I enjoy reading his blog because like Emile and I, he doesn’t come from the “make money online” crowd. He has real experience selling content to a niche target market and talks about his success on the Startup Freedom blog. He also does interviews with other online entrepreneurs. Like us, he believes that interviews make great content.

A funny thing happened. I contacted him about doing an interview and he agreed – but we each thought we were interviewing the other. So when the agreed time came for the interview and we realized we each thought we were taking the lead, we just decided to have a conversation about how we both got started and things we were doing to sell memberships and content.

Below is the video. Some of this I’ve already talked about here on Membercon, but there are some nuggets in there that I haven’t mentioned before. Plus Sean has some great advice for membership site owners as well.

Note: One thing I realize – I move my big grape head around a lot during interviews. I need to STOP! So, if you can get past my ugly mug being front and center the whole time, I think you’ll get some good info from our talk.

Part 1:

Part 2:

Yet it is a transition that must happen if traditional media companies are to survive. Advertising just isn’t working as it used to and it is much harder these days to spend a dollar on ads and make two. I can attest to it first hand from our recent ad spends.

There is no question that Condé Nast and magazines in general are in for a tough time. The reason can be summed up in just a few sentences from the article:

The transition could be made all the more difficult because consumers have grown accustomed to paying so little for Condé Nast’s magazines. “They’ve been one of the biggest offenders for undercharging for their products,” Mr. Janson added. “But having said that, I think there is a certain type of content that people will be willing to pay for.” Mr. Townsend expressed confidence that the consumer would come around, noting, “They pay $180 a month for a cable bill.” The company’s goal is eventually to reach parity in profits from advertising and consumers, he said.

Consumers pay $180 a month for cable because they never got used to paying nearly nothing for it because it was subsidized by advertising. Cable companies charged for their content (or more appropriately, to deliver that content) from the beginning and there was never an expectation that it would be nearly free.

I don’t believe the new strategy is doomed to failure, as Jeff Jarvis seems to. But I do know just from our experiences on a much, much smaller scale that going from free (or nearly free) to a paid model can drain the soul.

As long as traditional media companies keep in mind that the people who will never pay are the most vocal and simply forge on, it will happen. Traditional media companies can fight through the tough fight that is coming and come out on the other end stronger and more powerful.

The article is about as strong an argument as I have seen to charge immediately for content, especially online and especially for smaller players.

ConsumerReports.org starting charging for their content from day one because they don’t accept advertising for their magazine or website in order to stay unbiased. Turns out they were right along.

Creating content for sale is the right way to go for 99% of websites out there. Unfortunately the 98% of them that try Google AdSense first haven’t figured it out yet.

Or maybe I should say fortunately for us. The more people that realize people will pay for content, the more competition we will have. But I also believe that the more niche and specific information you can deliver, the more sales you will make.

Here’s the hypothesis: A list of subscribers that has paid for something is as valuable as a list of prospects that received something for free – that is 100 times as large.

In other words, we think that a list of 100 people who paid for content is as valuable as a free list of 10,000.

Are we right in our assumption? We’re going to find out!

I’ve always said that I would rather have a small, well-trained list than a large list that isn’t so. But there is probably a point where a freebie list will match the profit potential of a smaller list simply because the people willing to buy something are also on that freebie list.

But can we actually make more money from a tiny list where the subscriber has paid $1.99 for the squeeze page content rather than just giving their email address? We think so and we think it’s time to be tested.

So a few days ago we changed the squeeze page for InterviewIncome.com to charge $1.99 for the series of 4 videos that we previously gave away for free in exchange for their email address. We think that not only will we get higher quality email addresses, but that the people who do pay $1.99 will convert to other paid products at a much higher rate than those that paid nothing.

The 4-part video series is one hour in length when combined, and we do give solid information in the series. It’s easily worth $25 or more, but I doubt we could get that kind of spend from a squeeze page. But $1.99 seems more than reasonable for a one-hour class and we’re curious as heck to see if this works.

Old school internet marketers are probably rolling their eyes at this point, and that’s OK. We may be totally wrong on this – that’s what a test is all about.

But there is no denying that when someone pays for something, they give it much higher value – even if it is just a dime.

Our list will grow at a much slower rate, but dollar for dollar we think we can make more money charging for our squeeze page content. We will be growing an instant list of buyers and it also sets the right tone for the list – content is valuable and we are going to charge for it.

What do you think? Are we crazy? Wouldn’t be the first time someone called us that. Let is know in the comments.

Not only has he made over $1,000 since it was listed 40 days ago, more importantly it’s been an incredible new source of leads for his higher-priced website content. In this discussion we talk about how you can list your E-Book for sale in the Kindle store and some tips, tricks and lessons learned that Rob shares to save you literally days of time getting it uploaded and listed.

Most of the information out there about how to publish for the Kindle is flat out wrong. Rob talks about his experiences and how it has helped him get new traffic to his content website.

4 ways to watch/listen/read:

1) Listen to the audio here (click on the triangle play button):

2) Download the mp3 file here
3) Read the transcript (below the video)
4) Watch the video:

Related Links:

- Kindle Publishing page on Amazon
- Rob’s book in the Kindle store

Transcript:

Tim Bourquin: Well, let’s kind of move on to the distribution and the way you find new people that haven’t heard about you because –

Rob Booker: Right.

Tim Bourquin: Trader Interviews has been around for five to six years now and everyday there are people that have never ever heard of us and you think that at some point that’ll end, but it never does.

Rob Booker: Yeah, right.

Tim Bourquin: I like the idea of you put out some content — one of the things you do is sell a book for the Kindle on Amazon for $1.99.

Rob Booker: Right.

Tim Bourquin: The book we talked about. Why did you decide to do that? What’s the process of getting of my eBook put on for sale there? How does that work?

Rob Booker: Everything that I’ve ever done well that has generated interest in my membership website — and I honestly and humbly submit to you — has been done by mistake; trial and error. And I have for a long time wanted to publish for the Kindle, not because I thought that it would generate a lot of interest, but because I was fascinated by this platform. I was fascinated by the idea that it would be a new outlet for distribution. But I had no idea whether it would work or not and I simply, I originally did it more out of interest in the process than I did out of sort of generating interest. Because I just can’t pick the one thing that’s going to do it. I’ve just given up on picking the one thing that’s going to do it.

So, I did it out of interest to begin with because I realized that digital publishing probably five years from now is going to have an even greater — almost every book that I read myself, I’m reading on my iPhone on the Kindle application. And I had a Kindle but I gave it to my friend in Japan where the Kindle wasn’t available yet years ago. So, I gave him a first generation one. And I’ve told like 50 people they’ve got to start reading on it, and I just realized that it’s catching on and that people can go anywhere with all of their books.

So, it started out as this I want to publish for that and I want to be an early adapter if I can. I still consider it very early on in the process. I wanted to be an early adapter in figuring that process out for myself. Of course I could outsource it, but I did every single step of the way on this project by myself.

Tim Bourquin: And at $1.99 I can’t imagine you’re getting rich off of this.

Rob Booker: Correct.

Tim Bourquin: It’s definitely — so they’re paying for it which is always good.

Rob Booker: Right.

Tim Bourquin: But it’s a promotional tool in the end.

Rob Booker: It’s a promotional tool in the end. And that eBook is actually free and has been for actually five years, six years. It’s been free. It’s been downloaded; it’s probably a million times. Five hundred thousand is when I lost count because I switched servers and I no longer counted physical file downloads and that was three years ago, it was at 500,000.

Tim Bourquin: Wow.

Rob Booker: I mean the eBook in its free form has been downloaded maybe more than any other — it was the single greatest promotional tool that I ever did and it was the first eBook I wrote. I saved the Microsoft Word document with Adobe Distiller all those years ago and then I put it on the web and it just like – and I mean it’s easy to share, you could put your email address in it. It would automatically send it to you and then you could put — this is kind of like a no-no but you could put your friend’s email address in and it would send a copy to your friend.

Tim Bourquin: Right sure.

Rob Booker: And it would say that you know, “Bob thinks you should read this.” And then it went from person to person to person very quickly. And this is an expanded version. So I thought I improved it, I expanded it, I could charge for it and it would the best version of what I’ve done or the best issue of my eBooks or whatever you want to call it to put on the Kindle because it had been downloaded so often I had a built-in audience that would be ready to say, “All right, I’m ready to download that and give it a try.” And it was my first attempt to see if I could even make it work, if the pictures would show up, if the text would be formatted correctly, and boy it was like wrestling with –

Tim Bourquin: Yeah.

Rob Booker: It just drove me crazy at first.

Tim Bourquin: Well talk about the process…

Rob Booker: Okay.

Tim Bourquin: How do you get the — do you email Amazon? What do you do there?

Rob Booker: Well, I logged on to Amazon. I went to, I think, it’s DTP.amazon.com I think it’s the digital text platform or whatever that stands for. I think it’s DTP.amazon.com. And what you can do is you can actually log in to that website with your regular amazon.com log-in. So, they recognize you as a publisher as long as you’re a customer. It’s a seamless process so you can just log in and you’re ready to go.

