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Real Fast Results for Marketing, Business and Entrepreneurs

The Real Fast Results is a business podcast for people who want to see real results in their business fast. The show provides actionable, implementable steps in each episode. The focus is definitely on marketing strategies and list building with an emphasis on little-known but effective tactics. We also will cover passive and recurring income opportunities as well as productivity and time efficiency strategies for the busy and often distracted entrepreneur or content creator. Any time you invest listening to the Real Fast Results podcast will be both enjoyable and practical. If you're an online business person or entrepreneur who realizes that it's about working smart then you're going to LOVE this show!
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Oct 21, 2016
Nick Loper I think the promise that I want to put forward is kind of a new way of thinking.  Everyone wants to make money online.  Everyone wants to have a business.  I want us to take a step back and think about where that money comes from.  Somebody has to buy whatever it is that you’re selling.  The result that I’m after today, and what I’m after in the Buy Buttons book, is that there are a bunch of fast track marketplaces where you can get in front of a pre-existing audience of buyers.  That exists in dozens and dozens of different niches, for whatever skills or products that you have to offer.  That’s the result that we’re after. We have had people in my book, and that I’ve met through my podcast, that are making anywhere from $100 a month, on the side and that they are happy with it because it’s play money, up to $10,000 a month or more.  So, it’s more like, “Why do you want to make that money?  What does that afford you?  What is that going to buy you?  What does that mean in terms of your lifestyle?”  Probably the common theme of what we’re all after is to do something that we’re interested in, to do something that excites us, and ultimately, allows us to lead a happier life as a result. Download the Complete PDF Show Notes Free for this Episode That’s kind of what I’m after, and I just get a kick out of running these different experiments and seeing what works and what doesn’t.  That’s wonderful.  So, it comes down to doing work that you love and trying to figure out to monetize that while making an impact in other people’s lives. [bctt tweet="The bigger and more valuable the asset, the more money you can make." username="danielhall"]

In this interview you will learn about:

  • Peer-to-Peer Economy
  • The Sharing Economy (and websites to go to)
  • Marketplaces to Sell Your Skills (and websites)
  • Marketplaces to Sell Physical Products (and websites)

Links

Nick's Book:  Buy Buttons:The Fast-Track Strategy to Make Extra Money and Start a Business in Your Spare Time Marketplaces to Sell Your Skills TaskRabbit Upwork Thumbtack Fiverr Etsy Zazzle Udemy Amazon Marketplaces to Sell Physical Products Ebay Craigslist Amazon New Sites Nick Is Looking Into Prosper.com Fundrise Kickfurther

Download the Complete PDF Show Notes Free for this Episode make money

Real Fast Results Community

If you are diggin’ on this stuff and really love what we’re doing here at Real Fast Results, would you please do me a favor? Head on over to iTunes, and make sure that you subscribe to this show, download it, and rate & review it. That would be an awesome thing. Of course, we also want to know your results. Please share those results with us at http://www.realfastresults.com/results. As always, go make results happen!
Oct 19, 2016
Scott Paton
We’re promising people real fast results.  I’m assuming that you are an author, a speaker, or a coach (or that you have some level of expertise) and that you want to share that expertise with the world.  When you get right into it, it’s quite easy to go to your local college, put a class together and teach it.  But, you know, there are 10 people there and nine of them are totally uninterested in what you have to say.  That’s not really fair or true, but you know, what we want to do is to impact the world.  So, how can we have real fast results in terms of building our credibility?  That’s what I want to talk about today. [bctt tweet="Whatever your expertise is, you’re going to create a very short course that you can put up on Udemy." username="danielhall"]

Download the Complete PDF Show Notes Free for this Episode

In this podcast you will discover:

  • The benefits of building credibility.
  • How to build credibility by making video courses and posting them on Udemy.
  • How to decide on a topic.
  • How to organize your content.
  • How to set up a Udemy course.
  • How to get reviews on Udemy.
  • The best time to promote a Udemy course.
  • The importance of collaboration.

Links

Udemy Scott and Daniel's Course: Podcasting to Kindle and Print on Demand Books Scott Course: Podcasts Made Easy

Download the Complete PDF Show Notes Free for this Episode building credibility

Real Fast Results Community

If you are diggin’ on this stuff and really love what we’re doing here at Real Fast Results, would you please do me a favor? Head on over to iTunes, and make sure that you subscribe to this show, download it, and rate & review it. That would be an awesome thing. Of course, we also want to know your results. Please share those results with us at http://www.realfastresults.com/results. As always, go make results happen!
Oct 14, 2016
Connie Ragen GreenToday, we are going to be talking about re-purposing your content, which is HUGE!  I’ve been able to re-purpose my content for years now.  I have been online almost 10 years now.  So, for quite a few years, I’ve taken something very simple, like a blog post, and I’ve been able to re-purpose it into so many things.  This includes 14 bestselling books, international speaking gigs, just everywhere on every topic, and being able to connect with people who want to study with me.  These are people who I mentor.

Download the Complete PDF Show Notes Free for this Episode

Essentially, when you review this material, you’re going to learn to take content that’s in one type of format, such a blog article, and repackage it so that it’s in other formats and can be used in different ways.  So, the core of the content remains the same, but you can sometimes tweak it to fit another audience, thereby leveraging the same work over and over again.  The truth is that this is incredibly powerful.  Here’s an example.  I was just speaking to a group of authors over in London.  That’s not my primary audience, but I was able to re-purpose other presentations that I’ve done for online entrepreneurs and various groups to make it very specific for the authors, without having to redo the entire presentation. [bctt tweet="Re-purposing content is a great way to leverage your efforts." username="danielhall"]

In this podcast you will discover:

  • How to figure out what type of content your audience wants
  • How to re-purpose information you already have onto different platforms
  • Connie's Concept - “Book, Blog, Broadcast.”
  • Marketing Your Content
  • Outsourcing

Links:

Books by Connie ConnieRagenGreen.com Previous Podcast - Earn More, Get More Done Plus Get More Free Time By Hiring a Virtual Assistant with Luanna Rodham  

Download the Complete PDF Show Notes Free for this Episode

re-purpose content

Real Fast Results Community

If you are diggin’ on this stuff and really love what we’re doing here at Real Fast Results, would you please do me a favor? Head on over to iTunes, and make sure that you subscribe to this show, download it, and rate & review it. That would be an awesome thing. Of course, we also want to know your results. Please share those results with us at http://www.realfastresults.com/results. As always, go make results happen!
Oct 11, 2016
Andrew LockI thought that we would talk about one of the ways, and I believe it’s the best way, online to get residual income.  Sometimes this is referred to as recurring income or passive income.  That’s money where you do the majority of the work upfront, and then you continue to get paid over and over again, without limit, just like a songwriter gets paid for writing a song.  They get the royalties, and they continue to come in over the years.

Download the Complete PDF Show Notes Free for this Episode

What I find with membership sites, on any topic, is that people tend to sign up and become a member. [bctt tweet="When people sign up for membership sites, they join for the content and stay for the community." username="danielhall"]That’s kind of a big breakthrough, to understand that. They think that they want the information, but actually, what they really want is to interact with, connect with, share ideas with, ask for feedback from, ask questions of, and so on, among other people who are interested in the same topic.

6 Steps to a Successful Membership Site

I’ve developed a blueprint with six steps that I think are very logical…A logical sequence of things that need to be done, with the ultimate aim of having this residual income, because that means a lot less stress in your life.  It can also lead to financial freedom, because you know, you really can make good money from this.  The steps are:
  • Step #1 is to choose a topic.
  • Step #2 is to pick a platform.
  • Step #3 is to add content (and a community, if that’s relevant)
  • Step #4 is to attract members
  • Step #5 is to make money
  • Step #6 is to keep members
If you take all of these steps, you’ll have a successful membership site.

Links

Andrew's Book: Big Lessons from Big Brands: Secrets from Big Business to Improve Your Small Business Membership Site Success System Membership Site Platforms: Value Addon WishList Member Forum Software: phpBB Accepting Payments: PayPal Stripe

Download the Complete PDF Show Notes Free for this Episode

43-creating-recurring-income-with-membership-sites

Real Fast Results Community

If you are diggin’ on this stuff and really love what we’re doing here at Real Fast Results, would you please do me a favor? Head on over to iTunes, and make sure that you subscribe to this show, download it, and rate & review it. That would be an awesome thing. Of course, we also want to know your results. Please share those results with us at http://www.realfastresults.com/results. As always, go make results happen!
Oct 7, 2016
Bob JenkinsOn today’s episode, my mission is to share with each of you how to get 10x more leads from your website with a few hidden places to generate those leads.  You can’t just survive with a few landing pages.  You can’t just survive with a sidebar opt-in form.  There are a lot of different places where you could maximize your website’s results in the sense of lead generation, and of course, with that lead generation being targeted, get better results from the other side, as they become customers.

Download the Complete PDF Show Notes Free for this Episode

  [bctt tweet="To get real fast results, you need to have real fast processes." username="danielhall"]

5 Tactics to Improve Your List Building on Your Website

  1. Blog Posts - One of the things that I want you to do is to take a look at the five most profitable blog posts that you’ve ever written.
  2. Content - The second place is also inside of your content.  Now, this content can be on your own blog, and it can also be on guest posts within other people’s websites.
  3. 404 Error Page - The third place, on your website, that I want you to use to increase your leads is what’s called a “404 Error” page.  You may not know this, but if you were to go to your own website right now, and type in YourWebsiteDomain.com/blahblahblah, unless you’ve written a post by the name of blahblahblah, you’re going to find yourself on a 404 Error page.  In case you didn’t know, 404 is just the number that the computer geeks of the world came up with as the error code when a page doesn’t exist.
  4. Navigation Bar -I want you to have an opt-in opportunity in your navigation bar.  You know how people have their header, and they have a graphic, and they have a big opt-in box in there?
  5. Thank You Page - We’re going to talk about your “thank you” page So, your “thank you” page is a place a lot of people ignore, but when you are thinking about how to get more people on your list, and you spend all of your time optimizing your landing page, you spend all of your time optimizing your opt-in form, your lead boxes on your website, and all of this kind of stuff, and they say “yes”, what do they get to on the next page?

In this podcast you will also discover:

  • What a lead magnet is and how to make one.
  • How to set up offers on your 404 Error Pages.
  • In depth information on each of the 5 tactics.
  • How to connect with Bob Jenkins

Download the Complete PDF Show Notes Free for this Episode

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Links

Real Fast Results Community

If you are diggin’ on this stuff and really love what we’re doing here at Real Fast Results, would you please do me a favor? Head on over to iTunes, and make sure that you subscribe to this show, download it, and rate & review it. That would be an awesome thing. Of course, we also want to know your results. Please share those results with us at http://www.realfastresults.com/results. As always, go make results happen!
Oct 4, 2016
Heather Havenwood The promise is that if you’re an expert in your field, at any level, the best way to get people to become attracted to you is by leveraging other people’s lists.  We’ve heard this before.  Now, in the real estate world, we call that using other people’s money, but in the information and the marketing space, we call it leveraging other people’s lists.  Then, in the podcast world, you leverage the list of the podcast that you’re guest speaking on.  What you want to do is start learning the art of podcasting and being a guest.  So that is what we’re going to talk about today, being a guest on other people’s shows.

Download the Complete PDF Show Notes Free for this Episode

Benefits of Being a Podcast Guest

  • Traffic
  • List building

3 Steps to Being a Great Podcast Guest

  1. Structure - Okay, just to give you the world of “structure”.  What structure is for me, what I think that is, is that you want to make it easy for people to say “yes” to you.  Now, what does that look like as a host?  When my people reach out to a host, I have things like a media page ready to go, with all my images ready to go, my bio ready to go.
  2. Setup - Setup is having this thing called a microphone, and having a dedicated line, not on a WiFi. Again, I feel like this should be common sense, but there are times when you get on the phone with someone, to interview them and they’re on a WiFi.  You can’t do that when you’re dealing with audio and visual.  You have to upgrade your AT&T, or Google Fiber, or whatever.
  3. Promotion - Now, think about this.  None of us like to promote ourselves because we are taught at a very young age not to be narcissistic.  It’s very counter-intuitive when it comes to podcasting because your host already has a party going on, and then you have to go and invite yourself to the party.

Links:

HeatherHavenwood/media SexyBossInc.com Recommended Mics: Blue Yeti Audio-Technica iRig

Download the Complete PDF Show Notes Free for this Episode

fb-41-generate-massive-traffic-by-being-a-great-podcast-guest-with-2

Real Fast Results Community

If you are diggin’ on this stuff and really love what we’re doing here at Real Fast Results, would you please do me a favor? Head on over to iTunes, and make sure that you subscribe to this show, download it, and rate & review it. That would be an awesome thing. Of course, we also want to know your results. Please share those results with us at http://www.realfastresults.com/results. As always, go make results happen!
Sep 30, 2016
Dan Morris Today we are promising to teach, show and explore the idea of building a collaborative venture that will not only grow your list and grow your income, but will get you in front of the people that your audience members are following all of the time. It’s a product called the BC Stack.  We do it for Blogging Concentrated, and we do it for clients. We help build their “stack,” per se.  We find 65 people in the niche.  In our case, it has always been blogging on internet marketing.  We put together a package with 65 products, and we sell that package for $27.00, and we use the 65 people to help market it by sharing the profits of all of its sales.  So, not only do we grow the list with people who have already been filtered, but everyone gets in front of people they need to be in front of.

Benefits of Collaborating with Influencers

The primary reason for doing this is because Tom Cruise knows Oprah Winfrey.  Dave Ramsey knows Suze Orman.influencers  The top people in any industry know the other top people within that industry.  As far as I am concerned, the top people do not know you.  You are not at the top of the industry.  You’re just not there.  In order to get there, you actually have to reach out.  It doesn’t happen the other way around.  People don’t just randomly call the smaller people in the industry.  You have to reach out. This is an opportunity to reach out with something of substance, with a reason to say, “Hey look, we’re going to put your product, your ideas, in front of a bunch of other people who have already been filtered.  All of these other people in our niche have already filtered the audience.  Nobody follows them but people that like that kind of thing.  This is your audience too, so how about you contribute a product, and we’re going to put together something that nobody else does.”  Now, all of the sudden, I am talking to Tom Cruise.  Now I’m a position by name. Now the top people in any industry have more of a chance to get on big podcasts and big shows.  If they are ever going to mention your name, they actually have to know it exists first.  I mean, our first major benefit is if you want to be somebody in your industry, you have to meet the other people in the industry, or you’re just the guy in the basement. Outside of our world, validation comes when Dan Rather mentions someone in the news.  If you’re a runner, you’re probably reading Runner’s World magazine.  If Runner’s World magazine mentions you as a good running trainer, that is a third-party validation of what you’ve been trying to do the whole time.  That is part of rolling the snowball of your business, finding ways to make sure that you’re always planting in the minds of your audience that not only does what you’re saying work, but other people respect these concepts. Everyone has objections to buying your product.  Everyone has objections to even following or listening to your webinars. When you can slowly overcome those objections by putting validation in front of your audience, this makes it so much easier for you to say that you have a book coming out and have people pre-order it.  We’re huge fans of marketing to people through filtered lists.  For instance, coming on this particular podcast, these people already exist that are listening to this, which I would like to speak to.  That is much better than a billboard on a highway, which is not filtered; it’s just thousands of people.  So, this is an opportunity to stand in front of a filtered list, and a big list, in a big way. The second benefit, that I didn’t know the first time we did it, was that once it was over people wanted us to come on their podcasts, or they would say, “How do we do something together?” I say, “Send me the copy of what you want me to say to the email list.”  I will send it out.  I will help you reach all of the people that we have gathered.  Not everyone downloads every single product.  There’s always more people on the list than any contributor gets.  That kind of camaraderie like, “Why don’t we build a product together?”  Those more personal JV kind of things are the second benefit.  I didn’t foresee them, but they were very welcomed when people asked. People always say that you should be authentic online.  They try to tell you to be yourself, but the fact of the matter is that everyone is themselves.  That’s not the issue.  [bctt tweet="The issue is how to get an audience to follow you because their interests are your interests?" via="no"]How do you speak in a way that makes people say, “Man, I really need to follow that person because he has things to say that I want”?  What the BC Stack does, that a $25 Amazon gift card giveaway doesn’t do, is it bring in people to your audience who actually, in their heart, want to learn what you teach. You know, when you give away an Amazon gift card, if you want to do some sort of list building thing, then everyone on the planet comes to join your list because they want the gift card. However, at no point in time is there an authentic relationship between you and them.  The filter isn’t there.  The reason why they entered your community isn’t authentic.  It isn’t real.  So, I love this concept.  I might be on your podcast today, but you could also be on mine tomorrow.  That helps you, and it helps us.  It builds that relationship with our audience as well.

Step #1 - Finding the Top Influencerscollaborate with

Here’s the big picture.  We have a spreadsheet that we call “The Universe”, and in the middle of it, we put the niche.  So, it’s the DIY Universe, or maybe the Blogging Universe.  On this page, we have:
  • Amazon
  • Udemy
  • iTunes
  • Podcasts
  • Magazines
  • TV Stars
  • Radio Stars
What we do is go to every one of these sites and we find the top people.  For example, we find the top person on Udemy within that particular industry. We figure out who the top authors on Amazon are for a certain niche.  We learn who the top podcasters are who are talking about the subject at hand.  Then, we build out the universe as it pertains to the top people within the industry we’re looking into.  If you are a player within an industry, you should already know who the top people in that area are. Most of the time, the list that we develop are 90% full of people we’ve never met.  It may be some guy in India who wrote a great guide to blogging.  According to Amazon, this is one of the top sellers, and I didn’t even know it.  But, now I’ve got my universe defined, and all I have to do is reach out and talk to these people.  That’s the big picture.

contactStep #2- Making Contact

A member of the team, usually a VA, has to go find this information.  What’s their website?  What’s their Twitter handle?  What’s their email address?  We use a plug-in called Search & Scour for Gmail, and it actually finds email addresses like crazy.  It’s pretty much a Chrome plug-in.  So, I can find pretty much anyone’s email address, and then their Twitter handle, and we put together a letter.  It’s easier for me now because we have three under our belts.  I can say, “Hey, look at what we’ve done before.”  That makes it a much easier cold call. That first cold call letter, we did not reach out until we found somebody that wanted to be on-board.  So, we asked John Lee Dumas if he’d like to contribute to the very first one because I was on his show, and he said, “Great!”  So our very first letter said, “Hey, we’re doing a stack of products.  John Lee Dumas is involved.  Would you like to be involved?”  Basically, we’re leveraging somebody else’s name in the industry that the person we’re contacting has probably heard of.  That shows that this isn’t a fly-by-night type of thing.  It’s real. In any case, that’s the first letter, “Would you like to be involved?  Can I tell you more about it?”  I don’t put any more in it because it really is a cold call.  All I really need from them is to press, “Yes, I’d like to be involved.”  Then the door is open to say, “Let me tell you more.  This is what we’re trying to do.”  And, you reach out to all of them, which takes some time. You know, we have a saying, which is, “Be the biggest small dog you can be.”  In order to get Tom Cruise to say, “Yes, I would like to be involved”… Maybe you think, “I could never get Tom Cruise,” but maybe you go to LinkedIn, and you find Tom Cruise, and you use LinkedIn’s professional tools to tell you the path.  Who are the people that I know who could get to him?  Can I use one to introduce me to another?  An introduction is fantastic because that’s validation right there.  Or, do you use a small guy to get to a medium guy? This thing worked really well, if you remember back in the 90’s, when the very first viral thing online was OneRedPaperclip.com.  It was where a guy turned a paper clip into a house by trading his way up.  This isn’t that different.  We’re basically trading validation for validation to get to where we want to go.  Once you do the first one, you can just use the last one to sell the next one.  You really just have to do a bunch of work on the front-end.

Step # 3- Affiliate Set Upaffiliate

The hard part is the affiliate part.  Like, we use aMember. There are a variety of tools that you can use, but you really need to have some sort of software that can produce an affiliate link for your people.  So, once they agree to be part of what we’re offering, we send another email that says, “Hey, here’s what we need, and here’s when we need it by.”  For the most part, I haven’t really asked if they would promote, and a few people don’t.  I’m not as concerned about that.  Obviously, we want them to promote, but I don’t want to be a pain.  Like, I don’t want to be a jackleg.  I mean, it’s not required that they promote After I get their information, the next email that I send, and, this is the hard part and I haven’t perfected this, but it works really well, I send an individual email to every single affiliate.  Now, we had 370 affiliates at the last one.  So that’s 370 emails, and we send them every single day.  It includes their affiliate link, and copy for an email they could send out, and images we create. You know, we create new images every day for the product, saying like there are four days left or three days left.  We send them out individually so that the people who are helping promote do no work.  Like, “Here.  Just copy and paste.  Copy and paste this Facebook update.  Here’s an image you can use on Facebook.  It’s already optimized for Facebook, and here’s one for Pinterest.” We do that every day for the seven days that we do the project.  I don’t really ask for promotion; I normally just give them the tools.  When people ask me about promotion, I basically say, “You are in the business of selling your product.  I’m giving you a one-week opportunity to sell your product with 64 bonus items.”  And, I let them just do what they do.  I always say, “How many books do you think you’re going to sell this week?  20? 15? 8?  How about 100 if you offer 64 bonus items on top of your book?  Just tell your audience ‘Hey, guess what?  My book is on sale this week with 64 bonus items.  You’ll never get this again.’” If your book is $50, and you’re used to making $50, then $50 x 8 is a lot different.  You’re going to make $13 as an affiliate with our product, but you’re going to make $13 x 100.  That’s kind of how we talk to people.  Like, “This could be a no-brainer for your audience.”  They might be saying to themselves, “I’ve really been thinking about buying this product, but I haven’t yet.”  I mean 64 bonus items?  That is a different world than just telling them, “Hey, it’s on sale for 10% off this week.” Let me tell you, as far as I can tell, there is no other way.  If you do affiliate marketing, you’ll know, and you’ll have a list of affiliates, but only 3% of them will keep selling your product.  For the rest of them, it’s at the back of their mind because there are so many different things going on.  It’s not malicious.  It’s just hard.  Unfortunately, in our world, since most people don’t have CEO training, and most people don’t really have a team, the path of least resistance is the one that people take every day.  A good percentage of people don’t even build strong businesses because a shopping cart is too difficult.  They skip it every single day and say, “Well, I’ll get to that later,” because the path of least resistance is writing a Facebook post with an affiliate link. When you do the work for them, it makes it so much easier for them to even be excited about getting on it because there aren’t the stumbling blocks that you have to get over.  Your audience is never going to be as energetic or as grid worthy as you think that they are.  You think that they’re going to be gung-ho to sell your product, but they won’t be until they see how easy it is to be gung-ho and they see that they can probably make money from it since, for the most part, the stack is a no-brainer.

influencers-workStep # 4 - Work

The next step is work.  For the next seven days, there are lots of people that are going to email in.  There are going to be questions, problems, and new affiliates that come out of the woodwork.  Hour after hour, you’re going to have to be on your game for seven days.  Like, if somebody wants to promote, I’m going to get their affiliate link, I’m going to get their email ready, I’m going to get their graphics, and I’m going to email them back within like five minutes.  I’m going to tell them, “I’ve got you set up.  You don’t even have to register.  Here it is.”  I do all of that.  I can take care of getting their PayPal email address later, or whatever other crappy detail that I need. For one week, it is work.  For Rachel and me… Rachel is my business partner… It’s a lot of work.  We have people on the team, but still, you’ve got to know, if you’re going to make a lot of money this week, you’ve got to earn it.  There’s really no way around it.  This isn’t an automated IFTTT thing.  It is work.  I like it.  It’s one week.  Get a babysitter because you’re going to need focus time.  Things come up, and you just have to be ready.  Basically, the stack is open for 60 days.  We allow it to be open because if someone important contributes a product that basically means that on his website there is a page where people can come and get it for free, where they would normally pay for it.  If I make him keep that open for life, that is a risk that I can’t make other business owners take. We have tried to open it for 60 days, for everyone to get in and get out.  When they buy it, then it gets sent to PayPal, and it gets sent to.  I guess we can go through the minutia of that, but really, that’s as simple as it gets.  It involves setting up the PayPal button and the affiliate link inside.  You’re going to want to make sure that person’s email address gets added to AWeber and make sure that email goes out in the auto-responder that says, “Hey, if you didn’t get automatically redirected to the page, here’s your download link.”  Then, making sure that on Day 2 they get that exact same email, and on Day 3 they get a similar email, but make sure that you take customer service out of the equation.  You don’t have time for it.  So, you’ve got to keep sending them emails that say, “Hey, here’s your download link,” and/or, “Here’s your password.”  Make sure that’s built in. Now that we have a big email list, we send an email out that says, “Look, you cannot be an idiot business owner.  Just because you paid for 65 items, doesn’t mean you should download them all.  Really, what’s the one item in here that’s going to make you $28?  Because, if you can spend $27 and make $28, that would be a win.  Download that, and do that, and get better.  That way, if you don’t download anything else, you’ve made your money back and your business is moving forward.  If you spend all day today downloading 65 products and getting bogged down by all the different things you have to do to make all of them work, that won’t be a good thing.” That’s not good for the contributors because they shouldn’t download products that they don’t need.  They don’t need you on their lists.  You need to go find the thing that is going to make your life better.  Then, the next time we do the stack, you’re going to buy it again.  That’s what we want.  We want you to stick around for a long time.  At some point in time, if your customer didn’t have the product that he needed today, he’s going to reach out.  He’ll say, “Hey, I did this thing that I got through the stack, and I need help with this part.”  Now, all of the sudden, he has a relationship with someone in the stack. That whole authentic part has to take place.  Our job is to continually be good stewards to that list in order to make sure that people don’t unsubscribe.  A certain percentage will unsubscribe, but if you got on in the first place, how can I make your life better until the next one.  How can I send out an offer that I agree with, that I think is so much better, that’s going to help everyone?  That’s kind of our job.  How do I roll you into the next thing? Understand that this should be a promotion that lasts from a certain start date to a particular end date.  This is important, first of all, because of the laws of persuasion.  One of the laws of persuasion is that there needs to be a sense of urgency.  There are actually countdown times on the sales pages.  That’s because when there is a time limit, you actually feel like you have to take action.  The second part is that you have to limit access.  If you can’t always get it, then you know that you have to take action now because it won’t always be available. I will tell you that many, many affiliates show up on Day 6 and say, “Hey, I just found out about this.  Can you extend it for my audience for four more days?”  We can’t.  I can’t train the audience at any point that something happens beyond the cut-off date because next time, even if 1% of people go, “Ahh.  This will probably be available for another day, or there’s going to be a second offer where they reduce the price,” you’ll lose sales.  That’s because the power to procrastinate is huge. [bctt tweet="It’s very important to remember, if you say something as a business owner, you better live up to it." username="danielhall"]Whatever it is that you say, you have to stick to it.  So, if something is ending on a certain time and date, that’s it.  It’s over.  That’s one of the reasons why when I do a promotion, there’s a countdown timer, and it automatically redirects when that timer goes to zero.  That’s it.  It’s over, and there are no exceptions. Actually, I only allow one exception, and that is if a contributor comes to me and says that a certain person in my audience was on vacation and wants in.  If they say that within a day or two, and it’s the contributor that comes to me, I want to honor the contributor.  I feel like, I don’t want you to say “no” to your people because you’re not the one who created the timer.  This has only happened a handful of times during these promotions, however, and it’s like a lot of rules.  There are always some exceptions, but the general rule of that rule is “no exceptions”.

tipsFinal Tips

There was a mistake that we made the first time, and that was that we asked all of the contributors to contribute the product by the 12th because we were starting it by the 15th.  That worked fine, but what didn’t happen is I didn’t have a moment in those three days to look at the entire picture of everything that had been contributed and come up with angles, or marketing ideas, and put together a more comprehensive and strategic plan, in terms of marketing it for those seven days.  I would love for you to put 15 days, or two weeks, between the contributor deadline and the day that you start.  This way, you can email the contributors and educate them on what else is in it so that they have a better idea about how to sell it, and you also want to do this because it allows you to look at it and organize it, say, on your sales page in different ways. Once you see all of this, you might be like, “Oh man!  I could have grouped these four and these four so that people feel like they got a podcast pack and they got a blogging pack.”  If you don’t give yourself a little bit of time between the promotions, you’ll never see the things that might actually make you more sales.  I would say, spend a month trying to get the contributors so that you can put two weeks between the two.  Not a lot.  You really want those people to be fired up, and if you put too much time in there, they lose sight of what you all were doing in the first place.  You should, however, give yourself time to come up with some sort of strategic plan.  Look for some trends, or patterns, or something interesting. Also, I’ve had an opportunity to be on a couple of the podcasts of contributors who wanted the podcasts to come out the day that it started.  So, if you don’t give yourself a little bit of time, people can’t do that.  Then, we use a simple spreadsheet to keep track of the affiliates and their affiliate links.  Just on the spreadsheet, I kept track of their product names, the link to the website, and the code in case I had customer service problems, to make that very simple.  We did have the sale for seven days. I always try to bring in non-contributor affiliates.  One of my big ones is conferences.  I really like to contact conferences and say, “Look, one of the things that you do is you give like a $150 discount for tickets, but what if you gave away the stack for free?  Like, what if you just buy it for everyone who buys your ticket?”  That’s a $27 discount, and you’re going to get $13 back.  So, really you’re only giving $13 back, but you’re giving people an actual product, which is kind of the LeadPages way of marketing.  Every weekend LeadPages gives away a bonus.  So, I do like to offer that concept up. I like to suggest an idea.  Like, you could say, “Are you interested in marketing this stack?”  That’s nebulous, and they are like, “Well, maybe.”  However, if you say, “Would you like to give away the stack for free as a bonus for someone buying your ticket?  It will only cost you $13, but it’s a cool bonus.”  That gets their mind thinking.  If you say, “Hey, would you like to be part of the stack?  I know that you’re selling your book all of the time, but you could sell it for one week with 64 bonus items,” that’s a different mindset for them.  It’s kind of like if you have a blog and you have a “Pin It” button, that’s a great thing to have, but if you say, “Add this to your Halloween board,” that’s different.  It’s like, “Oh, that is a good idea.  I should add this to my Halloween board.”  The power of suggestion is important. Other than that, there’s the customer service in the backend.  I lost my email address.  I lost my login.  That part is hard to get around.  You can do the email auto-responders, but there is going to be some of that and you’re just going to have to deal with it.  That’s just part of the business.  After that, for us, it’s thinking about the next one.  More importantly, for us as an income source, it’s finding new clients to do that for between BC stacks.  We only do ours once a year, and if we did it more often during the year, I think it wouldn’t be as powerful.  Maybe it would.  Maybe twice a year, but I like once a year. I’ll do it for a DIY blog next week and for a gardening blog a week after that.  We use it as an income source, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that I’m tapping my community for $27 every few weeks.  I like that because, you know, we’re doing the course starting September 12, 2016 and in that I can totally tell them, this is why it’s for you.  You know, every course is 100% for you. I don’t mind tapping the audience for things that I have developed specifically for their needs, but tapping them for the BC stack where there are some things they probably don’t need [is different].  Like, there’s a product on how to load up WordPress.  Most of our audience doesn’t need that.  So, I feel like asking them for the same $27 a week for things that won’t 100% benefit them would be a violation of trust.  Trust and integrity are vital to your business because once you lose it, it’s damn-near impossible to get it back. I do want to say that you also have a responsibility for your audience’s time.  So, when you give them 65 products to download, you’re basically saddling them with 65 things to learn.  Consider that too.  That’s part of being the guardian and leader of your community.  You’ve got to make sure that what you’re bringing is really valuable.

Connecting with Dan

You can always go to BCstack.com. That’s the page that’s live every year.  In between times, there are links to the past ones so that you can see what we did.  Plus, visiting the site will give you an opportunity to get on the list so that you get notified when the next one is coming up.  Primarily, we run Audience Industries, which is BloggingConcentrated.com.  We also run FindingJoy.net, which is a site about motherhood, which Rachel writes.  It has blog posts that have over a million likes on them. You know, a couple of hundred thousand people a day.  It’s a really big site.  We also run Benefits of Resveratrol, which is an anti-oxidant and nutritional site, and we do that for the specific purpose of learning niche things that we need to do for the audience.  Otherwise, BloggingConcentrated.com is our hub and Provide Podcasts is the way that we do this kind of thing on a daily basis.

Resources

Dan Morris Sites: BCstack.com BloggingConcentrated.com Plug-in for Finding Email Addresses: Search & Scour Affiliate Set Up: aMember Auto-Responder Tool: AWeber

Real Fast Results Community

If you are diggin’ on this stuff and really love what we’re doing here at Real Fast Results, would you please do me a favor? Head on over to iTunes, and make sure that you subscribe to this show, download it, and rate & review it. That would be an awesome thing. Of course, we also want to know your results. Please share those results with us at http://www.realfastresults.com/results. As always, go make results happen!
Sep 27, 2016
David Perdew The one thing that I’m going to promise people today is by the time they finish this segment, they will know exactly how to create a sustainable and scalable business with residual income. First off, I’m going to use “passive” and “residual” income interchangeably here, and the reason is that there’s kind of a stigma with “passive income”.  People think that’s kind of “get rich quick”.  “Residual income” seems to be from working once and getting paid forever.  That’s what I like.  Do the work once and get paid forever.  I have experience with the big telecom companies, as a consultant, and they are basically the biggest membership sites in the world.  They know that you get a subscription every month to your phone bill, and they get a monthly contract from you, and it’s a subscription model membership site. What they’ve done is, they’ve actually been just the masters of creating monthly, residual income.  Now, when you start residual income, you can build on it every month because you know what’s coming in automatically.  That’s the way businesses grow, every business.

