly straightforward and fairly simple science to search engine optimization that it doesn't require light and candles and chanting to make it occur. You don't have to go see the black hat wizard to be able to figure out how it works. More often than not it is a combination of things that appear on your page and a combination of links that people are linking to your page that cause you to optimize extremely well. That is much, much deeper content than we ever intended to cover in this course and I don't position myself in any way, shape or form as an SEO expert. I do it for myself and I understand it reasonably well, but it is not something that I want to be known for teaching. There are a lot of people far more qualified than me to teach SEO. It is a feeding mechanism; organic search is a beautiful piece of the puzzle and one that everyone that listens to this should consider because the traffic coming to your site is free. You are not paying for that advertising. It is an investment of time but not an investment of capital.
This is the process of creating a workable plan. I think at this point we have pretty well shown exactly how it works. Start with an understanding of what the Internet is and how it works as an information vehicle, you build relationships through it. You develop a product continuum and then you begin to develop a core product, a hinge point product if you will. You then routinely, very systematically repurpose that product to fill your continuum and then use all these different tools of which there are many, many tools available and we have shown a few of them here, discussed a few of them here for the primary purpose of getting people into a relationship. Then you simply use everything at your disposal, whether it be some of the same tools like online video or blogging or what have you, to move those people through the relationship until that trust is established. Trust for our purposes is defined as money on the barrel head. When someone gives you their credit card and purchases your first level of product, it is reasonable to say they trust you. Amanda : Yes it is. Scott : Then from there, moving people through the continuum is nothing more than a process of time and percentages, some will and some won't. Therefore, you want to have a wide variety of things all niche related and occasionally feeding into that joint venture offering or two so that you can maximize your relationship with your fan base. The process of that creates a passive income based business. That is how a workable plan is established around this process. One final thought, I would say from my perspective the time spent in the implementation process have been useful in blowing out some of the fog that would set in as someone tries to get their head around the whole batch of new information. Clear up some confusion and eliminate some questions that are lingering and have someone look over your shoulder and say well, you are close, but I would consider or ask you to consider thinking of it this way. The intent is to transform someone's business not simply to inform them about a bunch of neat things going on but to transform their business from what it was to what it could be and to help them attain that passive income lifestyle yet still be positioned as a speaker and in fact as the top speaker in the world on their topic. Glad to have been able to play a useful role because that is a sense of what I am trying to do. That is where we got today and a great conversation with Amanda Goldston, thank you for your help.
Ensuring a Workable Plan Is In Place

Primary Purpose - Putting the pieces together and optimizing all aspects of your plan for massive success. As you go along, check off the circles to each step completed.
Step 1:
Listen to CD #8 from the Passive Income Avalanche system in its entirety Major Keypoint #1 : The first and most important element of this whole process of being positioned as the number one expert in your niche in the world is largely a perception process and then it is a positioning process.
Step 2 :
Find and review the workable plan sheet in your resource section. Major Keypoint #2 : The fact of the matter is we have to use free content to establish relationships. In the process of maturing those relationships through having conversation with your marketplace, slowly but surely that relationship matures to one where trust is established. The point where trust is established is what we call the first level of conversion. The first level of conversion is the very first time you put an offer in front of that audience and some say yes with their money.
Step 3:
Be clear (Decide) - What type of content will you be offering your niche market in the free area of your product continuum? Major Keypoint #3 : To make a workable plan out put all of the marketing pieces on the table,(review lesson 6 & 7) sorting through them and deciding which ones belong to your plan, which ones don't, which ones you are going to start with, which ones you will add later.
Step 4 : Step 5 :
Establish a form of Dialog not just a Monolog : Utilizing polling or surveying of your Niche Market regularly. Get them involved in the conversation with you. Start working the Marketing model you chose in Major Keypoint #3 Major Keypoint #4 : Essentially all you want to do in any given forum scenario is just hang around the forum and leave comments and try to be helpful to other forum visitors up to about thirty or forty postings. Then your strategy starts to shift a little bit. At that point you go back and you upload a very carefully written profile about yourself and a signature file which would include an offer to visit your site for your free content. Major Keypoint #5 : When you understand that moving people through the continuum is nothing more than a process of time and percentages, that some will and some won't purchase anything. Therefore, you want to have a wide variety of things all niche related and occasionally feeding into your model a joint venture offering or two so that you can maximize your relationship with your fan base. That is how a workable plan is established around this process.
This process carried out step by step is what creates a Passive Income based business.
Chapter 9
Joint Ventures & Building Loyalty Through Powerful Offline Marketing