Tim Bourquin: So, if I bought a book there, I’m already good to go?

Rob Booker: You’re already good to go. And then what it has is a very simple layout at the log-in screen. It’s my stuff or my bookshelf or my projects and my reports and then like a dashboard on the front page. And what you can do from that page is start a project and it goes through a five-step process where there are five sections all on the same page on amazon.com. And you can expand them by clicking on them just like a Gmail email that expands if you click on the title of the email, it expands down. Each section will expand down if you complete the section or if you click on it. You go through the process of naming it, doing a short description. You upload a file that’s an image of the cover so they can display it as an image of the cover and they give you very, very clear guidelines for what the size of that image should be. I think it’s 800 x 600 or 1280 x 800 or something along those lines. You could just make — I just went into an image program and wrote a bunch of words on a background and then just uploaded it. Did it by myself, I didn’t do anything special. You set the price for the book. You write your name in as the author. You check off if you’ve got the rights to publish it around the world and –

Tim Bourquin: Do they suggest a price for you or they want kind of the Kindle range in there?

Rob Booker: Yeah, that’s a good question. They say you can’t charge less than 99 cents for something and you can’t charge less than a $1.99 if it’s of a certain file size. So, you can start to work the process out in your mind that they’re paying for it to get distributed and downloaded to people’s phones and so forth so they’ve got to make that content available. So, if it’s a very big file, you have to have a minimum price. So, it’s the opposite of what you think Amazon would say. We’re accustomed to Amazon saying you can’t charge more than something, but what they’re really doing is they say you can’t charge less than something.

Tim Bourquin: They figured out what the costs are –

Rob Booker: Yeah, exactly. And so, I simply went through that five-step or four-step process. I went from the basic description of the material to saying that I did have the rights to publish it worldwide to uploading the actual content. And that Tim is where I wrestled with the beast.

Tim Bourquin: What kind of format did you have to upload?

Rob Booker: Strangely enough if you buy a book on Amazon — and anyone I don’t care which one you pick because I bought them all. If you buy a book and it says here’s how you publish to the Kindle, that book will be essentially full of stuff that I would advice everyone in the world of potential Amazon Kindle publishing to complete ignore.

Rob Booker: It was the worst — it was the worst information because every time I tried to upload it in the form that had been — it’s going to be simpler this way Rob, it’s going to be easier this way Rob, they’re going to be able to read it easier. So for two days for 10 hours, I did it the way that they said I was supposed to do it. And they said, “Whatever you do, do not just write it in Microsoft Word and then uploaded. Don’t do that. Don’t do that. And definitely don’t do it in Word 2007 or above. Don’t do that.” So of course I didn’t do that for three days. And of course at the end Tim, it was the simplest thing in the world. I finally got mad and I said, “Well I’m just going to try that.” I had my Microsoft Word document formatted exactly as I liked it — and maybe I could speak about that for a moment.

Tim Bourquin: Sure.

Rob Booker: And it had the images in line right in the documented; pasted right there, the charts, the pictures, everything in line with the text, laid it out like I liked it — and everybody knows how to use Microsoft Word.

Tim Bourquin: Yeah.

Rob Booker: I did a table of contents that linked to heading sections. So, I highlighted content in the table of contents and then I right-clicked and chose hyperlink and then I chose a place in the document where I wanted it to go. And then I formatted the text on the headings and all the subheadings just like I wanted; bold, underlined for each heading. Chapter heading, I wrote the letters and the numbers just like I wanted them and I gave them a heading format in Microsoft Word just like you would ordinarily do, and then I uploaded the stupid thing and it was perfect.

Tim Bourquin: So, when you were uploading it in like PDF or something, was it giving you error messages or was it looking right?

Rob Booker: It wasn’t even uploading the images. It couldn’t upload it correctly. The formatting was screwed up. Then they said, “Do html. Save it as a webpage and then upload it as a webpage.” Well then the images didn’t come out. And then upload it as a .mobi. What’s a .mobi? Is that a DJ? I mean what is that?

Tim Bourquin: Yeah.

Rob Booker: I mean I don’t even know what that is. So, I found out what .mobi was and I spent four hours doing .mobi. And I downloaded software packages that would convert this stuff that I did. And I realized at the end of the day…

Tim Bourquin: It was exactly what they told you not to do is what worked right?

Rob Booker: Exactly.

Tim Bourquin: So, it was a Word document you uploaded. It took it?

Rob Booker: It formatted it perfectly.

Tim Bourquin: Okay.

Rob Booker: And it put the images in line. It gray scaled the images. There was all this discussion about you’re supposed to choose the right color formatting and you’re supposed to — don’t use this certain type of image quality. And I finally gave up and all then I just put the images in just like I wanted. And guess what? Amazon reads it just fine. They got it all — really it was actually so simple that I looked back on the process and I said, “I’m going to do that again.” Like, “Now, I’m going to do that again because it was so easy.”

Tim Bourquin: Now how about the approval process? I mean are you allowed to put a link to your website at the bottom of every page? How do they see that kind of promotional part of it?

Rob Booker: You can put anything you want inside your book. You could put — I mean if you have the rights to put it meaning they’re more worried about copyright than they are about anything else. So, you could put a link to the website and what I put inside the eBook is an invitation. I say, “Listen if you trade conservatively and if you build up your account over time, there are some spectacular gains that you can make in the world of trading.” So, that’s a simplified version of what the eBook actually says And it says, “But if you don’t believe me and you don’t think then here’s my email address and here’s a special link that you can go to right now and we’ll send you even more information than what you’ve just read for free.”

Tim Bourquin: Wow.

Rob Booker: And that –

Tim Bourquin: Or for $1.99.

Rob Booker: Oh, no we’ll send a separate addition to the eBook for free.

Tim Bourquin: I got you, okay.

Rob Booker: It pushes the conversation further because now they’ve sent us an email, now they’ve subscribed. And so a reader of the eBook now is a member of our email family–

Tim Bourquin: Right.

Rob Booker: –by doing that. And almost every person who reads the book, almost every single one will click on that link and get that — so we say something very specific, it’s a call to action about a very specific thing. It says, “We need your email to send you this information” and our response back says, “We’d like to stay in touch with you. Here’s the free information that you requested. To stay in touch with us about this and get the next report or get the next whatever, go to the website, put your email address in and we’ll stay in touch with you.”

Tim Bourquin: Outstanding. Now, how has Amazon worked in terms of being a search engine? People type in Forex? Just like podcasters get great search from iTunes –

Rob Booker: Right.

Tim Bourquin: Does Amazon work? Does it get you a lot of people?

Rob Booker: Well, time will tell. I mean it took me about 24 to 48 hours for the book to get approved.

Tim Bourquin: Oh, I forgot to ask about that, do they approve it?

Rob Booker: Yeah.

Tim Bourquin: Is there some sort of an approval–

Rob Booker: There’s a 24-hour period of time to approve the content.

Tim Bourquin: Okay.

Rob Booker: And that means that someone reads through it and they says, “Yeah, it’s approved.” And I suspect that as long as you have the rights to do it, they’re just flipping through that material. And it was faster than 24 hours. It was really quick.

Tim Bourquin: Okay.

Rob Booker: And it was available for sale, but it didn’t have the description for another 48 hours. And it was available for sale for the first 10 hours without a picture of the book. So, you don’t want to panic if it goes on sale and it doesn’t have some of those elements. They’re coming, they just take awhile to update on the site. And then after that, it goes on sale.

What’s fascinating to me is that it went on sale and I don’t know how it did as far as search engines, but I went to 160. I sent you the image this morning. I took a screenshot. It actually went to 120, but I didn’t catch the screenshot. It went to 160 out of every book available on the Kindle store within about 48 to 72 hours and stayed in the below 200 range for like a week and a half or so, and it sold hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of copies –

Tim Bourquin: And you didn’t do anything different? You didn’t buy — you didn’t advertise it? It just did that organically?

Rob Booker: After that process was done, I sent out an email to my database. I wanted to see –

Tim Bourquin: Ah yes.

Rob Booker: – like first what can Amazon –

Tim Bourquin: Of course.

Rob Booker: – do for me. Then I sent an email out and then I did a Twitter update and I said here’s a little contest. And I did a contest. I said if you’ll write a review on Amazon about the book or if you’ll twit about it or if you put it on your Facebook status or you’ll send an email to all your friends, and you send us an update with a screenshot of what you did or the link to the review you wrote on Amazon, we’ll do a two-hour webinar for everybody that did something like that. We’ll put you all in there and then we’ll do a drawing and I’ll spend a couple of hours on the phone with somebody that did something extra special.

Tim Bourquin: Nice.

Rob Booker: And then it took off from there and it stayed — the ranking stayed really good for awhile even after that.

Tim Bourquin: Wow.

Rob Booker: So, I did do promotion after that. I kind of asked myself do I really want to use the trust that I have with my database to promote a $1.99 eBook? And the answer was, I don’t know; like I don’t know yet. I don’t what this will generate. I don’t how many people I’ve never heard from. And the answer is there were hundreds of people that I didn’t have on the list, I’d never known, never heard from, that came in the door because I published for the Kindle. Like hundreds of people that I never — they weren’t in the database.