The PIE Test - Passive Income Evaluation Test

You know, I was a systems guy.  I like to build systems, and that’s processes as well.  So, I developed my own little system called the PIE test.  [bctt tweet="The PIE test is the “Passive Income Evaluation” test. " username="danielhall"]It’s easy to remember, PIE test.  We all want a piece of that pie, right? There are five steps to the PIE test:
  1. The first one is “lifetime database referral”.  That’s my own term for commissions that you get paid over and over.
  2. The second step is “plenty of products”.  You want to make sure that you’re working with people who have plenty of products.
  3. The third is very high-quality products. Because, it’s your reputation no matter if you own the product or not.
  4. The fourth is “great product sales funnels”.  Is it a “one-hit wonder” kind of sales funnel or is it something that gives an opportunity to buy more and more?
  5. The fifth thing, and this is the biggie that I think a lot of people will bypass, is to “know your numbers”. If you know your numbers, you have a pathway to scalability.  That’s incredibly important.

Step # 1 - Lifetime Database ReferralsReferral Programs

Step 1 is “lifetime database referrals”.  A lot of people would call that lifetime commissions.  It’s very tricky, when you’re doing online business, because in the online business world people talk about lifetime cookies.  Lifetime cookies are completely different.  Anything that is a “cookie” goes away.  A cookie is a technical term for a little piece of code that goes on your computer when you are referred by somebody else in affiliate marketing.  Sometimes those cookies are set for 30 days, sometimes 90 days, and sometimes “lifetime”.  Everybody thinks, “Ooh, lifetime cookies!  Those are awesome!”  And, they are awesome; they are pretty good.  They’re my second choice. My first choice is “hardcoded in the software” because if you can get hooked up with the people that are hardcoded in the software to your referral, then you’re going to get a commission on anything that they purchase in the future.  That’s what I like. You know who I learned this from?  It was insurance agents.  Insurance agents, when they make a sale, like a life insurance policy or a medical insurance policy, they make a sale on the first policy and then they sell you additional policies.  You’re already in the system, and they get commissions on your insurance forever.  So, you know, that is real passive income, and that’s why this is such a good business model.  It’s kind of boring.  I never thought that I’d want to be an insurance agent, but man, it’s a great business model because it’s passive income and it builds cumulatively. This isn’t just about affiliate marketing.  You can do this with your own products in your system so that other people promote you, which is what we’ve done.  Affiliate marketing is when you’re promoting someone else’s product and you get a commission for that.  It’s like commissioned sales except that it’s very simple, very easy, and it’s a fast way to make money.  In fact, I think it’s the fastest way for somebody to get started.  If they can build a list or drive traffic, they’ll know how to make money with this pretty quickly with affiliate marketing. Now, the other part, the cookies versus the hard coding on the machine, that is, in my mind…You have to get the right software to run the system.  So, if someone tells me they are using, for example, JV Zoo, which I love JV Zoo; I sell on JV Zoo too, but JV Zoo is not a lifetime database referral program.  It’s a cookie program.  If you and I were promoting the same product, and somebody came to me and looked at the sales page through my affiliate link and decided not to buy, then they came through your link and looked at the sales page and decided to buy, because you were offering a bonus, you would get the credit for that sale.  In a hard coding situation, if they came because I introduced them to the product and they clicked on me first, or even last (sometimes), but whoever gets the sale is then hard coded for all future sales. So, that’s the difference.  It’s that first sale that gets made, but then the future sales are yours.  One thing that you need to understand is that people can flush their cookies off of their machine.  So, even if you set a cookie on someone’s computer, they can clean the cache, they could get a new computer, etc., and your cookie is gone.  The next person that might be promoting will then set their cookie because yours is not there.  Another good example is that if I visit a site on my computer and I don’t buy, but then I go to my iPad and I decide to buy from there, it could be a completely different cookie arrangement.  It could be a different link, right?  So, I would still get a commission no matter where they purchase from.  That’s the difference there. If you want to know if you are going to get commissions, the easiest way is to ask, but you have to be very careful because often the promoter doesn’t know.  They’ll say, “Oh yeah, we’ve got lifetime cookies set,” and you can say, “Well, is it lifetime cookie or lifetime of full?”  Then, you might have stumped them.  If they come back to you and say that it’s a lifetime cookie, then you might need to educate them. Another way to know is by what software they are using in their system.  Is it aMember, or Zaxaa, or DAP, or Infusionsoft?  These can all be set up to be lifetime referrals.  Then you have to just ask questions about that.

passive incomeStep # 2 - Plenty of Products

I know now that someone has lifetime referrals.  The next thing I ask is, “How many products do you have in your system?”  If I’m getting lifetime referrals for one product in your system, I’ve already sold that and I’m not going to get any more money. However, if someone has dozens and dozens of products, let’s say, you’re going to get a commission on all of those, and I would be very excited about that.  Then you’ll know that whatever you promote, you’re going to get some money out of it.  That’s what happens with lifetime referral programs.  I get a lot of people who say that they love to promote our stuff because they know when I send an email, they get money.  That’s the way that works. I also promote things that don’t have any cookies to them because I like to have a base income, but I also like to get peaks on good stuff.  We can do that.  In the kind of business that we’re in, we can identify products that we like to promote because it fits a niche in our system, it fills a training hole for us, or because it’s just a really good product and it converts really well.

Lifetime Referral Programs

Yeah, this is really hard to find.  Like I said, anybody that has an aMember system set up is usually using that.  It takes a little bit of investigation to find those people.  So, those kinds of programs, you have to start asking around and just learn who they are. Now, one of the other things that you want to find is tools. I like tools a lot because tools will give you lifetime referrals. For example, AWeber; you get lifetime referrals for AWeber.  Anybody that buys into that system, you get the commissions forever.  Zaxaa is one.  Zaxaa is a really good commission system.   You get people into that point system, and it’s a very good point system, and you get a lifetime commission from that.  So, those are examples.

Step # 3 - High Quality Products

The third step in my system here, in the PIE test, is very high-quality products.  Very low-quality products do not convert, and if they do, you get a lot of refunds on them. [bctt tweet="The key to knowing if you should deal with somebody is by asking them about their refund rate." username="danielhall"]The refund rate, if it’s less than 5%, I’m interested.  If it’s over 10%, I’m not interested because I don’t want to deal with refunds.  It’s my reputation on the line.  You have to be very careful about that. My definition of a great product is that it solves a real problem that isn’t going away.  I love evergreen solutions.  If a product is out there that’s more of a solution to a fad, I’m not interested.  If it’s a solution to a problem that is going to be around for a while, and a lot of people have expressed interest in it, that’s the kind of product, to me, that has legs.

Step # 4 - Great Product Sales Funnelssales funnels

The next step is to have a great product sales funnel.  That means that the front-end converts really well, but that there is something on the back-end as well.  If I’m sending someone to a $17 product, or a $27 product, or a $5 product, or whatever it is, that’s only the first step of the process of getting people into that system.  A great sales funnel is something that has upsells, downsells, cross-sales, long-term sales, automated sales, and all of those kinds of things.  So, I want to know what the sales process is with the people that I deal with, just as I want them to understand out sales processes when we put our products out there. There’s this seven-upsell syndrome, which I think is just insane because it wears people out before they get to the end of it. B the other thing that makes people really angry about upsells, and downsells, and all of that, is that they’re not related.  If they’re not related, people are just going to think you’re stupid because, you know, you’re just trying to extract money any way you can.  If I buy a course on how to do webinars, and you try to sell me on, I don’t know, “how to create PLR,” that’s not related.  Why would I even think that you know what you’re doing?  So, it’s not a good thing. Before we get to the next step, I want to give you a quick example.  We had somebody come into our system who loved the lifetime referral process and saw the benefit of all the products that we had, and they drove in 2,500 people into a free opt-in product, just to get them into the system.  But, then they said ROI… the short-term solution was not good enough to continue promoting. Well, that 2,500 people, over 18 months, because of our upsells, because of our promotions, and because of our product line, turned into $14,000 in commissions for them.  So, they didn’t do anything else, 18 months, $14,000.  Not a bad deal, right?  That’s a great little income stream.  If you have the right things in place, this becomes a stream of income for people.

david-perdew-know-your-numbersStep # 5 - Know Your Numbers

The last thing is “know your numbers”.  I love numbers.  Numbers are what we do.  Once you get your products created, it’s all about numbers after that.  It’s…“How do I improve conversions?  How do I improve the size of my list?  How do I create sales copy that goes from 1% to 2% on the conversion trail?  How do I add customer value, taking it from $10 to $50?”  It’s all numbers at that point, and the only way to do that is to stay in the numbers and have tracking systems in place so that you can see your numbers on the back-end.  Luckily, almost every cart system out there these days gives you a really good tracking system.  You just have to be willing to dig into them and understand them. Now, if you’re working with somebody else,I want numbers of those people that I’m promoting.  I want to know what those conversion numbers are.  I want to know which piece of the funnel converts best.  I’m working with a guy right now to do some product launches, and the very first time that I promoted his product, a third of my income, on a pretty good launch, came from the front end.  Sixty percent came on the back end.  That’s a good number.  I loved that.  So, knowing that there’s more money on the back-end, and being able to point out the numbers that actually give you those indicators, is good information to have.  You’ve got to ask for it.

Final Tips on Developing Residual Income

I think we’ve covered the formula.  Coming back to our promise in the beginning, if you create one stream of income, and you’ve got it working for you, you’ve tweaked it out so that your conversions are just about maxed out to what you can get for this income stream, the next thing you do is you create another income stream.  And so, it starts stacking.  I’m doing this all of the time, and a lot of the most successful marketers online are doing this.  Nobody goes back to the well every day and creates the wheel over and over.  Boy, I’ve mixed all of my metaphors up, but nobody creates the wheel over and over again every day, right?  You just don’t do it.

Connecting With David

Well, you know, I’m talking about how to create passive income streams here today, and I actually have something for you.  It’s basically our $197 program that we have called “Found Money: Creating Passive Income Streams”.  It’s a three-part, four-hour video passive income course, and it’s an in-depth look at three websites that drip passive income daily.  I mean, we went out and did some case studies with this and really took a look at some websites that are doing a good job with this. We’ve got a checklist for adding passive income to your site, and we’ve got video presentations for all of this, we’ve got MP3 audio downloads and PDFs of the presentations.  It’s just a really robust course.  If people go to NAMS.WS/Hall they are going to get this $197 for $17.  It’s almost a four-hour course for people on how to build these streams of income.  We go through all five of these and show you which niches to look at and how to find people, and exactly which processes, which products, which platforms to focus on.

Resources

David's Program: Found Money: Creating Passive Income Streams Lifetime Referral Tools: aMember AWeber Zaxaa

Real Fast Results Community

If you are diggin’ on this stuff and really love what we’re doing here at Real Fast Results, would you please do me a favor? Head on over to iTunes, and make sure that you subscribe to this show, download it, and rate & review it. That would be an awesome thing. Of course, we also want to know your results. Please share those results with us at http://www.realfastresults.com/results. As always, go make results happen!
Sep 22, 2016
Tom Antion We're promising your listeners MASSIVE, and I'm talking massive with a capitol "A", massive increases in speed and productivity.  That's the main thing.  So that they can sell more, faster, automatically. You can either make more money, or make way more money, in the same amount of time, or you can make the same amount of money and cut your time down tremendously, ten times or more, if you use the business tools that we're talking about today.  A lot of times you can do both too. The way that I kind of developed this, I've always worked out of my home.  I've been in business, formally, for over 40 years, never had a job, always worked out of my home.  I was always averse to a lot of employees.  Now it has changed, but I got to $1.2 million a year with one part-time temp person.  This was, at the peak, about 150,000 subscribers asking me questions every day and 30,000 customers.  So, these are the business tools, what we're going to talk about today, that allowed me to do that with only one temp person. Here's the thing.  When I started hiring people, that's when my accountant called me.  He said, "Hey Tom, you've got too much retained earnings."  I said, "I've got too much retained earnings?  That's good right?"  He says, you're going to have to pay more taxes now because you've got too much retained earnings.  I'm thinking, "I'm keeping my nose clean.  I'm not buying yachts, airplanes, and everything else, and now I've got to pay more taxes?"  He said, "Yup."  So, that's when I got mad.  So I started hiring people.  I thought, "I'd rather hire people and take a load off of myself, instead of buying bombs."  That's when I started hiring all of these people.

Speedautomate business

The first thing is, I'm a big stickler for speed.  Speed to market and speed with customer service, because I'll tell you now, people hardly want to fill out a form anymore because they feel like no one's ever going to answer them. They figure it's going to be two months before they get a reply.  So I've built a lot of my fortune because I just Boom!  I really hit and take care of customers really fast, and prospects really fast, because nobody else will.  So, they'll buy from me because they get really fast service. One of the tools, that I have been using since 1997. I don't know how many years that is; that's 19 years.  We figured out the other day, just an estimate, the best we could. It has saved me 7 million keystrokes in that amount of time, and carpal tunnel for sure! The name of the program, for a PC, is called ShortKeys.  This is the first class that I teach at my big mentor program because I don't want people fighting with their computer.  There's only so much psychic energy in a day.  I want you to use it to create products, write sales letters, and talk to customers, and all of that, not fight with your computer. I was crying about, "I have to type the same crap over, and over, and over again."  So, my young geek, Ilya, the little Russian kid that I recruited out of high school.  He's a little smart-aleck too.  He'd say, "Shut up," and then he'd go, and he brought back ShortKeys for me.  Basically, it's called a macro program.  Now, for the Mac computer, the Apple computer, it's Keyboard Maestro.  But what it is, I can make a little keystroke combination, like G1, and that's GreatInternetMarketing.com.  It doesn't have to be just a website link.  It could be "War and Peace,", or anything that you type a lot.  My motto is that if I get the same question more than once, I make the answer into either a short key, which I use a lot. Anyway, ShortKeys and Keyboard Maestro will save you just an enormous amount of time.  There are days where you will be tired, and cross-eyed, and trying to get your work done.  Well, the short key is going to type the thing properly every single time.  In fact, we make our employees use it because I don't want to be paying them an hourly fee to just type the same stuff over and over again.  So, you should have your employees use it also.  ShortKeys and Keyboard Maestro.  That's your first tip.  We're only talking $20 for this thing.  A one-time fee!  It's crazy!

tom-antion-signature-fileSignature Files

The next one is right in front of your face, and I use it even more than I use ShortKeysIt's called a signature file, or a "sig file".  Everybody knows that's just an appendage to an email that has your name, and email, and a blurb about your stuff, but that's not all you can use it for. If you have a program, or an email client, that will have unlimited signature files, I have probably 200 or 300 stock answers to things.  Even if I had them in a file, where I had to think about it, "Where was that answer," and I had to go find it, copy, paste... No, I just lost my train of thought.  But, if you email me a question that I've heard all of these times, I can go "Reply > Insert Signature > Pick it Out of the List > Hit the Button > Boom!" That's the speed, and people can't believe it.  They can't even believe that the email got to me and they already got their answer back.  That's impressive to people.  In today's atmosphere, when nobody gives a darn about anything.  "We'll get back to you at our convenience in 48 hours."  I could be dead in 48 hours.  I don't have time for that.  I'm old!  So, signature files. Gmail only gives you like 4 or 5, but Outlook... If you have Outlook, for Mac or PC, you have unlimited signatures, and it will do all kinds of other stuff for you.  I don't know of any of the other ones.  I just know that if you use that function, it will totally transform your business at speed to market, and taking care of people.

Automatically Sellingtom-antion-settings

Up-Selling

The first thing is called "up-selling".  When you buy one product, they offer you fries with that, right?  But, that should be automated.  That should be, "Bam, Bam, Bam," and if you do it right, you're going to make 30-50% more.  Every time I do it, 30-50% of the people take advantage of the upsell. I'm just going to mention the upsell theory that I go by to get that result.  Let's say that Daniel was going to do a speech, and he wanted to buy a new suit.  He went down to Today's Man, and he's going to pay $600 for a suit.  He goes in there, and they say, "Hey Daniel!  Anybody that buys a suit today is going to get 2-for-1 on shirts and ties."  Thirty to fifty percent of the people will go for that deal, but here's why.  Daniel already had a $600 price point in his mind, and the deal that they offered him was a lower-priced product.  It was related to what he was buying in the first place, and it was a deal. If you do those things, a lower-priced product that's related to the initial product and it's a deal, you will always do 30-50% more business.  Of course, I can't guarantee it, but I can't remember one that I didn't at least do 30%, and I've been doing this at least 24 years.  A lot of times, 50% of the people will take that deal. Now, you need to automate that with your shopping cart system, or whatever you happen to use.  That's called "point of purchase," by the way.  So, you automate the "point of purchase upsell".

Thank You Page Selling

There's also "after the sale upsells".  This is a very little-known one. It's right in front of you.  It's called "thank you page" selling.  Anytime you sell something, you should have a "thank you page", right?  If you do, why just say, "Thank you for your sale. Goodbye," you know?  No. [bctt tweet="The easiest person to sell to is the one that has their wallet out already." username="danielhall"]  Of course, they call it, "Do you want fries with that?"  This is almost like  Columbo.  Do you remember Columbo?  He knows the killer, and then he walks away, and the killer is relieved, and Columbo is like, "Oh!  One more thing..."  That's what "thank you" page selling is like. On that page, I might have, "Thank you for dealing with Antion and Associates.  Why not check out these other fine colleagues of mine."  I might have a Daniel Hall affiliate thing on there, or something related to what they just bought, where if they click and go buy something, I get an affiliate commission.  That's all automatic.  You're wasting that "thank you page" if it just says "thank you".

Add Finance Options

Also, you must add finance options, automatically to your sales, or to your bigger-ticket sales.  But, when I say bigger ticket, I think we sold 700 of my WordPress courses for $97, or that was the price if you paid it all at once, but 180 people took a 3-pay deal at $39.  In some places, the economy is tough, and you've got to realize that.  They paid a $17 spiff just to be able to pay in three payments.  Let's say that if I didn't have the finance option, I still would have gotten 100 of those people.  I still would have lost 80 of them.  If you multiply 180 times $117, that's would come out to another $18,000-$19,000.  If I didn't have the finance option, and people were holding tight to their credit card, they would have said, "No, I'll just wait." You must have a finance option.  But, when I first did this, before I had the shopping cart, I was so disorganized.  I would take the first payment and then lose the paperwork.  Then, I'd find it six months later, "Oh God!  I was supposed to charge this guy $99 a month, and I didn't do it."  Now the shopping carts will do it automatically, every 30 days and pound them to death if their expiration date goes bad, but all of this is automated so that I don't lose any sales because of it, and it makes more sales.  So, you've got to get your selling automated, and then we can kick into auto-responders, which is selling after the sale.

Auto-Responders

Let's talk about automatically selling.  [bctt tweet="Auto-responders, obviously, are one of the most powerful things ever invented." username="danielhall"]If you ask a bunch of marketers that have been around as long as we have, it's just crazy-powerful. My philosophy is I give people service, service, service emails, so that they're used to getting emails that help them.  Then, when I ask them to buy something, they're not upset.  You see?  Auto-responders do that for you.  This is just a smattering of the things we use to automate the business.  There are tons more of them, and a lot of them are cheap or free.  You just have to implement them. You know, you get one or two additional percentage points in sales a month, that adds up over a year.  That can be a car payment.  That can be saved for your kid's college.  I mean, it's clear money.  It's money that was there, and if you didn't go and pick it up, it's your fault.  That's especially true if you're new at this.  The better you do these things right from the beginning, the faster you won't be new anymore.  The faster you'll be a respected member of our community, because you know these things, and you implement them, and you've got money in the bank.

A few More Tips to Automate Your Business

There are all kinds of things that we use to format things correctly.  I've got 20 or 30 of them in this new book I wrote.  It's a 60-page eBook that outlines all of the stuff that I cover in my mentor program that people pay like $8,000 to get. I was sitting down one day and thinking, "I've been teaching this for years to people, to increase their productivity, but I never turned it into a product."  The book is called: How to Automate Your Business. Another thing is, I used to have a book called Click that kind of dominated the speaking industry for 10 years.  But, it got so big that it was 1,042 pages.  By the time I did it in one part, the other part is obsolete, so I am trending my business with more and smaller products that I can get out fast, and edit fast, so that if they change I can fix them fast.  However, there's another important concept here called "consumption". At 1,042 pages, I was overwhelming people.  Especially in the early days, I was the only guy around.  With all of this stuff that you get hit with, from JV Zoo, and Warrior Forum, and all these places, you just get buried.  So, 1,042 pages were just too much.  I started doing very tightly laser-focused books, but not little crappy 10-page things, though.  These are like 60 pages and illustrated, and they teach you things like how to maximize your cell phone.  There are a bunch of cell phone tricks that people just haven't been taught, like how to go way faster with your cell phone.  I just came out with this, and people are loving it.  It's making them go way faster, and it's giving them the time to work on the stuff that brings in revenue.  That's the important stuff.

Connecting with Tom

The main website for my big mentor program, that has all of my contact information and a downloadable learning brochure that has lots of tips in it, and there's a video people can watch.  That's at GreatInternetMarketingTraining.com.  The other thing is, I invite everyone to attend my variety show at 10 pm EST on Sunday nights via Facebook Live.  I'd like to warn people that it can get a little bit out of hand, though, because one of the sections is "A-Hole of the Week".  So, I get a little bit mad at people who do some bad things, but then there's a hero of the week too. I also give a professional speaking tip, and internet marketing tip, a self-defense tip; that's because I have a site called Brutal Self Defense.  I've been a lifelong martial arts type of guy.  We also have a "Fake Sponsor of the Week,".  That's where I show you a place that's definitely not sponsoring us.  So, it's a lot of fun.  That's at 10 pm EST, Sunday nights, at Facebook.com/Antion.

Resources

Tom's Book: How to Automate Your Business ShortKeys Keyboard Maestro

Real Fast Results Community

If you are diggin’ on this stuff and really love what we’re doing here at Real Fast Results, would you please do me a favor? Head on over to iTunes, and make sure that you subscribe to this show, download it, and rate & review it. That would be an awesome thing. Of course, we also want to know your results. Please share those results with us at http://www.realfastresults.com/results. As always, go make results happen!
Sep 19, 2016


Joan Stewart My promise is to show people how to become an expert in their niche, or their industry, or their topic.  Remember, expertise doesn't have only one definition.  Expertise is a ladder, and you're constantly climbing the ladder of expertise.  So, if you're at the bottom, we're going to help you get on the top couple of rungs and then show you how to keep on climbing. The benefit of this is that experts get the gigs!  Experts sell the books.  Experts get the paid speaking engagements.  Experts get the paid consulting assignments.  Experts get mentees; they get protégés.  They get people in their coaching program.  They get the moolah!

Getting the Credentials to Become an Expert

I always hear people say, "I'd never try to pass myself as an expert.  I'm not the person in the world who knows the most about my topic."  You don't have to be.  You only have to know more than most other people.  That's to be an expert at the bottom rung of the ladder, and we're going to talk about how to do that.  Then, you're going to learn how to keep climbing to become even more of an expert.

Overview of What it Takes to Become an ExpertExperts

  1. You're going to want to identify and study the top experts in your niche industry area.  You're going to learn from all of the other people who have already done it.  That's the first step.
  2. You're going to read 10 recent books on your topic.  Now, you might not find 10, and if you can't, then find as many as you possibly can.  Don't say to yourself, "Wow.  This niche is filled with a lot of experts.  I can't possibly steal business from them."  There's enough business out there for all of us.
  3. Attend conferences, seminars, workshops, training events, either locally in your own community, if that's all you can afford right now, and then branch off and go to the national ones.  This is going to do a lot of things for you.  We'll go into this in a little more in-depth later.
  4. You're going to start applying your knowledge by doing things that experts do.  In other words, as you start to become an expert on the bottom rung, you're going to start to do things with that expertise.  The most important message that I have to deliver about expertise is, "It's not only about what's in your head.  It's not only about what's in your brain.  Expertise is about what you do with that knowledge."  Experts do specific things, and we'll talk about those in a minute.
  5. You're going to keep always climbing the ladder of expertise, and don't stop at your comfort zone.  When you're in your comfort zone (and I've learned this from personal experience), that's when you get into trouble, and that's when the money stops flowing in.  I'm going to give you a good example of what I'm talking about, something that happened to me earlier this year.  I got way outside my comfort zone, but I learned how to do something really cool, that I've always wanted to do.

top expertsStep #1 - Identify and Study the Top Experts in Your Niche

Identify and study the top experts in your niche, and the best way to do this is to just use Google.  It's the best search tool on the planet, and you can just go and type in, "Top 5 Internet Marketing Experts," or "Top 10 Dog Breeding Experts," or "Best," or whatever.  I promise you that you will find something.  You will be amazed at how much stuff you find.  Follow them on social media, subscribe to their blog posts, and if they have a podcast, subscribe to it.  Get onto their email lists.  If they're an expert, I'll bet you they're building an email list, just like you should be if you want to be an expert in your field. Pay attention to the topics they're writing about.  Pay attention to the controversial issues they're discussing.  These are all topics that you need to learn more about and maybe you need to be discussing at some point.  Snoop.  Snoop!  Who are their first-degree connections on LinkedIn?  Now, I don't let people see my first-degree connections on LinkedIn, but some people do because they don't know how to configure the settings on LinkedIn.  Go find out who their first degree connections are.  Who are these people?  Then, go connect with them.  Go snoop to see what industry groups they are in on LinkedIn.  Go join those groups and see if those groups are perfect for you. What Twitter lists are those experts on, and if you don't know how to use Twitter lists, just Google "How to use Twitter lists".  Anybody can create Twitter lists, and usually experts are on a lot of Twitter lists that other people create.  That's how to do #1, how to identify and study experts in your niche.  And, I don't want you to view them as your competitors.  I heard someone once say:[bctt tweet=" They're not competitors. They're simple joint venture partners who don't know it yet." username="danielhall"] When I quit the newspaper business two decades ago, there were a couple of people who I thought were big mega-stars. One time I checked them out. I was surprised at how little information there was about them online.  I actually leapfrogged over several of them, and so today, they view me as a big star.  A lot of it is that you've got to do things with your expertise.  You can't only get a PhD in whatever the topic happens to be.  You have to keep learning and keep doing, doing, doing, doing.  We'll get to that in a little bit.

Step # 2 - Read 10 Recent Books on Your Topic

Read 10 fairly recent books on your topic.  Again, use the best search tool on the planet, Google.  Or, you go over to Amazon.  You type in, "Best books on internet marketing," or "Best-selling books for real estate sales," or "Top books in," or "Top 10 books in".  When you go over to Amazon, the site is going to tell you exactly what the best sellers are because they are going to appear down at the bottom.  Some of those books are going to be written by the experts who you've already identified in Step #1. Experts write books! Do the books have a glossary in the back of industry definitions?  That's a great way for you to learn a lot about your industry really quickly, and good books usually do have a glossary.  Make notes, again, of the controversial topics they are writing about in the book.  If they're telling stories, about people in your niche, copy that down because maybe that's someone you can interview later on for a podcast.  Also, look to see what books they are recommending.  They're recommending books, maybe on their LinkedIn profile, maybe they're reviewing books.  Take a look at the books they're reading and the books they're recommending. The aim of this activity is to get smart as fast as you can from people who are already experts in their field.  They are the experts; they've written the book.  And, you may not like the book.  Some of the books you may read, you may think they are crap, and they may be crap because these people have done a really good job of promoting themselves as experts.  So, make note if the book is crap.  You're not going to come across all of this material that is A+ and 5-Star.  It's just not going to happen, but I want you to learn from it and expand your brain and expand your expertise.  That's the best way to become an expert fairly quickly. When you are interested in a particular marketplace, and you see that something isn't first-rate, that should motivate you in actuality.  That means that there's an aperture in the marketplace that you can fill.  If you start seeing that there's a lot of crap, that means you're in a really great position.  That means you stand a great chance of becoming the foremost expert in your field.  Learn from that crap that you're seeing and do a job that's 10 times better.  If you follow this advice, you will become the expert.

Step #3 - Attend Live Conferences, Seminars, expertsWorkshops and Training Events

Attend live conferences, seminars, workshops, and training events.  Yeah, you can sit in front of your computer in your PJs, like you might be right now, but you want to get out there and go live for a whole bunch of different reasons.  In the first place, this will give you the chance to meet these hotshot speakers.  I speak at a lot of events, and a lot of people are there because they want to talk with me and the other speakers.  They want to pick our brains and meet us.  They want to learn from us.  They want to sit next to us at lunch.  You can't do that when you're only listening to someone on a webinar or a podcast. This also allows you to network with a lot of other people in your industry or your niche.  I can't even begin to count the number of people who have become my joint venture partners, which I have met at Judith's Author U Extravaganza, for example, or National Speakers Association conferences.  You can meet lots and lots of people who you can joint venture with and make money from down the line because your areas of expertise, they might overlap.  Even if they don't, don't worry about it.  They'll know stuff that you don't know, and you'll know stuff that they don't know. [bctt tweet="Use live events to start building an email list of people." username="danielhall"] I believe strongly in email marketing.  Email is, by far, my most valuable marketing tool, that's brought in the greatest amount of money.  These are also events that you may want to speak at someday. One of the things that experts do is they speak from the stage, either for free or paid speaking engagements.  Some experts won't touch free speaking engagements.  I love them; because I can sell from the back of the room. I'd much rather have your email address at a free speaking engagement than to be paid a couple of grand from the stage and not be able to collect email addresses.  I'll take the email address any day, because that's my most valuable marketing tool. Down the road, consider joining your industry trade associations and also becoming certified in your particular area.  For example, there are certified professional speakers in the National Speakers Association.  There are certified marketing consultants (CMCs) for consulting.  There are certified ghostwriters.  Certification is really powerful in your industry because certification is something that most other people don't have.  Your industry or trade association will be sponsoring a lot of these events. So, get out there and attend live, hobnob, rub elbows.  Meet as many people as you can.  Eventually, the good ones, you want to speak at these events. The benefit of going to a lot of these live events and seeing these big shot speakers, and rubbing elbows, you get to see who the jerks are, who you do not want to have any kind of relationship with at all.  Online, you can't tell that sort of thing, or by talking to someone on the telephone either.  If you see them on stage and they suck, and everybody hates them, "Man, are they boring!  All they do is promote from the stage," they are probably someone that you do not want to joint venture with.

joan-stewart-knowledgeStep #4 - Apply Your Knowledge by Doing Things That Experts Do

Start applying your knowledge by doing things that experts do.  It's not about what's in your brain. It's about what you do with your expertise.  Look at the people who are billionaires in this country who never graduated from college.  They don't have a PhD behind their name, but they are successful at stuff. Here are some things that you can start to do:
  • I want you to start writing articles and publishing them to your LinkedIn profile.
  • Start a blog.
  • Start guest blogging for other experts.
  • Start a podcast.  Podcasting has been on my to-do list for years, and I'm going to get around to it eventually.
  • Write an eBook on your topic for beginners.  If you're a beginning expert, what did you learn that you can teach other beginners how to do?  It doesn't even have to be an eBook if you love videos.
  • Do a video series.  You can teach a class in your community through the adult education program.
  • Go to the Small Business Administration's SCORE program and teach a course for small business owners.
  • Start referring to yourself as an expert immediately.  As soon as you start to build expertise, I want that word "expert" to be everywhere.
  • I want it in your email signature, on your LinkedIn headline.  I want it on your marketing materials, in your eBook, in your author bios, on your speaker one-sheet, and I want it in your newsletter, your blog, your podcast.  All over the place.
[bctt tweet="When people are searching for a specific kind of person to teach them, what word are they using?" username="danielhall"] They're using the word "expert". Don't use "authority," use "expert".  That's the word that most journalists are searching for too, when they're looking for people to interview.

Step #5 - Keep Climbing the Ladder of Expertiseexpertise

Keep climbing the ladder of expertise and never stop.  I was really in my comfort zone for a couple of years, and that's when I saw my revenue go down.  When I wasn't doing, and when I wasn't challenging myself.  Somebody approached me last you and said, "I want to bring you to my conference, that I have down in Orlando, and I want you to sell a high-ticket product from the stage."  Now, I've seen other people do this, and I always swore that was something that I would never do.  "I can't do it.  I don't want to do it.  It feels sleazy.  It feels awful."  And he said, "How about if I teach you how to do it?"  I said, "I can do that." So, he taught me how to do it, and I created a $5,000 product.  I sold one from the stage, and he got half the revenue.  So I walked out of there, all dejected.  I only made $2,500.  Then I went back to him, and I said, "Wait a second.  Let's sell this over at your website."  He said, "That's a great idea," and we worked out a JV partnership, and he sends me lots of affiliate commission.  All of these people on his list are not people in my niche.  He has a completely different section of people who we sell this too, but they all want to learn how to get publicity.  So I don't do anything, and we even have a fulfillment house fulfill the product.  I don't have to touch anything.  The only thing I have to do is cash the checks, and I love to cash checks.  Do you love to cash checks?  Yeah, I love it, love it, love it. Okay, so that's an example of getting outside your comfort zone.  If you've joined a trade association, try to be an officer in the trade association.  If you're the president of your association, that has a real cache, assuming that it's a good association.  Do you need formal training in your topic?  You might have to get a bachelors degree or a masters, or go to tech school, or maybe even a PhD.  Or, get that certification that I talked about.  Are you ready to become a columnist for Inc., or for Forbes, or for Huffington Post, or for Entrepreneur?  I was a columnist for years for Entrepreneur, and I am still getting leads from that.  I'm getting tons of leads from it. What else do experts do?  They have copyrights.  They have trademarks, and they have patents.  What do you have that you can put a copyright on, a trademark, or a patent?  Form relationships with other bloggers, podcasters, experts, and other media people.  Start to build a relationship, and always ask the question, how can I help you?  You want them to help you, but the best way to get their attention, especially if you're working with a journalist or a joint venture partner, "How can I help you?"  That will be music to their ears because most other people don't ask that question. It's also very rare for people to take action on the information that you provide. The people who buy my products and take action, I call them my "super-fans".  They are a tiny group, right in the middle of my target market, but they can't stand to be without anything I offer.  Not only do they implement my programs, they give me a video testimonial that speaks to the value of my product, that I can use on my sales page.  If I ask a person for a video testimonial, I'm not going to get it because I don't want to have to screw around with video and all of that.  So, what I do is I use a program called SuperTinTin, like Rin Tin Tin, the dog.  I think I paid $29 for it. You put it on your computer, and you can see each other.  I just interview them for about 10 or 15 minutes, and then I splice it together. I give it to my editor, and I tell him exactly which ones I want for a really nice, minute-long testimonial that hones in exactly on what I want them to say.  It may take 10 minutes, during that interview for all of that stuff to come out, and they would never sit down and give me a testimonial like that, but since I'm talking to them for 10 minutes and I have the video right on my computer, my editor can splice it together and it's primo.   It's really easy to use this program.  I'm a non-techie, so if I can use it, anyone can.