This week we are going to pick up on the essential message of last week, which was putting everything together in place to have a workable plan. These are two more pieces that we are going to add to that, that sort of build the bridge to what comes after you have got your workable plan up and running. Just for a very quick review, last week we covered the idea if you saw the handout, you know that what you had there was a different angle or a different view of the product continuum not showing the levels anymore other than just the names level one and level two and the actual task that you need to accomplish in each level. The task in level one, that free level, is to develop a relationship with the people searching for your niche content on the Internet. Everything we have done up to that point to position you and get you into place is now done, it is in place and you are driving traffic from all the different sources that you have selected into the level one of your program where they are registering for your list and they are getting free information in exchange. That is really nothing more than the establishment of a relationship. Then in level two, the big job you have is to convert that relationship to one based on trust. The best and clearest definition of trust for our purposes here is when they pull out their credit card for the first time and sign up. That is the clearest definition we can give of when somebody trusts you is when they hand you their credit card and say ok, I will take that. The hand out is just showing now that the whole objective is to drive traffic into the free level of your continuum and then to work that audience to a point where they trust you enough to convert to that first level of paid and that is when we have made the transition from pure relationship to one where they trust you, where trust is established. From there everything is going to flow through the continuum and some will buy and some won't buy as you roll out each different level of service that you have. Some are going to take it, so won't take it. You can tweak and tune and try to improve on it but essentially the whole game is played on those first two levels initially. Once you have got a working model in place though, you might want to start seeking additional sources of traffic. One of the great ones are what we are going to talk about here first, it is joint ventures. Joint venture is a very, very powerful strategy but that comes with a few caveats. The power of being able to leverage an endorsement, of having someone else who has their own list
Chapter 9 Joint Ventures & Building Loyalty Through Powerful Offline Marketing
bringing you on a call or inviting you out to a seminar to speak, putting you on the platform, whatever it is, these are all variations of joint ventures. It can be very powerful when they lend their name and their credibility with their list to you. It is an extremely useful way to get your offer in front of a lot of people that may or may not have heard of you before. However, here is the caveat, in fact there is a few. Let me start with the biggest one, pure mathematics. Let's just use marketers who only touch their list or promote to their list fifty times a year. So let's just say they are talking to their list once a week. For keeping things simple, let's say they promote to their list fifty times a year. That means the maximum number of opportunities for them to do a joint venture would be fifty. But right off the top they are going to save at least half of them, say twenty-five, for themselves, for them to promote their things. You will do the same thing with your list by the way, so this will be something to remember as people approach you with joint ventures, and they will as they see your list maturing, they see your business growing. In fact, you will find them coming out of the woodwork, coming and knocking on your door saying hey, would you do a joint venture with me, would you send my offer to your list? These numbers apply to you as well. If you are only touching the list once a week, fifty times a year, you are going to reserve some percentage of them right off the top for yourself as will anybody you are in contact with about doing JV's. So let's just say half. The next category is the ones that they are reserving, that this marketer is reserving for their friends or for their insiders. Frequently that is going to be somewhere around ten or twelve, maybe fifteen of the remaining opportunities are going to be reserved for their friends, for people they have done joint ventures with on a you scratch my back, I will scratch yours basis or insiders. They have saved twenty-five for themselves now they have taken another twelve to fifteen off the table, so that is thirty-seven to forty of those fifty touches are now reserved. So what does that leave, between maybe ten and twelve or fourteen total opportunities available for the entire year for them to accept these JV opportunities? What are some of the things that marketers are looking for if they are going to give you one of those few remaining spots? Certainly one of the things that will help you to get a green light and get your offer in front of someone else's list is that you go to them with content. Whatever you are doing with this person is not purely pitching something, trying to sell something but offering his list something of real value content wise. If you develop a talk around your message and it is very, very strong content driven, that is going to help you tremendously in cutting through all of those people that simply want to sell to my list, or your list, if you are following me so far. Is everybody with me? The next thing that you will want to remember is to have all of your promotional materials ready when you contact them. Let's say you are going to do a teleseminar and that teleseminar is going to revolve around an interview, the partner is going to interview you and you are going to deliver your content in the form of this interview. Having the Q&A already done and ready to go is incredibly
helpful rather than having them try to figure out what questions to ask and have you go free form into whatever answers you want to provide. When you show them hey, I have already done these before and I've got my Q&A ready to go and here it is, here are the ten things that I want you to ask me and my answers will drive this call, that is helpful. Having the sign-up form ready for let's say the online registration form and the back end auto responder all set up, ready to go. When they say yes, you can send them a link to it and they can test is and find out that it works. Having all of those pieces in place right up front is going to be very, very helpful to you in putting a joint venture together. Also, it is extremely useful for you to do research on any potential partners that you are going to approach. Know who they are before you go contacting them. See, if you are approaching strangers, people you don't know or have a relationship with, the likelihood is low that they are going to be interested in doing a JV with you. So now go back to some of the prior research that you have done, establish the list of all the blogs in your space. All those blogs have readers. Someone who is in your niche market runs them each. Being on a minimum of an email basis with those people where they know your name, they are going to see you in the search engines, they are probably going to know your name so reach out and establish relationships with those people. Then when you are looking for joint venture partners, they will know you, you will know them and you will be able to build on the relationship that you have. Top people in the forums, when you are in working the forums for example, very powerful step because you have been in there constantly contributing to the forum, the administrators of those forums know the names of the people that are contributing. Build relationships with them if you can. I don't have to go too far in this direction; I think you get the point, other websites that are in your space, not only blogs but on other websites that come up in the search engines. If you are on page one of the search engine results, there is five, six, seven other businesses listed there, it is very helpful to get to know the person behind those web businesses and develop relationships with them and marketing to their lists. If you have done some research on the partners and you have got all the materials ready and you understand coming out of the gate that they have only got a limited number of these opportunities, you can present it differently than some of the ones that have come my way recently where not only did they have none of this material prepared, really what they wanted was would you send this out to your list? When those come, you can state what your policies are. Say look, I just don't do that, I only have about ten or twelve of these a year. Now if you want to secure the deal, know what your stats are, know how many times people convert when you run them through this JV model, this is how many times people buy so that the guy can sit back and say ok, well I am going to get x number of people on the call, this number, based on your number in the past I can expect on x number of
people to convert and they can then determine if that is a good use of that hour, is that a good use of their list? If you have all of those numbers in advance from just doing your own calls and having tested and refined your own model, then you are going to find that you become one of the more popular people that anyone wants to JV with because you have got control of all this. With JV strategies there is only one other major thing to remember, when you are doing JV's, do everything in your power not to get put into a percentage-based deal. You often times hear these things where they say, well we want 50%. If they get a percentage, then you lose flexibility over pricing because you have some costs that have to be paid and they don't. They are just going to get a check from you for the percentage of the deal. When somebody wants a percentage, try to move them to a fixed dollar amount as best you possibly can. If we used Michael, let's say you were promoting on a joint venture call your $99 workbooks. Rather than get pinned into a 50% deal that doesn't take into account the cost of printing, the cost of mailing or any of the other costs that you might incur, see if they will agree instead to something that is fixed. Well we will give you $40 for every order. That way you know what your costs are instead of maybe end up in the end you feel like, well heck, we've got a discount this thing to get it sold, or we are already discounting. Percentages just become harder for you to make the numbers pan out in your favor. One of the more, if the person that you are talking to will only do a percentage based deal, then here is a strategy that you will fall in love with. Find the ideal product that moves people into your continuum baseline, your free level. Let's say you produce a little CD, a recording or something and you ship it out, it is a free CD with the cost of shipping and handling. By the way, that is very popular and it is referred to as a self liquidating lead generation model, meaning the money that you bring in covers the cost of producing and shipping it so it is a self liquidating lead model. Let's say you are going to offer that as your, if they want a percentage then say how about we do this, I've got this great CD and when people register for the call, let's put them into this free CD in exchange for the $7.95 shipping and handling. I will give you 100% of that. When you approach a joint venture partner and you offer them 100% but you keep everything that is sold on the back end, you are going to find that to be a very popular offer with potential joint venture partners. Kind of keep that in the background if they are talking percentage, percentage, percentage. Let's say you are doing a $397 course, do you really want to pay somebody $200 for every one you sell or would you rather give them some fixed number, say $100 a course, because that is a rich deal for a joint venture partner. They are not getting a lot of deals everyday where they are going to make $100. Rather than give you 50%, why don't we just agree on $100. No, no, no, I really like a percentage deal. Well I've got another way that we could do this, let's do it as I will give you 100% of the money that I get for my lead generation CD which is actually this great content CD. Let me send you over a copy of the file, the MP3 itself and you can listen to it. I think you will find that it is strong, and it is valuable. We give it away free for somebody that pays the
shipping. Now you know your lead generation costs are going to be fixed and that is the whole idea. That is a handful of things that you should know about doing joint venturing. Are there any questions about joint ventures that I can answer? Amanda : Don't think so. It is all very useful. A few of the things you mentioned there I have had people approach me; I had one the other day. Literally in the first line it made it very clear the only thing they were interested in was my list. I think it just sort of; you have covered an awful lot there with getting to know people and also just handling things when people approach you. I haven't got any questions. Scott : Ok. It is very, very important as somebody who is building a real business online to be thinking in terms of how precious your list is. Five years from now there will be no asset in your business more valuable than your list because it is your own personal ATM. You will have rock solid numbers and you will know every time you punch the send button, a certain amount of money comes rolling in the front door. That being the case be very, very careful how you treat the people on your list and when these, for lack of a better or more graceful term, amateurs approach you wanting to JV with you, most of them have not thought through the process. They just look at you and say well I bet they have got a great list that converts really well and I would love to get a piece of that, so I'd love to convert their list into my list and take some money from them while I am at it. First hand experience, I had done a JV for someone just a few months ago. We sent out to about 900 people, we had in the mid 20's total, not percentages but about twenty some odd people that clicked through to the offer itself. This wasn't structured well and it wasn't one of those deals that was intended to help them build leads that they would sell later, they were strictly trying to make a $400 sale straight out of the gate. Send the email out; if you click through to the offer, thanks for reading the offer now give me $400. Strangely enough, not strangely at all really, I am being facetious, no one bought, zero. Then to make things worse, the marketer didn't really know why they didn't convert and didn't really care that they didn't convert because it wasn't their list. They were burning my list. That kind of being the case it gives you some insight. Just be very cautious of how many times you touch your list in a year. When people are approaching you, and they will, keep track of how many you have already used and make sure that you are evaluating these potential partners before you agree to send anything to your list. That it meets their needs, that it is good quality stuff. If they are trying to sell a course of some sort, make them send you a copy and make endeavor to listen to parts of it before you let them offer to sell it to your group. When you are approaching people, the same thing, be prepared to send over access to what it is you will ultimately be selling to the people that are on his or her list so that they can see it. You've got all the marketing materials prepared, you've got some states for how well your offer is converting and you
know a little bit about them, you have a prior relationship with them, it will work much, much better for you. Those are just some essentials for doing JV's. So now, if there are no further questions on that, we are going to transition to the next part of this week 9 information which is how you go about converting your customers from being happy with you to being loyal to you for a lifetime. There is a certain amount of lifetime value of each and every person that you do business with. If you are clear and you know essentially what the lifetime value of each person is, the name of the game becomes creating loyalty because shortly there will be other people trying to take your spot as the top expert in your niche. It is king of the hill; they are always going to be trying to run up the hill. But as you are building a bigger and bigger list, if you are able to find ways to make that group loyal to you then you have started building a fence around them. I have done a lot of work with Dan Kennedy over the last five years. Dan might be the best teacher I have ever seen at talking about this concept of your herd, that your customer base is a herd of customers and that if you want to keep them for years to come, you have got to build a fence around them. How are some of the ways that we can build a fence around them? One of those ways is to employ some offline marketing. Strictly online marketing as email and such continues to grow, there is a direct correlation between the amount of email that I get and the amount of email I actually read. It is in the inverse, the more I get the less I read because there is simply too much of it. If your only form of communication is online, you are probably taking a risk that if they are not reading all of your email on a timely basis, that they might struggle to remember you the next time that you try to offer them something. So you want to mix a little bit of offline marketing in to your online marketing and that way you have the perfect blend of staying in front of your customer and keeping your name on their lips. Whenever they think of anything in your space, they instantly think of you simply because you are the one always there to remind them that you are the top expert in the space. There are a lot of neat little things to do. It is not uncommon if you have got a high lifetime value, if you have measured it and let's say the lifetime value of a customer is in excess of $1,000 let's say. You would establish a small budget somewhere in your annual marketing dollars to send these people some sort of a gift by physical mail. It is not another recording but maybe something nice like a t-shirt or I've seen people use logoed bandanas. You can let your creativity run wild. Think of something that you would like to get, not a terribly expensive item, it doesn't have to be a high dollar expense item. But you also don't want to send them a logoed Bic pen or something because that would show you are pretty cheap. There are lots of ways of simply reaching out certainly to your top tier of customers, the ones that routinely buy from you and send them something to let them know that you know. Maybe you send them a book once a year, a journal to keep notes in, almost anything that you can think of that will set you apart from everyone else. The second one in order of all of this is a newsletter. Did both of you see my newsletter last month?