Tim Bourquin: Right.

Rob Booker: They weren’t people who already knew me that I wouldn’t have had access to unless something had been available for them to find on Amazon.

Tim Bourquin: because they’ve never been on any other platform that you were there already –

Rob Booker: Exactly.

Tim Bourquin: So, this was a brand new platform where obviously there are millions and millions of users.

Rob Booker: And there’s a lot of people at home with a Kindle right?

Tim Bourquin: Right.

Rob Booker: They don’t — I mean they’re searching for — you know their brother does Forex or whatever, and a lot of people they’re finding it on their Kindle by searching for Forex or whatever and they’re seeing the book pop up and…

Tim Bourquin: All right. So, having said that now two questions: How much of the $1.99 do you keep and then I’ll go right out there and ask you how much money have you made doing this?

Rob Booker: I think I keep 60%? No 60 — I don’t even know, 70% that’s what it is.

Tim Bourquin: Okay.

Rob Booker: Like I’m the least interested guy. I don’t have any goals. But I’m like, oh work what did I do? So, I think I’ve made about $1000 from the sales of the book. It maybe more than that now, but it’s about $1000. But in terms of people who signed up for other products or services what’s the lifetime value of publishing that? I would conservatively put it in the $10,000 to $15000 range. I would say that I am most likely going to sell a couple of webinar subscriptions and possibly down the road something even more personal than that. It’s a fairly good — I mean I do a pretty good job of converting people you know–

Tim Bourquin: Right.

Rob Booker: – once they’ve come into the family of email addresses or whatever.

Tim Bourquin: Now, this is good because Amazon is obviously kind of the premiere site. You could go out and try to find other places to publish this. I don’t know maybe on a Sony Reader.

Rob Booker: Right.

Tim Bourquin: If Amazon is 80% of the way there, do you go out and try to find all the 15 other sites that are the next 20% or do you say I’m happy Amazon – you know, my time is too valuable to go wherever else.

Rob Booker: Amazon made it so easy and has such a large universe of people available to me. And I’m such a fan of Amazon to begin with that that’s where my loyalty was and that’s what I decided to bite off to start with.

I did initially go to the iTunes section that says how to publish content for iTunes, and I realized that I do not understand a word of it. It was complicated and the submission process was burdensome. It was done by email, it was done by — it was a far more complicated process to keep a smaller amount of the revenue in the end for the iBooks application which I do have for iPhone as well but which I have absolutely, positively decided it’s not easy enough to publish for yet. It’s just not simple enough. The process isn’t a three-step process to upload it. It’s a contact us and then we’ll email you back if we feel like it. I mean they don’t even — that’s it. They just say, well just email us and we’ll let you know. And I thought email you and let you know like — I mean –

Tim Bourquin: Yeah.

Rob Booker: It’s like they’re going to approve whether my content — and you know maybe it’s worth it, maybe one day it’ll be worth it. But I like something that as seamless and simple to do the first time around as possible. And I’ll probably have to hire somebody to get me into the iTunes thing because it’s not a simple process just yet. It’s in its infancy.

Tim Bourquin: That’s pretty typical of the Apple too. The same thing happens with the app store here, a lot of grumblings about –

Rob Booker: Right.

Tim Bourquin: – how long it takes and they don’t approve things. You don’t know why. So, I would imagine it would be very similar for the iPad so…

Rob Booker: When I went down the road of wanting to develop an application for my subscriber database, for my membership site, to access their trading account and generate reports and implement different strategies, I had the option of going through the Apple app route. They keep 30% of the revenue and they go through an approval process and it’s searchable in the store. There are some really great benefits to that of course. And then also I had a friend come to me and say, “Rob, why don’t you just build it for a mobile browser? Why don’t you just build so that it’s a mobile browser based thing and you keep all the subscription revenue and people just log in through the browser, and then it’s just not available for the iPhone, it’s available for the Blackberry, for the Android and for the — which is huge in Europe is the Nokia whatever that operating system is. It’s huge. It runs on more devices in Europe than any other platform.” And I realized, oh my gosh, like I could just bypass the store the first time around with an application that’s simpler to build, there’s no approval process. I can put it out there.

And then secondarily, Twitter built a mobile application, a mobile website before they built an iTunes app store app. And it’s a really good analogy, like get it working for people on a mobile browser for free first with no application process and then maybe I’ll go down the road of building an app specifically to do the same thing.

Tim Bourquin: Yeah. And there is some value just like there’s value to being in the Amazon store that people can find you so…

Rob Booker: Right.

Tim Bourquin: That’s down the road, but there will be some value there. All right. Just back Amazon really quickly there and then we’ll finish up because this has been great Rob, I really appreciate it. Did you do anything special in terms of just writing a description that would be keyword rich? Anything like that you thought helped?

Rob Booker: There are two things about that. One is, I wondered if I could change my description or actually change the file if I had a mistake in the file after it was published. Because like I don’t do it as much as you do, I wish I could go back in time and learn as much about testing keywords and sentences as much as you do and I’m trying. I’m doing a better job thanks to some of the stuff that you published. I’m like putting more time into it. But I thought once I published this, is set in stone and the answer is, no. What’s interesting is that I could change my description and I could even upload an updated version of the Microsoft Words document as many times as I wanted. And what happens is it goes through another 24-hour approval process and during that time, the older version of your description stays put and the older version of your actual eBook download stays put. So, it’s still for sale, you don’t complicate that process. And once they approve it, they put the new file up on their servers that’ll be downloadable.

So, what’s nice about this is I can actually test keywords in my description and track if I can time it. I can go from one week to the next and say I’m going to change my description this week and I’m going to see what kind of difference that makes in the store. And so I’m definitely going to go down that road. I don’t have anything different than the original description right now. But that’s exactly what the next step in the process for me will be is, does changing the description make a difference.

Tim Bourquin: Absolutely. All right. Well, that’s just great. I’m definitely going to publish either some text transcripts of the interviews I’ve done and do a fancy cover. I’ll probably outsource it to Elance for 50 bucks and have a nice cover made or something along those lines. But this is great. I never considered publishing this as a platform. Obviously, a lot of smarter people than I am -you — have done this already. This is great. It’s just one more huge place that people that are hanging out that is a door for them to find you which is terrific.

Rob Booker: Yeah, I decided that if I did it now and we’re still very early on, we’re only a couple of years into this whole thing. If I did this now, 15 years from now, I’m going to be really glad that I learned how to do it this early, I learned how to do it right early, and I learned what did and didn’t work early. I mean this is it. This is where a lot of books are going to be published and I realized that down the road I may decide to do a lot more of this if it’s profitable. But down the road, I don’t want to be trying to learn this or figure it out when it’s all a crowded space and it takes too long to figure out.

Tim Bourquin: Right. Well Rob hey, I really appreciate you coming in the office today and sharing all this. This is huge. I’m going to break it into two parts probably. The first part is about giving away free content and then second part about the Kindle. Thanks for your time. I appreciate it.

Rob Booker: Thank you Tim.

In part two we talk about how he published an E-book for the Amazon Kindle platform.

But first, our discussion about how he markets his content.

4 ways to watch/listen/read:

1) Listen to the audio here (click on the triangle play button):

2) Download the mp3 file here
3) Read the transcript (below the video)
4) Watch the video:

Related Links:

- Rob’s website

Transcript:

Tim Bourquin: All right everybody, hello and welcome to MemberCon. Another interview here today, I’m going to speak with Rob Booker. And actually, I’ve spoken with Rob at our other membership site over at Traders Interviews, but he’s also an entrepreneur outside of all the things he does in the trading realm. And so, I wanted to talk to him specifically about one thing today and that was the way he sells content. He just told me about a book that he’s selling on Amazon for the Kindle called, “Forex Strategy 10: Low Risk/High Return Currency Trading”. We’re not going to talk about that obviously, that part of it, but just about selling the content and his ideas for getting the word out there. So, Rob thanks for joining me here.

Rob Booker: It’s good to be here Tim.

Tim Bourquin: So, Rob lives nearby me now and is here in the office which is cool, I don’t have to do the interview over the phone. So, you’ve always had this kind of thing in the middle where you are a trader and you do all that and you’ve got your following there, but you’re an online entrepreneur too and you like to sell content, to put stuff out there. Most guys aren’t into it as much you. You read our MemberCon blog.

Rob Booker: Right. Right.

Tim Bourquin: So, how did that happen? How do you — kind of are in the middle there?

Rob Booker: Well, I’ve gone from trading for myself to being a CTA, which is a Commodities Trading Advisor, so I manage for families and friends and I’m licensed by the National Futures Association. As you know, trading and the world of the markets can be a really lonely endeavor especially early on when you feel like you don’t know very much. So, like some other people, including you and others, I started writing a blog maybe even before the term had been popularized, which turned into a regular column which turned into a newsletter service which turned into a membership site which turned into a huge ball and chain around my neck — no just kidding.

Tim Bourquin: Having to always update it?