How To Find Your Target Market - From a Recent FB Live Interview

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IA_HEPUAJXM?rel=0&showinfo=0&w=853&h=480]  

Connecting with Joan

I want you on my email list because I email twice a week.  The Publicity Hound's Tips of the Week.  I've been  doing this for more than 15 years.  I do it every Tuesday afternoon and every Saturday morning.  If Christmas is on Tuesday afternoon, you get me in your email box on Tuesday afternoon, and I do this... I think I've missed six issues in 15 or 16 years.  That's because I've made a promise that you're going to hear from me twice a week, and dammit, I'm an expert and I deliver on my promise.  So, you're going to see me in there. Three snack-sized tips every week, and because I am the "Publicity Hound," you get a funny dog video.  Some people read my tips just for the video, and that's okay.  You can go over to PublicityHound.com/tips/sample.  That's actually a sales page.  Pay attention to it.  That's going to sell you on all of the reasons that you should sign up onto my list for free.  So that's how to stay in touch with me twice a week. Joan's digital  reports are among her most popular learning tools. Each of the 52 reports, on a super-narrow publicity or marketing topic, is at least five pages, and chock full of helpful advice. Joan sells the entire bundle for $247. You can save $123 off that price if you go to http://PublicityHound.com/go/daniel and use the coupon code REPORTS at checkout.  These special reports are so popular that you'll even find a special report on how and sell write special reports--a perfect product for people who are learning how to become an expert.

Resources

Joan's Reports - http://PublicityHound.com/go/daniel Coupon Code - REPORTS Joan's Newsletter - The Publicity Hound's Tips of the Week Video Software: SuperTinTin

Real Fast Results Community

If you are diggin’ on this stuff and really love what we’re doing here at Real Fast Results, would you please do me a favor? Head on over to iTunes, and make sure that you subscribe to this show, download it, and rate & review it. That would be an awesome thing. Of course, we also want to know your results. Please share those results with us at http://www.realfastresults.com/results. As always, go make results happen!
Sep 16, 2016
Jeff Hunt Today, we are going to talk about the topic of website investing.  That is, buying into cash-producing websites and the market that has developed around these online properties, and exactly why you should be interested in that.  And then, we'll get into how you do that, in pretty good detail during this short conversation. I would guess that most people listening to this today have a website or are planning to have a website.  Those are assets.  They really are assets that have value, and whether it's your own or someone else's that you're looking to buy into. There's a lot of value there, in terms of the net worth of the traffic that you've generated, of the process that you have in delivering that product to a customer. [bctt tweet="There can be value in selling what you've developed or looking for things that compliment what you're already doing." via="no"]We'll talk later about how you can actually pick up and acquire audiences.  You don't have to always build things up from scratch.  That's just one of the key components of why you would want to do this.

Educating Yourself About the Marketinvesting in webistes

The first step was one that I didn't do my first time around, and that's educating yourself a bit about the process.  Anytime you make any kind of sizable purchase, whether it's a cell phone, or a car, or a house, you really need to know something about the market.  That's important.  At the time, when I started doing this, seven or eight years ago, there was really almost no information available about how to buy a website, and do it safely, and choose the right one.  How do you build a business, even if you're not looking to be an angel investor and go out and acquire things?  How do you go about finding something that can complement what you already have? I mean, content marketing is one of the big topics today, and it's all about sharing audiences.  I don't care what your topic is. Say it's about travel, or poetry, or whatever, I guarantee that somewhere out there is a website where someone has already developed an audience around a website that's very complimentary to what you do.  I've known a lot of internet marketers who have bought websites for nothing more than the list that comes with them or the traffic to the website that's already there. Then they can actually sell their own service on a website that already has that traffic and audience. So, the first step is education, and we can get more into how we do that, but essentially, one of the key parts of education is actually getting on the list of brokerages and marketplaces that sell websites and beginning to look at the listings.  Educate yourself by reading about:
  • What does the website do?
  • What is its product?
  • How does it attract its traffic?
And, you just really want to understand a lot of the business models that are used by a large variety of websites for making money.  There are a lot of fascinating, different stories out there about how people do that.  I could tell you a whole lot of stories that I could tell you about with websites that are for sale.  But, that's kind of... That's the first step.

investing-in-websites-searchSearch and Collect Listings

The next step, as I alluded to, is the search.  What that means is getting yourself on lists and beginning to collect listings.  So, in your search, you're looking broadly, and then the next step is to kind of narrow that search down to a few listings that you're more interested in.  The next step, after that, is actually some due diligence on those listings, to really get in and ask questions about those sites to make sure they are really what you would be interested in and that there's no funny business going on behind the scenes. Then, really taking it down to a single one and completing a transaction, where you're taking over the assets from the seller.  You've negotiated a price, and there's a process for making sure the money is safe in escrow and that you're protected with contracts while that transaction takes place between you and the seller to make sure that you're getting everything that you think the seller told you that you were going to get when you made the offer. After it's yours, the next step is "what do you do with it?"  How do you optimize it, and how do you control the business that you've just purchased?  Then, you move on.  Perhaps, later down the road you just sell  it, or you may not.  You may just fold it into your own portfolio. People attack this in different ways.  Some people have portfolios of smaller sites.  Many guys really look for something that's bigger, where they can sort of invest all of their energy into it.  It's a good idea to be focused in your approach.  That's certainly the case in website investing.  If you own too many of them, it can be hard to optimize any of them.  Some people really hone in, and they might buy one site and then actually just augment it with complimentary, symbiotic kinds of sites, as opposed to just going out and trying to find anything at all that might make money. A question I often get is, "Should I build mine around a theme or a particular type of business?" I've seen that to be very effective.  It's effective because you begin to learn more about the nuances of that sector or that business model, and you also have resources that you can leverage. Maybe you have technology, or maybe you have relationships with an ad network, or many things that you can leverage when you buy a new business.  And, other buyers that you are competing against with that business might not have the resources that you bring to the table.  For example, you might already have an audience, and you can sell the product of the new website to that audience. You'll get a lot more value out of it than someone who didn't have that audience.

On the Job Traininginvesting-in-websites-website

Clearly, to me, on the job training is one of the most important things.  That is something no one can do for you.  Just reading the listings, kind of putting a plan together, and there's certainly some resources available on the Web.  Different brokerage sites have blogs where you can read about isolated topics.  There really aren't very many courses out there on the topic of website investing.  There's really only like one or two.  I put all of my experience into a video course that I developed, and it's something that I continue to keep updated.  That's important, and even beyond that, just getting other eyes on the deal. It's not just an academic exercise. As you walk through the process, finding people that you can have a relationship with who have some experience in these and will say, "Hey, that's a good one, " or "That's not a good one," or "You ought to be asking the seller these kinds of questions." You know, a lot of that you can find in course materials, but it's really hard to find that online.  As you can imagine, "What can I ask the seller about this deal?"  Try to Google that, and you're not going to get many answers.  There's the informational kind of education, and then there's the experiential kind, where you're not only looking at listings, but you're also throwing some questions out there to the seller just to see what the give and take is like in a transaction. Just on that point, it's interesting, the kinds of people who buy websites.  One big category, surprisingly, is real estate people.  They're not technology people, but they're not afraid of deals.  They understand this process of, "Go find an asset that has some value, dig in a little bit, do a little research and due diligence, and make a deal."  So, they're not afraid of that.  When they hear me talking about buying revenue-generating websites, online businesses.  It's kind of like online virtual real estate they're in, and there are other people like that as well, who you wouldn't necessarily think that this is the first guy that's going to buy an online business, but in fact, there's really a variety of people who are attracted to this model.

Resources for Investing in Websites

Flippa.com is the biggest marketplace for lower-end websites.  And, when I say low-end, I mean anything less than $50,000.  So, it's not that low, but at any given time, every week, they have about 3,000 websites for sale concurrently, and they sell a great number of them every week. Then, the other category is brokerages There are a lot of online business brokerages, not the kind of Sunbelt business brokers that we know, that sell the brick and mortar things.  Companies like F.E. (Frank Ernest) International, Quiet Light Brokerage, or Empire FlippersThese are all companies that specialize in online businesses for sale. Those are the ones that you want to visit and get on their lists to buy. I also have a private buyer's list called WeBuyInternetBusinesses.com.  I'm not a broker, per se. However, because I'm pretty visible in this area, I get a lot of people asking me if I can help them sell their sites.  It's just a private list, and I send it out to the guys on that list.  Feel free to sign up there as well.

Return on Investment

We didn't really talk about the return, which we're this far in and I can't believe I haven't mentioned it.  [bctt tweet="Websites are selling at somewhere between 2 and 3-year multiples of net income." username="danielhall"] If you just do the basic math, what that means is that, if it's a 3-year multiple, it means that you're getting about 33% return on your investment every year, assuming that the website holds its value over that 3-year period of time. As everyone knows, 33% is a fantastic return, and even higher-quality sites are selling at that 3X multiple.  Of course, there are some newer sites, maybe a little more risky and less tested sites that are selling at, maybe 1.5X-2X.  You don't have to go on up to the 3X. But, that's really what's attractive to a lot of investors and new business owners about this. You can buy into a site that can potentially make you about 33% on your money.

Investing in Your First Website

"What do I need to bring to the table in order to invest in my first site?" The answer is that I've bought $100 websites, and $400 websites, and $40,000 websites.  And, it goes way up beyond that.  You can buy in for almost nothing.  Now, truthfully, the fact is that the less you spend, the lower quality you're going to get.  So, when you buy a $400 website, chances are it's brand new, it hasn't stood the test of time, and you know, we don't know if it will survive a Google update. We may not even know if the thing is legitimate or not.  Some of the traffic might be fake and those kinds of things, and there are steps that we take to avoid buying into low-quality things, and we talk about those things a lot in the course.  But, the 33% return over three years, probably isn't going to hold if you buy something that's pretty new and may not last six months.  So, you have to keep that in mind. Certainly, the amount of money that you have doesn't really keep you out of the market.  As long as you have a few hundred dollars, you can get in.  Now, the reality is that these things that are less than $5,000 - $10,000 are not real businesses, in the sense that they probably don't have several years of history.  They may have traffic, and they may have a product, and they may have all of the pieces of a business, but it may not be as sound as what people would call a real business, until you spend a little bit more. Lots of people, including myself, have found really good deals in that range of less than $10,000.  I bought one for $400, three years ago, and I checked back and I had made $900 on it.  My $100 website, I have made $350 on it. Even those you can stand to make a really good return on.  If you're going to launch something, you're probably going to get something a little more substantial.  If it has more intrinsic value, it's probably going to cost you more.

Narrow Down Your Options

The next step is narrowing things down.  Getting acquainted enough with the website, doing the reading and maybe a little bit of searching on it, and checking some things out that would make you want to take it to the next level.  We call this evaluation, and essentially what you're doing is, you kind of develop a "watch list".  Maybe you've found 3-5 listings that you're interested in and might be something that you would actually buy.  You'll start sending questions to the seller about those, and you'll probably have an interview with the seller. One of the key tools in due diligence is to have a face to face, kind of like over Google Hangout or over Skype, where they can show you the behind the scenes elements of the business.  So, like sales transactions, or maybe if it's an eCommerce site, they'll show you the shopping cart, maybe the PayPal statement, and those kinds of things, so that you'll get an idea that it's legitimate.  Most sellers will do that for you, even before you've negotiated a deal, particularly with the lower - end kind of websites.  Other sellers will do that during an escrow process. This next step is kind of the beginnings of the due diligence.  Maybe you have those 3-5, and then you narrow this down to one that you're really serious about buying.

investing-in-websites-negotiationNegotiation and Agreement

The next step, is actually, getting into negotiation and trying to figure out, "What is this thing worth?  What's the value of it?"  And, I talked just real briefly about the multiples of net income that we use to kind of price sites, but there's a little bit more to it than that. Every business is different, they have different risk profiles. For a real risky business, you're not going to give them the same multiple than for what you feel like is a stable business.  You'll think through that and kind of put a price on it.  It's not that complicated.  The truth is that it's not that hard to decide how risky the business is and to put a price on it that you think it's worth.  So, that's kind of the next part, that negotiation process. The step after that is once you're sure that you want it and you've reached an agreement. For lower-end sites, you may not need a contract.  You can kind of rely on the escrow process, which I use Escrow.com.  I've used them 20 or 30 times.  Essentially, the buyer's money goes to escrow, once escrow has the money, the seller transfers the domain, and the website content, and all of the stuff that you've bought.  Then, there's a period where you get to inspect it.  You just make sure that the traffic really is coming in, the sales really are coming in, and you've got everything that the seller says was included in the deal. Let a little time pass.  Then, you tell Escrow.com, "Yup, it looks good."  That closes the deal, and they release the funds to the seller. So, for smaller transactions, a lot of times you can rely on escrow to keep both parties safe.  For a little bit larger transaction, you're probably going to want to have an attorney, or if they are working with a broker, you'll want to have contracts already established, that you could customize.  That keeps you safer because there can be some things that go wrong with escrow, and you certainly don't want to risk it if you have a lot of money at stake.  That's the next important step in the buying process.  Anybody who has bought a home has probably been through something very similar, although you don't have a stack of papers buying a website like you do with a house. During that escrow process, you've probably made the transition.  If you didn't have a web hosting account, you do now, where you took one over from the seller.  Everything belongs to you, at that point.  Then, what's important, in my course I talk about low-hanging fruit. Every business has some smaller, easy things to do that you can increase profits pretty quickly with, or at least you can test it. And, I'm talking about things like, let's say you buy a business that has only one price.  They've got one product, but there's always buyers that want a premium version as well, or something, and they are willing to pay three times that.  There are other buyers that want a discounted version of something.  So, if you buy a business and it only has a one-priced product, that's a real simple one. You just add two or three levels of the product and differentiate it by expedited shipping, or a bonus training, or an eBook. You know, these are all familiar things to internet marketers, but every business has them, whether you are an internet marketer or not.  Or, if you're buying a publication, moving the ads around to get better click-throughs, or increasing the conversion rate on an opt-in page or on a sales page.  All of those kinds of things are real simple, and when I buy a site, I already have those in mind well before I ever buy it.  "Hey, I know that I can do these three or four things to tweak this thing and get more money out of it almost right out of the gate."  That's really what you look for. Then, as business people, we also want to put controls around it.  We just bought it, but actually, when I buy something, I'm thinking about selling it from the day I buy it, even though I don't sell a lot.  That's not my intent or objective, but I want everything to be in place in case I do sell it.  So, I want to make sure Google Analytics is on, capturing all of that, I want to have a spreadsheet that tracks the sales and the expenses by month.  I want to have some basic processes.  I want to make sure that the site has its own email account set up so that if I ever sell it, the email accounts transfer over and that it's not dependant on my own email for customer service and those sorts of things. That's just a list of basic things that responsible business people are going to want to do with a new website, and believe me, those things sound pretty basic, but you won't believe how many businesses there are that don't have those basic things in place.  If you do those things in place, you can stand to sell them for a lot more.  You might sell them for an extra point in multiple or something like that because the potential buyers in the future would just feel like, "Hey, this seems like it's under control.  It's working."  And, they'll develop some trust in who you are as the current operator of the business, and they'll feel like they can be more successful themselves with it. [bctt tweet="I sometimes talk about passive income from website acquisitions. The truth is, there's nothing passive in business. " via="no"]The non-passive part is like finding it to begin with and then doing some of those tweaks we said early on, to make it more profitable.  But, I've had websites that I bought a number of years ago that continue to make money month after month with very little maintenance or customer service.  So, those kinds of things are certainly possible. Now I think, more often than not, there's some routine that needs to be done on the website. If you don't want to do it yourself, you'll have that outsourced, the technical support, or somebody manning the chat box, or fulfilling the orders, or whatever.  So, there are ways to do that as well, and there are trade-offs. You may outsource things and have a little less profit to keep, but not have to worry about that stuff.

Learning From and Connecting with Jeff

If you want to learn more from Jeff, you can visit RealFastResults.com/WebInvest.  In terms of contacting me, my personal website is HeckYeah.org. I'm also developing OwnOptimize.com, and you can reach me through the contact areas of either of those websites.  You'll find some resources there as well.

Resources

Jeff's Course: RealFastResults.com/WebInvest Flippa.com Brokers: F.E. (Frank Ernest) International  Quiet Light Brokerage Empire Flippers

Real Fast Results Community

If you are diggin’ on this stuff and really love what we’re doing here at Real Fast Results, would you please do me a favor? Head on over to iTunes, and make sure that you subscribe to this show, download it, and rate & review it. That would be an awesome thing. Of course, we also want to know your results. Please share those results with us at http://www.realfastresults.com/results. As always, go make results happen!
Sep 13, 2016
Rachel Rofe Today, we are going to show people How you can make sales on some of the biggest eCommerce sites, like Amazon, without having to spend any upfront money with very, very minimal effort, and start to build up some cool passive income. One of the main benefits is the passive income, and also, it's just super-easy, super-fun.  As I explain it, you'll see that it can be so simple to get lots of designs up and make sales.  We have kids doing this system that I've been teaching, and it's really fun.  It's just easy, and there's no need to learn a bunch of different things.  This method seems to be working for people.

Download the Complete PDF Show Notes and view Rachel's Full Training Video of the Low Hanging System Free

The big idea here is that you can come up with different designs and things to put on different products, like mugs, T-shirts, and necklaces.  You come up with the designs, and then you overlay them.  You can take your designs and put them on top of the products, and then you get finished pictures.  You can take the pictures of products and put them on sites like Amazon, Ebay, and different places.

Using Print On Demand Sites

[bctt tweet="There are companies that will do physical print on demand products. Just create a simple design." username="danielhall"]

Download the Complete PDF Show Notes and view Rachel's Full Training Video of the Low Hanging System Free

 

Learn

  • 7 Steps for Selling on Demand Products
  • Identify niches that you want to make products in
  • Create your design
  • Launch your product on the drop-shipping site (Gearbubble)
  • Find keywords to use, so that you can be found once you launch your products
  • Launch on Amazon
  • Launch on other sites like Ebay, Bonanza, and Etsy
  • Process orders

Download the Complete PDF Show Notes and view Rachel's Full Training Video of the Low Hanging System Free

 

Connecting With Rachel

This particular product can be found on RealFastResults.com/fruits, and then I also have my personal blog over at RachelRofe.com. I also have a crash course on how to do all of this that you should totally check out.

Resources

Designing Tools:  Word Swag Drop Shipping Site: GearBubble.com Sites to Launch Your Product: Ebay Bonanza EtsyShopify

Full Video Training Of Rachel's Low Hanging System

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WvVYUVaTCwk]

Click here when the webinar is finished

Real Fast Results Community

If you are diggin’ on this stuff and really love what we’re doing here at Real Fast Results, would you please do me a favor? Head on over to iTunes, and make sure that you subscribe to this show, download it, and rate & review it. That would be an awesome thing. Of course, we also want to know your results. Please share those results with us at http://www.realfastresults.com/results. As always, go make results happen!
Sep 9, 2016
Tony LaidigWe're going to be talking about templates today.  Something that I love, and I know you love as well.  It's a great way to take  your business in a new direction that, perhaps, you haven't considered before.  So, that's what we're going to focus on.

Benefits to Offering Templates in Your Business

I think it's important to recognize, first of all, that we as human beings are hardwired to respond to templates.  I mean, after all, we are based on templates.  DNA, right?  Everything that surrounds us falls into some sort of template.  We may not think about it that way, but the fact remains. Anything that takes a long process, a long series of steps to do, over and over, repetitive-wise, can be turned into templates Anything that is outside your wheelhouse, like maybe designing a book cover... You're not a graphic designer, or whatever, but you want to have something professional-looking.  You can accomplish that using a template. So templates, across the board, save us time and save us energy, they save us effort, and that's one of the reasons why I refer to templates as "the perfect product type", because of those reasons alone.  We love saving time, money, and effort.  That's really it.  Imagine taking product development, from that perspective.  You have customers, regardless of what business you're in.  How can you help them save time, save money, save effort? Even McDonalds, their hamburgers are made using templates.  The process is a template.  Actually, the hamburgers are too.  They may not be the best hamburgers, but they are still made using templates.  Why?  Because out of the hundreds of thousands of McDonalds stores, restaurants, they want the hamburgers to be the same.  It's a form of branding.  You know, you want predictability.  So, templates give us that opportunity. Part of my career past was that of a cover designer.  I worked in the publishing industry for 20 years as a book cover designer.  So, it's easy for me to create a professional-looking cover.  I've done it hundreds of times, but for a new upcoming writer/author who wants to publish their book, they don't want it to look like crap.  It won't sell.  But, they don't know anything about designing a book cover. If I, as a designer, create a template that they can follow and just plug in their information, now all of the sudden, for a fraction of the cost and a fraction of the time, they have a professional-looking book cover that they can be proud of.  It will boost their sales.  It will boost their following.  You know, all of that.  I think that's just the beauty of working with templates. Let's say you want to start a new LLC, a new company.  You go to MyCorporation.com.  What do you do?  You fill in a template, and you pay a nice chunk of money for that template, but still, it just speeds up the process.  Imagine having to fly across the country, and sit down with an attorney, and fill out all of that stuff manually, face to face.  Holy crap!  We'd never do it.  So, it just saves us so much time, and not only that, think about what you have in your business.  What are people asking again, and again, and again?  What are they communicating with you like, "It's so hard for me to do X."  You know, or "I'm having a lot of trouble doing Y." What are those things in customer support, or in FAQs, or in your Facebook group, or whatever, that people are struggling with?  How easy would it be to help them to provide better support and create a new product by creating templates that help them solve that problem?  Another thing, like courses, they can take days, if not weeks, to put together.  Templates you could bang out in an afternoon.  A couple of hours and then you're done.  I love that feature.  That's why I say that it's such a win-win at so many levels.

Identifying and Developing a Template or Template Bundletemplates

You know, we have our friend Felicia Slattery.  Felicia is a speaker, trainer, and she's brilliant.  She's coached me on my speaking, teaching on webinars, and all of that.  She noticed something starting to occur within her business where people were wanting to get more speaking gigs, and she teaches how to do that.  In order to professionally reach out to groups and reach out to organizations, and places like that where a speaker would want to be, folks were struggling.  They didn't know how to make that connection.  She's like, "You need a one-sheet.  You need a way to communicate what your speech is, and where you've been featured, and who you are as a person, and all of that." They just really weren't sure how to accomplish that.  So, Felicia had the great idea, "You know what?  I could create a series of templates that people could just fill in the blank, and all they would have to do is put in their information, what the name of their speech is, their bio, their photo, and so on.  Then, they could pick colors, they could make it look professional, and Boom! Done!" She set out to do that.  She created a series of templates.  I believe there were four or five.  It was one basic template, and then she changed the colors.  Ten different colors, and now instead of five different templates, there's 50 different templates, or whatever the case may be.  But, it was just different colors. People loved it.  Talk about creating a service.  She had never done anything like that before.  She had never created templates like that before.  Coming from something that was a little bit outside of her wheelhouse, because she normally teaches speaking, but saw that need, provided a solution to that need, in the form of templates, and now all of the sudden, here's this little product that turns into a $15,000 payday for her.  The other side of that being how she did with it. I remember whenever she released them, people tagging her on Facebook with a screenshot of their speaker template that they just created for their own thing, and it was fun to watch.  It was fun to see people achieving that level of success so quickly, when they didn't have any idea what to even do before those templates were out.  It's such a great example of what can be done, very quickly, just by identifying a problem and then producing a template to solve that problem.

Step 1 - Identify What Your Customers Are Asking For

The first step is to identify what your customers are asking for.  What are the sticking points for your clients and your customers?  You need to be looking at things like your FAQs, and what people are mentioning on your support desk, and on your support emails, and what they struggling with as communicating on social media, etc.  That's essentially Step 1, and then the second step is to create a template that sort of fills that gap you have identified.

Step 2 - Create a Template That Fills in the Gap

One thing that I want to point out is that you should ask yourself what you would need to experience success whenever you are identifying what to create.  As the template creator, one thing that you would really need to be aware of, and conscious of, is that when you are really good at something, like cover design or whatever the case may be, the process can become invisible to us, where we think it's easy when it's not.  You want to even think about templates from that perspective.  "Oh yeah, I can whip up a cover in no time," and somebody else, they're like, "What? I got nothing."  They think it looks pretty, and well, we won't say what it looks like.  So, what would a template look like to accomplish that? We're not talking about step-by-step training, but we're talking fill-in-the-blank, is really it.  You know, what blanks need to be filled in order for your customer to experience the results that they want?  You talk about Real Fast Results.  That's the name of this podcast.  How will someone achieve real fast results from a template that you're creating.  What are those blanks that have to be filled in? Templates are all really unique.  Felicia's templates are perfect for speakers, and that's what they were created for. But, quite frankly, authors could use them to advertise their books, coaches could use them to advertise their coaching service, and on and on it goes.  Real estate agents could honestly use it to talk about what markets they're in and that kind of thing.  So, there's a lot of adaptability there, and that's the other facet of templates.  Don't pigeonhole them to the point where, "Oh, you've got to only use it this way."  You know, our job is to create a framework where people can be flexible.

business templateAdding Templates to Your Business

Decide what kind of template will best serve your audience. Of course, there's the creation process.  You have to create that template.  There's a number of programs that I like to "play in," so to speak, when it comes to template creation because a lot of the templates that I work with are information-driven. 

Tools to Develop Templates

  • My favorite, probably, is PowerPoint.  That's the same program that Felicia used for her templates.  It's really easy to set up, to modify the data, and so on.
  • Microsoft Word could be another example, because Word documents are very easy to fill in.
  • Even Adobe Acrobat, you can use to create some pretty cool templates.
  • From a cover design perspective, I've created some templates using Photoshop, which of course is the #1 image editor on the planet.  But, I've also created them in PowerPoint.  So, it's identifying the tool.
Now, something to keep in mind here, with the tools, it depends on who your audience is.  You don't want the tool that they need to use to modify the template to be cost-prohibitive, or require a steep learning curve, or those kinds of things. It's usually a good idea to include some sort of instruction on how to modify the templates, but you can get PowerPoint as part of the Office 365 Suite for $10 a month.  You know?  And, if you really don't want to do that, you can get OpenOffice for free.  So, there's a lot of flexibility in using a presentation-style software for creating your templates because... free, $10, I mean, whatever... It's available to pretty much anybody, and it's pretty easy to figure out.  So that would be the next step.

Free Templates Vs. Paid Templatesprofit

If you go to the Microsoft website, where they have Office, you'll notice that they have hundreds of templates there that you can download and use for free, which begs the question, "Yeah, if my customers can go to Microsoft, or other places, and find templates for free, why on earth would they buy templates from me?"  And, it's a good question; it's valid.  I've never let that stop me. To me, it's a non-issue that the templates are available for free because they aren't mine.  They aren't my templates.  So, whenever you're buying templates from me, or from whomever, you're not just buying a template that you can download somewhere.  You're buying expertise, you're buying insight, you're buying business experience, professional results, and those kinds of things. You're not just selling a template.  You are, but you're not.  You're selling yourself.  You're selling your results.  That's a huge factor in it.  Relationship certainly plays a role in that.  Felicia certainly has a reputation of being a great speaker.  She has spoken thousands upon thousands of times.  So, she can draw upon those results and that experience to bake that into those templates. I've created nearly 600 book covers.  That means I know a thing or two about book cover design, and I can bake that experience into my templates, and that's really what it comes from.  That goes back to the question of, "What specialized knowledge do you have that will solve problems for your customers that could be turned into a template and save them time, money, and effort?"

Step 3 - Sell Your Templates

The last step is to make them available, to sell them, which is an obvious thing.  I had a thought that I'd like to share really quickly just, again, to drive home an example.  So, let's say that you serve the publishing industry, and you have a first-time author who wants to publish their book.  What all do they need, as it comes to you as the publishing professional? Obviously, they need a book cover.  They need the text of the book laid out.  They need a website.  They need branding.  They should have an author one-sheet.  They need a media kit, a book trailer, an Author Central page, a professional bio; you know, all of those things to help them promote their book, right?  Every one of those, every single item, can be template-ized, and they should be.  That's just one small market, and the same could be true of a myriad of markets.

Learning More and Connecting with Tony

I have put together a pretty stout on-demand webinar.  It's available to you right now.  You can head on over and register at RealFastTemplateProfits.com.  The easiest way to connect with me would be to visit TonyLaidig.com.  I've been working on redesigning my site, making it look pretty and functional.  But, that's the best place.  You'll get to learn more about me and see what I'm up to.  My courses and trainings are all on there as well.

Real Fast Results Community

If you are diggin’ on this stuff and really love what we’re doing here at Real Fast Results, would you please do me a favor? Head on over to iTunes, and make sure that you subscribe to this show, download it, and rate & review it. That would be an awesome thing. Of course, we also want to know your results. Please share those results with us at http://www.realfastresults.com/results. As always, go make results happen!
Sep 6, 2016
Felicia SlatteryOur promise today is we are going to talk about, "What you should talk about."  You know so much stuff in your head, and you know so many things in your business. We want you, at a moment's notice, to be able to have a conversation with anyone who connects to your audience that you can benefit from, that you can build your list from, that you could make money from, very quickly and very easily.  That's what I have to talk about.

Benefits of Being Able to Speak Confidently About Your Business

Obviously, there's the tangible number of leads that you can get and the amount of cash that you can make.  That's obvious.  To me, the biggest benefit is the confidence and the calm that comes with knowing that you know your stuff, and you're going to know the answer.  You're going to know what to say. We hear all the time that public speaking is the #1 fear of a lot of people.  We don't dig deep to find out why, and the biggest reason is that people aren't sure what they are going to say or how they're going to say it.  So, when you already know, in your head, what you're going to say and how you're going to say it, you just have this confidence that is about you.  So, someone is in a pinch. A meeting planner is in a pinch, and you are at a meeting, and they're like, "Oh, we thought someone was going to be here, and they're not here.  What do we do?  Daniel, can you talk?"  You can be like, "Sure I can," and you're ready and good to go. To be clear, I wrote a book called Kill the Elevator Speech: Stop Selling, Start ConnectingSo, what I don't want you to do is I don't want you to memorize an answer to, "What do you do?"  We need to know who we are, what the kind of work we do is, and the kind of people that we help, and what the results are. That's kind of an easy no-brainer.  That's another kind of conversation that, I'm meeting you for the first time, we're shaking hands and saying hello. Really, what we're looking at is an opportunity for you to connect with a group of people, whether that is, a podcast situation, a video situation, a media situation, on stage, whatever that case may be. "Hey, I'm going to put you in front of some people.  Let's talk."  What are you going to say?  How are you going to say it?  Where are we going to go? That's where we are going with this, and to me, what we're looking at is knowing, on a head level and actually at a heart level, what are you about?  What are your steps?  What are the pieces, or the parts, or the things that you can really offer, which #1 for you, make you stand out, and be different, and be unique, be interesting?  Number 2, what's going to benefit the audience?  So, those are the big overlying principles that we're looking at.  Those are the kinds of things that are going to make you look good, benefit you, and also provide value.