Amanda : Yes, I got one. Scott : I know it took a while to get it to the UK and I sent one down to Michael but I know he was quite busy in December with the visitors and such. That is not a terribly hard thing to produce. There are lots of software programs around that will allow you to do a little desktop newsletter. Printing those and mailing them out cost me somewhere in the range of $12 per person, per year and that includes international when you average it all out. I am comfortable making an investment like that because I know that the lifetime value of my customer is high enough to support it. Now one of those things that is critical is when you measure online readership rates of ezines, ezine rates have actually dropped below 18% readership, or excuse me, of opening rate. So if only 18% or less are even opening your communication and no one really can tell you how many are reading it, all of the response mechanism you have in an ezine are pointless. So we have got to keep that in mind. But when you send something physical in the mail with your name, picture and some information about you, not strictly as a promo but as something useful, then you are going to further your relationship with people. Since you saw it Amanda, did you see what I was doing as being difficult to do? Amanda : No, not at all. Scott : Okay. Now that was by no means our best effort because we didn't spend a whole heck of a lot of time on it, but was there at least one thing in there that was useful or interesting? Amanda : Well I thought so. When it came, I literally, I sat and read it from cover to cover because it was well written. It was actually quite a simple, easy read and yes there were quite a few things in there that were useful. Scott : Ok, that is really important to know that it was useful. Do you think that in a sea full of email people are going to remember the one piece of direct mail that they got that was useful and interesting to read? Amanda : Yes, I think so because I am like you now. I am finding I scan down over my email and where something looks like it is somebody personal that I know; I will open those and read those. I probably delete 90-95% of my email, most of it unread and unopened. Michael : Me too. I do the same thing. I will just go down through and it is remarkable even with spam filters how much spam gets through, at least on mine.
Scott : Right. We are not necessarily talking about spam because theoretically everybody that you are emailing to requested that email. But if you are invested in the idea of sending out a direct mail piece, certainly a newsletter to me is the most valuable thing you could send month after month. The investment certainly is reasonable but you can make offers in there. In January I am going to be telling people about the new Unforgettable Speakers website and all the changes that it means to the business. We are sending that out to about 120 this month and the list is now starting to grow week over week. It will just continue to get better as this new website comes online because we found a hole in our conversion, our call to action was weak and on the unforgettable speakers site we were doing a very bad job of getting people converted to the list. That is being fixed. For example, one of the things that I learned in sending that particular newsletter out was that the weight of it, I could put two additional sheets inside of that newsletter. Since it was tabbed shut, I could still put two individual sheets inside of there. Well those are going to be offer sheets, they will be some sort of offer contained on a separate sheet of paper, inserted in the newsletter and it will have a form on the bottom that they can even fax in to order something. Giving people that sort of direct response vehicle and the ability to just fill in their name, write their credit card number on it and fax it to you and you will turn around and ship them back whatever it was you were talking about or offering can be very useful to you. So the newsletters like that, that is going to be a very, very powerful tool and quickly you will figure out how much time is involved in preparing it, how much effort is involved in addressing it and getting it out to your list, what the weight of it is and what you can add or need to remove to keep it within a postage rate of one ounce is usually about where you want it to be. If you have something big you want to promote then you could do something more but you are talking about really, basically a free reminder that you are in business and that we have a relationship, that you are a customer of mine. I am going to use that as a communication vehicle month after month after month. That converts customers into loyal customers. The other thing you get that is really great about a newsletter is you get the pass along value. If you pick that up off the counter and you stick it in your bag as you are out the door, there is a chance, maybe a significantly measurable chance, a 40% or so chance that when you are through reading it, you are going to hand it over to somebody else to read. Circle an article in there and hand it to someone else to read. They might turn around then and come back to the website and register for their own newsletter, expanding your list even further. That is a useful thing and newsletters and just paying attention to your customers and keeping multiple ways of touching them will be very helpful to you. I threw in something in here that I wanted to cover just really briefly and then we are going to go to the essentials of offline marketing. In fact, let me just cover the essentials of offline marketing first and
then I will put this little definition piece in place that I think will be, I don't know that you have seen this before, maybe you have, but it is only if you are a research oriented type person and research marketing that you have seen it presented like I have got it here. When you are doing offline marketing, and for the purposes of offline marketing, aside from a newsletter, I am talking about postcard mailers, sales letters that are printed and stuffed in envelopes and sent out, advertorials which is something that kind of looks like an editorial but it is actually an ad, I don't have any examples online that I could show you but I am sure that you have seen them, if you are not familiar with the term let me know and I will see if I can find one that I could show you so you know what an advertorial looks like. Inserts similar to a postcard but not mailed, it is just stuffed into a box or someone else's package, we have all gotten those with our bills, and particularly the credit card companies send these inserts out. Even some of these principles can be applied to if you are doing the oldest form of local advertising, which are the yellow pages. All of these essentials become part of what you are designing into your piece. Number one is, you got to have a headline. A compelling headline that will grab somebody's attention will go further toward making the piece, helping the piece to be read than anything else. Second is going to be a picture. Picture with a caption because the most read thing on almost any sales letter or postcard you send out is the caption underneath of the picture. So when you start getting mail, the whole idea of this is to get you to look at the mail that shows up in your own box a little differently, start scoring the mail that comes into you against this list and see how many are actually doing in your opinion a good job. Do they have a headline? Do they have a picture with a caption underneath of it to draw you into the story? Is there some compelling copy? We are not really doing a copy writing course here but the idea of compelling copy, each paragraph has one purpose, and it is designed to get you to read the next paragraph. So is there some compelling copy or is it, like I had someone call me last night asking for my input in what he was describing to me as a piece that he is doing that was built around his, I don't know, not really even a USP but built around his mission statement. If I send you a piece of mail with my mission statement on it, is that going to make a big difference in your decision? Amanda : Not really. Scott : Probably not. Particularly if the mission statement says something like we do really good work at fair prices. That is not compelling. So give me some compelling copy to follow along with your story. Amanda, in your space there are some very, very powerful things you can learn from the cards. Is that true? Amanda : Absolutely.
Scott : If you engage me in a story about someone and say is this you that I am talking about or am I describing your situation and you are drawing me into the story then I am inclined to go from one paragraph to the next as I read through it. We have to have some compelling copy. Next we have got to have an offer, which is a reason to respond. When you draw them through this story, you want to lead them somewhere, Do this, and get this. When you have got an offer in place, you also need a deadline. You got to do this by this date to get this. It is okay to come up with a completely different offer at that point, change the date and start all over again. But if you don't give them a date to respond by, and preferably sooner rather than later, you are going to find that people will procrastinate. And if it gets stuck over here on the side of my desk in a pile of mail, the next time that they see it, it is probably going to go in the trash can because they didn't take action and then they forgot why they were even interested in keeping it in the first place. So give them a fairly short deadline, give them a reason to respond right away. Also, you need a response mechanism. A great one, you see even some of the big retailers have caught onto this piece. Call, click or stop in is a slogan you hear out of the big Home Depot stores now. Call, click or come to our store. So they give you a phone number, they give you an email address or they tell you to go to the store and buy it there. So give people multiple ways to respond if possible. But at the very least tell them how to go about ordering. Don't make them think, tell them exactly what they need to do. So the response mechanism. Your call to action, which is actually a reiteration of your offer, just tell them what to do and here is how to do it. So you have the offer, which is the reason to respond, the call to action, which is, do this and then the response mechanism, which is how to do this. Finally maybe the most important thing that you can offer anybody in any direct mail piece that you are selling to is a risk reversal. Take away the risk; offer them a very strong, very clear guarantee. If you don't like it, let us know, we will refund your money. People are fearful of risk, fearful of loss, they probably will be paralyzed by that risk and that loss will be clear in their mind and then they won't take action. So if you eliminate the risk then people will be much more inclined to get involved. I do some of that in the marketing I am doing for courses like this. Just take the risk away. If it is not working for you, you don't owe me anything. Just kind of remember those principles. There are eight things there; the headline, offer, deadline, response mechanism, picture with a caption, compelling copy, call to action and risk reversal, your guarantee. One other thing that I wanted to share with you which is my little researched definitions. When you are considering offline, doing any kind of offline marketing it is very, very common in marketing for people to try to do this branding. If you have ever seen people try to brand their business, the only ones that can successfully do it are big companies. Or when you hear someone refer to their brand.
I was so intrigued with this idea of branding and what is a brand that I actually went looking one day to try and understand what it really was. I found in Wikipedia a definition, which was the best definition I had ever seen anywhere. Simply, a brand is a collection of symbols, experiences and associations in the mind of a consumer. When you think about that, a collection of symbols, experiences and associations in the mind of a consumer, how hard is that to create? How many times do you have to talk to that person to get your logo for example, which would be a symbol, across to someone? Experiences might be easier, if the experience is good might be relatively easy. If it is bad, you can be sure that you can brand it, they won't forget it. The associations, trying to get those things in the mind of a customer, well this is why brand advertising as opposed to direct response marketing is not as accessible to small business people because it is nearly impossible to build a brand in the mind of a consumer. In fact a great example of this is when I was putting inspired life together back in 2002 and 2003, my business partner and I were meeting with venture capitalists on a regular basis. We had a need to raise significant capital for marketing and we actually met with this guy and he had told us early in the process when we were still developing our prototypes that if we would build it, they would market it for us. They would give us the money to market with. You fast forward to the day that we get the whole thing built out, whole thing is working, website is up and running, a lot of excitement. We do a demo for these investors actually through a little open house. We had a bunch of investors come in and we demonstrated this thing with a lot of fanfare and lights and music and bottles of wine and cheese, it was just a big party. The guy came up to us afterward and told us that we had knocked it out of the park and that they were prepared to write a check, they wanted to know how much we would need for marketing. They were basically confirming what was in our business plan and we told them we were going to need four million dollars. He said ok, well I am going to have you come to the office and do some presentations for my partners, but on my handshake we have got a deal, we are going to do this, you are in the process of reinventing a billion dollar industry, multibillion dollar industry. So you fast forward a week or two and we go over there to this guy's office and my VP of marketing flew in from Albany, where she lived, Albany NY and we all went over there. At the appropriate time in the presentation the guy turned to her and said Rebecca, how much money are you going to need to market this company? Her response was We will be able to establish a brand in the mind of the consumer for four million dollars.Smiles all around, everything looked like it was great. Fast forward a few weeks, we could not get these guys on the phone. Fast forward a few months, they have still not returned a single call. Try to go to their offices, you can't get to see them, they are all in meetings, they are all out of the office and on and on and on the excuses go. The guy disappears. I cannot get a hold of him and we ran out of money and the business got set on the shelf. One day I finally meet the guy, I find him, I am just in a restaurant and here he is just sitting at a table a few rows away. I walk over to him, I said hello and asked him if he remembered me and of course he did. I
said, You know you guys turned into ghosts and disappeared. What happened? He said, Do you remember the question about branding? I said yes. He said Your VP of marketing said that you could build a brand for four million dollars. Later my partner said to all of us that this is a company that is worth taking four million dollar risk on but they will not succeed in building a brand for four million dollars. They are going to need closer to forty million dollars and while I think they are worth a four million dollar risk, they are not worth a forty million dollar risk. Therefore I recommend that we do not move ahead with it because they are going to burn through the four and they are going to come back for another four and then they are going to come back for ten more and then another ten and then we stop feeding it, they are going to turn to other investor groups, we are going to be diluted and we are going to lose our money all together. I recommend we not move forward. All of a sudden it occurred to me, the use of the term brand was a problem that, it is very, very expensive to drive home a collection of symbols, experiences and associations in the mind of a consumer. Does that make sense? Amanda : Absolutely. Scott : Going forward in your program, you don't want to be branding, you want to be doing direct response. So here is the definition of direct response and then we are going to head toward the finish line here. Direct response marketing is what this whole course has been about, teaching you how to build an online marketing model, to position you as the number one expert in the world with your niche content is going to be simply how well you do direct response marketing. The definition of direct response is it is a form of marketing designed to solicit a direct response that is specific and quantifiable. A direct response that is specific and quantifiable. I want you to do this and then I am able to measure how many people I sent that to, how many bought. It is very specific, and it is very quantifiable. Based on how well you take all the things you learned in the first chapters, it is going to come down to that. How well can you put in front of your audience week after week the type of marketing that is designed to solicit a direct response that is specific and quantifiable?
JV Strategies and Building Loyalty Through Powerful Offline Marketing