Rob Booker: Yeah. And it became an excellent way for me to repeat the concepts that I believe in with respect to trading. It helped solidify those beliefs. It’s so you know everything that I gave out in the subscription site, I felt like I was getting back in spades and it just sort of took on a life of its own. So, it’s been about six years now that I’ve run the membership site, publishing eBooks, content, actual published books, and selling subscriptions right on the website to members that have been around for years and years.

Tim Bourquin: Have you found a good balance between offering the free blog content, offering free eBooks like I saw on your site that you offer and transition those people over to actually become buyers or something?

Rob Booker: That’s a really great question. I think I’ve struggled with that as much as anybody or more than anybody. And I read just voraciously to try to increase my understanding of what I’m supposed to do or how I’m supposed to do it. And I feel like to a certain extent, I’m self-taught, but I have found, to answer your question, I think a happy methodology for offering something to people to become interested in the content to begin with and then asking them to take a step further. Absolutely, yes.

Tim Bourquin: Okay. So, is it a matter of one free eBook and then you’re pitching them afterwards? What’s kind of your mode of doing that?

Rob Booker: I actually had lunch yesterday with a fellow who’s kind of at the beginning stages of where I was six years ago and I’m happy to sort of talk about it openly. I have a multi-step, fairly simple process that I implement now. It’s more principle based than it is rule based. Meaning I try to offer on a regular basis once every 30 to 60 days something of value that’s absolutely free and that’s easy to share and in the past, an electronic book, a Microsoft Word document saved as a PDF, published by me, designed by me, done by me, which sort of generated enthusiasm for something authentic because it didn’t look I’d had a designer or graphic illustrator do it — something every 30 to 60 days that was absolutely free and easy to share. It could be an eBook. Sometimes I did mini websites about trading around an economic report. Sometimes I would do an interview. Sometimes I would actually do a full on video. I would answer questions that people had submitted to me by email and I’d put the video up on YouTube. And I would always try to make the content something that was of value in and of itself that really almost seemed like borderline, I probably shouldn’t be giving this away. Like other people would stop and say, “Well that’s too much, like you’re probably giving away too much.” But I wanted to do it to say, “Listen if you don’t ever want to do business with me that’s fine, but I don’t want to waste your time either.” I don’t want you to think, “Oh, another email from Rob Booker.” I want you to say, “Oh, it’s an email from Rob Booker, I don’t have to buy anything and it’s going to be interesting.”

Tim Bourquin: Right.

Rob Booker: So, that was the first stages of it. And that generated, over the course of the last six years, about 30,000 regular opt-in and double opt-in subscribers to my email database, which are waiting for me to send them out something from time to time.

Tim Bourquin: Right. And I guess between 30 and 60 days is a long enough time between that it’s not something where if you’re putting a lot of paid content between those, they still feel like I’m missing something here. I guess there’s a point at which you get to the point where you’re putting out so much content that they don’t feel like they’re missing anything. I think that’s a dangerous place to be.

Rob Booker: Yeah. And I think that’s something that’s been really hard for me to figure out how to do. But a lot of times the eBook or the questions that I do in the video or lately every month I’ve just been doing a video and publishing my actual live trading account statement or I actually do a mini question and answer session for 15 minutes about what trades I took and how I did it — and you can’t get the whole thing out in 15 minutes even if I wanted to. But what it does is I say — and this is what I’ve been doing for the last 30 days while you haven’t seen me. I’ve been working with the latest class in producing these trades. These trades were taken with the class. And so last time you saw me, the account was at x, y, and z and now it’s at 400 or whatever it’s at and in between we’ve talking about it the whole time. I’m happy to let you know what I’m doing, but I don’t have time and it’s just the honest truth, I don’t have time in 15 minutes to share the whole thing, but I’m completely transparent about it.

And people say, “Oh, my gosh, what are you doing like showing your account statement online? Like that’s insane. Who would ever do that? Your numbers are on there, you account, everything’s on there. Why would you do that?” And there answer is, because it’s about authenticity. It’s about saying, “Listen I’ve got something I think I can share with you in a short amount of time that might help you out, but listen if you want to go a step further, I have something that will allow you to do that.”

Tim Bourquin: And we should tell, for people that aren’t in the financial industry that that’s completely unusual. Most guys, they put out software out there, you know for a fact that they’re not traders. They’ve got somebody else to write it, it probably doesn’t work, it cost $5000.

Rob Booker: Right.

Tim Bourquin: So for somebody to actually show their account statements and prove that they know what they’re doing is extremely rare. And right there, you’ve got huge credibility.

Rob Booker: Right. It’s like a person who maybe runs a marathoning or a running site or somebody who runs a medical site that helps people monitor their heart rate or whatever; things like that. It’s like somebody saying come into my life for half a day or come into my life for 15 minutes and I’m just going to let it out. I’m going to let you know what the story is behind here and what’s going on. And it really goes a long way ’cause you get so many emails and there’s so much stuff out there that it’s just who is really behind all this. And I think that goes a long way for me in keeping people around on the list.

And it’s been sometimes — two months ago I had somebody that said they joined the list three years ago and they’ve been just getting emails on and off, they’d never written me back, they’d never talked to me on the phone, all they’ve been doing is just hanging out on the list. You know, I’m pretty low key about the whole thing. And then something came out, I said I was ready to take on another private student and work with them privately as a trader and he wrote in and he said, “I’m ready to do it” and it’s a very expensive sale. It’s a very, very expensive deal and he did it on the spot and had been sort of like all these years that I’d never heard anything from him — you know all I had been doing is basically he’d been freeloading off of that content for awhile.

Tim Bourquin: Yeah. Yeah.

Rob Booker: But really in the end, it built enough trust that over those years he was ready to do something.

Tim Bourquin: See that’s where I really am trying to find my way there too because three years in terms of the sales process, I can’t even imagine right? I mean I’m glad to have those people on the list, but my kind of MO has been if you haven’t bought within the first three days, I’m going to push you until you’re off the list. And if you had done that —

Rob Booker: Right.

Tim Bourquin: – you wouldn’t have made that sale so… I mean it’s good to keep in mind and it’s a good reminder for me that just because somebody is not ready to buy right now, doesn’t mean that they’re not going to be ready to buy in two years. I mean it just seems like an awful long time but they’re there.

Rob Booker: Right. Every like 90 days, I’ll do a larger class, an online webinar based class that’ll have between 20 and 30 spots available. And what I’ll do is go through a process of saying — I’ll email more frequently right at that stage and that’ll be more of a sales driven — it’ll almost look like an auto responder at that point where I will actually say it’s coming, get ready and then email me here to be on the early, you know, warning list. And then I’ll go from the early warning list to okay, it’s coming out tomorrow, get our keyboard ready — you know get ready –

Tim Bourquin: Right.

Rob Booker: – and then it’s tomorrow. And then usually I’ll build up to that over a three or four-day process, sometimes over a two-week process. You know, I’m pretty disorganized so I do the best I can by myself. And then by the day it comes out — I’m only doing 20 or 30 people for something that costs between $1497 to $1997 and it’s gone. It’s one day — on the day that it goes on sale, it’s gone.

Tim Bourquin: Wow.

Rob Booker: It’s over and it’s done. I only do that every once in awhile but when I do, I do. I hit them — like every day I say it’s coming and here’s my account statement. And then the next day, it’s coming and here’s an interview with a person who went through it three months ago who’s doing well now. And then the next day, I hit them again and I say here’s the full schedule. And then the next day, I hit them and I say, listen it’s coming out in three days and I’m not trying to be a jerk and I’m even trying to — like I’m telling you that if you don’t do it the it won’t be available.

Tim Bourquin: Right.

Rob Booker: I don’t really do this very often and the only reason I do it is for these reasons. And the fact of the matter is, it’s gone, it’s over with, and I fill the class up and then every time I feel like I really should do another one of these. I should do a bigger class –

Tim Bourquin: Right.

Rob Booker: – or I should do something else.

Tim Bourquin: So, you’re using product launch formula for all intents and purposes. It sounds like you’re doing it. You close it down, you lead up to it, you generate that excitement, which is kind of the product launch formula.

Rob Booker: Okay. That’s great.

Tim Bourquin: Okay.

Rob Booker:

Tim Bourquin: And that works. Because we’ve had things on sale and when you leave them on sale, if you had left that open as a recorded webinar for day in and day out, it just doesn’t sell.

Rob Booker: Oh, yeah.

Tim Bourquin: There’s something about that urgency.

Rob Booker: Right.

Tim Bourquin: There’s something about that buildup. But now do you get a lot of unsubscribes during that four or five day process?

Rob Booker: I get about — when I look at my report than goes out it’s between 24,000 and 27,000. It’s been higher than that. But I’ll get 1% unsubscribe and like 0.05% complaint. I don’t know if your service logs a complaint.

Tim Bourquin: Right. Yeah.

Rob Booker: And usually those complaints are you know unavoidable right? I mean you just can’t –

Tim Bourquin: They just hit the spam button.