Sharing Two Sides of Your Businesssharing your business

There are two sides to what we want to share.  The first side is the personal side, the "who you are" stuff.  That's how people connect with others.  The kind of businesses that we're building are personality-based businesses, for the most part.  We're authors, we're speakers, we're coaches, we're consultants, we're experts in some shape or form.  We're sharing ourselves and the information that we share.  S o, people want both of those.  They want to know, "Okay, so who is this person?"  The second side is the information that we sell.  That product, that service, whatever "that" is. Those are the two pieces, and that's what I want you to be thinking about as we're going through this process.  So, personal bits and professional bits.  Have these, both pieces, ready to go, and be able to share those kinds of things. So, that's where we're going to start.  Let's talk about the person first. That may sound like a weird place to start, but it's actually not because, again, this is what's going to make you stand out.  Why?  Well, are there other people in the world teaching what you're teaching?  Here's the actual answer, "I hope so because if there's not, there's probably not any money to be made in your area."  I'm just saying.  Go into a market where it's proven. Now, what's going to make you stand out from everyone else?  Is there a right way to do what you talk about? Probably.  Well then, there's other people teaching the same kind of steps and the same kind of methods.  It's not necessarily the professional content that's going to make you stand out.  For example, I teach people about speaking, and there's a right way to start a speech and a really bad way to start a speech.  You know, there's a handful of ways.  So, anybody that teaches this stuff knows the handful of ways.  There's a right way to end a speech.  How am I going to stand out from somebody else?  I'm going to stand out over here with who I am and what I'm about.  And, that's going to be the same for you. People are going to be attracted to you, and your message, and YOU.  Your person.  You're the reason why people will buy that professional content, because of YOU.  So, let's talk about your personal self and think about a couple of different things.  I like to put it in the context of storytelling. Think about some of those stories, in your life, that you can, what I call, make a turn toward.  Something that happened in your life where people go, "Oh my gosh!  Really, that happened?  That's interesting," or "That's cool," or "That's scary," or whatever.  Then, they connect to that, and you go, "So, now that I've told this story, here's why it matters to you."

speaking - storiesProfessional Story

A great example is, back in 2008, I had been running my own business from home, and things were okay.  I had to learn to use the Internet in 2006 because I wanted to be home with my babies, who were 1 and 3 at the time.  So, I was doing okay and making a little bit of money, doing some coaching and that kind of thing, and then I went to my first internet marketing event.  I was sitting in the audience, and again, this was my first event so nobody knew who I was, and I didn't really know any of these people. I wasn't really in the internet marketing world at the time, and I was sitting and taking all kinds of notes, and it was great.  And then, there came a portion of the event when there were a couple of speakers, both talking about Google.  One was talking about Google Adsense, and one was talking about Google AdWords, which are kind of two sides of the same coin. But, they were having some technical difficulties, like the video wasn't working or the audio wasn't working, and they wanted to record the session.  They said, "We're going to figure this out.  While we do that, we'll bring up the speakers," so all of the speakers were now standing on the stage.  Not just these two, but a bunch of people.  All of the speakers for the whole event are standing there, and they're saying, "Hey, we'll take your questions." I was like, "Ooh, this is really cool."  I was ready to take notes and everything.  People are raising hands and asking questions.  Somebody raised their hand, and she said, "How can I be more credible on the Internet?"  And, I had been speaking because, again, that's what I do.  I had been delivering a speech called "Credibility and Cash Flow" for the last year and a half.  I thought, "It's going to be really interesting to hear what these really smart speakers are going to have to say about it at this event."  As they spoke, I was like, "None of them really have the answer."  Why?  Because credibility and cash flow wasn't their thing.  So, they could answer it okay, but that was something that I knew. It was informal, and they were still struggling with the tech stuff, and it was a small enough room, maybe with a couple of hundred people.  So, I felt kind of comfortable, like half sheepishly raising my hand. Nobody knows me at this point.  I said, "I could speak to that," and they said, "Oh great!  Come on up," and then somebody handed me a microphone.  "Well, hello!  Felicia has a microphone!  Look out!"  And, I gave about 2-3 minutes of my 30-minute signature speech, "Credibility and Cash Flow". People are taking notes, and everybody is on the edge of their seats like, "Wow!  This is really good stuff."  And, at the end of that, I looked down the line, and maybe you remember the cartoons when we were growing up, when we were kids, and there would be one head over another over another in a doorway; that's kind of what I saw when I looked down the line.  I had one microphone, and all of the speakers, I was standing up next to them at that point, and one of the other speakers, New York Times bestselling author, he goes, "And, who are you again?"  I was like, "I'm Felicia Slattery." So, what did I just do?  A couple of things.  Number 1, I shared with you a story about who I am and what I'm about.  At this point, you have no question in your mind that I'm not afraid to get on a stage, right?  So, now  you know a little bit about me, but I also shared (it's kind of a share within a share) that I had content ready.  I had been delivering this speech, at that point, for over a year, which for me is forever.  That's just a long time to be talking about the same thing.  By the way, 10 years later, I'm still talking about the same thing because people want to know. I know this stuff inside and out, so when someone raised their hand and said, "Well, hey, I need to know this."  I knew I could provide value.  From that, my entire business changed.  From just being willing to raise my hand and go, "Hey, I can speak to that," within three weeks I was on the #1 internet marketing podcast in the country at the time.  I was invited to be on stages all across the country.  I was invited to do guest blog posts, which was a huge thing at the time.  It was like, suddenly all of this changed.  My list grew exponentially, I started making all kinds of money, I had people wanting to be my affiliate, and I was like, "What's an affiliate program?"  I didn't even know.  "I'll get one of those, I guess." It was so fun. What I'm asking you to do is think about, "What kind of story can you tell?"  Now, I want you to break your stories into two pieces.  That, for me, that was a professional story I just told.  You want an example of you, showing who you are as a work person, like I just shared.  The other story that I want you to have in mind, that you're going to share with people, is a personal story.  Again, it can be anything, but you want it to be something that you can then, kind of doing what I'm doing here.  Unpack a little bit for the audience and say, "Why did we just tell that story?  What's that about?"  And, I'll demonstrate because sometimes that's a little bit easier.

Personal Story

It was just about four years ago that I was diagnosed with non-smoking related lung cancer.  I'm here.  I'm doing great.  Yay!  And totally healthy and fantastic, and I'd like to talk about how I experienced a miracle during that time.  What happened was, I was diagnosed with a particular kind of lung cancer.  There are three kinds, if you don't know about this.  I know way more than I ever wanted to know.  There's large cell, small cell, and then this weird third kind that no one has ever heard of.  I was diagnosed with small cell non-smoking related lung cancer from a biopsy.  They had tissue, and because I had been doing what I do...I speak and do podcasts, and webinars, and all kinds of stuff all of the time, I had built up a sizable list and following between social media and my lists. So, the night before my surgery, I sent out an email and I said, "If you're the praying kind, please pray.  If you're the visualizing kind, please visualize.  If you're the energy kind, I need all of the good vibes I can get.  Whatever... please send it.  I'll take it.  I'm having this surgery tomorrow, and I'm scared."  The next day I had surgery, and when I got out of the surgery, my doctor said, "I know we had seen what we saw.  It was the small cell.  But when we were in there, and we got a bigger piece... We got the rest of everything out, it was this weird third kind..." This weird third kind is called mucoepidermoid, a weird medical name, and Harvard University, over 20 years, had only had 12 cases of this.  Of the 12 documented cases, it never spread, it never came back, and nobody ever died.  And, that's the miracle that I experienced in my life. It was a scary time.  I mean, I couldn't speak.  Ha ha... That's a whole other story.  I couldn't speak for three months. They had to remove a big chunk of my lung.  My brain was looking for that chunk of my lung and saying, "Oh, we don't see it. Ah, you can't breathe."  So, my breath would stop because my brain didn't think that I could breath.  There were three months when I was like, "If I can't speak... [gasp]... what am I going to do for a... [gasp]... living?  Do I need to find a new... [gasp]... line of work?"  They're like, "It'll be fine."  Darn it, if it wasn't cardio exercise that got me back.  My husband was like, "I told you so."  He's a personal trainer. So, anyway... What was that?  That was a personal story.  Now, I'm going to tie that personal story back into work.  How did I get to experience that miracle?  Well, I experienced that miracle, number 1, because of my faith.  That's my personal piece, but also because I had built up this community of people who were listening to what I had to say, who were reading my emails, who were reading my social media posts, and they liked me.  Remember, we talked about this at the beginning.  You've got your personal, and you've got your professional. If all I was about all of the time was doing public speaking and that was it, and didn't connect with people, I don't know what the outcome would have been.  But, what I do know is that I received email replies from literally around the world, and in multiple languages and in broken English [saying], "I'm praying for you, and I hope you're okay."  And, it was amazing.  That was because I had taken that time. You know, you hear about building your list. Well, I think of my list as individual human being people, and that's how I like to talk to them, and that's how I treat them.  That's, then, how they treated me, and they helped me have a miracle. Now, there's my story.  That was a personal story.  I had cancer; that's a personal story.  I related it to work, and I'm going to relate it to you.  If you're not building your list, and building your tribe, and sharing who you are, you're making a huge mistake in your business.  Why?  Because there are business reasons to do that, and there are going to be personal reasons, that you don't even know of, later.  You don't even know. I have multiple stories I could go on about, but like, all kinds of reasons why you want to be sharing who you are with your people.  So, a personal story and a professional story that rolls off of your tongue, the way that I just shared those stories with you.  It's clear that I've told them before.  I want you to practice your stories, your personal stories, your professional stories, so that you can connect with people also.

Using Stories to Build Your Business speaking - business stories

What you want to do is think of a way, "How can I tie this personal stuff into this work stuff?"  So, for me, I tie my personal stuff into my work stuff by saying, "Okay so, how did I connect with people?  How did I build my list?  How did that miracle happen in my life?  Well, it was through speaking.  It was through connecting with people from the stage.  I'm going to show you how.  Here are some ways that you can connect with people from the stage," and then I would share some content about connecting from the stage.  You tie your personal in with your professional, and then share some steps about exactly how to do that. When you're thinking about, "What are the kinds of steps that I should share," these should be things that you're going to know off the top of your head because you say them all the time.  Maybe, think about the most frequently asked questions that you get in your business.  When you say, "I am a..." or "I do this," or "I have a book called that," or "I have a training that does this," and they want to know stuff.  What are those three, maybe four, and no more than five, most frequently asked questions that you get, that you can then speak to right away? I'm telling you now, from years of experience doing interviews like this, and podcasts, and being on stage, and even media interviews.  There's not a question that somebody's going to come up with when they are first meeting you, first introducing you, that you're going to be stumped by, if you've thought through these 3-5 frequently asked questions.  Because, everyone wants to know the same thing, so they're going to ask you that.  Know your answers.  It's pretty simple. When I share that story about being able to jump up on stage with that group of people, and actually the miracle story because what I talk about spoke to a lot of audiences and that's how I did it... One of the things that people say all of the time is, "Oh my gosh!  I'm so scared to speak.  I don't think I could ever do that." How does someone get past being scared to speak?  Ding!  There's my question.  How does someone get past being scared to speak?  I know the answer to that, and so, I [say], "You know, there's three things that you can do..."  Practice and visualize, those are the two biggest things.  The third is "expect it".  Know you're going to be nervous and deal with it. Then, I have steps.  "Well, how do you do that?"  How do you visualize, and what does that look like?  How do you practice, and what does that look like?  If I have 30 seconds, I'm going to say, "Visualize, practice, and expect that it's coming and deal with it."  If I have three hours, I'm going to spend an hour on each one of those.  See?  Easy. So, if you break things into numbers that you know... three things... two things... the #1 secret of... five things... Don't go above five because it starts to get hard to remember.  Unless they are very specific steps that you could totally do in your sleep, anything above five, that's okay.  But, otherwise you'll be like, "I don't remember the sixth one.  What was it again?"  That does the opposite; you don't want that. So, no more than five.  Three is an easy number.  And then, sometimes it helps to have the #1 secret, or the #1 tip, or whatever, like that because people will ask you.  Here's another one that you'll get asked a lot.  What's your favorite quotation?  If you don't have a favorite quotation already, then think of one that you like and have that in your head, whatever it happens to be.  I love lots of quotations, so I will use a different quotation for different reasons, depending on what they happen to be. Sometimes you get asked that question at weird, random times.  For me, I didn't even expect that it was coming... Back when Twitter was a brand new thing, I would do like 50 quotations a day, just tweeting out stuff. Motivational stuff, because it was fun and I loved it, and it was copy and paste, so I mean, how hard was that?  That's how you build your following is, you give people what they were interested in, and my people were interested in that. So, I would have like 15 come to mind, and all of them try to get out of my mouth at the same time.  It didn't work; so now I've got a couple that I fall back on, depending on what the circumstances are.  Think about that for yourself as well.  That's like a little bonus tip.  What could be a famous quotation that you could share?

call to actionCall to Action

You know, I think the final step is that you've got to tell people what you want them to do next.  You've got to have a call to action.  Now they know you, now they know your stuff, so now what?  What do you want them to do?  Do you want them to go to a website?  Do you want them to read a blog post?  Maybe you've got a re-targeting campaign set up?  So, anyone that hit your blog post, that you've got out there for free, you're going to be re-targeting them for the next 180 days.  Hallelujah!  Thank you Facebook!  They don't even have to opt in.  You're just going to follow them around.  Not that I know anything about that... Or, maybe you do want them to opt into something. Maybe you want them to go buy your book, or maybe you want them to download your free Kindle book.  Maybe you want them to subscribe to your podcast.  Maybe you want them to subscribe to your YouTube channel. Whatever you're working on at the moment. By the way, your call to action can change depending on what you're working on at the moment.  It doesn't matter what your call to action is, it just has to be something.  You just want them to go somewhere because if they liked you, and they thought your stuff was good, now give them more.  What's next? Give people their marching orders.  That's another thing.  In the business world, people want a leader.  They want to follow a leader because they don't have the time to figure out a lot of this good stuff themselves.  They are busy doing what they're doing.  If they identify you as an authentic leader, someone that's genuine and somebody that they trust, such as when you do make a call to action, when you do have them do something, or ask that they do something, not all of them are going to do it. However, there's going to be a percentage of those people who resonate with you and your story that will actually take the action.  Those are the cream of the crop people.  Those are the people who you really want to be doing business with anyway. Why are those the people who you want to be doing business with anyway?  It's because, 1), they made a decision, and 2) they took an action.  So, they didn't just decide, "This is good stuff, I'm going to have to go get that later."  They did it right now.  You know this, if you've worked with anybody.  The greatest joy they get is when they come to us and say, "What should I do," and then they go do it and get their results.  They're like, "Hallelujah!"  Then, they go off and do their thing.  We want those people who have made that commitment and taken that action, however small it may be.  It doesn't necessarily have to have purchased a product.  Just going to like the Real Fast Results podcast would be an action they could take.

Connecting with Felicia

If you like the idea of trying to figure out what you want to say and having it ready to go, and you liked the story about how I was just able to jump up on stage, that would mean that you'd want to have a signature speech ready to go.  So, go to SignatureSpeechSecrets.com, and  you can opt-in there and get something for free.  Learn about how to do the signature speech, and if you think the beginning stuff sounds great, I have a whole training that you can sign up for after that.  If you think the beginning sounds good enough and you can run with that, awesome!  I have plenty of other stuff coming your way that will help you.  It starts with having your signature speech ready to go at a moment's notice, knowing what you're going to say, knowing how you're going to say it, and feeling that confidence.  That's SignatureSpeechSecrets.com.

Resources

Felicia's Book: Kill the Elevator Speech: Stop Selling, Start Connecting

Real Fast Results Community

If you are diggin’ on this stuff and really love what we’re doing here at Real Fast Results, would you please do me a favor? Head on over to iTunes, and make sure that you subscribe to this show, download it, and rate & review it. That would be an awesome thing. Of course, we also want to know your results. Please share those results with us at http://www.realfastresults.com/results. As always, go make results happen!
Sep 2, 2016
Dani Hedlund
Welcome to this edition of the Real Fast Results broadcast.  Dani Hedlund is here today to share her secrets on how to get a literary agent.  This, of course, is very important to know if you have a desire to become traditionally published.  Let's see what she has to say...

Today's Promise

Today I'd like to talk about how you go about getting a literary agent. There's a lot of debate about whether or not a writer should seek out an agent, or whether or not they should go to an independent publisher, or even a self-publisher.  It's the stance of my company, and myself, that the best way to go about getting your work out to the public is going through an agent. The reason for that, agents are your best avenue to a large traditional publisher. Frankly, if we have ideas that we want to put out, maybe that's through a quirky sci-fi or a deep-rooted memoir, we want as many people to read that as possible.  What we are aiming at, as authors or editors, is to get that to the largest house that can give us the most proliferation.  That is always a literary agent.  Your top five, or top ten, publishing houses do not accept unsolicited work.  So, these agents are the gateway into that larger avenue. Literary agents have kind of a horrible reputation of being these, you know, heartless bastards that are exploiting the great writing of these new creators. However, in a lot of ways, literary agents are the new editor.  They are the people that you call in the middle of the night, and you're drunk, and you don't know if you're going to have to kill off that character.  Your agent is going to be the one that's like, "Okay, calm down.  I don't know.  That character kind of needs to die, but let's drink and talk about it."  And, they're also there to make sure that you don't get screwed.  They are there to verify all of your contracts, to make sure the house that you're at is the right one. Also, now that there's this huge avenue for writers to go from book deals to film deals, an agent is going to be the one that makes sure they can navigate that new space.  I mean, we're writers; we all wanted to grow up to be Hemingway without the shotgun.  We don't know these sorts of things.  So, we need someone to be our conduit through it all.  Literary agents, in that respect, are the goldmine of being able to help a really great author get everything they want out of the industry.

Finding the Right Literary Agent for You

How to Get a Literary Agent-pinterestLet's say that you have a great book, and that's going to be where we'll start.  The end goal will be that you have an agent that signs you.  I'm not going to do any of the "write a book well" sort of talk.  We are all starting from the point that you need to sell it.  This is a very common situation, where I will come into work and have a really brilliant novelist who has the "Great American Novel," and this person can't get an agent to reply to them.  A big thing with that is just forming the query. The way that querying used to work, like back in the day, before the 90's, was you wrote a good book, you summarized it in a page, and then you sent it.  Agents just wanted a good book, so they would read an interesting description, they'd ask for pages, and then they'd buy it.  That world is no longer the world we're living in.  We're now living in a publishing world that's inundated with so many books and so many queries that agents are trying to make their jobs as easy as possible on themselves, which means a query letter has to do two things.
  1. It has to do the old thing it always did, which was making a book sound interesting,
  2. but it also has to make an author seem marketable.

Writing a Good Querywriting a query

The first thing about making a book sound interesting is you have to sell it in a way where it's not just like the back of the book blurb. It has to be, "Here's a new interesting idea, and then here's possible ways it could go," without actually telling the agent anything about the ending of the book, and never, ever telling the agent how to do their job. A very good query starts out straight in, and it's going to say, you know, "Sandy McClain was a woman who always knew her place in the world, until the day she discovered a letter written from the future."  Yes, that's a terrible line, but it's going to show you instantly that I have a character and here's why I care about them. That's going to make up one or two paragraphs of the query, but a lot of times an agent won't read those first couple of paragraphs.  They'll skip right to the third paragraph.  This is the crux of selling the author.  This third paragraph just says where else the author has been published.  That's called a publishing platform. It'll say something like, "This author has been published in The New Yorker and The Paris Review," or any literary journal or anthology.  What this says to an agent is, "Okay, somebody else has already taken a chance on this author.  This author clearly can write well, and they're already developing a fan base.  Great.  Most of my work is done for me." After they see that, then they'll go back to look at what the book is about.  A lot of really great authors will even sell their books while developing the query, but since they have no publishing credit, an agent would be like, "Ugh, I mean, that sounds good, but do I really want to waste the hour it would take me to read the first couple of chapters?"  And, often times, the answer is no.  Definitely when you're querying an agent, make sure that you're selling the book well and that you're selling yourself well. Another weird thing that's emerging in the industry right now is social media platforms.  Again, before the 90's, publishing houses were big enough, and they had enough money, that they had really large marketing departments.  That meant you could take a totally unknown author, buy their book, and then marketing people would market. Nowadays, people are reading less and that's hemorrhaging from the company.  So, large publishing houses are taking that out of marketing and publicity. Which means that the author has so much responsibility now to market themselves and so does the agent.  That's why an agent makes a larger percentage now, because they do a lot of the marketing work. One of the things that a lot of agents look for is they'll have their secretaries Google your name and then write down the number of Twitter or Facebook followers at the top of the query.  I know so many agents that just discard anything with under 1,000 Twitter followers, which is crazy. They don't even read the query letter. It's very important for an author to make sure that they are creating a professional social media platform.  There are so many young authors that I run into, and their social media handle is like "SweetCheeks5".  Like that's the first thing I do... I'm like "No.  Use your name.  Be professional.  Reach out to other people in the industry." A very important thing, in writing a good query letter, is selling yourself as well. 
  • Get good publishing credit.
  • Have a strong social media/marketing platform.
  • And of course, sell the book well.
I know that I could talk about any of those aspects, but I think it's most essential that we go over having your own platform because a lot of authors have trouble doing this.  You must market your stuff, and parcel with that is developing a fan base, a rabid fan base that wants to buy anything that you create, pretty much right out of the gate.  If you can do that, then you are so much more desirable for an agent and a publishing house because you have inbuilt sales, or at least that's the thought.  That's the reason why you need to do this.

agent 1How to Make Yourself More Attractive From a Marketability Standpoint

The most common thing that is done is to get smaller publications.  That's submitting to literary journals, submitting to contests, submitting to anthologies.  The big reason for that is you have people in the industry taking a chance on you and publishing your work.  That allows you to build a fan base, but mostly it just shows the agent, "Okay, that person writes well enough that someone bought something they wrote."  It can be a literary journal that no one has ever heard of, or it could be a very prestigious literary award, it just has to be something. This is especially true for literary fiction.  If you're writing literary fiction, you need publishing credit because that is one of the most difficult industries to both make money in and to find representation.  That's just because it doesn't sell near as well as the other aspects.  So, that's publishing credit, and that's very important. A really great thing about publishing credit is that if you're writing shorter works, you're growing as an author.  I could just kick myself because my first work, right out of the gate, I wrote a novel.  If I were writing and published short stories first, I would have learned all of the very stupid things that I was doing in a short, manageable way that didn't make me think, "Oh my God!  I have to get rid of the last three years of my life." I highly encourage writers to always be making short work, and it's a great emergence into the industry, and it's another way to make contacts.  A lot of the time, you can get published in a literary journal and an editor will be like, "Hey, I was so excited to publish it, can I help you in some other way?"  The moment someone in the industry turns around and says, "Can I help you,"  that's a wonderful moment.  That's a big aspect.  Especially if you're writing nonfiction. Blogging and building up a blogging fellowship is also incredibly helpful. You look at The Rules of Inheritance, which is a beautiful memoir that was published a couple of years ago. Jennifer Lawrence ended up insisting that the film rights were purchased, and it will be a wonderful film, and Claire is a wonderful writer, but she didn't [need to work on getting] an agent because she ran one of the most successful grief counseling blogs in California, at the time.  So, she got to pop that into her query and say, "Hey, I already have hundreds of thousands of followers that care deeply about my grief counseling, and I want to write a non-fiction book about losing my parents to cancer."  And, the agent was like, "Okay, I'll book the writer.  You instantly can sell." I know that blogs get a lot of crap in the industry, but they're great.  If you can make people care about you, that is wonderful, and social media is the same sort of thing.  If you're writing quick little things about your cat that, you know, 70,000 people like, cool.  Good.  I mean, if you write about physics, at least 10% of those are going to come along.  So, those are great aspects to grow, and depending on what you're writing, you can build up that sort of awareness in other arenas.  For instance, if you were writing historical fiction about the Roman Era, and you're a Roman critic at Oxford, that's going to lend a huge amount of credibility to an agent being like, "Okay, you're definitely the person to write this." That works in a lot of different arenas.  You know, if you're writing a feminist non-fiction piece, and you're the head of a feminist group in your state, then great.  So, anything that could help an agent paint for themselves, "Okay, this person obviously has the ability to write this book, and they have credibility that I can market," is really good.  There are certainly unconventional ways to build publishing credit, but those tend to be the ones that are the most successful and the most accessible to agents. The other thing that I would say, that one of my authors pointed out to me a couple of years ago, and it always really stuck with me. His name is Scott O'Conner, and he wrote Untouchable, which was a totally wonderful book.  He's brilliant.  I love him... But, he told me that the most successful thing that he ever did for his writing was to be "a good literary citizen".  I've always loved this. He ended up landing, essentially, his book deal because he stalked his local bookstore.  He went to every single reading, every single time someone came out.  He read their books.   He went and he talked to them, and book signings, honestly, aren't very popular.  So, you'll end up having a really great writer that has, you know, ten people come to the book signing, and you talk to them afterwards.  You talk to them about things they care about.  Suddenly, you have an arsenal of people with power and influence who like you. He ended up randomly getting his book deal because the bookseller was like, "I want to pick up this book.  What do we need to do about it?"  And, he just stalked this book store for like five years.  Giving back to the community in that way, going to signings, reaching out and doing reviews of books, and you can build that on your blog.  If you're a young person, get involved with your literary journal at your school, intern somewhere. This is just a game of who you know, and who you can grow from, and who  you can lean on when it matters.  Clearly, use those connections.  Anything you can do to build connections is the right way to go.

Where to Send Your Queryliterary agent - sending

We've discussed, roughly how to construct a letter.  You sell the book well.  You sell yourself well.  But, who in the world are you going to be sending it to?  Where are you going to find a good literary agent?  This is one of the most common steps I see authors struggle on. The first thing they usually do is list to me their favorite writers, which it's everything from Neil Gaiman to Stephen King, and they think, "Well, I kind of write it like that.  I want that agent."  exceptions to that rule, but generally, if you are the sort of agent that represents really big names, you may only have five clients.  That's all you need because you are pulling in 20% of these enormous deals. Take into account where you are as an author, and then try to reach out to an agent that's in a similar place.  There's a really wonderful website called AgentQuery.com, and it lists pretty much all of the agents out there and the genres that they like, and what they're looking for, and whether or not they're actually open.  I would recommend going in there.  There are great little checkmarks where you can say, "I write fantasy.  It's magic realism.  I'm looking for this kind of an agent." Put together a very nice spreadsheet.  You have to be so organized about this stuff and figure out when they're open for submission. And, it's very important to specify why you are submitting to that particular agent.  That means it's a lot of research.  If you see an agent that fits all of the things that you're looking for, and you read their description, and they want, "Character-driven sci-fi that has reflections on society," and you're like, "Oh my God!  That's what I just wrote," you can't just put down, "I read those things, and that's what I wrote."  You have to put in the time.  It's a lot like dating.  You have to listen to what they want and then know things about it. Go look up the titles that they represented, and then figure out whether or not that's the sort of thing that you fit into.  That way, in the letter you can say, "Dear Mrs. Johnson, I would be really keen to be represented by you because you published this book, and it does this thing, and my thing is like that."  Then the agent will be like, "Okay.  You put in some time, and you actually know what I do for a living.  You respect me, so let me show you respect."  That's a very common thing that new writers don't do.  They just assume, "I'm going to be making the agent money, so why would I have to do that?"  It's not like that at all.  It's a mutual relationship, and if you start with respect, they will give respect you back. The best way to find an agent is by looking at the books that are most like what you write, and go to the back of the book, to the acknowledgement page, because every writer acknowledges their agent.  Then, look up that agent directly and figure out what they are doing.  I find that [looking in] Barnes & Noble's "Discover New Writers" section is a super great way to poach agents in the way that you know that those agents care about new talent.  They're looking for new voices, and they are usually pretty new in the industry because that's who deals with debut talent. Go through and find books that are your book.  Read all of the descriptions, or order the books and read them, and then really care about querying to those agents.  New people in any agency, like always junior agents are lovely.  They're still not broken inside, so they still read most of the queries.  Make sure you're querying to the right sort of people.  Also, there's just a couple of things you should never do. Never, ever use the words, "I think this will be a bestseller," and never say it has "film potential".  Agents hate it when you tell them how to do their job, so never, ever do it.  I find that comparative lines, and by that I mean, if I say that I have written Fight Club meets Grapes of Wrath, that tends to work pretty well on East Coast agents, but like UK agents hate comparisons.  It's a very weird sort of thing.  But, kind of figure out what demographic [book fits in]. There are so many great resources online.  QueryShark is one of them.  It's a wonderful New York agent who, essentially you just submit queries to her, and she chooses them, and then she just rips them apart online.  But, it's the most helpful way to figure out what you're doing wrong. There are a lot of weird sorts of things for that, and there are a lot of resources.  Just make sure that you're not falling into the pit holes of telling an agent what to do, and make sure that you are querying to agents that actually care about the stuff that you care about.  That is, along with showing the fact that you have publishing credits, you have a marketing platform, and of course, your work has to be really good to start with.

finding a literary agentSteps to Finding Literary Management

  1. The first step is writing the query exceptionally well.
  2. The second step is making a list of all of the agents that you want to reach out to and doing the actual research.
  3. Then, the next step is sending your queries out.
I would never recommend sending a batch of more than  5-8.  You have your whole list of all of the agents that you could possibly want, and then the middle ground people, like the B-quality people.  Send out 5-8 query letters, and make sure that you're catering them correctly.  The reason for that is because, inevitably, the first query letter that you write, no matter how much you love it, is probably not going to be good enough.  You only learn that by getting rejected. Then, some agents promise to get back to you in three months, but some of them are six months.  It's kind of insane, but send it out and see if you get rejected, see if you get comments back.  In a month go back and make revisions to the query letter.  Make sure that you're sending it out to everyone you know, not just the literary people that you know, but send it out to some of the readers you know because they'll be good at telling you whether or not it would make sense.  Keep doing what you're doing and adding more people to your list.  Usually, you'll get to a point where you haven't heard anything back and you're just kind of confused.  That's the time to kind of seek help.  Like I said, there are  lots of great online resources that can help you get good at this stuff. This is usually  a sign that you're selling your book wrong.  The primary way that someone is usually selling their book wrong is they're not identifying the genre correctly.  Like I said before, literary fiction, you can sell some, but to get a literary agent to be like, "Okay, I'm going to take a huge chance on someone, who even if they are Don DeLillo, are not going to make me very much money."  So always go back and look at your genre, and see if there is a way to pitch your book in the best possible genre.  If you wrote a literary fiction book that is 5% fantasy, you pitch that thing as a fantasy novel.  You pitch it to a genre agent because that's the way someone is going to be able to justify taking a chance on you. One of our writers is amazing, Emily St. John Mandel.  She wrote Station Eleven, which you know, won like every award known to man last year.  It's a very beautiful, post-apocalyptic book about a Shakespearean troop, after the apocalypse, traveling around. It is straight up literary fiction.  Half of it is written in poetry.  It's like a mystery, sci-fi.  That's what you need to do.  You need to figure out the most sale-able thing about a book and then you push that.  That's just a matter of a writer letting go of their ego and saying, "Hey, I'm not selling out, but I'm trying to figure out how I can push this book in a way that matters." Then, I say go through the entire process again under a different genre.  Seek out new agents, and make sure that you're being as marketable as possible.  If you're still hitting a whole bunch of walls, it might be time to think about bringing in an editor, or think about bringing in someone who can tell you whether or not the problem is your first couple of chapters, because some agents will ask for a chapter sample right up front with a career letter.  Maybe the career letter is too long.  A lot of times that doesn't mean that your work isn't great or that it won't find a publisher; you just haven't figured out how to sell it correctly.  Because, why would you know that?  You're an author.  Like, you wanted to be an introvert for the rest of your life, and now you're expected to get up and sell something? During that entire time, what you should be doing is building the platform.  You know, you're submitting things out, and you put your soul on a query letter before passing out into the darkness.  The only thing that's going to keep you sane is progress.  So, keep submitting to literary journals.  Keep building that platform.  Keep being a literary citizen.  Build your blog.  Build your social media.  That way, every time you go through a round on a cruise, you get to add another line in.  "I got to publish at this new place," or "I have this many followers."  Or, "I met someone great and they said they'd pass it along to their own agent."  That does miraculously happen sometimes. As long as you are constantly keeping progress, and you're making sure you're growing, I swear if you've written something good, someone will take a chance on you.  It's just that you've got to be ready for rejection, and don't give up.  It's just like business.  You have to just believe in what you're pushing enough and just keep fighting because the world is hard and you've just got to be harder.

Genres that Sell

There are certainly statistics.  You can just, essentially, Google how many sci-fi titles got moved by Penguin or all that jazz, and they fluctuate a little every year.  I can tell you with certainly, the thing that sells best in all of the book world is non-fiction.  That's everything from memoirs, to celebrity memoirs, to cookbooks.  It sells significantly better, but in terms of what sells for fiction, it is without a doubt genres like mystery and fantasy.  The thing that sells the absolute best is YA (young adult).  Young adult books can reach into so many different demographics, and that tends to sell exceptionally well. If I had to go back in time and tell you that you need to create a bestseller and make as much money as you possible because your life is on the line, I would have you write a YA book because I know that's where the money is at.  It's really where it's at.  If you really want to sell, write a YA series.  Anything where you can have the same characters for as long as possible, it's a win.  But, aside from YA, our genre really sells about the same.  From fantasy to romance, it's very similar demographics.  Literary fiction, on the other hand, is less than 10% of the market, and especially anyone that goes out and gets an English degree, they pop out wanting to write literary fiction. You know, we all want to be Dickens and Hemingway, and that's fine.  You've got to write what you feel.  You know, if you wrote Brickhouse, you put down that you wrote a murder mystery.  You do not write that you wrote literary fiction.  Pretty much, don't write down "literary fiction" on anything, ever, or at least not anything if you can avoid it.

Find Writer Friends

I think that's what I would recommend, more than anything, is to go out and find writer friends.  I know that might seem contradictory of all the very process given, but this is a very difficult process.  One in a million get an instant acceptance.  Their uncles are literary agents, and you know, they went to the Iowa Writing Workshop and walked out with a contract.   You're really going to start doubting yourself.  You're going to doubt whether or not you're a good writer, you're going to doubt whether or not you made the right move when your mom was begging you to become an accountant. It's going to be so hard, and the only thing that's going to get you through that is to be able to lean on people that care about the same things that you care about, and that care about you as an artist, and that are going through similar things.  I remember going through this process, and I had friends that were going through the same things.  We would go to the pub and buy each other a shot for however many times someone got rejected.  You have to lean on each other because this is going to hurt so badly, but it's worth it.  If you have something great that you've written, it deserves to be in as many hands as possible.  You have to put in this hard work now.  Be open to revisions, and be open to change, but keep believing in yourself and lean on the people that believe in you.  It's going to be hard, but it's going to be worth it.