Primary Purpose - Converting your authority into loyalty through proper use of offline marketing strategies and the proper JV Strategies as ways to leverage other people's resources to build your long term passive profits. As you go along, check off the circles to each step completed.
Step 1 :
Listen to CD #9 from the Passive Income Avalanche system in its entirety
JV Strategies
Major Keypoint #1: Once you have got a working model in place though, you might want to start seeking additional sources of traffic. One of the great strategies is joint ventures. Joint venture is a very, very powerful strategy but that comes with a few caveats. The power of being able to leverage an endorsement, of having someone else who has their own list bringing you on a call or inviting you out to a seminar to speak, putting you on the platform, whatever it is, these are all variations of joint ventures
Step 2 :
Determine how many Joint Ventures you are goin to accept each year as a way of understanding the mathematics of Joint Venturing with others. Major Keypoint #2 : One of the things that will help you to get a green light and get your offer in front of someone else's list is that you go to them with a content driven offer. Whatever you are doing with this person is not purely pitching something, trying to sell something but offering his list something of real value content wise.
Step 3 :
Research any potential partners that you are going to approach. Know who they are and as much as you can about their market before you contact them. Major Keypoint #3 : When approaching a potential Joint Venture partner have all of your marketing and promotional materials ready. This includes having the Q&A already done and ready to go. Also, have the sign-up form and the auto responder all set up, ready to go.
Step 4 :
.
Know what your stats are, know how many times people convert when you run them through your JV model. Prospective JV partners can then determine if that is a good use of that hour, is that a good use of their list? Major Keypoint #4 : If you have all your stats in advance from just doing your own calls and having tested and refined your own model, then you are going to find that you become one of the more popular people that anyone wants to JV with because you have your process under control.
Five years from now there will be no asset in your business more valuable than your list because it is your own personal ATM.
Offline Marketing
Major Keypoint #1 : There is a certain amount of lifetime value of each and every person that you do business with. If you are clear and you know essentially what the lifetime value of each person is, the name of the game becomes creating loyalty Major Keypoint #2 : Strictly online marketing as email and such continues to grow, there is a direct correlation between the amount of email that I get and the amount of email I actually read. It is in the inverse, the more I get the less I read because there is simply too much of it.
Step 1: Step 2 :
Develop a plan to mix a little bit of offline marketing in to your online marketing and that way you have the perfect blend of staying in front of your customer and keeping your name on their lips. Develop a newsletter that is printed and mailed each month or at least each quarter. Major Keypoint #3 : Your printed and mailed newsletter will cost you somewhere in the range of $12 per person, per year and that includes international postage when you average it all out. Knowing that the lifetime value of your customer is high enough to support it, should make you comfortable making an investment like that Major Keypoint #4 : In a sea full of email people are going to remember the one piece of direct mail that they got that was useful and interesting to read. Major Keypoint #5 : Use the newsletter as a communication vehicle month after month after month to convert your customers into loyal customers
Step 3 :
Ensure any direct mail piece you develop and mail incorporates these 8 essentials. 1. A Compelling Headline 3. Compelling Copy 5. Deadline (Date to respond by) 7. Testimonials 2. Picture with a caption 4. Offer reason to respond 6. A response mechanism (A way to order) 8. Risk reversal
Offline Marketing
Step 4 :
Be sure to understand the difference between Branding and Direct Response Marketing Major Keypoint #6 : Branding as defined by Wikipedia is a collection of symbols, experiences and associations in the mind of a consumer. When you think about that, a collection of symbols, experiences and associations in the mind of a consumer, how hard is that to create? How many times do you have to talk to that person to get your logo for example, which would be a symbol, across to someone? Experiences might be easier, if the experience is good might be relatively easy. If it is bad, you can be sure that you can brand it, they won't forget it. The associations, trying to get those things in the mind of a customer This is why brand advertising as opposed to direct response marketing is not as accessible to small business people. Major Keypoint #7: The definition of direct response is it is a form of marketing designed to solicit a direct response that is specific and quantifiable. Teaching you how to build an online marketing model, to position you as the number one expert in the world with your niche content is going to be simply how well you do direct response marketing.
Direct response marketing is what this whole course is all about!
Product Continuum Example 1
Consulting
1-on-1 Coaching
Speak at seminars / events
E-book - Paperback book
Free Report - Teleseminar
Mastermind
Free Strategy Sessions
Facebook Group - Speak at Events / Seminars
1-on-1 Coaching
Small Group Coaching
Small Group Bootcamps ($997+)
Home Study System ($297-$497) Advanced Audio/Video Program+Manual ($97)
CD or DVD Program ($10-20)
Free information (report, e-course, teleseminar)
Overview of Continuum Model
1-on-1 Coaching
Group Coaching
Seminar / Workshop Third Level ($497 average)
Second Level ($97 average)
First Level Paid Content ($10-20)
Advanced Level of Free Content
Basic Level of Free Content
resource #4
Establishing a Workable Plan
Ist Level of Conversion - Trust Established
Free Content - Relationship Established