Rob Booker: Yeah. Or somebody’s email — they don’t remember even double opting in or whatever else and I’m totally fine with that. I mean I wish everybody well on their way if they want to be a Mr. Grumpy Gills. But generally speaking, no I don’t. Because I tell them, I tell them pretty regularly you know, here’s my account statement and listen I’m going to email you in three weeks. I’m going to email you, you’re going to be hearing about it.

And I kind of like remember when I took my first sales job I took it for three months specifically for the purpose of getting trained by this internet service provider. I went and worked in there in the afternoons in the sales department just for the training, just to sit there. And I remember people, you know, sharing things about like only letting people have it for a certain amount of time and the price is only available for a certain amount of time and principles like that. And one of the biggest one was this guy sat like three rows down from me — it’s like 15 years ago and he said, “Listen what you got to do is got to do small contracts.” You’ve got to say, “Listen I’m going to ask you a month from now for three minutes of your time to look at something so get ready for it. I want you to know that I’m going to send a bunch of stuff on this list, but a month from now or every once in awhile I am actually going to ask you to buy something from me. Get ready for it.”

Tim Bourquin: Yeah.

Rob Booker: So it’s like there in their mind. They’re like, “All right, I got. I got that there’s a mix here.” That this email list is a mix of, you know, free content that’s just enjoyable and then sometimes it’s going to come out and it’s going to say, “I’m ready to ask you to buy something from me.”

Tim Bourquin: Yeah.

Rob Booker: And they’re like, “Oh, okay. Well at least, I’m not caught by surprise on that.”

Tim Bourquin: Which that is a great idea and something we haven’t done. Maybe in that first email we sent where it’s nothing but a free piece of content, maybe the second one, but somewhere in those first two, you say, “Look, we sell something, it’s obvious to you” and even though you know it’s obvious to them, you haven’t said it. So, it is almost a surprise and I’m surprised that they’re surprised.

Rob Booker: Right.

Tim Bourquin: But if you just come out and say, “Look this is a business –

Rob Booker: Right.

Tim Bourquin: – I’m going to send you some great stuff here, but at some point I’m going to ask you to buy something too. I hope that’s okay.”

Rob Booker: Right. And I say usually I’m going to do as much as I can to help a large number of people for free. I speak for free. I don’t ever take a fee for speaking. You know almost all of the things that I’ve ever published in writing are totally free. I have a whole website page that’s dedicated to everything you can get from me for free. And then I say, but some of the stuff that I do involves proximity — it gets closer to what I’m doing. The closer you get to me, the more expensive it gets.

Tim Bourquin: Right.

Rob Booker: It’s a proximity thing. And everybody’s like, “Oh.” And so I have something that, you know, if you’re an arm’s length away, like a long way from me, it’s free. And then if you want to kind of trade with me for a three-week period of time over webinars, then it costs the next level. And then there’s only one other thing that you can do and that’s work with me alone for like six months and it’s ridiculously expensive and I’ve never lost touch with anybody that ever did that.

Tim Bourquin: Yeah.

Rob Booker: And that’s really expensive. But they get it, they know that that’s coming and I think that they say, “Ah, okay well at least he’s trying to do everything he can for free.” But then you can’t please everybody and some people are always going to well sure you know? You know, “Why can’t I come to the webinar?”

Tim Bourquin: Right. Why can’t I come to your house and sit next to you while you trade for six months for free?

Rob Booker: Exactly, for free.

Tim Bourquin: And feed me and put me up, yeah.

Rob Booker: You know people say that all the time. I think sometimes it’s a valid criticism. They say, “Well, you put yourself out there and you promote yourself as knowing so much” it’s like well, you know, if you’re going to put yourself out there then you better be ready to tell me — you’re spamming me or whatever, you’re emailing me or whatever, I deserve to know more. And I’m like listen — every time I hear something like that I’m like, “Well, what do you want to know? I’ll do a webinar presentation, what do you want to know?” I’m usually willing to say to that person, “Gosh, there’s probably some people out there like you that would like to see more of something.”

Tim Bourquin: Yeah.

Rob Booker: I’m not so like full of myself that I can’t realize that you know there are some people out there that maybe I haven’t given as much as I should have or could have. But then when it comes down to that proximity, I’m going draw the line there and say; “Listen there’s only enough room for so many people.”

Tim Bourquin: Right.

Rob Booker: And that’s that.

Tim Bourquin: In the financial industry I see it’s a little more of a problem than other places. But you get the fact that some people say, “Look, if you’re so good at this why are you teaching?”

Rob Booker: Yeah.

Tim Bourquin: The same thing with the interview income course that we do too.

Rob Booker: Right.

Tim Bourquin: So once in awhile we’ll get that, “Hey, if you’re making so much money doing this, why are you teaching it?”

Rob Booker: Right.

Tim Bourquin: What do you kind of say to those people?

Rob Booker: Well, one of my favorite players in all of baseball and I’m a reasonably interested baseball fan is Mariano Rivera of the New York Yankees, and there was a wonderful profile written of him in the New York Times magazine recently. Mariano Rivera says in that profile or it said of him that he will teach anybody his cut fastball. In the middle of the game actually, you will see him out in the bullpen with an opposing pitcher with his hand outstretched with his fingers over the ball and him putting his hand gently over the hand of the other pitcher showing him how that cut fastball is pitched. And people say, you know “Why would Mariano Rivera do that?”

Tim Bourquin: Yeah.

Rob Booker: Why would he — you know if it so important. And the answer is the more he teaches the better he gets. The more he shares, the better he feels about himself. And the fact of the matter is 99% of the people are going to take that information and they’re –

Tim Bourquin: Exactly.

Rob Booker: –they’re just not going to be able to use it anyway. But it doesn’t mean that he isn’t interested in the improvement of others. And I’ve always said — like why is success in one endeavor — why is that supposed to be related to disinterest in people who are just starting? Why are those two things supposed to connect to each other? Why wouldn’t it be the other way around? Why wouldn’t it be, well if you’re so successful also, why aren’t you giving back?

When Warren Buffett gave away his entire fortune to the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, nobody said to Warren Buffett you know anything. They just said, “Wow, that’s great.” And I think that’s the true spirit of the people who really do it actually very well, is they realize how difficult of a struggle it was of them. Now, when they take money for it, the criticism is why would you need this money to take it?

I just remembered something that a friend of mine told me once. He said, “Rob, you just tell them, whether you pay me this money or not is not going to affect my lifestyle. It won’t and I’ll be honest with you about that. But it might affect yours.” And that’s all I have to say on the subject is that I can’t take it any further than that, that I’m here to help you. Yes you could see my account statement, I am actually doing well enough that I don’t have to take your money to teach you, but I’d like to, if you’d like to do it. I become better as I do it. I absolutely reinforce principles that every day I forget. I forget them too. I’m no different or no better than anybody else. And it reinforces those principles and we take that journey together and it’s enjoyable for all of us. And it’s just something we’re never going to get away from are people who say, “Well, if you’re doing so well why would you teach?” And the answer is, “If you hate me so much why are you emailing me?”

Tim Bourquin: Exactly. And for me I think the answer is, look I’m a business owner, I’m an entrepreneur and there are ways that I volunteer my time with the police department. That’s what I do now.

Rob Booker: Right. Right.

Tim Bourquin: But I am not obligated to offer this for free just like you’re not obligated to pay.

Rob Booker: Yeah exactly.

Tim Bourquin: And it’s a choice. And to some extent you value what you can measure and you value what you pay for. I know that the people that take the course who pay for it are going to work harder at it and actually take it seriously.

Rob Booker: Uh-hum.

Tim Bourquin: If you don’t pay for it, you’re probably going to watch a few lessons and be done with it.

Rob Booker: Yeah. I have a one-page PDF that is written and it’s called why.PDF and I don’t where it is on my website. Wes who helps me with email — whenever that email comes in, that PDF goes out immediately. It says, “We get this question all the time. We totally understand it. We welcome your input. We’re looking forward to a dialogue about this subject with you and here are some answers because your question isn’t as unique as you might think it is” — which is the underlying implicit statement.

Tim Bourquin: Right.

Rob Booker: You know, “This isn’t the first time we’ve heard this. I’d love to share the answer with you and you’re going to have the take it or leave at that point,” and then you move from there.

And on the subject of letting people in for free, I have taught probably seminars in person over the last six years to probably about 1500 people separately in chunks of between 50 and 100 and sometimes as many as just 5 or 10. I have probably on 10 different occasions or more given a seat to somebody out of, you know, just pity. You know? Here’s –

Tim Bourquin: Right. Sure.

Rob Booker: “Yes, you can sit in my seminar.” And I felt good about it at the time. And I tell you in every single — and there are no exceptions — in every one of those instances, it was a complete disaster. They asked more questions, they sat in the front, and they interrupted the rest class –

Tim Bourquin: Taken more of your time.

Rob Booker: They interrupted the rest of the class. And what happened was they had a sense of entitlement about their spot there which was completely disproportionate. It was almost like I had welcomed them to take a bigger spot in this seminar than someone that paid. And it was my fault, I take complete responsibility for it, and I’m certainly not speaking poorly of those people. I mean some of them are still my friends. But I regret having done that not for my sake. I regret having done it for theirs. They made less progress. They felt less inclined to do the work that I asked them to do. It took them longer to work through the materials. In some cases they didn’t even show up for the second day or the third day of the seminar because it didn’t mean anything to them.