Thoughts on Self-Publishing

I have a really hard time with self-publishing in the respect that there are a lot of times when a self-published book falls on my desk, or even an independently published book, and honestly, it's one or two edits away from being picked up by a big house.  I look at the print numbers, I look at circulation, and this book that could have changed the way that people think, it sold at its max, maybe 1,000 copies.  I know, as a publisher, that this could have gotten a major distribution.  It really breaks my heart because this author not only has shot himself in the foot for this book, but he's come onto the scene as a debut author, which is one of the only aspects of publishing that still has any marketing oomph. You sell well as a debut, or you sell well as established.  This middle ground is the really, really hard part.  Honestly, it breaks my heart.  And, that doesn't mean that there aren't some books that are brilliant and no traditional publisher will pick them up because no one wants to take chances.  There are times like that where I will advise an author and be like, "Hey, you've written something brilliant, and it's insane because I don't know of any way to get it published.  The only way is for you to go out and just do it yourself."  But, I've said that twice in my 12-year career.  I definitely think that if you believe in yourself, and if you're getting feedback where people are saying, "Hey, this is good.  This is worth it," just put in all of the rounds of revisions. It sucks and it's heartbreaking, but do it because your work deserves it.  Honestly, going it alone is so hard.  A lot of people think that it's easier than surviving with an agent, but if you really want to get out there and get your voice heard take the hard road.

Connecting with Dani

I run a non-profit called Tethered by Letters.  We are an international company that helps people do exactly the things that I'm rambling about.  We run full editing workshops, we walk people through the query process, and we are, you know, the strange, loud advocates for, "Hey, you've written something really well.  Let's help you get it published."  You can find us at TetheredbyLetters.com, an internationally distributed literary journal.  It is the fastest-growing literary journal in the states.  We just found that out, and we're so excited that we're going to get it tattooed somewhere.  So, if you're looking for some way to get that publishing platform credit and certainly try out F(r)iction.  It's totally lovely, but I'm completely biased.  So, reach out.  We're always happy to help.  That's what we do.

Resources

Books Mentioned by Dani: The Rules of Inheritance Untouchable Station Eleven AgentQuery.com QueryShark TetheredbyLetters.com

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Aug 30, 2016
Sell Your Story - PinterestWelcome to this edition of the Real Fast Results podcast!  Today's special guest is Dr. Ken Atchity, who is a very well-known Hollywood producer.  As a matter of fact, he is a producer and author who has also worked as a literary manager, speaker, writer, editor, and professor of comparative literature, among other things.  During this exclusive interview, Ken shares insight on what it takes to sell your story to Hollywood.  Without further ado, please welcome Ken to the show...

What's Your Promise Today?

I think what we're trying to get across today is giving our audience insight into how a story gets sold into Hollywood and whether they should have any hope of selling their story into Hollywood.  That's my goal.

What Are the Benefits of Selling My Story?

Every book writer and storyteller would like to see their story in front of a maximum audience.  That's what I have dedicated my last 30 years to, is helping storytellers find their maximum audience, and I long ago realized, of course, that the maximum audience is the screen.  We used to call it the "big screen" and the "little screen" before the advent of the flat screen in homes.  Sometimes that screen can be as big as the one at the movie theater.  But, in any case, television and film take stories around the world.  There isn't a country, with the possible exception of Saudi Arabia, that doesn't love movies. When you get a story told to the movies, the world gets to see your story.  You know, it can be dubbed in 182 languages, etc.  If the story came from a book that you wrote, then guess what?  The book will sell many, many more copies than it ever sold before.  We've had several examples of that in the last couple of years.  The Lost Valentine with Betty White ended up selling a whole bunch of copies of the book, which was republished for the purpose. Meg is about...after years and years of preproduction, Meg is going into production this summer in New Zealand, and we've already geared up the books to be sold again, even though they've been selling for 15 years now.  They'll really sell now because the movie becomes a commercial for your story, for your book.  So, it will sell more books.  You're getting your story out to everyone, the people who read and the people who watch.  That's the exciting part about making a Hollywood deal.

Can You Run Me Through the Steps of How My Story Might Get Told?

I think the first and most important element your story needs to have is to be universal.  It needs to be the kind of story that everyone wants to hear about.  There aren't that many stories in human experience, but we want to hear over and over again because every time we hear them anew, we actually hear things we haven't heard before, and we think of that story in ways that we hadn't thought before.  Therefore, it applies to our life and gives us a better inkling of how to deal with this crazy hodgepodge of stimulation that we call life.  Stories are...When we stop, and pause, and ask the question, "What's it all about," and "What would happen if a person like me got stuck into a situation like that,"...That's kind of the ancient formula of storytelling. So, its first quality is it has got to be something we care about universally.  You can start with the Seven Deadly Sins, or the Seven Virtues, and it isn't hard to figure out what people care about.  Love, and hate, and fear, and loss, etcetera, these are all big human subjects for stories, and therefore universally applicable.  That's the #1 quality that you need to have.  The second quality that a story for Hollywood needs to have is a hero.  I use the word loosely because I know better, as a former professor of classics and Greek drama.  I know that the real word is protagonist.  The Greeks invented that. The very first plays that were staged in Athens only had one actor.  He was the protagonist.  He was not only the protagonist, he was the only actor, and he basically came out on stage and acted out a story.  Later on, some genius added the second actor, who was known as the antagonist, the one who tries to stop the protagonist because he has opposite goals.  You know, we were off and running with drama when we had those two actors.  We still need that first actor, the one whose story it is and who has to do things in order to make his story turn out either happily or tragically.  So, that's what the protagonist is all about, but he's the first...He's the actor, the one who causes action to happen, and he is the primary reason that we're watching.  That means the protagonist, the hero, has to be sympathetic. Sympathetic is another ancient Greek concept.  It doesn't mean that we have sympathy because he lost his mother or he lost his daughter.  It means that we are able to suffer along with him.  That he's got such charisma as a character that we instantly get his suffering and can experience, through him and with him.  That's what "sympathetic" means.  So, we need a sympathetic hero.  If someone's completely unlikable, we lose interest within the first few minutes, but this hero doesn't necessarily have to be a good guy. My favorite example is Shakespeare's Richard III, where this ugly, kind of crippled, stupid guy comes out onto the stage in a black costume and proceeds to tell us how unhappy he is with life because he's constantly getting the short end of everything and that he's finally decided to do something about it.  He's going to go out and kill his brother's family and take the throne, after committing the 10 crimes that he predicts that he will commit.  Within a few lines of this amazing opening, everybody is totally rooting for him, not because he's a good guy, but because we are fascinated, mesmerized, horrified, by his candor.  You know, his outspoken willingness to tell us how bad he is and that he's going to do something about it, and we watch in horror for the rest of the play, until he finally brings himself down in ruins along with the whole kingdom. There's an example of a sympathetic hero.  Or, the beginning of Lethal Weapon, the first movie, when Mel Gibson wakes up in his really sleazy-looking trailer and reaches for a beer can that's open.  He takes a slug of beer, stands up and takes a walk into his bathroom and pisses.  Then, sits down again, pulls out his gun, and starts Russian roulette with the barrel of the gun in his mouth, and then we learn that he's a homicide detective.  Within the first few minutes of this, we can't stop watching.  Here's a story in which the hero is a suicidal homicide detective, and of course, he's matched with a partner who has only got a couple of weeks to retire after a long and happy career.  So, this is called creating sympathy for the characters, and these are some of the qualities of a great story. Those are three big things that you need to have to get your story sold to Hollywood.  There are others.  There has to be a very three act structure.  What are the three acts?  The beginning, the middle, and the end, not necessarily in that order, as a famous Italian director once said, but you have to have them.  The ending has to be conclusive and satisfying.  It can't just be intellectual, and thoughtful, and [open ended]...Movies that have those types of endings are not huge blockbuster successes.  People pay for stories, and stories as far as ordinary people are concerned, the audience, is "I want something that instantly drags me into the story, that keeps my attention the whole time, and then that punches me at the end with a conclusion so satisfying that I feel like I really got my money's worth for my ticket.  And, if I'm watching on television, that doesn't cause me to push the remote at any time during the story, other than maybe to turn the volume up. That's what it's all about, and that's what we are all looking for in Hollywood.  The good news about Hollywood is that it has become a lot more complicated than it used to be.  It's much more voracious for stories than it used to be because we have so many channels, and so many outlets, and so many ways of distribution.  All of them have to be fed, like a dragon that's eating rabbits.  It needs rabbits every day.  If it sees a rabbit it likes, then it will make a deal. It chases rabbits, and you know, one of the things that struck me when I entered this profession, from the academic world years ago, is that there are people called "trackers" who spend their whole days tracking down the rights to stories, and calling people like me and saying, "Do you control the rights to XYZ story?"  All they want to hear is "yes," or "No, but I'll tell you who does control them."  Then, they report back to their bosses, who pay them monthly just to track stories.  I thought, "Wow, this is really the world of storytelling if people are tracking them, not to mention paying lots of money for them, and investing millions and millions into making movies out of them."

What Can I Do to Punch Up the Ending to My Story?

Be creative.  That's where the creativity comes in.  You want to have an ending that leaves people bowled over and thoughtful, and sitting there in the theater thinking about it because they're so impressed by it.  If it's an action movie, it's going to be a big, climatic action scene with explosions, and guns, and all of that kind of stuff.  If it's a romance, you want a very satisfying conclusion.  It doesn't always have to be a happy ending, although in today's world that's what mostly succeeds.  I always use the example of the ending of Witness, where Harrison Ford's character is leaving Kelly McGillis' character, who lives on an Amish farm in Pennsylvania.  He is a tough Philadelphia detective, and as they kiss for the last time and he gets in his car, the audience is heartbroken.  They are thinking, "This is the most beautiful romance we've ever seen, and now he's leaving?" The director, Adrian Lyne, shows a very large place, a ranch or a farm, with a very long driveway.  That was probably the most important thing, when they were location scouting, was to choose it for the length of the driveway because his last shot is of Harrison Ford's car driving down that driveway.  As it's driving down, we see that it's slow, it's hesitating, and we're rooting for him to make a u-turn and go back into her arms because she's standing there in tears, watching her leave.  Then, as it keeps going, and he doesn't turn around, we start thinking, "Wait a minute, would I believe that?  A Philadelphia detective decides to live on a farm with Amish people, or would I believe it if she jumped in his car and went to Philadelphia with him?  Can I see a future in that?"  And, you realize, you get resigned to the fact that that's not the way this story can end. Finally, he reaches the end of the driveway and disappears from view as he turns, and you feel stunned by the beauty of the story and by the realization that some romance doesn't have to end in wedding bells and have happy endings.  It doesn't make it less beautiful; it just makes it more real.  So, there's an example of enhancing an ending so that the story leaves you satisfied. And, notice that the director is  filled with dramatic insight because he knows that it will take that long for the audience to be rooting for the ending he has chosen for this story.  You know, if you did it too suddenly, you'd feel weird and dissatisfied.  So, suspense and drama are what movies are all about, and if what you started with isn't dramatic or suspenseful enough, you write a treatment to fit your story, and in that treatment, you make sure the ending is more dramatic than what your source material was.

What is a Treatment?  What Else Will I Need?

I wrote a book about treatments years ago because I kept hearing the word, and I realized no one had a common definition of it.  My partner and I, Chi-Li Wong and I, did a survey of 200 execs in television and film, and writers and directors, and got back responses.  We used those responses to explain what a treatment is and to define what a treatment is.  Basically, it's a tool that has two functions.  It's a tool for focusing your story, like a diagnostic tool, and it is a tool for selling your story, a marketing tool.  So, diagnostics and marketing. I always urge the writers that we work with to write a treatment before they even start writing a script or anything else.  The treatment is the perfect way to do it because you're not invested emotionally in the pages you've created.  Since they're simply a tool, they're not the final result, and you don't have to moan and groan if we decide to change the sex of a character, or if we decide there are too many characters, you can just cut out the character and put him in the back of your head for another story sometime. So, a treatment is very useful because it allows people to read a quick overview of your story, you know?  It can be five to, say, ten pages long.  There are no rules about that.  We say a treatment is a relatively brief narrative, a loosely-written narrative.  I always say the best way to think of it is like a passionate letter to your best friend, explaining the night that you walked out on your wife.  You would not be using expository prose from sixth grade lessons; you would just be explosively describing, "I came home, and I found her naked in the middle of the living room, dancing with my neighbor who I thought was my best friend."  And, "blah blah blah..."  You just instantly blurt it all out.  That's what a treatment is, and it makes someone immediately want to make this movie, basically. That's what a treatment is, and it's one of several things you need to market your story.  Another thing that you need is a pitch, which is a one-line pitch of your story that will be unforgettable, describing the situation in a way that makes the listener want to know how it comes out.  As I said, the skeletal, generic pitch is, "What would happen if a gal like this found herself in the middle of a situation like that?"  That's what your pitch needs to be.  Once you have that pitch, it's called a logline, you can then email it to people in the industry who might be interested in looking at your story.  They'll then ask you, "I'm interested in the idea you have.  Do you have the treatment, or what do you have?"  And then, you send them the treatment to further hook them. At the end of the day, if you started with a script or if you started with a book, they'll ask to see that too, but it's a sales scenario in which these are the tools that you use to make the sale.  A one-page synopsis is part of it too.  Like, you'll have a pitch, a one-paragraph or one-page outline of the story.  Well, not an outline; you shouldn't use that word because that's one of those sixth grade word that, synopsis/outline, nothing to do with drama, nothing to do with Hollywood.  We want something that punches us in the face and makes us decide, you know, "you've got to see it".  That's the biggest, probably...Most used sales pitch of friends to friends on the phone, or email, or text is, "You've got to see it." Then, they might say, "Well, what's it about?"  And you say, "It's about a dog that waited for its master for 25 years, until he came home."  You know, that's the pitch.  "Okay, I'll see it."  You know, "Who is in it?"  "Richard Gere. "  "Okay, I definitely want to see that."  You know, it's that simple.  It's not complicated psychologically; it's just human.

So, If My Story Doesn't Have All the Elements That it Needs, I Can Just Repair It in the Treatment?

Exactly.  The treatment, what the beauty of it is...Let's say your story is based on a book that you wrote, if your book doesn't have a conclusive ending, now you give it one.  If your book doesn't have a well-defined "Act II", with a lot of ups and downs and twists and turns, you make sure the treatment does.  You might have to invent some of that stuff, but that's okay.  You're the creator.  You invented the story in the first place.  Now you try to make the story a movie, and movies are governed by action.  I always say there's two kinds of action.  One is, "He opened the front door and she shot him."  You know, "She was standing there with the shotgun and blasted at him."  That's action. But, dialog is also action in a movie.  It's not action in a restaurant where you overhear someone at the next table because mostly people are saying kind of inane things like, "How are you feeling today...Oh, I'm feeling okay.  How about you?"  This kind of dialog is not dramatic dialogue.  Dialog is...You know, there's a famous scene from China Town, Robert Towne's script, in which the detective, Gittes, is with the leading lady, and he says, "I want the truth,' and she says, "My sister...She's my sister."  And, he slaps her and he goes, "The truth, god damn it, I need to hear the truth," and she goes, "My mother," and he goes, "I just want the truth," and he slaps her again.  "My sister, my mother, my sister, my mother..."  Then finally, "She's my sister and my mother."  This dialogue suddenly reveals why this woman is so tortured and why, you know, the things that have happened in the story have happened. It's extremely dramatic, with very few words.  There's a great line in a Hemingway short story that I also love, in which these two people are sitting and waiting for a train in Spain and he is jabbering away, talking about like, "It's fine, you'll just go there and let a little air in, and then everything will be fine, and we'll be just the way we were before, and there's really no big deal to it."  The girl is not saying anything, and he keeps talking.  "I'll go with you if you want me to.  I mean, I'm willing to do it, but you can do it by yourself," and so on.  And, she says, "Would you do me a favor?"  "I'll do anything for you.  I told you, I'll do anything for you."  Well, she says, "Will you please, please, please, please, please stop talking." The next line is...The man did not say anything for a moment, and then he said, "Would you like a beer?" You realize, at that moment, that there is no future for this couple, that he is not on her wavelength, and that they are headed in a different direction.  That's all done with dialogue.  There's hardly any action in the story.  You know, there's hardly any physical action.  It's done with only dramatic dialogue, which is action.  And so, novels have much non-dramatic dialogue in them, connectives that get you from one place to the other, but when you actually want to turn it into a film, you need to get rid of all of that and replace it only with the dialogue that moves things and makes things happen.

Any More Words of Wisdom for People Who Really Want to Do This?

It's difficult.  That's my first word of wisdom.  It's not easy.  Think about it.  Everyone in the world would like to have their stories told by Hollywood, but the great part about it is the difficult part.  The fact is, when you succeed you will have done what everyone in the world wants to do.  So, you need to be your own decider here and not listen to the advice of anyone.  Just go for it, and never stop going for it.  Just learn as much as you can about the business (It's called "show business" for a reason), and about how it works.  That is our #1 goal...is to help you to understand the business procedures by which it works so that you have a chance there, and never forget that they are looking for you as much as you're looking for them. I always say, "People think of it as a dark, slow-moving river that you can never get across.  In the middle is an island with beautiful trees, and flowers, and beautiful people."  Once you get on that island, even though it was difficult to get on it, guess what?  It's going to be even more difficult to get off of it.  That's because once you're in there, they want you to [stay], and they become loyal to you because they're proud of the fact that you crossed that island.  They recognize you for that.  So, it's a great goal, and it's a goal that never gets old because no matter how old you are, you can still sell stories and Hollywood is still listening to them.  You know, people say, "How many chances do you get at Hollywood?"  Well, you get as many chances as you are willing to take.  That's how many you get.

Where Can I Go to Learn More?

If you're interested in selling your story to Hollywood, you can definitely head on over to http://realfasthollywooddeal.com/ .  There, you'll find an on-demand webinar that I helped to produce.  It will take you much more in-depth into how to go about selling your story, you novel, your short story, your story idea to Hollywood.  It's completely free to check this out. The aim of the webinar is to help you to take that next step in your education, or at least dip a toe and find out whether or not you want to take the journey.  You may not. The fact of the matter is that it is difficult, but for a lot of people it's well worth it.  That's up to you to decide.  The webinar that's being offered for free is an on-demand webinar.  You can go, and register for it, and basically start listening to it within 10 minutes from right now.  Again, you can check out much more thorough training on this topic at RealFastHollywoodDeal.com. IMPORTANT:  If you listen to the on-demand webinar and wish to continue your education I have a special coupon code which will save you $300 instantly - please you the coupon code PODCAST when you check out.

Real Fast Results Community

If you are diggin’ on this stuff and really love what we’re doing here at Real Fast Results, would you please do me a favor? Head on over to iTunes, and make sure that you subscribe to this show, download it, and rate & review it. That would be an awesome thing. Of course, we also want to know your results. Please share those results with us at http://www.realfastresults.com/results. As always, go make results happen!
Aug 26, 2016
John Lee Dumas
We're going to deliver, today, how you can build a meaningful audience for yourself. If you're looking to become a self-sustaining entrepreneur, who has a viable business and multiple streams of revenue, you need that.

Building the Right Audience for You

We, in this day and age, have a great opportunity.  We can produce content, and we can produce content in many forms.  Of course, we have video, audio, written content, and great social media channels, like SnapChat, Instagram, Facebook, you name it...Fill in the blanks.  There are all these different content-producing platforms. So, if you want to build, not just any audience but the right audience for you, you've got to come upbuilding audience with a content marketing plan.  Like, how are you going to deliver free, valuable, and consistent content to an audience? That's then going to become your audience because they are going to know and trust you for providing that free, valuable, and consistent content. Once you have started to build that audience, and have gotten that consistent momentum, it's all about, "Hey, how can I communicate with this audience?  How can I actually reach out and say, 'Daniel, can you jump on a quick Skype call, or a quick 10-minute Google Hangout, so that I can just ask you  little more about yourself?'"  Where are you coming from, why are listening to my content, why are you reading my content, what are you struggling with right now?  That way, Daniel can tell you all of their pain points, his challenges, and his struggles. Then I, the person Daniel likes and trusts, because of that content I've been producing and they have been consuming, can create a solution for them in the form of a product, a service, a community, and/or all three.  That's the beauty of creating that marketing content and that, again, free, valuable, and consistent manner.  And, if you build that audience, that audience will sustain you for years to come.

content marketing planComing Up with a Content Marketing Plan

If you want to come up with a content marketing plan, you're going to say, "What's the medium that I resonate with?"  Back in 2012, I was like, "I don't like to write.  I'm not a good writer."  I personally don't think talking head video is very valuable for anybody because, why am I going to stare at a screen where there's just two faces talking?  That was my mentality, so I said, "Why not just go for the audio content?  That resonates with me; I get it."  I like to consume content that makes sense for me, when I'm going on runs, when I'm driving my car, I can consume that type of content, and then I can build an audience around that as well.  So, I decided to go forward with the audio-only podcasting content. Frankly, it was a rough start because I wasn't good.  I didn't know what I was doing.  I had no interview skills.  I had no podcasting, broadcasting, entrepreneurial skills, whatsoever.  But, I was putting myself in the right position every single day, to do that thing, to get a little bit better. I can even say a couple of years ago I made that same commitment to writing.  I was never a good writer.  That's why back four years ago I didn't start with a blog.  I started with a podcast.  But, once I nailed the systems down for that medium of podcasting, I started moving to writing next. Now I write an email every single day.  Some of the emails are long, and some of them are short, but a lot of people come back and say, "Wow John!  Who is your content guy?  Who writes these emails?"  And, I'm just like, "Wow!  Nobody has ever thought that I was a good writer before, and now a lot of people do, but it's only after writing 1,000 emails that I've gotten to this point." I wrote a lot of crappy ones and a lot of "okay" ones.  Then I wrote a lot of pretty good ones, until every now and then, I do come across an idea where I am able to write a great email.  But, it always comes down to doing that thing, and that's been really important. Once you've found the content your resonate with, start working on the other area you're not as good at.  If that's what it takes to build the business you want.  I mean, maybe you get to that point where you've mastered that one medium, and then you look around and you say, "Wow, I have a great business!  I get great revenue.  I want to continue to focus, and double-down, and dominate this medium in my industry, in my niche." Then you can just stay there.  You just stay in that zone with what you're in right there.  You don't have to bolt on this or that because a lot of times people do, and then they look back a year or two years later and say, "I just created exactly what I did not want.  This business that now consumes me, instead of me controlling the business." You know, I would be very intentional about bolting different things on.  For me, I made a very intentional decision, two years ago, to add writing as something that I wanted to improve upon.  I wanted to make that part of my business.  But, that was after a lot of thought, and we were already growing  a large audience in the podcasting area.

Tips on Choosing the Right Content Platformcontent platform

You have to know who you are.  Again, I knew I wasn't a good writer.  So I said, "I'm not a good writer.  I don't like to write."  I'm not necessarily a good interviewer, but I do have a much easier time talking, and having conversations, and asking questions in a conversation-type format...in an audible type of format."  So I said, "Let's try podcasting." The funny thing is that if podcasting hadn't worked after a couple of months, I might have shifted and tried something different.  But, that was just the initial knowledge of the strengths that I had, even though, again, I wasn't strong as an interviewer or as a podcaster at the beginning, but I was stronger than as a writer, or a social media guru, or whatever else there might have been.  I just looked at something that I enjoyed and was stronger at than other areas, and I went forward with that.  I think that's a good place for people to start. Some people may ask, "Does it come down to persistence?" Persistence, actually, is a word that I would use with caution.  You can get into a position where you are digging in a whole.  Yeah, if you're persistently digging in that whole, you might strike gold in the end.  But, at the same time, you might just be digging a deeper hole, and there might be no gold underneath that.  So, you should be persistent to a level, to a degree, but you should always be evaluating every shovel of dirt that you are taking and asking, "Is this still the direction that I want to be digging?  Is this still the area that I want to be living in?"  If it's not, then step out of that whole, and shift, and go another direction. It's consistency that's key.  What are you consistently doing to produce content, to produce free, valuable and consistent content to an audience that you're growing?  And, that's in any form, in any medium.  Again, for a long time, I was being very consistent with Instagram and with Facebook, but I didn't get any of the traction that I got in those that I got immediately when Snapchat came to light, with their stories.  I immediately shifted from Facebook and Instagram, which was my main focus, to Snapchat.  And, that's where I've grown a really cool, awesome, large audience that watches my stories, and my rants, and my quotes on a day-to-day basis. Then, a couple of weeks ago, Instagram launched Instagram StorySo, now I'm leveraging my knowledge of how to tell stories on Snapchat back into Instagram. Which before, to me, was not really a great platform because it just didn't allow me to communicate the way that I wanted to, which are in short 10-second bursts of content, ranting, and stuff like that.  To me, anybody can post a photo of a quote and get a bunch of likes, but that doesn't distinguish.  My distinguishing factor is my personality, my take, my thoughts, my rants, which  a lot of people love and agree with, and a lot of people hate and disagree with.  But, you know, it's that differentiator, and I'm able to be consistent with the producing of that content.

audience buildingEvaluate as You Go

You always want to keep your finger on the pulse. And, "the finger on the pulse" in these scenarios that we're talking about is your audience.  It's the people that are consuming your content.  So, you need to be looking and interacting with the comments you're getting on Snapchat, with the social media mentions you're getting on your podcast, with the emails that you're receiving. You have to really have your finger on that pulse. A lot of people are scared to because, "I don't want to set the precedence that I'm going to be responding to individual comments, or emails, or this, or that, because that's not scalable, that's not leverage-able."  Well, that's not, but the information, and the knowledge, and the value that you get from those interactions is scalable.  It's what is going to allow you to create a product, a service, a community, that you can then do 5, 6, 7-figure launches with, like Podcasters' Paradise came to be.  It was because people were asking me so consistently about how they could create and monetize their own podcasts. I never would have thought to launch a podcast and community if I hadn't had my finger on that pulse, but I did, and that was 3 years ago.  Now we have over 3,000 members and over $4 million in revenue, and that was because I did the un-scalable, unleverage-able thing about having those conversations, about listening, about really caring about what my audience was saying.  So, that is always going to have to be part of the equation if you are looking to build a business in this content marketing arena.

Next Step in Audience Buildingpodcasting

Now that you've created free, valuable, and consistent content, now that you've kept your finger on the pulse and heard what your audience is actually saying, you'll want to go ahead and say, "I've had the content produced for you.  You've listened to the content, you've engaged with the content, you've given me your pain points, your obstacles, your challenges, your struggles, and now it's me, as the person you know, like, and trust, to create the solution, to create the products, the services, or the communities that are going to solve these issues that you're telling me that you're having." Then you actually go ahead, and hopefully with the help of your audience, build out a product, a service, a community that's going to be of value to them.  That's how Podcasters' Paradise came to be, Webinar on Fire, The Freedom Journal.  That's how all of these products and services came to be.  It's because I listened to that audience who was telling me their pain points, their challenges, and their obstacles, and I just handed them the solution in the form of whatever I thought would be the best form to provide that solution.  And if it wasn't right for them at first iteration, I'd just pivot, adjust, and make that move until it was. Let's say you already have a platform built up, but you really want a massive audience. The step is...You already have that current audience, so you're not talking to them enough, because if you were talking to them enough, if you were doing things that didn't scale and didn't leverage, like scheduling 10 back-to-back 10-minute Skype calls with your audience on Skype, and asking them the real questions, then you would know how to build your audience more. You would know about where that audience heard about you, so you could amplify those areas to make sure they're working.  You would hear what they don't like about your show on a consistent basis, or you could, maybe, pivot or adjust that.  Then, you would have that idea of what you could create for them that could grow your product suite in the right direction. Then you produce the product, service, or the community, and you offer it to them for monetary retribution.  You say, "Hey guys, I created content for you.  You loved it, and you listened to it.  I asked you what you were struggling with, and you told me.  I came up with a solution for you, and now, here it is on a silver platter."  "You said you wanted it, and now here it is." Have them start engaging with that paid product, which is something that they have now actually financially invested in.  Now you're really going to be just working with the cream of the crop.  That real audience.  That 5 percentile of people who are your core audience, and that really do want to take things to the next level and get more access to you, or to your ideas, or to your courses, or to the communities that you're creating.  Then, you're going to be looking at them and saying, "Okay, how can I add to this?  How can I find more of these 5-percenters? People that actually bought?  How can I add more people to this buyer's pool while not focusing on the 95% of people that are just consuming the free stuff, but never upping into that next level?"

Connecting with the 5%

All we have is time as entrepreneurs.  So, we need to get to the point.  When we've done all of the steps that we've talked about thus far, then we're now identifying where our time is best spent.  Then, we allocate the vast majority of our time in those directions and taking that time, that we used to spend in other areas, that aren't the best use of it.  So, it comes down to an evaluating principle, and it's always tweaking, and adjusting, and pivoting, and trying new things, but learning every step of the way in order to get more efficient, more productive, and more focused on what works for you in your business.

Connecting with John

All the magic for us happens at EOFire.com.  We have great free podcasting courses at FreePodcastCourse.com.  We have free webinar courses.  We just have a lot of great free resources for entrepreneurs at EOFire.com, and the biggest success that I've seen entrepreneurs have are when they know how to set and accomplish goals.  So, my passion project, that's now live and available, is a physical, stunning, hardcover journal called The Freedom Journal:  Accomplish Your #1 Goal in 100 Days.  It became the 6th most-funded publishing campaign of all time at Kickstarter (Kickstarter.com) at $453K in just 33 days, and it continues to sell in massive amounts every single month.  You can check out more about how you can accomplish your #1 goal in 100 days at TheFreedomJournal.com.

Resources

John Lee Dumas - The Freedom Journal:  Accomplish Your #1 Goal in 100 Days John's Podcasting Community - Podcasters' Paradise Snapchat Instagram Story

Real Fast Results Community

If you are diggin’ on this stuff and really love what we’re doing here at Real Fast Results, would you please do me a favor? Head on over to iTunes, and make sure that you subscribe to this show, download it, and rate & review it. That would be an awesome thing. Of course, we also want to know your results. Please share those results with us at http://www.realfastresults.com/results. As always, go make results happen!
Aug 24, 2016
Luanna RodhamWelcome to this edition of the Real Fast Results!  The special guest today is Luanna Rodham.  She is going to share her secrets for how you can earn more and get more done, plus have more free time, by hiring a virtual assistant.  Let's see what Luanna has to say...

Today's Promise

By the end of this episode, today, you will know whether you are ready to hire a virtual assistant, if you can afford a virtual assistant, how having a virtual assistant can help you to make more money in your business, and where to find  a good one.  

Commonly Asked Questions About Hiring a Virtual Assistant

I'm going to do my steps as questions because I get a lot of questions about VAs.  So these are the questions that we will answer.  There are four of them:
  1. What is a virtual assistant (VA)?
  2. Do I have enough money to hire a VA? Can a virtual assistant actually help me make more money?
  3. What can I actually outsource?
  4. How do I go about finding a good, reliable VA?

Question 1: What is a Virtual Assistant (VA)?virtual assistant

A virtual assistant is obviously someone who works virtually.  You don't have to live in the same place as they do, and they come with all of their own equipment.  They have their own businesses.  They have their own computers, their own microphones, their own printers, their own software, etc.  They are not your employee.  You're not paying them employee taxes or anything like that.  I think that's very important to know.  As a virtual assistant, it is their own business.  Their business is helping you succeed in your business. There are different types of Virtual Assistants.  You have VAs that might do just transcribing, or editing, or data entry.  You have VAs that just help with social media.  You have administrative virtual assistants to help you make plane reservations, making phone calls, making hotel reservations, etc.  There are so many different types of virtual assistants.  A lot of VAs have varying backgrounds.  Mine is in education.  I was a special education teacher, so I do very well helping organize people.  They'll say, "I want to do this, and this, and this," and then I can break it down in steps and say, "Well, the first thing you have to do is you have to open a Pinterest account, and you have to start making pins, and open boards..."  So,I really help with organizing and social media. You have VAs that  have tech backgrounds.  You have VAs that were in the corporate world. There are all different kinds virtual assistants to help with your specific needs in your business.  Essentially, these are indpendent contractors that you are bringing in to do defined tasks, based on what experience they have.

make more moneyQuestion 2: Do I Have Enough Money to Hire a Virtual Assistant?

I get this question all the time, and this is what I recommend when I get asked that.  How frazzled are you in your business?  Are you spending all of your time checking emails, trying to do social media, trying to make sure the websites working right, trying to find people's login information for your membership site, and so on?  If you're spending all of your time doing that, and you are not able to create, or coach, or whatever it is that you truly got into business for, then yeah, you probably can afford a VA.  You can afford a VA, and you need a VA. I recommend that you sit down and you look at what is making you so frazzled.  And, what would it be worth if you had a $200 marketing budget?  And, you could just take $200 a month and put that towards giving some of these tasks to someone else so that you could actually create. just say $200.  If you're at that point where you can spend $200 and consider it a business expense, or a marketing budget, you will be amazed by how putting forth that $200 will help you have enough time to create and make products. 

Can a Virtual Assistant Help Me Make More Money?