Blogging/ Website Forums Article Mktg. Pay Per Click
Social Media
Online Video
SEO
resource #5
Develop Your Workable Plan
resource #6
Here are some links to tools and examples of products I use:

1) I use Olympus Ws-100 digital recorder for audio recordings (available at Radio Shack) 2) I use and recommend the simple, one step video Flip Camcorder by Pure Digital (Available at Best Buy or Amazon.com) 3) This is the free software I use to do minor editing of audio recordings http://audacity.sourceforge.net/ 4) iMovie (for Mac users) and Movie Maker (for Windows) are free software programs for doing minor editing of video. It's very likely that one of them is installed on your computer already. 5) Here is a brief tutorial on how to use Windows Movie Maker http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/using/moviemaker/default.mspx
7) Another source for transcription services is to accept bids for your project on www.elance.com or www.guru.com 8) Here are my favorite tools for keyword research: i) Google Keyword Tool http://adwords.google.com ii) Word Tracker (free trial available) http://www.wordtracker.com iii) Key Word Discovery (free trial) http://www.keyworddiscovery.com/index.html iv) Spacky provides keyword lists from all 3 major search engines. www.spacky.com 9) Here are my favorite tools for traffic research on competitors: i) Alexa Traffic Tool http://www.alexa.com/site/ds/top_sites ii) Compete.com http://www.compete.com 10) Here's my favorite ways to determine inbound links: i) Link Detective software (free download for Windows) http://www.versiontracker.com/dyn/moreinfo/win/10543686 or you can determine this by entering: ii) link www.yoursite.com in the search bar on Google iii) linkdomain www.yoursite.com in the search bar on Yahoo 11) You can research available forums by going to: i) Google.com and typing forums + your niche or keyword ii) Research available blogs on www.Technorati.com iii) Research Trends on Google Trends http://www.google.com/trends iv) Set alerts for your major keywords at Google Alerts http://www.google.com/alerts v) Spy on competitors, grab their keywords and more at www.SpyFu.com
resource #7
6) This is the transcription service I have been using for over two years with great results. They take your audio file and type it into a MS Word document in about a day - its also very affordable (about 1.25 cents per word). http://idictate.com/
How to Effectively Work A Forum - Step by Step