Tim Bourquin: Right. Right.

Rob Booker: And I just felt — I felt cheapened, they felt entitled, nobody felt better off. It was just a big mistake. I now have somebody else answer the questions from my friends. ‘Cause every time I do a seminar I get 20 very close friends who say, “Hey is there a spot?” And I have my West who’s my good friend and he’s worked with me for 10 years, he writes them and he says, “We have 30 people who are waiting for that free spot and the best we can tell you is if you really want it, just buy it. And if we can make it fit we’ll eventually try, but we can’t make any promises to everybody who asks.”

And then they realize that the pressure that I’m under as somebody who’s travelled all over the place, I feel this obligation to do as much as I can for free and I feel bad when I say no. And West tries to communicate that. He says, you know, “Try to not put all that pressure on ’cause we just don’t know how to fit everybody in for free.”

Tim Bourquin: Right. Right. It’s a business and everybody has got to make their own decision about it, but you have a lot of valid points.

Stay tuned for Part 2 about how Rob published his E-book for the Amazon Kindle…

Rather than doing the smart thing and being quiet until I heard what the next number all my classmates yelled, I did the dumb thing, guessed, and yelled out the wrong number. I was quickly surrounded by 3 drill instructors who immediately began screaming. I don’t remember exactly what they said, but it was something about the fact that they couldn’t believe the City of Los Angeles was so desperate for officers they would hire me to protect people. I looked up and saw Mr. Green Beret just smiling at me as he continued his own push-ups. I hated his guts immediately.

But one day, while we were running trails up near Dodger Stadium, we started talking about trading stocks online. Talking about something other than how hot, thirsty and tired we were made the miles go faster. He mentioned that he had started trading stocks online for very short periods of time – day trading – before the term even existed. I was fascinated by this and started doing a little research myself on the weekends.

(Green Beret dude I hated on Day 4 actually became one of my best friends and was in my wedding 3 years later.)

Fast forward a few months and I opened a small account at one of the only online brokerages at the time (this was a while before E-Trade and Ameritrade were around) and started day trading. I did pretty well and people started to ask me how I was trading. I got tired of constantly talking about it, so I wrote up a 5 page Word document that outlined how I found the stocks to trade and how it all worked. I kept adding to it until it was nearly 80 pages.

Being the capitalist that I was, it finally occurred to me in 1998 that I could actually sell the report as a book – online. I had a little money saved and spent the entire amount on a website and sold the book for $24.95 plus $3.00 shipping. Things were pretty slow back at first but I sold my first book in 1998 with a website with a ridiculous $100 bill background and 30 different fonts in bold text all centered down the middle. I wish so much that I could find that design now. The first 6 months people had to send me checks and money orders – I didn’t even know what a merchant account was.

Then one day, Wired Magazine called. They had heard about this cop who trades online and wanted to write an article about it. The scanned version is below.

(Click on the image below for a larger version)

I sold about 400 copies of my book in the weeks that followed, and the link wasn’t even in the article. I would print out copies on a black and white laser printer and bind them with a comb-binding machine in the morning. My wife would then take boxes of books to the post office in the afternoon to ship while I was at work. While we were waiting for my daughter to arrive from the womb, our days were filled with printing, binding and shipping. When we couldn’t finish the printing and binding in the morning, I’d leave for work and my wife would continue the process – sometimes until I got home again 12 hours later (God bless her – 8 months pregnant and all).

It was a huge win and it was at that time that I knew I wanted to make my living online from then on. It took another 2 years before I actually quit my job, and it could have happened a lot sooner if I had any idea what I was doing. I did no advertising and no promotion. I simply rode the “daytrading” wave when it came in the late 90’s and the damn thing literally sold itself. 30, 40, sometimes 50 copies a day. It was AWESOME. I can’t even imagine what I could have done if I knew anything about marketing like I do today.

But, courtesy of the Wayback Machine, here is the earliest version they have of my very first sales website (it sometimes takes a minute to load). Not a bad website design for 1999! Don’t you just love my “risk free guarantee?” I’m sure I swiped half of that sales copy from some other website that actually looked like they did knew what they were doing.

The book led to me starting a national trader organization which led to starting my first trade show and conference for online traders. One thing led to another as good things always seem to do.

It was an exciting time, and while I still get excited every time I get an email that notifies me our online cash register has rung, there was something very special about getting those checks in the mail back in 1998. Just like I wish I could find that first website design, I wish I had that first check. Things don’t seem like a big deal at the time – until years later when you have some perspective.

Does the Wayback Machine have copies of your first website? If so, link to them in the comments – I’d love to see them.

I came across the post from a Tweet by Andrew Warner of Mixergy.com. It’s an excellent article and I found myself saying, “Yes!” out loud after every point.

My favorite is probably this one:

Go with your gut and do not care about fameballing. Go with what your gut says, regardless of how it might look to the rest of the world. Too often we (I) get lost in caring about what people think. It usually leads to a wrong decision. Don’t worry about becoming internet famous or appearing on teh maj0r blogz. Fame is fleeting in the traditional sense. Become famous with your customers. They’re the ones that truly matter. What they think matters and they will ultimately put their money where their mouth is.

There was one I don’t entirely agree with, but it’s only because I found it gets me into trouble:

Be a master of information. Many think it might be wasteful that I spent so much time on newsyc or read so many tech information sites. It’s not, it’s what gives me an edge. I feel engulfed.

Personally I find that the more I consume information (and therefore the less I create) our income declines. Wealthy content creators always create more than they consume, but that’s a subject for another blog post.

Each quarter or season (Summer, Fall, etc.) publishers send out notifications about books that will be published soon. You can request review copies of the books and also request interviews with the authors.

Because the publishers and authors are in full promotion mode to ensure a good start to sales on release day, it’s easy to get interviews with “less known” authors and “easier” to get interviews with famous authors and celebrities.

For example, here is Wiley’s Digital Catalog for Fall 2010 (be patient – it takes a while to load).

At Random House, you can sign up for their notification email newsletters here.

At Harper Collins, here is the list of people to contact in publicity to get author interviews.

All of the above can also help you get high-resolution headshot photos, cover art, etc.

I was curious as to what his results where and why he decided to offer a free version alongside the paid version. In this interview, he answers that question and many others. I ask him about his goals for selling paid content, his past experiences in doing so, and what he thinks about “launch fever” that seems to be overtaking the internet marketing world.

4 ways to watch/listen/read:

1) Listen to the audio here (click on the triangle play button):

2) Download the mp3 file here
3) Read the transcript (below the video)
4) Watch the video:

Related Links:

- Nathan’s website
- Nathan’s site designer – Kimb Jones
- Pat Flynn – Smart Passive Income
- David Risley
- Chris Guillebeau

Transcript:

Tim Bourquin: Hello, everybody. Welcome back to my interview here at MemberCon.com. We’re going to be speaking with Nathan Hangen. And I got he got my attention because I saw his comment on somebody else’s blog. So I went over to his site and took a look at what he was doing, and he is doing a lot of the things that we talk about here at MemberCon. But one of the things that was really interesting to me is that he sells an eBook, but alongside it, he’s got a free version that anybody can download that is set up a little bit differently. We’re going to talk to him about that today and his whole business too. So Nathan, thanks for joining me on the phone today.

Nathan Hangen: No problem. I’m happy to be here.

Tim Bourquin: I’m going to jump right into this and then we’ll get a little background on it in a minute, but you’ve got an ebook that you sell on your website that you’ve got a paid one that people can pay for, but then you’ve got pretty much the same content right below with a link for a free download. Can you talk about how you made that decision to do both of those?

Nathan Hangen: Sure, absolutely. To be honest, I talk a lot about experimenting on my blog and that’s what this was. It’s really just an experiment. Number one, it’s not original content. It’s a combination of old posts mixed with some new thoughts. And so I didn’t feel right. I wasn’t sure how I felt to be honest about pricing, and I couldn’t come up with or have a price that I was happy with.

So, at the same time, I also wanted to test the responsiveness of my audience, see who was there for free stuff, see who was there for me and who might be willing to pay more. And so what I did was I basically created this as a free product. No opt-in required, you know. If you want to come and get it, I paid money, 150 bucks for the design, and I said “Come and get it if you want it.” But if I also offered more with the premium version. You can get access to my Members Area. You can talk to me and I have some premium podcast there and just a bunch of stuff, not a ton but enough. And so I said you can come and get that. You can get the premium version for 10 bucks and so I wanted to see how many people would opt for the premium versus the free, and I thought that would give me a good test for how responsive my audience was to what I was doing.

Tim Bourquin: And what did you find out? Did people pay for it?