If you're not spending all of your time attending to those menial tasks, that have to be done in order to run a business, then you have more time to build product funnels, make membership sites, create new products, and coach clients.  And so, yes, definitely, having a VA will help make you more money.  I do recommend that you not start out putting tons of money into it in the beginning, unless you absolutely know what the tasks are that you want completed. This all comes down to defining for yourself what are the highest and best uses of your time, your energy, your mental bandwidth.  In other words, look at those things that truly make you money in your business and focus on those things, and essentially, try to give as much of those "other" tasks to a virtual assistant.  Even if you are really good at those sorts of things, there's going to come a point where you are out of gas.  You don't have any more to give emotionally, physically, or you're just out of time.  That is one of the biggest benefits to bringing on a VA. You need to be looking at outsourcing as much of those things that are not the highest and best use of your time.  The more you do that, the more money you could potentially make, in most instances.  This frees you up to direct your attention and energy into those things that you know that you're talented at.  You can, essentially, pass off those things that need to be done, where you're not as gifted, to the VA or VAs that you have.  In this way, you will likely be able to see more time for yourself and your family, and more money because you're really practicing your gifts, whatever those gifts happen to be.  The key is to find someone who has their own set of gifts that are complimentary to your business and your business goals.

Question 3: What Can I Actually Outsource?outsourcing

One of the things that I find people get the most overwhelmed with is their email or their support desk.  When you have to switch from a task, like, let's say that you are creating a product or writing your book; and, you have to switch to go check on the customer support desk, where people aren't happy or they're upset that something isn't working, it takes about 20 minutes to get back on task after you have done that.  If you're not having to mess with the menial day to day tasks, outsourcing is going to really help you stay on task and create. There are many things that you can outsource to a VA.  Daniel Hall and I have a course about this, and in that course, we list a bunch of things that you can outsource.  What I recommend you do is sit down and make a list of what is stressing you out the most.  What is causing you to become frazzled the most?  Or, make a list of what's keeping you from creating. For example:
  • Your email
  • Posting on social media every day
  • Making pins for Pinterest
  • Uploading your books to different sites
  • Editing/Proofing
  • Finding pictures
Whatever it might be, make a list of things that you're spending your time on that's making you nervous and stressing you out.  After you do that, look at that and say, "Okay, my email is really making me stressed.  Do I really want somebody in my email, or can I set up a customer support desk and have somebody do that?  And, can this VA set up a support desk?"  He or she probably can. Make this list and just start looking at it. "Is that something that I really have to do?  Do I have to post to Pinterest every day?"  Well, you want to do that for your business, but do you personally have to do that? No, you don't. Do you personally have to go in and load up your Hootsuite, or whatever you're doing?  Do you personally have to find all of the tweets, and post to your blogs, and find all of the keywords for your blogs, and all of those kinds of things?  No, you don't.  You don't personally need to do that.  Yes, you want to write the content, but you can have somebody else re purpose it and put it on the Internet for you.  So, that's what I recommend, is..."What can I outsource to a VA?"  Just write down things that you are frustrated with.  If you have a shopping cart system, loading products in the shopping cart, loading the auto-responders, and the follow-up sequence, and all of those types of things are something that you can give to a VA to do.

Question 4: How Do I Go About Finding a Good, Reliable Virtual Assistant?hiring a virtual assistant

There are three ways that I recommend finding a VA.  And it may sound silly because I know that you think of a virtual assistant as, you know, virtual... maybe somebody that you don't meet.  However, I think that the best way to find a virtual assistant is to meet them face-to-face. I like meeting people face-to-face because then you know if your personality is going to gel or not, and that is very, very important when working with a VA.  You may find one that you work with, and your personalities just don't work alike.  And, that's okay, but if you meet them face-to-face, you have more of a chance of finding out if you're going to be able to work with that person.
  1. A great way to meet a virtual assistant is face-to-face at networking events.  And, when I say that, I mean meet-ups or anything like that you may have in your area.  The thing about networking events is there are virtual assistants there.  People think that there's not, but there are.  Everywhere you go in the online/small business world, you're going to find VAs.  You just need to talk to people and find out who they are.  So first, you know, "How do I find a virtual assistant?"  The first way, if you can do it, is by going and meeting them at a live networking event.
  2. The second way is word of mouth.  I think this is a really important one.  You may say, "Daniel, who's your virtual assistant?  Do you know a virtual assistant?"  Talk to people that you know, that you really trust and you respect.  If you like how their business is running, more than likely, they have a virtual assistant.  Find out if their virtual assistant has openings, or if their virtual assistant knows someone.  Word of mouth is a great way.  That's how I meet my clients.  It's been at networking events or word of mouth.  I've never really had one pop up from my website, and I kind of like that because I want to meet them face to  face to see if we can gel. When you are thinking of people that you can ask, check out your Facebook groups.  Ask them too, "Who is a virtual assistant that you use," or, "Is there a company that you recommend?"  You can ask anyone that you feel like you know pretty well.  That's a good way to go.
  3. The third way is, there are sites that you can go on to look for virtual assistants.  There's Freelance.com.  There's Upwork.com.  I know a lady who owns a VA company called VAnetworking.com.  Some of you know Nichole Dean and her business partner Melissa Ingold. They have a site called CoachGlue. Well, Melissa has her own Contractors List. I would definitely recommend checking out that list.  So, those are people that you can go online, and kind of meet them online, and tell them what your project is.

How Long Do I Want to Work with A Virtual Assistant?

Now, one thing that I want to bring up is that you need to be thinking, "Do I want a VA for just a short-term project, or am I going to want one that I have a long-term relationship with?"  If you want just a short-term project, a good place to go is Fiverr.com.  They do a lot of short-term stuff, or any of these, Freelance.com, Upwork.com, etc.  Those will do for one-time projects.  If you need a logo, if you need something with your website, if you need something edited, or whatever, these sites work pretty well for finding someone.  But if  you want a virtual assistant that you work long-term with, I would really recommend the first two things: live networking events and asking around.

VA show - tipsVirtual Assistant Tips from Daniel

If it's a short-term, large job, like having an index made for your book or some special research project, one thing that you can do is put a local ad on Craigslist, explaining what the project is all about.  You can find some pretty good folks this way, and if you do it in your local area, you can meet them at the library, or Denny's, or whatever, so that you can get face-to-face, and you can figure out if they are someone you want to work with, or not.  I mean, you can kind of interview them. When you find someone you think you could work with, you will want to send them some sort of small project before you hire him/her.  It should be something that takes some thought on their part because one thing that's really crucial is that you've got to have an assistant that will follow your directions.  Ultimately, you want someone that can handle you asking, "Hey, can you do this," and they are able to figure out the rest.  Now, when you are first starting out, this approach doesn't work, most of the time.  You will have to be very specific about what you want and tell them exactly how to go about doing it.  At the same time, a big part of this is finding someone that can follow your directions well. If you start communicating with someone and they don't follow your directions well from the very start, you really shouldn't bother hiring them.  You can check this out beforehand by giving them something to do during the hiring process.  You might set up a WordPress site and have them make one post to that site.  In any case, you'll want to give them a task and see if they do it according to your directions.  If they don't, you really shouldn't bother hiring them.  Otherwise, it's just going to be a big waste of time for you and the other person.

Hiring a Virtual Assistant

It's also a good idea to have a trial period.  If you talk to your potential assistant on the phone, and you think they sound great, offer to give them work for a month or two.  That way, either one of you has time to back out of the arrangement, if need be, without there being any hurt feelings.  Virtual assistants, that's what we do.  We help you in your business, and we should be able to follow directions, and whatever else that you need. Make sure that you are clear, that you're doing this for a trial period.  That way, you can see if the person can follow through with everything they are asked to do, and if they can keep up with what you ask of them.  It's good for the VA too, because they may get into a situation where they think, "I don't have enough time.  This is more than I thought it was going to be," or, "We just don't work well together..." The last thing that I wanted to bring up was, in our course, I specifically talk about the qualities that you want to look for in a virtual assistant.  You know, are you a micro manager? Do you want someone that you tell every detail to?  Or, do you eventually want to be able to just tell them, "Go set this up," and they do it.  Some people can follow instructions well, but aren't necessarily good at figuring things out on their own, and others would rather be given a task and left to their own devices.  Of course, you want to pick a personality that works well with your personality, and vice versa.

Daniel and Luanna's VA Course

It is on Udemy.com. It's called: Easy Steps: How To Hire A Virtual Assistant (VA). And if you act now, you can get it for half price by visiting RealFastResults.com/VA.  If you're interested in it, it's very well-reviewed by the other students in it.  And, if you're thinking about hiring a virtual assistant, it's definitely a good idea to go check this course out.

Resources:

Easy Steps: How To Hire A Virtual Assistant (VA) Upwork.com Freelance.com VAnetworking.com Fiverr.com Melissa Ingold's Contractors List CoachGlue

Real Fast Results Community

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Aug 20, 2016
D'vorah Lansky Welcome to this edition of the Real Fast Results!  The special guest today is D'vorah Lansky, M.Ed.  She has been mentoring authors for about 10 years, and a lot of what she teaches has to do with setting goals, having the right mindset, and being really clear about your focus. So, without any further ado...

Today's Promise

What we're going to be focusing on today is how those micro-habits, that we have the option of creating, when applied, can bring us macro success.      

D'vorah's Excellent Book For Author Productivity

[caption id="attachment_2636" align="aligncenter" width="357"]Click Here Click Here - The Busy Author's Productivity Journal by D'vorah Lansky Ed.D.[/caption]  

Forming Micro-Habitsroad map

On any journey, you need a road-map.  Otherwise, you might get somewhere, but not necessarily where you want to be.  By creating habits that allow you to reach your goals, you're going to be creating the road-map to your dreams.  Without a road-map, we often find ourselves being really busy, and doing all of this busy work, thinking that we're accomplishing all of these things, but we're not really accomplishing much. It's like being on a hamster wheel, and that's exhausting and overwhelming, so we don't want that.  I'm hoping the tips that I am sharing today will help people with that.  Then, by having an action plan, you'll actually accomplish a lot more, rather than winging it and hoping you'll accomplish things. The benefit of doing this gets larger and larger as time goes by.  You get used to the habits, and of course, success attracts success.  It also allows you to focus on, "Where do I want to be spending my time," or "Is this a good use of my time?"  You also have to factor in time for relaxation and time for family.  I'm not talking about working 24/7.  I'm just saying, focusing with intention.

Overview of the Three Micro-Habits

I'm going to be going in depth in a few moments, but the three micro-habits that would really help to turbo-charge a person's career would be:
  1. Get really clear on your goals and develop an action plan.
  2. Schedule and prioritize your time.
  3. Become a master of your to-do list.

Step 1 - Get Really Clear on Your Goals

Step 1 is to get really clear on your goals.  One of my favorite sayings is, "A goal is a dream with a deadline."  So, we're not just having it out there in the ether; we're actually putting a plan for it.  As you get clearer on your goals and your action plan, one of the things that I recommend you do is get a blank piece of paper and create a master list of all the projects you're working on or want to develop.

time managementStep 2 - Schedule and Prioritize Your Time

Gather up all of those sticky notes that are all over the place, that may be in binders, on walls, or on your computer, wherever they might be, put them on your desk and transfer them onto a master project list.  You may want to divide your page into six boxes and put things by topic. Once you have that master project list, that is going to be, if we're using the analogy of a road-map and taking a journey, so that's the gasoline in your engine.  And then, what you want to do, is you want to look at all of those ideas, and that might be a highlighter or a couple of different colored highlighters, and somehow narrow things down so you can identify the #1 thing that you want to accomplish over the next 30-90 days.  While you may have 50 or 100 things on that list, I would imagine that the bulk of them would go under 4 or 5 headings. So, which of those 4 or 5 headings do you want, if you had to pick one, do you want to work on over the next 30-90 days?  This is going to allow you to get a laser focus, and it's going to allow you to get a lot done.  It's also going to allow you to take a lot off of your plate so you can reduce that feeling of overwhelm.  When you can create that laser focus, and put everything else on the back-burner, what I find is that I actually have more time to do the fun things.

Step 3 - Become a Master of Your To-Do List

To be able to go and do those enjoyable activities, take the dog for a walk, travel with your family, you need to be able to get things off your plate.  One of the tips that I recommend is that, once you've created this master list, and you take that one project that you want to focus on, put that on a fresh piece of paper and then break out all of the pieces of the puzzle that go with that project. Anything on that master list that does not fit with what you're focusing on currently, or in the near future, cross it off your list.  Move it to a "someday, maybe" page, and put it on the back page of your master clipboard.  That's going to get it off your mind.  You won't lose it, but I find that this activity is so freeing.  It's just like you've finished 25 projects.  But, you don't have to lose them; they just don't have to clutter up your current mind space.

Your Success Is Hidden in Your Daily Activitiesdaily activities

One of my favorite things, along this line, is "Your success is hidden in your daily activities."  You can see how serious you are about your success. Just takes a pad of paper and carry it around with you for two days, and make a list of everything that you do and how long you're spending. It will be eye-opening.  It's kind of like, have you ever done a diet journal, where they have you write down everything you eat?  It's very eye-opening.  So, do that with your time. Then, what you want to do is actually schedule time in your calendar, because we think we're working a lot, but it could be, if the phone rings, Facebook pings, if someone comes over, if we have a whim, our work may take a backseat.  It's not only important to know what you'll be focusing on, but when you'll be focusing on it.  What I recommend is, open up your calendar, and don't schedule times that you think you should, schedule times that you think will really work.  Obviously, you don't want to schedule when you have to drive the kids to soccer, or when you have noise in the background, or whatever's going on in your life.  Schedule times that are realistic. Maybe there's a time when your family is all out doing something, or you have a downstairs room where you have privacy and you can have a sign up that lets people know that you're at work.  Involve your family and let them know when those hours are, and schedule those as recurring appointments in your calendar.  Not only that, but don't put those in your calendar, and then when anything comes up, just ignore it.  Prioritize those times as if they were your best paying client. Try this for 30 days.  It will blow your mind, and it will increase your income.  You also want to minimize distractions during those work times.  So turn off your cell phone.  If you need it on, put it on vibrate, and disable Facebook pings or close Facebook altogether.  This one, you can take to the bank. When you're scheduling, there's a couple of things that you can do.  One thing is to batch projects, and so, if a headline has to do with a project, then that goes into that specific focus for that project.  I recommend having specific days or specific weeks that you focus on specific aspects, specific jigsaw puzzle pieces of your master project.  Imagine a piece of paper divided into nine boxes, where each box is a different component of the project.  Well, in my schedule, my calendar, Friday is "blow with the wind time".  I don't schedule... on a rare occasion I will, but for the most part, I don't schedule any work appointments.  I go out, I'll do errands, I'll go to the bookstore. On occasion, I may even go to the movies, but I also have "blow with the wind time" in my business, and it's usually not at "peak brain power time".  It's usually like when I'm watching the ballgame, in the evening, or on a weekend.  That's when I have that master list of "Ooh, got to make a headline," or "Ooh, got to write that person."  It goes onto a piece of paper, and I have it actually scheduled as a block of time on my calendar, to do all of those administrative pieces of the puzzle.  It's actually really fun because you get to check off so many things since those are pretty quick projects.

roadmap - tipsA Few More Tips

I used to have 20 or 30 things on my to-do list, and I always felt like such a failure because I only finished 15 of them.  Then, I discovered something called "The 6 Most Important List".  This is actually one of the tips that I wanted to share today.  You want to streamline your to do list.  So, you have this big, long to-do list.  You might have 100 items on it; you may have taken and created a master project, and in that master project, maybe you have 20 or 30 items.  You can't do them all in one day. Well, I heard this story.  Just to be brief, the point is, in the early 1900's a productivity expert went to a major corporation and helped them improve their bottom line by meeting with each of their executives and telling them each night before they left work, they were to create a list of the six, not the 25, but the six most important things on their to-do list so that they knew what they were going to be focusing on the next day.  He told them to do this without fail, and not to do anything else until they finished those six things.  So, that's become a daily habit for me and something that I teach the authors that I work with. It's that sense of satisfaction of shedding things off.  When you work from a master list, you may not feel like you're making progress because it seems like an unending list, but when you prioritize your to-do list, and you pick the six most important things, you're going to accomplish a great deal.  Even if you work three days a week, three times six, that can add up.  In 10 weeks, that's 180 things that you just finished, versus spinning your wheels. What I used to do, I used to feel like I was spinning in circles.   I would feel like, "Oh, I've got to answer this email," or "Oh, I've got to work on this headline," and then I had all of these partially-created projects, like all of these baking projects in the kitchen, and none of them were getting into the oven. By deciding you're the boss of your business, you decide, "What are the six most important things?"  And, I really encourage you to focus on this.  The bonus tip is to set your "6 most important things" to-do list before you wrap up your business day so that when you arrive to work, whether you're working from home, or working from the road, or working from an office in town, you'll know what you're going to be focusing on when you get to work that day.  That's going to allow you to hit the ground running, and you won't have to think about what you'll be working on. If a person doesn't have a list, they don't have a plan, they don't have that road-map for the day in place, what can easily happen is "Oh, I've got to email this person.  Well, let me just go ahead and email that person."  Then you end up checking email, and then you're like, "Oh, I've got to go over to Facebook," and two hours go by and you haven't even written your list yet.  This way, you get to work, and boom, you have your blueprint for the day.

3 Action Stepsaction steps

What I've done is I prepared three action steps to support the three tips that we shared.  It might have sounded like there were a lot more than three tips, but I'm going to recap it right here so that you can have a takeaway.
  1. The first one is to create a master project list and break it down.  Identify your main project, identify future projects, so you can create a separate page where you can have future projects, and then everything else, that's not an urgent, present-tense, something that needs to get done in the foreseeable future, put it on a blank piece of paper, add it to a "someday, maybe" page, and put it on your clipboard as the back page.  Every time you think of a project, moving forward, decide which of these pages it should go on.  Again, that's your main project page, your future project page, or your "someday, maybe" page.
  2. The second one is to open up your calendar and schedule recurring appointments when you'll focus on your business.  I would recommend that you do that for 90 days.  You may want to try it for 30 days to see how it works.  Well, you know what?  Schedule it for 90 days.  You can always change your mind, but there you have it blocked out.  I believe that after 30 days, you're going to see such momentum, that this could be a long-term business strategy for you.
  3. Thirdly, for the next 21 days, start your day with the "six most important things" to-do list that you composed the previous night.  
That's the recap of what we spoke about.

Connecting With D'vorah

The best way would be to come to my website at www.ReachMoreReaders.com.

Real Fast Results Community

If you are diggin’ on this stuff and really love what we’re doing here at Real Fast Results, would you please do me a favor? Head on over to iTunes, and make sure that you subscribe to this show, download it, and rate & review it. That would be an awesome thing. Of course, we also want to know your results. Please share those results with us at http://www.realfastresults.com/results. As always, go make results happen!
Aug 16, 2016
Tom Corson-KnowlesWelcome to the Real Fast Results podcast!  Today we have a very special treat.  Tom Corson-Knowles is an absolute expert in Amazon publishing, and he does very well when it comes to sending the books that he publishes to the top of the list on Amazon.  Welcome to the show Tom...

Today's Promise

I'm going to show you the five-step system to get any book to become a #1 bestseller on Amazon.  Whether it's a print book or an eBook, this will work for you.

Benefits of Gaining a Bestseller Status

There's a lot of benefits of gaining a bestseller status. Here are a few that come to mind:
  • Obviously, if your book is #1 on Amazon, you'll be able to say that you're a #1 Amazon bestselling author.  So, you can add that to your bio.
  • It can help you get more speaking gigs, if you're a speaker.
  • It can help you to get booked for more podcast gigs like this, and on radio and TV.
  • It can enhance your bio and the credibility you have in your field.
  • There are many other benefits as well...
Actually, just being a #1 Amazon bestseller can give you a little badge next to your book in search.  So, if someone searches for your book, or keywords related to your book, and sees your book in the Amazon search, it will actually have an Amazon bestseller tag which will say "Amazon Bestseller".  That can really, dramatically increase your conversions, and you can actually end up getting more sales just by virtue of having a book that's at #1 on Amazon. That designation only sticks while the book is #1 in any category, at least one category on Amazon.

5-Step system to Achieve an Amazon BestsellerAmazon Bestseller

The 5-Step system is really simple.  Number 1 is you want to find a relevant bestseller category on Amazon.  There are over 27,000 bestseller categories just in the US on any day.  That's between books and eBooks.  So, there is a ton.  There are many, many to choose from, and some of them aren't very competitive at all.  So, really what you want to do first is just find as many relevant ones as you can, to see what your options are for later. Obviously, if  you're writing a children's book or a romance novel, it's only going to fit into those categories.  You're not going to put your romance novel into a business and marketing category.  That just wouldn't make sense.  So, you're going to want to find the relevant bestseller categories first, and that just takes a bit of research. Number 2 is you have to analyze the competition.  So, once you've found the relevant categories, you just want to find out who the competition is, what they are like, and see what you can learn to make your book better, to make your cover better, and to make your book more marketable. Number 3, you'll need to calculate how many sales you need to make in order to hit #1 in each of the categories that you've researched.  That way, you're going to know, "Okay, in this category I need 100 sales in a day, and in this category I need five sales in a day."  Then you can know, based on your campaign, on your budget, and on your promotional abilities, how many copies you can sell and which categories you can reasonably expect to be #1 in.  The rest may be a little too competitive for you at this time. Then, number 4, you're going to choose two target categories because Amazon will actually allow you to choose two bestseller categories for your book. So, you're going to choose the right two categories for your book, based on that research that you've done. Number 5 is really easy.  Just get Amazon to put you into those categories.  That sounds super-easy, but it can actually be kind of difficult when all you're doing is publishing your book in your Kindle Direct Publishing account, or in CreateSpace, they don't actually give you the 27,000 categories to select from.  It's because Amazon's internal database doesn't sync with the external data that's actually used to list their books.

amazon categoriesStep 1 - Find a Relevant Bestseller Category

The quickest and easiest way, for most people, is just to go to Amazon.com, and type in, or search for, some books that are bestsellers.  Actually, I'll have a link in the show notes that will take you directly to a page on Amazon that lists all of the categories of Kindle bestsellers and print book bestsellers.  If you don't have that, basically, you just need to find a book that's a bestseller on Amazon.  Then, you need to scroll down to "Product Details" on that book's page and click one of those bestseller rankings, and that will take you to that page as well. That's the first move; just finding those bestseller categories. Then you're going to browse through those lists and find the ones that are relevant to you.  If you have a business book, you're going to look into "Business & Investing" as a parent category.  Under that, there's going to be hundreds of child categories, or smaller categories that are nested underneath that one. You're going to browse through all of those different categories and see which ones are relevant for you, and just kind of write those down to keep track of them.  So, that's Step #1.  It's just researching all of the relevant bestseller categories. You can actually be listed in 20 or more categories on Amazon, but you can only select two.  The way that works is you try to select the two child categories, like the smallest, most niche categories, and them those can be listed in more parent categories.  For example, there's a "Direct Marketing" category, which is under the "Marketing" category, which is under the "Business & Investing" category.  So, that's just three categories right there, just from that one category that you've selected. Some people might be thinking, "Do you start by putting in a keyword related to your book?" No, so you actually have to go and find the either the direct category page on Amazon, which we'll share in the show notes, or find a book that's a bestseller already and then scroll down to "Product Details" and click the hyperlinks in those product details to those categories, and that will also take you to those categories.  When you just type in a keyword, those books may not be bestsellers and it might not take you to the direct list.  Just to be clear, you can use keywords, but what you're looking for are books on a bestseller list specifically related to your subject matter, and essentially, working backwards from there.

Step 2 - Analyze the Competitionbestseller - competition

Step #2 is to analyze the competition, and this is a step that I think a lot of authors just completely miss out on, and you can learn so much at this stage.  Really, I think this is something you should be doing constantly.  This is not just a one-time thing.  You should always be checking out the competition.  Primarily, what you want to do is, once you've found those relevant bestseller categories for your book, you want to browse those bestsellers on Amazon.  Look at the top 20 books in each of those categories. Really dive in deep.  What are their book titles?  What are their subtitles like?  What are their book covers like?  What are their book descriptions like?  What are their reviews like?  Read the positive reviews and the negative reviews, and see what customers like about those books, love about those books, and what they don't like about those books.  Just by doing this basic research... I mean, you can spend hours and hours on this and learn so much information that can help you not only to market your book better, but actually to create a better book. So, if you're researching a market on Amazon, and you see that all of the top books in this market. People really liked certain things about them, but there is one, or two, or three things that people really hate about these books. And they are leaving negative reviews about them, that really lets you know. If you really want to write a book in that market, and really want to stand out from the crowd, you'll obviously want to incorporate those things that the other books left out.  The readers or reviewers on Amazon will tell you all of that information.  It's all there and available.  The thing is that no one does this. Very few authors actually read the negative reviews of their competitor's to find out how they could actually be improved. It's sad because it leaves a ton of opportunity on the table for anyone who is willing to do that extra grunt work. It's the same thing... It's not just non-fiction.  This works incredibly well for fiction as well.  I know that some of my fiction students have used the same strategy and have just blown it out of the park with their books because they incorporated scenes or themes that the reviewers of their competitors have told them were really important to them.

Amazon bestseller rankingsStep 3  - Calculate Exactly How Many Sales You Need to Hit #1

Step #3 is you need to calculate exactly how many sales you need to hit #1 in each of your categories.  The reason you want to do this is just to be very clear and have reasonable expectations.  It's unlikely that you are going to be #1 in all of the Kindle Store, right?  Because, in order to do that, you'll need tens of thousands of sales in a very short period of time. You can easily hit #1 in many different categories, but you need to know how many sales you actually need.  So, the way Amazon does this is there's actually something called the Amazon bestseller rankings, which we've talked about a little bit.  Basically, Amazon ranks every book in order of how competitive.  The #1 book is the most competitive, has the most sales, #2 the next, and so on and so forth. When you look at some of these books... Let's say the #1 book in "Direct Marketing" on Amazon, and you scroll down to the product details, you'll see the Amazon bestseller ranking in the Kindle store, or the print store for print books.  Let's say the book's ranking is 10,000, so you would need to beat that 10,000 bestseller ranking.  The problem is that you can't tell by looking at the number how many sales you need. So, what I've done with the help of this brilliant data guy is we've created this super-advanced calculator that tells you exactly how many sales you need in either a 24-hour period or over the duration of a month in order to hit any sales rank on Amazon. Check out the relevant bestseller categories in Step #1, find the bestseller ranking within the "Product Details" section of their books, and then just copy and paste those numbers into the sales calculator.  And, it's totally free, by the way, and the link will be in the show notes.  But, you can just type it into the sales calculator, and it will tell you exactly how many sales you need in one day, or in one month, to hit that bestseller ranking. The main ranking is the Amazon Bestseller Rank, and there's one for the Kindle Store, and there's one for books.  That's just the overall rank.  So, it goes from #1 to about 4.5 million because there are about 4.5 million eBooks signed up on Amazon right now.  That's the overall Amazon bestseller rank, and then there's your ranking inside of a certain category.  So, your overall rank is going to be based on the competition with every other book on Amazon, but inside of your category, you'll only be competing with the books that are listed in that category.  That's why you don't have to be #1 on Kindle; you can be #1 in some of the other 27,000 bestseller lists.

Which of the Two Numbers Do I Need to Plug into the Calculator?

Any of the generic, overall Amazon bestseller rankings.  It's going to be between one and 4.5 million.  You just copy and paste in that number, which is listed on the page of every single book listed on Amazon that has sold at least one copy.  Copy that number into the calculator, and it will tell you how many sales you need to hit in order to hit that ranking.

Step 4 - Choose Two Target Categories

Step #4 is you're going to choose two target categories.  So, you're going to actually select your categories on Amazon.  Like I said before, when you publish your book on Kindle through KDP, or a print book through CreateSpace, or any other Print-on-demand (POD) publisher, or Amazon merchant account, you're not going to be able to select all of the bestseller lists that are available for your book.  Essentially, the reason is that Amazon uses an internal database, and that's where it shows up on KDP when you publish your eBook on Amazon. But, when you actually look at the bestseller rankings on the website, the ones that your customers are finding on their computers, on their iPhone, on their iPads and their Kindle devices, those are all BISAC categories, which are essentially industry-standard categories.  This essentially gives you all of the databases for like libraries and all the various book industries use the BISAC category.  So, that's why Amazon has two different databases, and they just don't link up perfectly.  So, the simple solution is just every category you see on Amazon's website is the BISAC category; it is the correct category. Since you're doing your research on the website anyway, all you really have to do is just copy and paste those categories and just send Amazon a support email in your KDP account or your CreateSpace account saying, "Hey, can you please change my book to these categories?"  Then, you can just copy and paste them directly from the Amazon website, and they'll make that switch for you.  So, it's super-easy.  That's Step #4 and Step #5.  In Step #4, you're choosing your two target categories from Amazon's website.

Step # 5  - Send an Email to Amazon

Step #5 is sending an email into Amazon in order to get them to put you into those categories.

How Does This Help Me to Become a Bestseller?#1 Amazon Bestseller

Essentially, how this works is Amazon only lists the top 100 books in each category on their website, and on their list, when customers browse.  So, if customers are browsing the bestseller list to buy books, which they very often do, they are only going to see your book if your book is ranking in the top 100 of your given categories.  If your book is ranked #200 or even #101, it's not going to show up in those searches and you're not going to get exposure from it. Simply by changing your bestseller categories to categories that you can rank in the top 100 for, you're going to get more exposure, and you're going to get more traffic to your book, which obviously means more sales over time.  That's one of the huge benefits, but there's really a lot more.  You know, the thing with the publishing business is that it's very incremental.  Every little bit helps.  If an author is only selling 100 copies a year, it seems like it would be such a huge stretch to get to 1,000 copies a year, but really, it could be as simple as just changing the categories, or changing the book cover, or changing the subtitle, or changing a line in the book description. A simple change can make a huge difference over time, and this is one of those changes that we've noticed can make a huge difference.  We've had some of our clients' books sell hundreds and hundreds of books.  A lot of the time, we'll have clients that come from competitors, other self-publishers or publishing services, where they were self-published and they just wanted us to take it over and do their marketing, and simply by changing things like their categories, we've seen increases in sales as much as 173%.  It sounds like such a small thing like "Why do they do that?  Who really cares," but those small changes can make a huge difference over time. It's a long-term business. I think a lot of people have gotten into the Kindle publishing craze and are looking at it as a short-term opportunity to make a lot of money. But, it's the publishers that really look at the long-term that have been the most successful, by far.  We've been able to do things now, like doing book deals in different languages, and distributing books in Anacosto, and physical CD audio books, and all kinds of deals. If we had only focused on, "How can I make so much money this month," or focused on just short-term stuff, we wouldn't have been able to stick around to see these huge opportunities come around.  I think whenever you can focus on the long-term, and on quality, and on adding value to customers, that's where you're really going to get the biggest return over time. That's why I think categories are such a big deal.  It is about providing a better experience for your customers.  If you select the wrong categories, or just choose two random categories on Amazon, you might not be in the right place. You might not be where your customers are really looking for books like yours.  Since most authors haven't done this research, simply by doing it, you can always set yourself apart.

Connecting with Tom

You can check out my blog at TCKPublishing.com.  There's tons of great information and articles there.  That's where my book calculator is as well.  I do have a free training course for those who want to find out how to format your eBook for Kindle, how to get it published on Kindle, and how to do book launches and promotions.  It's all free at eBookPublishingSchool.com.  I also have a podcast called the Publishing Profits Podcast.  Every week we interview bestselling authors, publishing attorneys, accountants, lawyers, and agents.  Really, anyone in the industry that's doing awesome stuff and knows what's working right now for authors.  That's PublishingProfitsPodcast.com.

Resources:

Amazon Book Sales Calculator

List of the Top 100 Most Competitive Amazon Kindle Bestseller Categories

List of the Top 100 Least Competitive Amazon Kindle Bestseller Lists and Categories

Kindle Direct Publishing

CreateSpace

How to Effectively Use a POD (Print On Demand) Publisher With Robin Cutler

Real Fast Results Community

If you are diggin’ on this stuff and really love what we’re doing here at Real Fast Results, would you please do me a favor? Head on over to iTunes, and make sure that you subscribe to this show, download it, and rate & review it. That would be an awesome thing. Of course, we also want to know your results. Please share those results with us at http://www.realfastresults.com/results. As always, go make results happen!
Aug 12, 2016

Jason ChicolaWelcome to this edition of the Real Fast Results podcast!  Joining us today is the CEO of Rev.com, Jason Chicola.  This is a service that is highly recommended by many successful business professionals.  Many of the people who follow Real Fast Results are content creators of one form or another, and it's a good practice to use transcribed content in your business, in general.  That's because these help people to leverage their time effectively.  In this interview, Jason brings forth insights on how to use transcription services in your business.  Jason, welcome to the show... Our promise is really simple.  We transcribe audio for $1 per minute, we return it within 24 hours, and the accuracy is 99% or higher.  That's it.  It's that simple.  I can give you more detail on all of that, but we want transcription to be really simple. If you go out and look into the market, you'll find people that make it complicated.  They will charge you based on how many speakers you have.  They'll charge you extra if you want it in less than 24 hours.  They will give you all kinds of up-charges if you want to have different formats.  We do none of that.  We have a flat price of $1 per minute, no if, ands, or buts, and I think we are the only place that you'll get that.