Step 1: Give To Get Total # Of Posts : 30-40 before moving to step 2 Set up accounts with the top 5 forums that are involved in your niche When you set up an account, give limited information about yourself. Go in, read, and answer questions, or give advice. DO NOT engage in anything negative. No flame wars, no name calling, etc. ;-) Step 2: Be Prepared Total # Of Posts : 31-60 before moving to step 3 As you participate in the forums, be prepared to set up pages that answer some of the questions you answer all the time - for example, instead of answering "What should I do about XYZ?" for the 10th time, or even answering that with pointing to your previous posts, answer by saying "I see that question a lot, so I took the time to make a page. Go here: (URL) Step 3: Update Your Profile Total # Of Posts : 61-90 After a week (or less, if you participate in various conversations), update your profile; add as much information as you can. Also, at this time, edit your signature file and include a URL to your website. Step 4: Ask to Help Others in The Forums. Don't just troll the forums. In other words, don't make every answer be in hopes for a sale. Think of it more as relationship building. Look for people who need help with seemingly unrelated issues. For example, if someone needs an expert to be on a live call with them, offer your services. Those things come back to repay you. Step 5: Start a Great Thread. Total # Of Posts : 100+ Within 4 weeks of being on the forum, ask a great question, or something that will ignite the board. Stay away from religion, politics, rumors, or anything that is not professional. An idea might be: "What stupid tricks have you tried and were completely amazed that they worked?" ...be creative with it.
resource #8
How to Effectively Work A Forum - Step by Step