Nathan Hangen: Yeah. To be honest, I didn’t expect a lot and so I only think I got a lot in the beginning primarily because I didn’t really pitch it. And if you look at my blog even now, it’s kind of hard to find it. And it’s almost intentional. I didn’t want it to be like a launch or anything. But people are paying for it. I think right now, we’re at about nothing huge. I think I’ve got 30 people that have paid for it and they’re in my Members Area. I just raised the price to kind of I like the people that are there and I’d be happy if we didn’t have any more. So a lot of people took the free option and that’s okay.

Tim Bourquin: You’re in the military. You’re going to be out in a month. You’re going to try and do your website full-time. Thanks for your service by the way. I appreciate that. So, where do you make the majority of your revenue then with your blog that you intend to do this full-time after?

Nathan Hangen: That’s a great question because to be honest, it changes every single month. It’s kind of weird. I’ve done a lot of launches and so let me take it back this way. I have two sets of income. I have the monthly stuff that happens regularly and then I have the launch stuff. So, an example of a monthly income would be like Twitter Rockstar and Facebook Rockstar and consulting that I do, which probably makes about 25% of my income. And then I have things like the Beyond Blogging book and the Beyond Blogging project, which the Beyond Blogging project was pretty big pretty big success, same with the book. And so that’s probably another 50% of my income I would say, that whole Beyond Blogging thing, and then the other 25% comes up from a combination of new projects like Blogger Beats and Roark Media but mostly affiliate sales.

Tim Bourquin: Okay, mostly affiliate sales. You’ve got a lot of different things going on that kind of add a little piece to the pie of your overall income. Do you recommend trying to get a lot of different things out there or do you find that that is kind of hard to manage and you would rather be focused on one thing?

Nathan Hangen: It’s super hard to manage and I don’t know if I recommend it. I mean, it’s that approach has gotten me where I am today and so I can’t turn my back on it. I’ve always been a throw a bunch of stuff on the wall to see what sticks kind of guy, but I think it also leads to a place where you’re not willing to stick out some stick it out long enough with something, and so you got to walk the fine line. The reason I do so much is because I meet so many awesome people and I form partnerships, and that alleviated a lot of that burden. So it’s not all just me. But I also I have a lot of interests and that’s my way of I guess jumping on them all. So I would I would recommend initially start with something and work your way through your finding your voice in your marketing approach and then you can start testing different things to see what works.

Tim Bourquin: Well, when I first saw the ebook that you were offering for free in addition to the paid version, my first gut reaction was here is another blogger who is a little bit hesitant to ask people to pay for your content, but and yet you’ve done that. You’ve done that before. So I’m curious as to why. Why not just go out and sell it? Because you know the contents of value even if it’s repurposing other stuff. You know, why it almost I guess the question is that it makes me sense that you feel like it wasn’t worth the money in the first place. Does that make sense?

Nathan Hangen: Absolutely and that’s a great question. And to be honest, number one, I don’t want to get trapped in this hamster wheel blogging where I rely on my blog with a platform to create products and sell stuff. I’m much more interested in creating things. You know, Beyond Blogging for instance was 47 bucks and there’s a lot of huge controversy about the pricing of $47 for an ebook and it’s ridiculous. But Beyond Blogging project opened at 500 and it’s going to be 800 bucks when we reopen it. And so I’m not really afraid to ask. I think and it’s not that I don’t value the information in that.

I think really, I wanted to use it as a test. I just wanted to see number one, if I branded it the way I did it’s claiming your destiny with people how would people feel about that. Number two, I gave people I told people they could give it away for free as long as they attribute it back to me. And so, I wanted to kind of use it as a grassroots thing. Perhaps looking back, I didn’t approach it in the right way and I should have promoted it more if I was going to do that. But it was a test. It was like who’s everybody says they’re with me but who is really with me. Even though it’s only $10, I knew that that would be the differentiator, and to be honest, I found out who my real fans were and who were supporting the business.

Tim Bourquin: That is interesting, and of course, I love tests. We test a ton of things on our membership sites as well so I totally get that. That makes a lot of sense. Do you find that you talked about that controversy with the dollar pricing at $47. I mean I can’t believe people would actually be upset that that’s much. I’m assuming it was on because they thought it was too expensive, but I found the most vocal crowd is the people that complain about it and the people that are willing to pay just without their credit card and buy it. What are your senses there?

Nathan Hangen: Yeah, absolutely. I don’t if you know. Are you familiar with Chris Brogan at all?

Tim Bourquin: Of course, yeah.

Nathan Hangen: Okay, yeah. He promoted it because he is in the book and we interviewed for the book. And so his crowd he doesn’t market to his crowd. His crowd is it’s different. So, to them basically, the people who are complaining were the whiners. They’ve complained to him about everything else and so it’s just they weren’t going to buy it anyway and they’re miserable, and so they want everybody else to be miserable. $47 is not a lot of money even for an ebook. You know, I’ve seen them go for quite a bit more. And so, it was hard at first because it was the first time I’ve been out in the spotlight that much and there was a lot of critics. But then I realized these people weren’t my audience anyway and so it doesn’t really matter what they think, and that was the real that was a real lesson for me.

Tim Bourquin: Yeah. I know. I’ve seen I follow Chris. I’ve known him for a few years here and my take on that is that whenever you have a blog for a couple of years or more, you’ve done nothing but just give great content and great blog posts and giving everything away for free. That moment you try to start charging for something, it’s so much harder. It’s just I think it’s much easier if you start out selling something from day one and kind of put that mindset in people’s heads so they don’t think that that this is just freebies all the time.

Nathan Hangen: Yeah. And my pal David recently talks about this a lot. He kind of taught me, you’ve got to train your audience to be not only to see offers but to be receptive to them and to pay attention to them. And so, it starts with I’m not one of those people who believes in just blogging and blogging and blogging and giving it all away for free because you see a lot of that. Yeah, you can get 10,000 subscribers pretty quickly if you don’t sell anything, but then you’re stuck in that hamster wheel. You’re not selling anything, you’re not making any money, and you’re trying to please commenters instead of make costumers. And so I much try to think the approach where I’m just going to start selling right off the bat.

Tim Bourquin: I like that pleasing commenters rather than selling, about pleasing customers or getting customers. That’s exactly the right that’s exactly how I think of it as well. And I’ve talked about this on MemberCon that we don’t have an enormous list because we get a lot of unsubscribes because people, even though we send out a good week’s worth of free information before we even make our first pitch, people a lot of people unsubscribe at that very first pitch and that tells me they were never going to buy anything anyway so I don’t want them on the list. I want people on the list who are at least open to thinking about it, and you’ve probably figured out the same thing.

Nathan Hangen: Yeah, absolutely. I don’t know if you read my post on Copyblogger on Tuesday I think it was, but it was basically about be yourself, don’t apologize for it even if you have to be a little more than yourself. I’m known as kind of an edgy like, over the top, I’ll say anything that’s on my mind type of guy because I don’t believe in sugar coating things. And yes, people are unsubscribing. They don’t like my empire motif. They think I’m a jerk, whatever. You know, that’s fine. If you don’t like what I’m saying on my blog, you’re probably not going to like me in person and you’re not going to like what I’m selling. So let’s just cut to the chase and call it a day and stop wasting our time.

Tim Bourquin: Sure. And being plain vanilla is not what attracts readers anyway. You can write boring posts that don’t really take a side on anything and you’ll find that you’ll have a really tough time building an audience that way. So, I’m not a believer in controversy for controversy’s sake but certainly don’t don’t water down what you have to say just so you don’t upset anybody ’cause you’ll never going to get a following that way, which it sounds like you’ve done as well.

Nathan Hangen: Yeah, I tried vanilla for about the first year, maybe even longer of my blog, and it didn’t work at all and I didn’t get any traction. I couldn’t figure out why and then it hit me, you know. I’m just like everybody else.

Tim Bourquin: Now, I noticed on the front page too, you’ve got the opt-in form there to sign up to get something to join your email list, but you don’t have a lightbox. Have you tried a lightbox in the past?

Nathan Hangen: I actually I have an exit popup. It’s a Robert Plank script. I’m not sure if you’re familiar with him or not.

Tim Bourquin: Yes, I am.

Nathan Hangen: But it’s called action popup.

Nathan Hangen: And I use it. I think it’s at the cookie one time. I’m testing it. I tried to test it more and run it more times, run it less times, and it’s very it works very well. But I’m at a point now where I’m kind of reevaluating what I’m doing and what my goal is, and so I’m trying to remove as many variables. But I do believe in live actions. People complain about them all the time and I don’t care. It works and it’s not a deal breaker for most people.

Tim Bourquin: Now, the guest post that you did for Copyblogger, obviously, he has got a huge audience. Do you find that that results in some initial pop in traffic but then your site traffic goes down again or does that traffic stick and then become regular readers for you?

Nathan Hangen: Well, I started guest posting for places like Copyblogger and ProBlogger back when I had a different blog design, and I found that nothing was sticking at all. And I realized, number one, it was my positioning and it was my branding. And so, once I changed that now, yeah, I do experience it does fade away but a lot of it does stick. There’s I could get a hundred subscribers from Copyblogger in a day and most of them stay especially now that I’ve added I made my newsletter better. I’m always working on that conversion and on that funnel and making it better. So, it does stick. I mean, you lose the traffic, but over time, it will start to stick more and more.