How To Use Transcriptions in Your BusinessTranscription

There are probably a dozen different reasons, that are common, of why people would want a transcript.  Media is a big industry that is producing writing.  So, whether you are a writer, a podcaster, a consultant, or a coach, if you are regularly trying to take conversations or discussions and turn them into either insights or deliverables, you need a transcription.  You're probably taking notes and writing things down on your own.  All of those people need it, and other industries need it too (market research, legal, etc.) but the value is really in the time savings. If you're currently taking notes and writing things out, ask yourself how long it takes.  An untrained person would probably take 10 minutes to type out one minute of audio.  So ask yourself, "What is my time worth?"  That's the calculation you have to do.  Our transcripts are $1 a minute, so a 30-minute file, we'll transcribe for $30.  It may take you 300 minutes.  If your time is valuable, you're probably better off just going with us. We have customers that use transcription for all kinds of reasons.  Many of them are in the media, which means that they are producing deliverables (i.e. Books that they've sold, eBooks, blog posts, etc.)  We have a number of clients that have a small stable of writers that they use for the second step of taking a transcription and editing it so that it's more readable.  It all depends on what you're trying to create.  I could think of one company, that's a large customer of ours, that produces books for people.  If you want to write a book, they will help, kind of, ghost write it for you. They get audio from their clients, they turn it into a transcript, and somebody else turns it into a book. To be specific about this, if you are regularly producing content like this, you may want to go to a place like Upwork to find a writer who fits your style.  The reason I think it's hard to give a general purpose answer is that everyone has a different definition of what good looks like, or what the writer looks like, and so you have to find the style, the writer that works for you.

Innovative Uses of Transcription

transcription - videoI'll give you a couple of examples.  We see an enormous amount of use around video.  Think about how much video is being captured, created, and shared around the world today.  One of our customers, called Heavybit, produces video and they use our transcripts for a couple of things.  If you go to their website and you watch one of their videos, it will be captioned.  So, you can see their words on the screen in real time.  There will be an article next to the video.  So, if you don't feel like watching a 20-minute video, you can scan the article and decide if it's your cup of tea. Another thing you can do, if you're reading an article and you're in the 20th paragraph, and you see a sentence that really intrigues you, and they seem to be talking about something that's in the video, you can click the text of the article and the video will jump to the right position.  Basically, we call that "interactive transcript".  We've actually built some software to let anyone with a video make their transcript interactive.  That means, the video links to the text and the text links back to the video; it's a two-way street.  It's not publicly released, but it will be out there, and we'll make that free to all of our customers. Think back to when you were in college.  Wouldn't it have been cool if you had transcripts of all your lectures?  Now, the risk is you might not have gone to class.  Okay?  But, if you were cramming for a test, and you had to think back, "What did the professor talk about, mitosis or meiosis?"  If you managed to have a search box to find it, the text and the video would be together. So, I think everything with video, there's a lot going there. I mentioned earlier, a different trend is the example of people using the transcriptions to produce books.  That's a big deal.  We've had some famous authors that probably don't want us to announce what they are doing, but famous authors using us. Typically, it's their production company that's using us, and this is typically more in the world of non-fiction.  I think that's a big trend. There's another big trend that we're seeing around a new category of market research, which is called "usability research". There are many companies out there building the apps that are on your phone. What they do is they get random people on the Internet to use these apps, and as people use them, they have them talk about their experience. "Why did you click that button?  What do you think will happen if you click this button?"  They'll have people, in some cases, not very successful, and in some cases getting confused, but they will record the reactions of "normal people", and then the people that build the app listen to the videos. And, this is being done on a large scale, and a bunch of those videos are running through us. There are a lot of companies using video/audio recording transcripts to do their focus groups.  Think of the focus groups back in the 50's, where they put them behind the dual-pane glass.  Well, the focus groups are moving to the Internet, and it's moving to video and transcripts that are linked together. I have to remark, Lynda.com is one of our favorite customers.  They use us to caption all of their content.  I think that it's probably worth noting at this juncture that we offer two related services: transcription for people who have more dialog and captions for people who have videos where they want their words displayed on the screen.  It's another matter of the details, but if you put it on a video, you want captions. There are probably four or five different reasons why someone making an educational course or video would want captions.  The most obvious one is that you might have a listener that's hard of hearing, but there are many others.  It helps the recall, and it helps their education to be able to see the words from the screen.  Most businesses have some customers who speak English as a second language.  Many people, who are parents with young children, will find that they can turn the video down when their kid goes to sleep and just read the captions.  Most people in America use captions now and then, and only a very small percentage is hard of hearing. In education, having a text is transformative. We transcribe.  We don't produce the recordings; we receive them.  My point was that there are many companies that are getting regular people to use their products.  They are recording audio or video and sending it to us.  So, we don't provide the audience; we just provide the transcription, but it's a whole burgeoning new industry.  I know of 10 companies that are doing it at some level, and two or three are doing it to scale.

A Key Tip For Using a Transcription Service Like Rev

Clear audio.  I can't tell you how many times we get a recording that was done at a Starbucks with banging stuff in audio transcriptionthe background, and then they wonder why there are mistakes.  "Garbage in, garbage out," but if you record good audio, you'll get a great result.  I would predict that within a decade, you're going to see speech recognition playing a major role in this kind of work, and for speech recognition to be effective, what you would want is individual tracks.  That's going to help. Right now, I think the current state of the art of recording is pretty poor because most people are focused on mobility and convenience.  That is, "do it with my phone," as opposed to quality.  I think it's going to be a while before quality methods are used regularly.

Connecting with Jason

If you go to our homepage, Rev.com, you'll see three offerings: Transcription, Captions, and Translation.  We offer them all today. Our Twitter handle is @Rev.  We have an iPhone and Android app called the Rev Voice Recorder.  Go to your app store and look up Rev.  The app lets you record and transcribe.  It's very convenient.

Real Fast Results Community

If you are diggin’ on this stuff and really love what we’re doing here at Real Fast Results, would you please do me a favor? Head on over to iTunes, and make sure that you subscribe to this show, download it, and rate & review it. That would be an awesome thing. Of course, we also want to know your results. Please share those results with us at http://www.realfastresults.com/results. As always, go make results happen!
Aug 9, 2016
Robert Plank
Welcome to the Real Fast Results podcast!  Thanks for being here.  The special guest this episode is Robert Plank.  Let's jump right into the show today and see what Robert has to share with us... I am going to share how to go from having an idea for something, to solve some kind of problem, into having a money-making membership site ready to go.  This will be where someone goes to a webpage, sees a bunch of cool stuff, clicks a button, clicks to buy, they pay the money, and they get what they paid for.

Membership Sites Bring in Passive Income

It's the passive income.  It's great to not have to start at the beginning of every month, or every day, at zero.  It's great to be able to do whatever you want and have a bunch of money that came in automatically.  Then, if you want to do some more of that, if you want to do whatever it takes to grow your business, that is all extra! I honestly believe that whatever everyone listening does, even if it's like a service; for example, maybe you set up websites for local businesses, you should still have a membership site for a couple of reasons.  One is that you could get a lot of extra money for something that you're already doing anyway.  I found that when I sell any kind of information products, and stuff like that, I'll get extra business just from people buying the membership site or buying the product. I used to do a lot of nerdy PHP programming, setting up websites.  Well, it was tough to get new business. However, as soon as I made a couple of courses, just sort of showing what I did, I would get a lot of people who I would go through the funnel. They would buy this course, trying to see how I was going to do it, or maybe they were going to hire someone else to do it, and they would end up hiring me to do it. It's really cool making this thing called a membership site because you're doing it anyway, and you might as well get paid a second time for it.  Also, there may be someone that couldn't afford to hire you for $2,000.  You might have lost that person for $0 otherwise, but this way, you may be able to get $200 off of them instead and everybody wins.

How to Set Up Membership Sites - An Overviewmembership sites

The first step would be to set up WordPress.  It's free, and it's what most of us marketers use to just be able to click a button and make some content.  So, we set up this thing called WordPress, and we put it on a domain, like a .com domain such as RealFastResults.com.  Once WordPress is set up, the two pieces are the front-end piece and the back-end piece. For the front-end, we have a thing called a landing page or a sales letter.  We use a plug in for that called PaperTemplate.  For the back-end we have the member's area, where someone can log in.  We use WishList Member for that.  The pre-step would be to get a website, get a domain name, and get a host account. Then the real stuff is to set up WordPress, set up your sales letter or landing page as your front-end. Then set up the actual login area, called the back-end.

Step 1 - Set Up WordPress

The first step is to set up WordPress.  The only way this would be awkward or difficult is if you've never done it before.  If you've done this once or twice, then the process of setting up your membership site will be super-easy.  Even if you're not technical at all, there are all kinds of videos out there on how to do this.  Some people use Fantastico, QuickInstall, or SimpleScripts to help set up their WordPress site. The point is that you have this website, and people listening may be used to like uploading files into a folder or something like that, but you click a special button and you install WordPress. Right out of the box, you'll have this place where you can go and post, basically, online journal entries.  Even that, technically, would kind of get you done.  Technically, we're talking about membership sites, and a membership site, all it has to be is a protected download area.  It doesn't have to be something where someone pays you month after month.  It can literally just be  a little protected area that has a bunch of posts, has your videos, other content, or whatever. From there, you go to C-Panel, and within there, it's either called Fantastico, QuickInstall, or SimpleScripts. From there you simply say, "I want to install a WordPress blog at the top level of my site.  It's RealFastResults.com."  Then, it asks you stuff like, "What's the name of your blog?" and "What do you want your password to be?"  You click it, it's done, and that's how you can start adding content to the website.

membership siteStep 2 - Set Up the Front-end

Next, you make what's called the front-end.  You don't need a plug-in for this, and you don't need a theme for this, but it's better if you do.  Basically, you just need one big, long webpage, and even if you have a page with nothing else but a button to click and buy, that would be better than nothing.  Even if you had no time for anything else, but you said, "Hey, I'm Daniel Hall and I have a great membership site on publishing comic books to Kindle." You could still tell someone, "Go to this webpage, and there's just a button there," but at least they would know to go there and click the button. If you had an extra three minutes, then you could put above the button what the title of the course is.  That would be another step in the right direction. If you had another couple of minutes, you could list, maybe 10 good reasons to buy, or 10 things that people would get out of that course.  Then, if you had another three minutes, you could change the headline to something interesting like, "Who Else Wants to Publish Their Comic Book on Kindle Today and Do It In 3 Clicks".  Now it's kind of coming together where they go to this webpage. What we like to do is have it at the very front door of your site. If your site was RealFastKindelComics.com, they would go there and all there would be on that page to do is see what you have to offer and then either close the browser tab or click and buy.  That would be Step #2, getting that front-end set up.  One thing that I've had a lot of success with is writing the sales letter first, even if it's just a couple of quick bullet points.  I've seen a lot of people get tired of doing things in the wrong order, and that's why I tell people to just have a buy button, because that's Step #1.  Anything else that comes after that is extra. When I see a lot of people who fail, what they mess up on is that they go in and make a lot of content first.  They go in, and they make their logo, and they create their business card, and then they go, "I just spent a month working my tail off, and now I have to write something called a sales letter."  When I like to do is, while I'm still in a fresh state of mind...I'm still excited and stuff, and not tired out yet...Make the sales letter, even if it's just some quick thing.  Then, when it comes time to make the course, it kind of has to live up to the hype of the sales letter.

Step 3 - Set Up the Back-endmemberhsip site - tools

The third step is this thing called the back-end. So, this is where all of the magic happens.  This is where you set up a plug-in called WishList Member.  What that basically does is protect your content.  I can't stress this enough, that a lot of people think in the wrong kind of terms.  They think that a membership site is a monthly thing, where every week you deliver an interview or an article.  I prefer to think of it as is a protected download area.  So, for example, YouTube, Twitter, and Facebook would all be membership sites because someone can be a member of that site, right?  I mean, Facebook is free, but it's the same idea; either they can get in or they can't. Some people think that they are going to have a site for free, or even for $10.  What I like to do is create a cool course.  I like to have something that has some meat on it... $200, $300...And that way, there's a couple of pieces to it.  If you're getting $300 a pop, first of all, you can have a nice little affiliate program, you could pay out some nice commissions, then if you only made like $3K, you could still be like, "Okay, I just made $3,000, and I feel like my efforts paid off." I think a lot of people have low confidence.  They think that they have to give it away for free or give it away for $5.  Well, what are you going to teach about for $5?  It's going to be a piece of crap.  It's just going to be some PowerPoints, but if you make it $200 or $300, you're probably going to add is some software and some cool videos. As far as the back-end goes, there are two pieces:
  1. The tools that you use
  2. and content strategy. Like, how many videos am I going to make, what are they going to say etc.

Back-end Tools

As far as the tools, since WordPress is already set up, we use WishList Member to protect it.  So, what's cool about that is that if someone goes to that front page, they see what they like about Daniel Hall's course about Kindle comic books, they click the button, and they buy.  After they pay you money, say they pay you $200, they go to a registration form that says, "What's your first and last name?  What's your email address?  What username and password do you want?"  They create that account, and now they can go anytime they want.  If it's five years later, they can still come back to this Kindle comic book course. What's cool about this, from a management point of view, is that if someone comes back five years later and they have forgotten their password and click a link, they can get back in. If they pay you money and they refund, now they're locked out.  So, it's really cool from a management point of view, and then what we'll usually do is pile in some videos. Then, we'll use a cool tool called TablePress.  It is so cool.  Basically, you can make a table or a grid inside of your membership site. Usually, if I'm pressed for time, I'll just put some posts on a page.  It will look like any other blog, and they buy access to this blog. Maybe if we have an extra five or ten minutes, we can make a table or a grid. Say I want to have like three columns across, five rows, and add in some cool little icons.  It's one of those nice to have little goodies, where you can make the inside of your membership site look pretty slick.  Make a dashboard, and just make it point and click.  You can make it the way you want it instead of some videos just kind of tossed in a webpage. I would say that my top tools, as far as WordPress being set up are WishList Member and TablePress to structure the membership site with.  So, those are the tools.

memberhsip site - contentContent on Your Membership Site

When it comes to recording, it takes a little bit of a mindset shift. I think that a lot of people, when they are doing a course, they think, "Let me see what kind of trivia I could just give to you about Kindle comic books.  Let me show you some Kindle comic books.  Let me show you Photoshop, or you could use this other editor."  People just go off in all of these scattered directions. Usually, when I buy a course, I will look over this kind of stuff because I'm just there for the content.  Usually it starts off with a five-minute intro, and then they'll have like a 20-minute longer thing, and everything after that is about 5 minutes.  It's like they get tired or something, and then it ends up being like 20, 30, 40 videos, and you have to page through every little thing to get what you wanted. It's just this meandering thing taking me into all different directions.  What we like to do is think in copywriting and marketing terms.  We think, "They are going to buy this course on Kindle comic books, so what are they going to actually have built by the end?" It's not just what they have learned, but what actions have they actually taken.  This is how you separate yourself from the cheap Kindle and the cheap Udemy kind of courses.  Now you're actually a $300 course.  By the end, they should have, say one or two Kindle comic books up.  Maybe they have another one in progress, or whatever it is. However, by the end of your course, they should have something set up.  That way, they will buy your next course, they won't refund, and all of that good stuff we all like to have. We think of it in terms of, by the end of this course, they will have all of this stuff, and then I split it up into four milestones.  A milestone, we can call it a module, is like a video, that's usually a screen capture that's like 60 minutes long, maybe 90 minutes at the most.  This is how we avoid having to page through all of these little five minute videos. Then each of these four pieces actually counts for something, and is building on the next, and is in the right order.  Then, at the end of each of these modules, we'll have a little 10-minute assignment.  So, for example, in the Kindle Comic book course, at the end of the first module, maybe they will have their first comic book created but not published. Maybe the second module would be having them publish it.  That makes it really cool in a lot of ways.  A lot of people won't get past that first hour of video, and when you're making the sales letter, you're like, I've got all kinds of promises for you, because I can say, "Tonight you join this course and you'll have your first comic book created using the software," or something like that.  So, instead of making videos with no plan, the way I always do it is think in terms of four milestones, 60-90 minutes, and it's all in video form.  Put it on there, put it in that little TablePress grid, and it's a cool little package for anyone that's looking to get some results fast. Sometimes what I'll do is add in free bonuses for any kind of course that we have.  One piece of the bonus may be some kind of software.  Either built-in software on the membership site, buy rights, or have something made.  So, that's good.  If not, I'll tell them where to go and buy, say, some sort of point and click comic creator and then provide some kind of video training on how to use it.  Then, I'll throw in a checklist of sorts.  So I'll have a list of questions they ask like, what's your Kindle comic book going to be called, how many pages is it going to be, etc.  By just going through and answering those questions, they will have something at the end. A few weeks after the course is done, I'll go back and make what's called "quick-start" videos.  I'll make just a video that's just one hour or so. I'll split that up into five-minute chunks just so that if a person has a short attention span or no time, I'll give them just the bare nuts and bolts.  Sometimes I'll have just a quick little section, where it's like, "Just give me the bare essentials," basically.

Getting Traffic to Your Membership Sitegetting traffic

What you need is traffic.  You need to send some people to that site and get your first member going.  I think that at this point, there are two paths you can take.  One path is, you can keep on adding to the site and making it cool, and I think that's the natural path a lot of people want to go into.  That's because it means you don't have to go into any of the scary stuff.  You don't have to market your stuff or buy ads.  You don't have to send emails, do webinars, get affiliates, and stuff like that. I think that at this point, as soon as you have the minimum viable product, even if the sales page could be better, and even if you haven't quite figured out TablePress, what's important at this point is to get one single, paying member.  I think some people get kind of discouraged because they think, "Oh man, I see all of these people talking about having a $100,000 launch.  On the first day, I guess I'll be okay with like $50,000."  Then, they put out their site and they just get one sale.  I'm thinking that's great because before you had $0.  Yeah, you may have put in 10 or 20 hours, but don't cut it up and say that you only made $10 an hour.  You made your first member, and then the next thing you know, member #2, #3, #4 are going to come in with almost no work at all. Going down the line, I think that there are some cool things that anyone could add to a site.  For example, what we do a lot of times, is we have a plug-in called WP Notepad, and we have it to where, underneath every video, or every post, there's like a little note-taking area where any of your members can go in and type their own private notes that are stored on your server.  So, they don't have to save it anywhere.  You could add a checklist under each post so that they can check off if they've watched that video or gone to that webpage. We have a way where you can add a pop-up using a program called WP Kunaki, where it will confirm their physical shipping address.  So, you can send them a quick "Thank You" card or call them on the phone as soon as they join.  That way you can say, "Thanks for your purchase.  I just wanted to make sure that you made it to the download page."  You could also send them a DVD, or whatever.  Those are all nice things to have, and those are good to add maybe like in a week or two. The next one or two weeks should be dedicated to getting some dang members in there. You need traffic, and you need a compelling offer, but how do you do that?  One of the ways you could do so is essentially by making allies with someone that has a list and has a community that would benefit in some way from your membership site.  You could include that person in the resources section, or you could reach out to that person and maybe do an interview with them, or a bonus of some sort that you could include within your membership site.  You could even include a link back to their site to go download whatever the bonus is. This is a way that you could go about making an ally of a mover and shaker in your niche that has a vested interest in seeing you succeed because the more you succeed, the more eyeballs they could potentially have on their stuff since it's in the member's area.  This also gives you the opportunity to seed your members area with good content.  The content does have to be A+ for this to work well, but you can share the spotlight with other experts, essentially, who now have a vested interest in seeing you actually succeed and the site succeeds.  Again, the more you succeed, the more successful they will be, potentially, and they will see some benefit from that as well. We work with people who are outside of internet marketing.  They have a list, and usually it's like on YouTube or Facebook, but they don't even know what they have. Some of these guys are playing around on Facebook, and they'll post some like random link and get 100 likes.  We're just like, "Dude, you need to figure out what kind of problem people have, get an idea for a course, record some videos, and put it in a membership site.  Then, post it and start making some money."  Yeah, it's crazy how some of these people, especially outside of internet marketing, they have a list and don't even know what they have.  It's like, "If you spent a couple of days on this, you'd have tens of thousands of dollars without even trying."

Learn From Robert

The best way is to buy our membership course at MembershipCube.  If you're not quite ready for that, I have a blog at RobertPlank.com, where I talk about a lot of this stuff.  It doesn't have to be that complicated.  I know that it's really easy to let the inner voice of "low-confidence" kind of trick you into thinking you have to keep on building stuff  before it's ready to go.  You can have the best of both worlds.  You can make a really simple membership site, just come up with a really simple idea.  Then, you create your modules and create some little bonuses, put it out there, and get some more sales.  After that, you can go back and innovate again and again. Every batch of sales that you get, you can go back and say, "Now my reward, after doing the scary marketing stuff, is to make some of those five minute videos," or "My reward is now to reach out and get some guest interviews to create some membership site content."  I think that there's something to be said about just figuring out what problem you're solving.  That way, it's impossible to not create the content, and this way you're trying to cover every little nook and cranny. You're not trying to be the encyclopedia of Kindle comic books, for example.  You're just saying, "The goal is to have a dang Kindle comic book done, so anything else that I say that gets too off topic or too long-winded, that's a step in the wrong direction.  All that matters is, here's the software to make it, ignore most of this, click these buttons, and boom, you have a Kindle comic.  Now you have your results." If you want to add any extra bonus in, that's great, but I think a lot of people have it backwards when it comes to what to include as bonuses.  They think that someone's just going to buy a course where they offer to give some Kindle advice, like, "Ask me anything that you want to about Kindle."  Well, how the heck are you going to sell that.  People are going to think, "I don't know what to ask, why don't you just tell me about Kindle?" There's something to say about just keeping it simple, getting it in place, and then go back and inch up everything.  So, just get it set up. Use WordPress, PaperTemplate, WishList Member, TablePress, and get some videos made, and then call it a day and come back to it later.  Now, WishList Member does cost around $300, but we do provide this for free to our members at MembershipCube.  Daniel Hall also provides training for a free way to protect your site at DanielHallPresents.com/GetCodeWishList Member is recommended, but it can be costly if you're just starting out.

Resources

Robert Plank's Membership Course: MembershipCube WordPress Tools: WordPress Fantastico QuickInstall SimpleScripts Membership Site Maker: WishList Member Front-end Tool: PaperTemplate Back-end Tools: TablePress WP Notepad

Real Fast Results Community

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Aug 5, 2016
Lisa Rothstein
Welcome to this edition of the Real Fast Results podcast!  Today, you are going to learn something that's vital to your business, and that is the ability to actually use words to persuade people to do what you want them to do.  That, in the business, is called sales copy.  A very special guest is joining us today, and she is actually going to share how to go about writing sales copy that sells.  The really cool thing from your standpoint is that this will be presented to you as though you were a complete newbie in order to make sure that each aspect of this is made clear.  Please welcome Lisa Rothstein to the show... Even if you think that you can't write anything, you're going to be able to learn how to write sales copy to sell your information products or courses.  You may have flunked high school English class, but you'll still find that you are able to do this.

Benefits of Writing Your Own Sales Copywriting sales copy

Here's a great question to start with: "What are the benefits of actually putting time/effort/energy into this?" A lot of people want to just outsource their copy to a copywriter like me.  I have written copy professionally for years and years, both in the advertising industry, business and in the digital marketing space.  There's a time for that, but if you don't know how to write your own copy, it sometimes means that you don't really even understand your own business. A lot of times people will come to me and ask me to write some sales copy or a sales page for them, and they won't have their target market figured out and a lot of other elements of their business figured out.  They just expect someone else to figure their business out for them.  It's kind of a diagnostic tool to see how well you're selling and why it's good and beneficial to people. I've also taught people to write their own sales copy to the point where they end up seeing the value of what they have to offer, way more than they did before.  That's because when they have to write out all those bullet points telling people why it's great, it makes them go, "Wow!  This is pretty awesome.  I'm going to double the price of the product."  If they hadn't of written it themselves, I don't think they would have had that experience. Obviously, the big benefit of knowing how to write better sales copy is that you will sell more of your stuff.  But, there's also a lot of other ancillary benefits.  For instance, the confidence you have in what you're offering is so exponential when you have crafted the message yourself.  When someone asks you about it, you'll be able to talk about it because you have a grounding in what you're selling.  That's why I'm so passionate about helping people learn how to do this themselves. I often tell people to write their sales pages before they even decide what to put into the product because as they're doing that they'll say, "Hey, you know what would be really cool?  I should put this bonus in here because it feels like it would fit right here..."  In other words, it gives them the idea to put it into the product.  So, it's a symbiotic relationship. It's not a separate process, and that's why, I think, some people delegate too early. The other big reason to write your own copy is that, even though a professional might have a little better way with words, but they could also just dial up a little of what you've done yourself.  So, you could give them a really good first draft of what you want to say in a clear way, they could do so much better of a job.  Plus, it's still your ideas and your work, whereas if you just hand it off you advocate.  I don't like that.  I don't think it's a good idea for people to do in business.  I thoroughly agree with that.

3 Reason Why People Feel Writing Sales Copy Is Hard

sales copyBefore I get to the five steps I'm going to tell you about for the actual page itself, I want to share three reasons why people think this is so hard.  A lot of people are probably thinking, "Yeah, yeah, yeah, but I couldn't write my way out of a paper bag. I can't do this.  I've sat down and tried, and I just can't."  There are three reasons why this is hard, okay?
  1. It's Difficult to be Objective About Yourself - The #1 reason why it's hard is because it's difficult to be objective about yourself.  I'm sure that many of the people out there could turn into their best friend or colleague and figure out ways to talk about that person's product, but when it comes to selling yourself, whether you are a coach, or a consultant, and so on, it's hard to see the forest through the trees.  Also, especially if you're a woman, you don't like to brag, so there can be some resistance going on.  That's one reason.  Being objective is tough.
  2. There Is No Sales Copy Secret- The second reason is that there are a lot of copyrighting gurus out there, and I really don't count myself as one of them, but they'll tell you that there are all these secrets. Maybe there's this secret handshake or this secret world that you have to know about in order to write great copy, or maybe that you have to be a really amazing writer and only certain people with the talent to do this can do it. That's absolutely not true.  We've already talked about that.  It's really not true. While there are some people that enjoy it and are skilled at it, there's a big difference between writing this kind of copy that we do in the digital marketing space and the kind of Madmen "creative" stuff that I used to do in the advertising business.  That's a whole different animal you don't need. You shouldn't be doing that kind of clever, slick stuff in our space anyway.  So, all the secret stuff, what I'm going to teach you today is really going to blast that out of the water.
  3. The Challenge of the Blank Page - The third thing is the challenge of the blank page, which is true for everyone, professional writers included.  That blank screen paralyses everyone.  You don't know where to start or how to start.  What I'm going to teach you now is going to help you with all of those things.  It's going to help you with your objectivity.  It's going to help you realize that there really are no secrets because if you do these five things that you're about to be taught, you're really 99% of the way there, to having really great sales copy.  This will also help you with the "blank page" phenomenon because it will give you five different ways to get started.  Starting is the hardest part.

5 Steps to Writing Great Sales Copywriting copy

I actually learned four of these five steps on the first week on the job in the ad business.  I came out of college, and I didn't know what I was doing, and all of these old men, with their pipes and their bow ties, were there, and you know, I was totally intimidated.  But, my boss took me to the side and gave me this piece of advice, that I've been using ever since all these years.  He said, "Lisa, there's really only four steps to writing great copy."  Now, that was advertising, so I added a fifth step. You're not going to understand them right now, but you will when I go through them.  The five steps are:
  1. "Oh dear!"
  2. "Good News"
  3. "Here's Why"
  4. "That's Right"
  5. "But wait...There's More!"
I'm going to teach you this, but learning is remembering.  The fact of the matter is, you see this every single day.  It's just like any other kind of structure.  Like, if someone teaches you structure and then you go to the movies and you say, "Oh my gosh!  There's Act II...And there's the inciting incident."  You learn the structure and then you see it everywhere.  So, whenever you watch an infomercial, you'll see this.  Next time you're up at 3:00 in the morning, turn on the television, and you will see this in action.  You may not want to be as blatant as they are in your work, but it's what's underneath even the most elegant sales copy that you'll see.  It's in the framework.

Step 1 "Oh Dear!"

The first expletive, "Oh dear," is where you'll state the problem.  You've got a ring around the collar, and you have tried soaking and scrubbing.  This works for both Madison Avenue and digital marketing.  Basically, this is where you explore why the reader's life sucks right now without your solution.  One of the things that I like to do with my own clients that you can do too, which it helps to do it with a partner, is to actually pretend to be your ideal client and sit with someone else and pretend that person is your therapist. So, you're their client, and you come to them with a problem, and they're like, "Okay, what seems to be the problem?"  You might say something like, "Well, I'm 40 and I haven't had a date in years.  I'm afraid that I'm never going to meet anybody.  I'm afraid that I'm always going to be alone and my biological clock is ticking, so I'm not going to be able to have any kids.  And, every time I go on a cruise, I have to go as a single person, and every time I go visit my family for Christmas or Thanksgiving, everyone asks me, 'So, when are you going to settle down,' and it's just horrible and I hate it." The more you talk about the problem, the more you'll express all of that stuff, and the more that will feed your ideas.  When you go to write your copy, your ideas will flow more easily, and you'll end up saying something like, "Are you worried that you'll be single forever?  Do you hate going to family functions because people are always asking about when you're going to meet someone?  Do you feel like a third wheel with your friends, and when you go on vacation, do you have to be all alone?  Are you concerned that it's going to be this way forever and you're just going to die alone and never have any kids?" You can put the ideas you've had during your role playing right into your sales copy, and the readers of that copy are going to be like, "Oh my God!  How do they know I feel this way?"  So, really try to sit down and explore all the reasons why the person would need to use your product.  Think about every area of a person's life when you are thinking about how their problem affects them.  How does it affect their health?  How does it affect their career?  How does it affect their financial situation?  You know, all of these sorts of things.  Just brainstorm and download all of this misery, and then you pick and choose the juiciest ones to put into your sales copy. It's about illuminating, expanding upon, and explaining how that problem is affecting the life of your prospect, and in an emotional way.  Sometimes you have to be talking for a while before you actually hit the emotion.  Something that has happened to me and some of my clients is that they go through this practice and actually start crying.  They are so closely identifying with that person, and they're like, "Oh, it's so terrible that she's never going to meet anyone, and she'll never have kids, and she'll always wonder what life could have been like if she had been able to find a partner."  That's just one example, of course. The problem is that a lot of writers, and a lot of writing teachers, will tell you to say what keeps them (your prospect) up at night.  That has become so cliché and intellectually based in people's minds that people really can't reach any kind of depth that way anymore.  This process helps you to get into the emotional space a little bit better.  People justify with logic, but they buy on emotion.  So, if you can connect with them emotionally, and you can articulate to them even better than they could even explain it themselves, what the problem is, why it is a problem, and what it feels to have it, they are going to believe that you have the solution.  It's just a psychological reflex for people to subconsciously think, "I believe that you have the answer because you've been able to explain the problem so well, so clearly, and so emotionally." The most important thing to remember, when you're writing any kind of work, but especially sales copy, is that the creative process is to brainstorm everything.  Don't write; just get it all out there.  What options would you have.  It's like smearing the paint onto the pallet, if you were a painter, and then saying, "I'm going to take a little bit of the red that I squeezed out, and a little bit of blue that I squeezed out, and dab it onto the picture."  You're not going to use it all, but until it's all out there, you don't know what you have to work with.  Often, people go straight into the writing, and then they wonder why it's flat and paralyzed.  You aren't writing at first, you're just squeezing the paint onto the board.  That's it.

Step 2 "Good News"

Sales Copy - good newsNow you've gone wait deep into the problem, and why it sucks to be them, and all the effects it's going to have on their life.  "Well, guess what?  You've got this problem.  Well, good news!  There's a solution! Introducing my brand new, handy-dandy whatever it is...That is going to solve all those problems."  Now you might want to paint an opposite picture by imagining when you have this problem solved, imagining what it's going to be like when you bring the love of your life to Thanksgiving dinner and everyone loves him, and you plan your vacations together, and there are all of these memories that you get to share.  I'm just making stuff up, and you don't necessarily have to go into all of this detail. You've stirred the pot in your "Oh Dear" section to the point where people really want to believe that you have the solution that they need, so they are just waiting for you to prove to them that what you have to offer works.  They want to believe you.  This leads into Step #3, which is "Here's why".

Step 3 "Here's Why"

This is where a lot of people mistakenly start.  "Here's why it works.  Here's how it works.  Here's why I know what I'm talking about...Because I went through the same thing too, and here's my story.  Here's why you can believe me...Because it worked for all these other people who are going to give you their testimonials right here.  Here's another reason you can believe me...Because I'm going to give you a money-back guarantee.  Here's the process.  Here's all you're going to get." You might offer to give your prospects 8,000 hours of MP3s, and workbooks, and workshops, and live events, etc.  A lot of people start with that.  Nobody wants a workbook.  Nobody wants a DVD.  But, when you tell them, "You've got this horrible problem that I understand better than anyone, and I've got the solution to solve it," you'll have their attention.  Then, you simply go on to tell the reader why it's going to work.  You're going to have all of this proof that what you have worked for other people, and it's kind of like calling for witnesses at a trial if you're a lawyer.  I like to use analogies because I think that it helps a lot. So, you know, here's the character witness, and here's the glove that doesn't fit.  It's like the demonstrations, when you see the guy driving his truck over the flashlight and it doesn't break.  Before and after pictures are often used in this capacity if you're selling a weight loss product, or a fitness product, or something like that.  They'll show a before and after, and that's part of the proof.  You hear about social proof a lot, but there's all kinds of other proof.  "Here's why this is important, and here's why my process is kosher.  Just look at all the statistics out there that show that you're more likely to be shot by a terrorist than to find a mate after the age of 40."  You know, I didn't make that statistic up, but I call it in as part of the evidence that I am presenting in my case. You don't necessarily have to do all of these things in this exact order, but you could do worse than to do them in this order.  Watch an infomercial and you'll see that.  Even if you watch television commercials that are 30 seconds long.  When you're doing the brainstorming section of your sales page, and you realize that you don't have a whole lot in the section, that means you really need to go out and get some more facts and evidence to bolster my case.  Where can I go back to my clients to get testimonials?  Where can I call in a statistic?  Where can I strengthen my guarantee and show why my process works? Where can I pull in my own story to prove that I've been through this myself.  A lot of people will create products where they have solved a problem for themselves, and now they are bringing their system or intellectual property out to the world.  This is where you might start to talk about your story and how you were in the same place they were, and that's why you can talk about it now, saying something to the degree of, "I discover this process, and lo and behold, it worked.  Then, I tried it with my clients and it worked for them.  Now I'm bringing it to you."  That's part of the "here's why" section.  People are going to start to believe what you're saying because there is some credibility there.