Step 6: Promote Yourself This step comes after the great thread. Step 5 might take two or three times to get right, so do not proceed to this step until step 5 is done. Start a thread with a traditional, but good, headline (think sales letter). This is where you get to play with the big boys. The initial post should use the majority of the features the forum allows: pictures, fonts, etc. The main thing is to keep it to about a 45 second read for the average person. This is not a sales letter. In fact, the better thing to do would be to tell the "insiders on the forum" how to bypass the sales letter and get right to the meat of the service. They'll feel special, and go follow the link. Step 7: Enjoy The Traffic Total # Of Posts: 100+ At this point, you need to just refresh this list. Keep going over it, one step at a time. Of course, some things will now happen faster, such as steps 4 and 5. Do not over promote yourself - remember, you're not there to troll; you're there to help.
Scott A. Dennison http://unforgettablespeakers.com
resource #8
Repurposing Courseware
No. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 Method Speaking for lead generation Speaking in Keynote Presentations Speaking for your employer Speaking at informational seminars Teach at local University Teach at online University Teleseminar Webinar Web based learning / mentoring program Weekend retreats / bootcamps Speak on Cruise Ships Workbooks Books / e-books Booklets Articles for online distribution Articles for syndication Special reports or white papers Free or paid e-course Blog entries Ezine Printed Newsletter Magazine (your own private labeled) Rewrite / revise public domain material Single Audio CDs MP3 content Podcasting Radio show Radio interview series Audio CD multi-packs CD-ROM programs DVD Online Video (your website) Description Any talks you give where you add to your email list Paid or free engagement where you are featured or promoted As a part of your job you speak to represent your employer Usually a sales presentation disguised as a speech Specialized knowledge taught to students Adjunct professor, teaching online or by phone Promoted event, sometimes free or for a fee to teach or sell more information on the topic Built around a powerpoint type presentation and presented on the Internet Typically a high-end course taught to small groups Speaking / teaching affinity or small groups in a local environment To provide education / entertainment to on board guests Sold as a part of / or separate from a home study system Hard cover, soft cover or electronic books Low priced for online, back of room sales or used as bonuses Written or excerpted from your existing materials and distributed for lead generation Offered on exclusive basis to syndicated outlets for a fee From 2-3 pages to 30 pages, these are targeted to your niche and offered as lead generation tools Excerpted from your other written work and offered as lead generation tools To generate traffic to your website and position yourself as an expert in the niche Electronic magazine / newsletter From one page to dozens of pages, can be free or for a fee Further positions you as the expert in your niche Positions you as co-author with better known and often deceased experts Easy to record, low cost to distribute Same content as CD for instant download Similar to blog post, just done as an audio posting Either your own or as a guest on others - may be broadcast or online only Typically online, but could be syndicated 6-12 CDs or more Training programs involving multi-media and distributed on CD Rom discs Recorded at live event or in a studio Used to gain subscribers or sell services
resource #9
Repurposing Courseware
No. 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 Method Live Streaming Video YouTube Channel Ustream - online TV show Informercial (online or on TV) Small Group Coaching One-on-one coaching Counseling Short Consulting (1 hr to 1/2 day) Consulting on retainer (subscription) Long term Consulting Done for you Implementation Service Train the trainer programs Licensing of your material to others Membership site Subscription to content Home Study Courses Ghost writing for others Industry Training Programs Corporate Improvement Trainings Description Often done at live events to widen attendance Short videos used for training or to generate traffic Used to entertain or educate - sell or service viewers Created to demonstrate / sell your services Up to 10 people in a small group Typically a high-dollar offering made available at the top end of your product continuum Informal (or formal) offering of wisdom or insights to clients based on your materials Spot analysis of the process you teach as it is in use, followed by some quick Clients who have a regular need for your wisdom/experience on a periodic basis Usually done on contract basis for a fixed cost High-end service offered for certain clients who need services and can afford to pay (have more money than they have time) Process where you begin to leverage yourself in the niche by having protges working for you as employees Further leveraging your expert status by training and licensing others in your niche materials for upfront fee and monthly royalties Private, password protected materials offered on a monthly continuity basis Content that is sent, usually in physical format, by mail to the member for a monthly fee A big-box of your materials usually including audio/video and manuals Leveraging your expert status by writing similar material for others in your niche for a fee Further leveraging your expert status by training others in your industry usually for a fee Works in certain niches where corporations will pay to be trained in your materials. Very profitable when combined with licensing of your materials recommendations
resource #9
My Final Thoughts for You