Tim Bourquin: And do you email your list daily, weekly? What’s your frequency?

Nathan Hangen: I started off emailing them every time I ran a post, but I found they interfere with my newsletters. So now what I do is I I have an autoresponder that emails them twice a week and I email my personal newsletter letting them know what my about my posts, my guest posts, my products. I do that once a week so it’s three times a week.

Tim Bourquin: Okay. All right. I know I’m kind of all over the place here but your design of your site, it’s really nice. Who did that for you?

Nathan Hangen: His name was Kim Jones. He is based in the UK over at he’s going to kill me if I can’t remember it Basic Studios is who did it and it’s actually very inexpensive. I was happy about that.

Tim Bourquin: All right, good. Well, I might go check him out myself because we’re kind of using just a template that we spruced up a little bit here and there until we get traffic and then but it’s about time we start to rebrand it and have a little bit better look, especially hearing from what you said that that was an important part of kind of getting people to stick around. It was looking like you’re official, I’m assuming.

Nathan Hangen: It was night and day. I mean really, it was my traffic is I mean my daily traffic has doubled since then, and just everything has come together because of that and I attribute it a lot of it to that designer. And in fact, I’m happy with it now that I’m still tweaking it. I just talked to another designer friend of mine to do some more tweaking for me. So I’m always tweaking.

Tim Bourquin: Okay. And about those affiliate dollars that you’re making, I know that you’ve got the 125 by 125 ads that are kind of pretty typical on a lot of blogs these days. Have you found some things that really work well either outside of the ads or those ads themselves to kind of really boost your affiliate income?

Nathan Hangen: Actually, those ads are all products of mine so there’s no ad there except for under my post, there’s I think that right now I have one ad for I think it’s Jonathan Meat Product, but aside from that, all of the rest of the stuff except there’s a Basecamp ad there too. But anyway, I find that the autoresponder stuff works a lot better than the ads. There’s a product called the niche blogger that really does really well for me and it’s building my list, things like Basecamp, a lot of different products like that, just little things. And then it’s funny but lately I’ve been having a lot of success on Twitter as an affiliate. I just I helped Chris Guillebeau with his launch, the Empire Kit, and you know, I was fortunate enough to make around ten sales, about 1500 bucks just from a couple of tweets. The same thing happened in a Video Boss launch, and so I’m finding that blog ads, blog posts don’t work, but emails and tweets do work.

Tim Bourquin: Interesting. Yeah, I’ve noticed too that the more I get into the internet marketing space, I’ve only been in it for two years so I still consider myself a bit of newbie compared to a lot of people. But the big guys in it, the Frank Kerns and everybody else, it seems like everybody is pushing their launches and you get five or six emails a day for the same launch from different people. That seems to be kind of a growing problem to me. I don’t know that that’s going to be as effective a year from now as it is now. Do you see that as an issue?

Nathan Hangen: I do and in fact, I was just talking with Brian Clark about that ’cause there’s a lot of discussion even in my niche which is less internet marketing, more of content marketing, you know. There’s a lot of launches and I think it comes down to number one, everybody is just relying on what have worked five years ago. Nobody is coming up with anything new. And even though those guys have a huge list and they might be doing seven-figure paydays, it’s still wearing thin. And so I think what we’re going to have to see is number one, better positioning, better and better effort. I mean, people are focusing too much on the marketing and not enough on kind of the word of mouth thing. And I think the word of mouth is really where the money is at.

Tim Bourquin: Does that mean that it’s going to be more about content marketing and blogging rather than the list? Do you think that the money in the list mantra is going to switch over to the monies in the content?

Nathan Hangen: Well, I think in a sense it has, but to be honest, I would rather have a huge list than a huge blog subscriber list in terms of RSS ’cause I think the list is always going to work. The people that bought Frank Kern’s product are going to buy Andy Jenkins’ product tomorrow. But eventually, you’re going to run out those people so I think that’s why things like even offline marketing and just trying new methods, even like webinars and USTREAM and just getting real, showing that you’re a real person and you’re not just coming down from above with this $2000 product that’s supposed to blow you away. I think people need to focus more on on the positioning of their products. I think that’s I think that’s what it’s about.

Tim Bourquin: All right. Finally, what’s next for you? What are your goals for your blog and in your business this year especially now that you’re going without the safety net of a job, which I which was a scary time for me but I’m glad I did it? What kind of goals have you set for yourself here?

Nathan Hangen: Well, a couple of things. Beyond Blogging, I just interviewed first is we just interviewed Seth Godin and Gwen Bell and J.D. Roth. We’re coming out with a new version of that with nine other great people. So that’s coming out. Beyond Blogging project is about to reopen and that’s going to be that’s going to be a that has been a very fun time for me. But more than anything I’m working on a few products on my blog but I’m moving more into software, iPhone apps, and you know, kind of mobile frameworks, plug-ins, and things like that. I’m moving heavily into software because I think that’s where a lot of the future dollars are. And so I’m soon to be developing digital products but I’m really also working on evergreen software products.

Tim Bourquin: Right. Are you writing those yourself to have some experience there or do you outsource that?

Nathan Hangen: I come up with the idea. I outsource everything else.

Tim Bourquin: Okay. And any website that you found that’s really good for finding outsource programmers?

Nathan Hangen: Well, so far I’ve been using Elance pretty successful. If you’re interested in learning more about one guy that’s doing really well is Pat Flynn over at…

Tim Bourquin: Smart Passive Income.

Nathan Hangen: Yeah, exactly. And he is doing I had talked to him about it and he is doing some great things. His goal is to make a thousand dollars a day and he think it’s obtainable, and I think I think it is obtainable. So start at Elance but find a good developer that you can rely on and stick with them.

Tim Bourquin: Yeah, I’ve been following his monthly income reports which are always interesting, and I’m surprised about the income he has made from the iPhone apps, but it’s just an enormous opportunity. So, there’s always something new, something you got to chase down before it gets too popular I guess, and the iPhone app is part of where it’s at right now.

Nathan Hangen: Yup. It’s just I think more than anything and what my business is about is about creating products that people want and not about creating products to have something to sell. I think if people really focus on finding markets that are underserved or close to that, then they’ll have a lot more success than just trying to make something that sounds good.

Tim Bourquin: Good point. All right. Well, you can find Nathan at his blog. We’ll link to it, but it’s Nathan Hangen dot com. Well, let’s do the whole thing, nathanhangen.com, and you can read his blog there and I highly recommend subscribing. He’s got some great tips and tricks there that I’ve been following as well. So Nathan, thanks for your time today. I really appreciate it.

Nathan Hangen: Hey, no problem. Thanks, Tim, for having me.

Quite simply, it’s this: People say they are beginners, but usually take action and buy only “advanced” courses.

This may not be a surprise to some of you, but please allow me the opportunity to feel brilliant for discovering this – at least for a few minutes while I explain.

The beginner segment of your audience – of any audience – is typically going to be the sweet spot for your targeted marketing. They tend to be the most passionate about getting information, doing the research and investigating what it’s going to take to make themselves successful. They are, in other words, the perfect market to buy your information, courses, downloads and content.

We hear constantly from people who email and say they know very little about the subject, but know enough to know it’s where they should be. Perfect – that’s exactly who I’m looking for because I can offer them a solution to their problem before they become a bit jaded by experience and feel there’s nothing more they could learn that could help them reach a higher level of success.

(C’mon, you know what I’m talking about. We’ve all said that to ourselves at one point or another)

But when we offered “beginners start here” type of courses, even at much lower prices than our advanced courses, sales were tough to come by. Initially I thought it was a marketing problem. I wasn’t explaining the value proposition, or I wasn’t hitting their pain-points directly enough. But that wasn’t it. No measure of tweaking, adjusting, surveying or talking would bring the beginner course up to where we thought it should be.

If our audience was 75% beginners, shouldn’t 75% of our sales be for the beginner course? Nope. Not even close.

Then one day on one of our more obscure content sites we began offering a beginner course with an immediate upsell to the advanced course as a package. It worked. Sales of the beginner course nearly tripled – not to 75% of our sales, but certainly higher.

We realized that people don’t buy courses for what they need now, but for what they hope to become in the future. No one expects themselves to be a beginner forever. The mindset seems to be, “If I take the beginner course, at the end I’ll still be a beginner.” That’s not how we saw it, but we were looking at it too rationally, and the buying process rarely is.

Your audience wants to buy something that will instantly make them an expert and catapult them to the front of the group with advanced knowledge. That may not be realistic, but that’s the way we all function.

Most of your audience is probably beginners, but they want advanced content because that’s where they expect themselves to be after investing money and time to learn.

If you have just one course to sell, don’t label it as advanced or beginner – simply label it as the all-inclusive solution. You may be tempted to just start with the beginner course and fully intend to create an intermediate and advanced course later. But our experience has been that it’s a tough way to go. Sell the fact that your information takes someone from beginner to advanced and you’ll have a product that will match the expectations of your buyer.

The lesson learned: Target the sweet spot of your market (beginners) but deliver the advanced content they want to buy.