Step 4 "That's Right"

You've told them that you understand the problem, and you may have made them feel a little horrible, but also hopeful because you may have the solution they're looking for.  At this point, you've proven to them that your solution is probably going to work.  So, you have now reached Step 4, which is kind of a recap.  You'll essentially say, "That's right.  You're going to solve this problem that's been bothering you forever, that you thought was insoluble, and you're going to have this amazing solution instead.  You're going to get all of this stuff, that I talked about in the previous section and all of these reasons why it's going to work." Now you're starting to talk a little about components and more about the actual physical stuff they are going to get and how they are going to be delivered.  The idea here is that your prospect will be thinking, "Well, how much is this going to cost me.  It sounds so great that I'm afraid it's going to be too expensive."  That's why you'll sometimes see the value of each individual item listed out for a total value of a bazillion dollars, but you only have to pay $197, or something like that.  I'm exaggerating to make a point, but you've seen this on infomercials 100 times over.  Usually, in regular advertising, that's where it starts. I wrote an ad a long, long time ago.  It was a TV commercial that did very, very well.  This was way back in the day, before there was liquid dishwashing detergent to put into your dishwasher; there was only powder.  So, one of my commercials launched the first liquid that went into dishwashers.  In this case, it was like, "Oh no!  Your dishwasher powder didn't dissolve and your dishes aren't clean.  Good news!  We have this great new Palmolive automatic dishwasher detergent that's going to solve that problem.  Here's why it works.  It's a liquid, so it dissolves and doesn't leave powder all over your dishes.  That's right.  You'll never have this problem again." I mean, that's pretty much how it went, but in the visual people are throwing out their dishes and throwing them against the wall because they were so mad that their dishes weren't clean.  It was the 80's, so it was a little bit cheesy, but the idea is that this is still the same structure.  At this point, in the traditional advertising world, you would stop.  If you're in the infomercial or digital marketing world, you're going to move on to Step 5, which is "But wait...There's More!"

Step 5 "But wait...There's More!"

This is where you would throw in all of the bonuses.  It's where the infomercial will say, "But wait!  We'll double your offer.  We'll give you two of the things you didn't even know you needed one of five minutes ago.  We're going to give you two of them, just pay more shipping and handling."  Obviously, we are in the digital space, so if you have an info product, you'll offer bonuses.  The best bonuses in this space are things that help people consume the product and/or that add value to the product.  It should be something relevant. A lot of times I will tell my clients that they have given way too much value in their products and that they should take something out of there and make it a bonus.  Put it on a little velvet pillow, and now it's like, "Oh, and now you'll get my amazing spreadsheet that's going to help you to keep track of your progress."  Anyway, the point is that you were including that before, but by offering it separately you can make your offer seem even more valuable and irresistible.  The best thing is that if it's a digital download, it doesn't cost anything to deliver, but it's super-valuable to your prospect.  So, there's this other extra thing, and sometimes people will buy it just for the bonus. When I take people who can't write sales copy through what we just did I ask, "How many people thing they can write their own sales page now?"  Pretty much, the whole room raises their hand, whereas in the beginning I'll ask, "How many people think it's impossible to write copy," and pretty much the same people raised their hand.  Once you get into the details, you may have to scratch your head a little to find the right words, but you probably don't have a problem with writing but a problem with clarity.  Now that you know what these five things are, as long as you just do:
  1. "Oh dear!"
  2. "Good News"
  3. "Here's Why"
  4. "That's Right"
  5. "But wait...There's More!"
Then, you just fill in all of the blanks.  You'd have the basis of a pretty good first draft after doing this.  In fact, it would be better than most people's and even better than some copywriters.  And, how much more will you feel connected to what you're selling once you have actually done this? The "Here's Why" section is probably where you would put your bullet points.  I haven't gone into all of the features, and benefits, and stuff like that.  I'm bringing out a course soon that talks about that.  There's lots of people who talk about features and benefits, but I mean, all of that stuff fits into this process.  It's going to make you feel much more confident about what you've got.  That's why so many of my clients raise the price of their products after they do this.  They may not have had that kind of confidence before, and they were just hoping that someone else would figure out why this thing was good and how to say it, you know?  It's better if you do it, at least in the first draft.

Testimonials

When you're actually creating your page, after you've basically collected all of this material, if you have enough testimonials a great thing that you can do is dot them around and use them to break up the page visually.  Also, you might put a testimonial right after a bullet point when you have a testimonial that illustrates that point.  For example, if you said something in a bullet point that let people know your product will increase their income, you can follow that with a testimonial where someone says that they had an increase in sales.  This essentially tells the reader, "I'm not just saying this, look what he has to say." It's a luxury to have testimonials that boaster your product's track record, but even if it doesn't have that kind or track record yet, there are still ways that you could go about borrowing credibility or get folks to say nice things that will allow your reader to connect the dots and figure out you're someone they should be listening to.  I work with people on that too, because some folks are just getting started, and they are like, "But, I don't have testimonials."  There are things that you can use instead.  They may not be as valuable, so you should always be collecting that kind of proof, anywhere you can find it. One thing that you can do is use beta testers to try out your products.  No one has to know if they paid for it or not.  They got results, and that's what matters.  As far as the reader is concerned, it's none of their business.  So, that's awesome.

Where To Place the GuaranteeSales Copy - guarantee

I like to put it near the order form, or near where you are going to be asking for the sale. Because, at this point they want to click "Add to Cart," but maybe they're scared.  People always ask, "What if someone asks for their money back, and they just want to take my product and use it."  You know what?  That's the cost of doing business, and the number of people who are going to be made to feel safe enough to do business with you without knowing you far outweighs the two or three bad apples who are going be thieves.  So, I always tell people not to worry about that. There is a way that you can go about taking a person off of your list if they refund too much.  For example, if a person refunds three times, you might take them off of the list and you send them an email that says something like, "We're obviously not the company for you, so we've taken you off of our list.  If you do buy something else from us, you will not ever be refunded again."  That's how you can handle that, but there's no reason to advertise this. You may have to deal with this once or twice a year, if that.  It's a really tiny percentage of people that you might have to do this with. I would put it in more than once.  I'd put it any place where I thought people would need to be reassured.  The guarantee is there to make people comfortable enough to press "Buy Now".  It's not there because you just really want to give people their money back.  Obviously, you will if they ask you to, but the idea is this as a risk reversal.  Also, you need to believe in your own stuff to say, "You know what?  If you buy this and you use it, you should be really happy, so why wouldn't I offer you a guarantee?" I know some people who never offer a guarantee, and that's their policy.  I think that since we are talking about writing sales copy that works, guarantees work.  That's why people put them there.  So, most people won't come back, and if they are legitimate "refunders" like, "I've tried it, and it's not for me," then I don't want their money.  Neither should you. Actually, I've had to refund a couple of things that really weren't what I thought they were, and the people were super-cool about refunding it.  I went on social media and said, "Oh my God!  These people were so awesome.  You know, I asked for a refund, and they said 'no problem'.  They just gave it to me."  They probably got more mileage out of me saying how great they were that it was worth way more than the sale would have been to them.

Connecting With Lisa

If you go to LisaRothstein.com/RealFastCopy, I'm going to give you guys a downloadable cheat sheet that will help you fill in the blanks on these sorts of things.  This will make it even easier for you, and I use it with my own clients.  It's really fun and easy to fill in, and it's something that you can keep with you and use it as a place to kind of capture all of your ideas for your next sales page.  You can use it over and over again.  I really hope that you enjoy that.  You can find me on social media too.  I spend a lot of time on Facebook, and of course, my website is LisaRothstein.com.

Resources

Lisa's Free Sale's Copy Brainstorming Kit

Real Fast Results Community

If you are diggin’ on this stuff and really love what we’re doing here at Real Fast Results, would you please do me a favor? Head on over to iTunes, and make sure that you subscribe to this show, download it, and rate & review it. That would be an awesome thing. Of course, we also want to know your results. Please share those results with us at http://www.realfastresults.com/results. As always, go make results happen!
Aug 2, 2016
Mark Timberlake
Welcome to the Real Fast Results podcast!  Today, you’re going to have the chance to learn about digital assets and the advantages of producing them.  The information found herein was first presented by Mark Timberlake, who is an absolute expert when it comes to exploiting this type of aperture in the marketplace.  Mark, welcome to the show… Today we’re promising to help people understand how they can create digital assets that they can actually sell over and over.  So, by the end of this, they should have a clear concept of how online training can be packaged as a digital asset, and how a person could then put that outlet in some of the places where you can get some instant income coming in.

Benefits of Creating Digital Assests

In terms of lifestyle, it’s a residual-based income so it’s a dream; it’s living the dream.  Me and my wife, we live thisdigital assets dream.  We create digital products, and we sell them, and we live off the income.  It’s just freedom from employment and service-based work.  We escaped employment 15 years ago and started our own business, but we still had a lot of service-based work going on. We were still dealing with clients, but that’s one step away from working with an employer because you’re still being employed.  You’ve just changed your employer, and you can pick and choose your employer a little bit more, but you’re still being employed.  However, when you actually create digital content that you can sell, and it’s a digital asset, there is no employer.  That’s the real beauty, and it’s exponential in terms of how much that product can actually earn.  It’s limited by the amount of people you can get in front of, and it’s limited by the amount of times you can sell that product.  That is where it gets really exciting. A third-party platform is very good when you’re launching cold.  Now, if you’ve got a really strong, established audience, I wouldn’t recommend that you go on to these third-party platforms over that, to increase your audience.  But, if you’re brand new and you don’t have a list, you’re new to online marketing, you love to teach, and you’ve got a passion about something, these places can give you that really quick launch.  Particularly sites like Udemy, which have got really high-quality standards but help you through the process, they can really get you learning how to create courses quickly. I would recommend looking at third-party courses from instructors like myself. The reason why I say this is because we’re going to teach platform agnosticism, which is really important.  While we're talking about platforms, I just want to mention this principle.  We want to create courses that we can put on platforms, but we don't want to create Udemy courses, we don't want to create Skillshare courses, and that's some of the platforms we can put stuff on.  We want to create agnostic courses that are primarily our asset, that we can then put into them in an appropriate manner, which will allow us to tap into their marketplace without losing our identity as a business. Does that make sense?  It's like going into a supermarket.  You don't want to supply the branded product.  You don't want to supply, you know, the Walmart ketchup.  You want to supply the Heinz ketchup.  You want your brand to be consistent, and that's one of the key things you need to understand.  When you go to these places, the temptation might be to hand over your brand to these places, but what you really want to do is just use the supermarket and put your brand in there, and then people can come back to you. Udemy likes big mega-courses.  Now, Skillshare wants 20-30 minute courses.  Let's look at that practically for a moment.  For instance, I've just released my online Instructor Masterclass 2016, and there are 16 modules in that course.  This is a practical example.  On Skillshare, they want small courses, and they're going to pay me per enrollment.  So, I've got 16 modules, which are independent courses on Skillshare, and I've got one mega-course on Udemy.  On Skillshare, I get 16 enrollments for everyone that takes that course, and then on Udemy, I get one big enrollment. Then, when I put it on my website, which is another thing we're going to want to do. I encourage people to use a third-party website to start out like Teachable, or something like that, where they take in all of the back-end hosting, you put into your course, and then you can market them as well.  So, then I can now put the same course on my website, and then I can upsell.  I can have  a subscription on there. I can bundle a load of courses. I might have a monthly Hangout or webinar.  For instance, on Zenler, who I'm just switching over to from Teachable. Zenler has a built-in webinar functionality, so you can literally host the webinar inside your school.  You can host a free webinar, and literally on the page is the subscriber.  So, there is lots of really exciting stuff happening right now. The key is that you want to be able to create the content from the very beginning knowing that this is platform agnostic, this is your content.  You need to split it up in different ways  for different platforms, but you maintain control. It becomes really exciting when you start doing that because now you're developing all of these different income streams in different places.  If one falls over and collapses, you've got five or six others that are still running and you're minimizing your risk.  That's the key thing.  From the beginning, don't get tied into one platform.

Different Ways To Use Your Digital Content

digital contentThere's a couple of really exciting things potentially happening at the moment.  Just whispers and rumors right now, but there's a whisper that Amazon might get into the online teaching space, selling digital training courses.  They've already opened up Amazon Video.  Now, there's a whisper that they're talking about getting into the actual delivery of education.  So, in the way that they have embraced Kindle eBooks, they want to embrace training. LinkedIn also just purchased Lynda.com.  This is the grandmother of online training courses.  They've been doing it the longest.  They are the ones that have mastered it, but the way they have always operated is you produce the course and they own the rights.  So, for me, they would have to pay me a lot of money to get the rights to my business because I know the exponential value of my product over time.  It's a case of the more eyeballs that go in front of it, the more money I'm going to earn.  That's just simple math with a good-quality online training course. There's a whisper that they (Lynda.com) will start opening up the platform so that third-party vendors can upload.  Now think about that.  That's Microsoft, essentially, and Amazon are starting to sniff around the online education sector.  So, when you create your courses--you've got these things, they are like bags of sweets, you can put one bag over here and just a couple of sweets over here, and you can put a big multi-pack of sweets over here.  The point is that as the market progresses and grows, you've created a digital asset that you can then just drop straight onto these platforms, and that's where it gets really exciting. Online education is absolutely massive.  It's one of the VCs.  The venture capitalists are all trying desperately to find somewhere they can get involved and spend money on because it's one of those areas that's really exploding fast.  If people are spending money, that means content creators have a massive opportunity to get into right now while we're still in the early part.  We aren't even in the boom part.  We are in the early part, and there's a massive opportunity to get in right now and create courses because this is going to boom.  It's a pebble on the beach at the moment.  It's going to be a whole beach soon, and now is the time to get involved.  Create high-quality courses that are agnostic, that can go anywhere, and that can earn you this residual income.

3 Steps To Making Digital Courses

I can give you a simple overview of the three things you're going to need to master.  I can give you some quick tips, but the process, in itself, is a learned skill.

Step # 1 Quality of Educational Content

So, #1) Quality of Educational content.  Now, where a lot of people fall down, they'll see an opportunity like this and they'll think, "Okay, I can just create a quick course, and I can make loads of money."  No.  If you want this to be a long-term asset, you've got to put the time into it.  You've got to be thinking, "This could potentially earn me $100,000 over its lifetime."  You've got to design from the beginning with that kind of potentiality in the back of your mind.  You might only make $100, but you've got to approach it like, "This is a significant asset I'm developing here." I've created courses where I said, "This one's going to absolutely go crazy," and it just falls flat.  I've created over 40 courses now, and there have been some that I didn't think would do that well, but all of the sudden, it really surprises me.  So, #1) Quality of Education.  You have to remember that, at the end of the day, that's what people are actually buying.

Step #2 Quality Production Values

#2) Quality Production Values.  That doesn't mean you have to have a professional studio.  You could literally use a slideshow and a mic.  You could literally combine a slide show and a good-quality podcast setup, and you can create courses.  So, you don't need lots of money. I've got a green screen studio where I do a lot of talking heads.  Whichever level you go to, you've got to keep pushing the quality.  So, the quality of production is really important.

Step #3 Marketing Excellenceonline marketing

And then there's #3) Marketing Excellence.  You have to learn the basics of online marketing. It's a skill set that's absolutely fundamentally required.  Although you're starting out by putting it onto platforms, you do need to understand some key things like SEO.  You do need to try and understand how to optimize some text.  That sounds really huge, but it isn't as big as you think.  You've just got to learn the trade.  That's the key thing.  You've really got to take time to learn the trade. Let's say that you've got a very popular podcast.  Well, you would have had to learn the trade of podcasting.  Yes, everyone can do it, but only the people who have mastered the process will do it well, will do it professionally, and will do it to a high standard.  That's what sets it apart.  So, that's what you've got to have--high quality teaching, very high-quality production values, and marketing excellence.  When you build an online course creation, digital asset business based on those principles, it's just a case then of finding the course, or set of courses that are going to start getting that response from the marketplace that you're looking for.

How to Find a Responsive Niche

The first thing to do, believe it or not, don't go to niche at the moment.  It's still very early in the marketplace, and the temptation is to do your "DIY Brain Surgery Course".  Bear with me.  There's not very many people in the world that want to practice DIY brain surgery.  On the other hand, there's how to do a Facebook ad.  You know, that is so broad.  Let me give you another example.  You can create a master course on online marketing, but you've got to be specific about who you're trying to reach.  What I'm trying to say is don't go too broad, but don't go too narrow either. One of the things to test what's working is to go on one of the sites and have a look at what's working.  Go on a platform like Udemy and Skillshare.  If you want to make big courses, Udemy is #1.  Some other places are starting to catch up quickly.  But, if you want to do business to consumer, like craft-based courses, hobby-based courses, and lifestyle courses, Skillshare is much better.  Once you understand that, and you've got the two main, sort of, protagonists in the marketplace, Udemy being business to business, and Skillshare being business to consumer, then have a look at your expertise.  Go in there and see what types of courses, in your expertise, are getting the students, they're trending, they seem to be doing well. Be honest with yourself.  If you look at a course and say, "I can do better than this," then make a better course.  That's the place to start, but one other thing is when you make your first course, your first course is disposable.  You're going to throw it away.  That's where you learn the art of making a course.  You'll continually learn, but that's where most of the big lessons are.  I've seen people do this.  Don't try to create an 18-hour talking-heads master-class because you're going to film it, you're going to look at it in six-months time, and you're going to be embarrassed of it. The thing to do is to create a small course, maybe with something like Skillshare, just to go through the process of learning.  Take some courses on how to plan and how to structure.  Just start with a small course.  Don't throw away your best course on your first course.  If you're a master at Facebook advertising, and you can show, "Here's what I've spent.  Here's my return on investment."  Start with how to set up a Facebook group.  Don't give up your best stuff at the beginning because that course won't be your best.  Go and have a look, see what's working, and don't fall into the trap of going to niche or too wide, but do a little research and see what's actually going.

Building Course Material

digital assets 2 - responsive nicheYou'll want to break up 2-10 minute segments.  You know, 2-5 for most subjects, and 10 if it's technical.  You have to learn how to translate Chinese.  This is one of the core educational issues that nuance online instructors may not have grasped yet.  It doesn't matter if you're a professor.  It doesn't matter where you come from.  When you start speaking to someone, every area of knowledge has its own language. So, if you sit down with someone and start talking to your granny about podcasting, and you start saying, "Yeah, I'm going to be doing this, and I'm going to be using my preamp," she's not going to understand what you're saying.  You're speaking Chinese. Every area we have expertise on has its own subset of language.  English isn't some sort of homogenous blob.  It's built upon all of these areas of expertise.  If you want to do quantum physics, you have to learn a whole new language before you can comprehend that.  That's the core thing to understand.  When you're teaching someone, you have to translate Chinese.  That's what the best instructors do.  They take a complex subject, which is complete Chinese to someone else, and they translate that into language so that the layman can understand. It's not about being the smartest or the most knowledgeable; it's being the best translator.  If you can explain a simple concept to them, that's simple to you, but complex to them, better than everybody else, people will pay you money to solve their problems.  Become the translator.  Become the one that's best at translating Chinese, and that's what's going to give you long-term value in your product.

Recap: Steps To Making Digital Courses

The "Golden Triangle" of course creation is high-quality educational content, #1.  You want to solve people's pain points and problems.  You want to be doing that better than anyone else.  You want to be translating that Chinese.  #2) You want high production values.  No matter what level you are, you want to take the time to do the editing and remove all the "ums and ahs" so that you have really good quality.  Invest in that process.  #3) Marketing excellence.  Learn how to market yourself, learn what's going to work, and learn how to place your product. And, just understand that these third-party platforms are going to do some marketing for you, and that's why we're using them at the beginning.  A beginning instructor, usually the worst skill they've got is marketing.  That's the thing they least understand, but that's where the leg up on these platforms are going to be.  You're going to have some stabilizers on your bike.  They are going to supply the stabilizers, and they are going to get you going, but you don't want to stay on stabilizers forever.  You want to be platform agnostic, and eventually, you want that audience that you're building on your website, on your property.  I think those are the core things to know.

Third-Party Platforms Suggestions

If you go to my website, SMEHeroes.co.uk, you'll find a platform guide.  It's a resource that we keep up to date, and it shows all of the latest places and some of the things that you need to be aware of.  On that, we've got Udemy, Skillshare, StackSkills... There's lots of information on there that is current and up to date.  It's a great resource for someone trying to figure out where to put their courses.  For instance, if you have courses on programming, you may not want to put them on Skillshare, necessarily, but there are other third-party sites that specialize in those types of things. There are also sites to avoid.  For example, there are some sites that won't pay you.  They've been identified too.  There are also some third-party hosting platforms.  These are places you can put your courses and  sell them.  Go to SMEHeroes.co.uk, and go to the "Platform Guide".  It's linked at the top, and you're going to see lots of different places where you can sell.  If you want to connect with me, you can find me on all of the social platforms from there.

Resources:

Udemy.com Skillshare.com StackSkills.com Third Party Websites for Back-End Hosting Teachable.com Zenler.com Mark's Platform Guide Platform Guide

Real Fast Results Community

If you are diggin’ on this stuff and really love what we’re doing here at Real Fast Results, would you please do me a favor? Head on over to iTunes, and make sure that you subscribe to this show, download it, and rate & review it. That would be an awesome thing. Of course, we also want to know your results. Please share those results with us at http://www.realfastresults.com/results. As always, go make results happen!
Jul 29, 2016
Robin Cutler
Welcome to the Real Fast Results podcast!  Robin Cutler, from IngramSpark, is here to share her secrets on print on demand (POD) publishing.  So, without further ado, let’s welcome Robin… Our promise today is to talk a little about print on demand and what your options are as an author as well as the different platforms in which you can make your book available.  Most importantly IngramSpark, but also CreateSpace and some other options that you might have.  What we plan to do today is to bring clarity and to offer you some real solutions for how you might move forward with your self-publishing plans.

Defining Print on Demand Publishing

Print on demand, as a technology, has been around for, actually, about 20 years.  It really started at Ingram 20 years print on demandago, when Ingram started a company called Lightening Source.  That was actually done by John Ingram 20 years ago, and Lightning Source is now the state-of-the-art print on demand company of the world.  Print on demand is just like it sounds, where instead of an author or publisher having to stock inventory, through print on demand, you can actually print as you need to and pay as you go. What’s so great about print on demand is that it allows you, as an author and as a publisher, to bring your book to the marketplace and reduce the risk of doing so.  We aren’t actually printing until we actually get orders for those books, and those orders can go directly to the customers in many cases.  The minimum order in a true print on demand model, like what we offer through Ingram Spark, is one copy.  So, isn’t that phenomenal? To me, this is the heyday for self-publishers.  They have as much, and as many, the tools at their disposal as the traditional publishers have always had.  You know, they have access to IngramSpark, which is the world’s largest book distributor.  You can put your content out into the marketplace very easily and inexpensively, through print on demand, and just see what happens without having to sell the family farm, which was not always the case in the old days.

How to Start a Print On Demand (POD) Project

First of all, you need to have worked with an editor to create a published book. You should work with a designer. Although, if you have the skill to design yourself, that’s fine.  Most people don’t, however, so you would probably need to work with a designer to actually format your book in a trim size that can actually be printed as print on demand.

Book Trim Size

book trim sizeThere are some limitations on what you can do when it comes to print on demand.  You will want to check and make sure that the trim size that you and your designer have selected is one that actually can be manufactured through your print on demand process.  There are a lot of choices, as far as what those trim sizes are.  The smallest is 4x6, and it goes all the way up to 8.5x11.  There’s color, there’s hardcover, paperback, and a couple of different options in bindings that are available now.  Even in hardcover, you can have a cloth-printed look to your hardcover book with a jacket on it. 6x9 is the one that’s most heavily chosen by all publishers. That size is the one that’s most commonly seen on most bookshelves, and 5.5x8.5 is another one.  For children’s books, we’re starting to see sort of a square trim size.  There’s an 8x8 and 8.5x8.5, and also 8.5x11.  But, what’s great about a squarer kind of trim size is that it gives you a lot more flexibility in terms of your illustrations.  Most illustrations will fit on that sort of format.  We are always adding, and I think we’re about to launch a 10.5x10.5 square trim size through Ingram here in a month or so.  You can always check and see if we’ve added anything recently. There’s just a lot that’s available. An author, as they are writing their book, they tend to have an image of what they think that finished book should look like.  Often times, that image or vision that they have is a non-standard trim size because they think that makes their book unique in the world and on a bookshelf.  Unique isn’t necessarily a good thing, in terms of cost, and also, how you distribute your book.  In fact, you want it to be standard and part of a format that booksellers can sell easily. So, I say, don’t get hung up on the format.  Make sure it’s standard.  Make sure, especially as a new author, it fits a print on demand trim size.  You can go onto the IngramSpark site, and I’ll give you this information.  There are also other places you can check out what various print on demand providers offer.  So, I would say that’s Step #1. I think that it is smart to look at similar books in your genre.  Not only the trim size, but you also want to look at the pricing of your competitors and books in the marketplace.

Making Changes In Your Book After It's Published

Another thing that I wanted to mention about the value of print on demand, and this is a big, big thing, is that you can easily update your book.  If you’re a published author, you know that it’s hard to get it right initially.  Invariably, no matter how good of an editor you have, or how good of a proofreader, you’ll find something that you want to change.  And, it could be something for the good. Let’s say that you won an award.  That’s something that you would want to include on the cover of your book.  Maybe you’ve gotten a great review.  Well, if you’ve printed 5,000 copies, and they’re in your basement, and you’ve gotten this great review or this great endorsement from James Patterson, you’re kind of screwed.  You want to add that to your book.  Print on demand allows you to easily do that.  So, you just update your file, and everything that’s printed after that is the new information on the book. You can also easily update the metadata. There’s a lot of information out there, especially in the self-publishing world, about metadata and the importance of that.  So, POD allows you to easily update all of the book information, the pricing, the description, anything you want to update.

Next Step: PDF

You've edited your book, picked the correct trim size and evaluated your competition. Now, all you POD - PDFneed to get started are the finished PDFs of your book for print on demand. You need a PDF of the cover and a separate PDF of the interior.  In creating those PDFs, that’s why It’s really valuable to use a professional who understands how to create a PDF for print.  Just a Word version of a PDF, maybe, is not going to work.  It definitely won’t work for the cover.  It may work in the interior, but it definitely won’t work for the cover. IngramSpark offers a cover generator template.  Once you decide your trim size, you can use that template.  The cover gets placed on it so that it will fit perfectly.  And then, you just create an IngramSpark account, upload your information about your book, and what we call the metadata.  Then, at the end of that, you upload your files. We have this great validator tool.  On the screen, this scrolling thing happens, and it will show you if you have any issues with your files.  If you do, you can go back and have your designer fix them and re-upload them.  Once it goes through, you get a proof, you look at it, and if you say, “Gosh, this looks fantastic,” you turn on the distribution for that book.  What that means is that your book actually goes out into the world via these data feeds.  One of the primary ones is Ingram’s catalogue, and from there it goes out to Amazon, and Barnes & Noble, Gardners, and the UK.  You know, it goes all over the place.  So, it’s really fantastic. Just to bring clarity, one of the reasons why Ingram is so important for a self-publisher is because booksellers and libraries want to purchase books across a multitude of publishers from a single source.  They don’t want to have to go directly to these publishers.  They want to just have one or two vendors that they deal with, and so Ingram’s one. Once your book is in the Ingram catalogue, it’s like your book is right there beside all of the Random House books.  There’s nothing that marks your book as being self-published.  It just looks like any other book in the Ingram catalogue.  So, when you are promoting your book to libraries and to booksellers, it helps to elevate you into the realm of professional authors. If you can say, “My book is available from Ingram,” you don’t have to say that it’s self-published.  You don’t really have to say a whole lot more than about the book itself and where it can be purchased, and you say that it’s available from Ingram.  When you say that it’s from Ingram, it’s implied that it’s been vetted and is of a good quality.  That brings up another point, and that is to make sure that your book really is a good-quality book, which, by the way, is not that expensive. I say spend your money in creating, formatting, and marketing your book.  Don’t spend your money on inventory.  You can always do that.  If your book takes off, you have a lot of other options, but especially bringing the book to market as a new author, don’t invest in inventory.  Invest in creating your book and bringing it to market.

The Difference Between Ingram and CreateSpace

POD - infoJust for full disclosure, I used to actually work at CreateSpace.  I loved working for CreateSpace, and for Amazon, and I feel really proud of the work that I did there.  I mainly worked with publishers, not so much with authors, like I do now at Ingram.  But, I have nothing but great things to say about CreateSpace.  I will say, because this is probably the #1 question that I get. Authors often ask, “What’s the difference between IngramSpark and CreateSpace?”  So, I think we can have a discussion that can help bring clarity to authors that are sort of wondering the answers to that question. The difference is that Ingram has much broader distribution.  CreateSpace distributes just to Amazon.  Although, CreateSpace has a program that they call “Expanded Distribution”.  Guess what “Expanded Distribution” is?  It’s Ingram.  It will put the book in the Ingram catalogue, which is a good thing, but it actually puts the book in the catalogue at a disadvantage to the author.  Your book is listed with what we call a “short discount, non-returnable”.  It doesn’t really get you what you need if you’re planning to sell to libraries and especially to booksellers. By putting your book into IngramSpark, you make your book available to Ingram and everywhere that Ingram sells; which is about 40,000 retail and library partners around the world.  Then, you control and can specify how that book gets listed in the Ingram catalogue.  You want that kind of control as an author, and I would advise you to have that control.  You can set up the same book, using the same ISBN, and we’ll talk in a minute about ISBNs because I have a lot to say about that.  But, you can set up the same book, with the same ISBN, that you own, in both platforms, with the same files.  Then, you’ll be pretty-well set. What’s great about having your book on CreateSpace is that your book will always show up as being in stock within Amazon’s catalogue, which is a great thing.  You want that as an author as well.  What’s great about setting it up with IngramSpark is that in the Ingram catalogue there’s no mention of CreateSpace being associated with your book.  Booksellers don’t like to see that.  If you walk into the store with a CreateSpace book, you’re likely not to be warmly welcomed.  So, you don’t want that. You just set up your book under your own imprint in the IngramSpark catalogue, and you’re good to go.  If I had to pick one platform, because a lot of people just want to have one place where they keep everything, I would suggest it be IngramSpark just because it’s the broadest distribution.

The Use of ISBNs

To distribute a book, you do need an ISBN, which is the international book identification number.  You attain an ISBN from, in the US it’s Bowker.  In Canada, the Canadian government gives free ISBNs.  So, it’s kind of country-specific, but in the US, you can obtain them from BowkerTo me, owning your ISBN is like owning your name.  It travels throughout the life of your book, and there’s a different ISBN for every format of the book that you have, and that identifies the format as well.  So, you want to own it just because you don’t want your book tied to any one distributor. Anytime your book is given a free ISBN, your book is tied to whoever gave you that free ISBN.  You never want that for the life of your book, or even for a short length of time.  You’ll regret it in the end, and it’s not a good thing to do.  Just to be clear, CreateSpace does offer the use of their ISBN in your book, but you can’t use that ISBN on any other platform but CreateSpace.  In addition to that, the publisher is then listed as CreateSpace, which is not necessarily a good thing.  On Amazon it’s one thing, but off of Amazon it’s a whole other matter. You should really use the same ISBN on both your IngramSpark and CreateSpace edition.  Otherwise, it creates confusion in the marketplace.  For instance, you’ll suddenly get Barnes & Noble interested in your book, and they go to the Ingram catalogue.  Well, you’ve set up your book via CreateSpace using your free ISBN, and you’ve turned on “Expanded Distribution,” so they see it listed there, but you’ve also assigned your own ISBN to the one that you set up with IngramSpark.  So, it takes Barnes & Noble a minute to see that.  Then they’re confused, and it doesn’t necessarily put you in the realm of a professional author.  Instantly you will kind of have a mark against you. You want to set up your book exactly with the same ISBN that you have purchased and that you own.  It will travel along the life and the format of that book on any platform.  Like, you don’t want exclusivity anywhere.  We don’t require exclusivity at IngramSpark, and I don’t advocate exclusivity for the author.  I think you should be as broad as you can and make your book available as widely as possible.

Print On Demand Tips

Remember this process:
  • Use POD when you’re launching as a new author.  It’s there to really make it easy and affordable for you.
  • Purchase your own ISBN.  Make that investment.
  • Make the investment in working with professional editors, designers, marketers, and spend your money like that.
  • Set your book up, at least in IngramSpark and CreateSpace.  If you’re only going to choose one, I would choose IngramSpark.

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