I'd like to thank you for investing your time and your capital in my program. The depth of my passion for helping speakers, authors and trainers like you, to make your unique God-given message accessible to everyone in the world who needs it has been the driving force behind the investment I've made in creating this program and making it available to you. I am trusting you will follow my passion, thoughts and guidance step by step as described in the Passive Income Avalanche system which in return may afford you the opportunity to lead a millionaire lifestyle. So in closing, I'd like to quote a great Bible verse, which inspires me daily. It is written in Ecclesiastes 11:1-4
Cast your bread upon the waters, for after many days you will find it again. Give portions to seven, yes to eight, for you do not know what disaster may come upon the land. If clouds are full of water, they pour rain upon the earth... Whoever watches the wind will not plant; Whoever watches the clouds will not reap.
What Solomon meant when he wrote this is : Life involves both risk and opportunity. Because life has no guarantees, we must be prepared. "Cast your bread upon the waters" means that life has opportunities and we must seize them, not merely playing it safe. We need a spirit of trust and adventure, facing life's risks and opportunities with God-directed enthusiasm and faith. Waiting for the perfect conditions will mean inactivity. I encourage you to cast your bread, give your portions to many, plant your message in the world and reap its rewards. Thanks again and may God Bless you !

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The Speakers

The Speakers Profit System

The Speakers Profit System

The Speakers Profit System

Welcome to the Passive Income Avalanche Home Study system

The Speakers Profit System

The Speakers Profit System

The Speakers Profit System

The Speakers Profit System

The Speakers Profit System

The Product Continuum Concept

The Speakers Profit System

Chapter 1 The Product Continuum Concept

The Speakers Profit System

Chapter 1 The Product Continuum Concept

The Speakers Profit System

Chapter 1 The Product Continuum Concept

The Speakers Profit System

Chapter 1 The Product Continuum Concept

The Speakers Profit System

Chapter 1 The Product Continuum Concept

The Speakers Profit System

Chapter 1 The Product Continuum Concept

The Speakers Profit System

Chapter 1 The Product Continuum Concept

The Speakers Profit System

The Speakers Profit System

Chapter 1 The Product Continuum Concept

The Speakers Profit System

Chapter 1 The Product Continuum Concept

The Speakers Profit System

Chapter 1 The Product Continuum Concept

The Speakers Profit System

Understanding the Product Continuum

Step 1 : Step 2 : Step 3 :

The Speakers Profit System

g) Affiliate income? h) Advertising? i) j) 4) Other? Other?

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The Speakers Profit System

What is your niche market as a speaker?

What is your website domain?

What is the size of your active email list?

If you are on LinkedIn, how many connections do you have?

10) If you on Facebook, how many friends do you have?

12) How often do you tweet?

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The Speakers Profit System

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The Speakers Profit System

29) Any other thoughts you'd like to share?

Name Address City Email Address Phone # State Zip

Complete and return via email or Fax to (727) 499-6980

The Speakers Profit System

Building your Product Continuum

The Speakers Profit System

Chapter 2 Building Your Product Continuum

The Speakers Profit System

Chapter 2 Building Your Product Continuum

The Speakers Profit System

Chapter 2 Building Your Product Continuum

The Speakers Profit System

Chapter 2 Building Your Product Continuum

The Speakers Profit System

Chapter 2 Building Your Product Continuum