Lessons, Tips and Tricks for Making Money With Interviews

Think of Amazon as an incredible search engine for content. You can offer your E-book for sale in the Kindle store in a few easy steps and my guest for this interview, Rob Booker, has listed his book for sale in the Kindle store.

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…

Read more…

creating content, selling content online, site marketing Amazon Kindle publishing, self-publishing

Regular readers know I love testing different things to see which actions, graphics, emails or text convert best and lead to higher sales.

I’ve followed Anne Holland’s marketing information for years, first at MarketingSherpa.com and now at her newer site, WhichTestWon.com.

It’s a great site for test junkies and I love the “Test of the Week.”

This week’s test is from a membership site. I recommend everyone subscribe to the RSS feed and take a look at the free pdf reports available for download.

site marketing Anne Holland, marketing sherpa, Which Test Won

Every so often I try to take a break from the matrix and go offline for a few days. I did just that the past few days and did a ton of hiking with the family in Yosemite. It was beautiful, with the waterfalls at full speed since there was quite a bit of snow this season.

On every hike at some point my mind inevitably turns to business. MemberCon has grown nicely over the past few months, but there were (in my not-so-humble opinion) some nice articles written in our early days when the only reader was Emile.

And just this evening I went back and updated one of those earlier posts so I thought I’d point to a few gems that you probably missed in those first few weeks of this blog.

Here they are in no particular order

1) Membership Site Software Plugin Reviews – a good rundown of our thoughts on various membership software offerings.

2) How To Be a Niche Content Millionaire – My interview with David Eedle about how he started and grew his very niche membership site.

3) Should You Start a Forum or Message Board? – a discussion of the value of starting a message board for your website

4) Turn Your Knowledge Into Membership Dollars – my interview with Perry Lawrence about how he promotes his membership site

We’re also starting a new membership site in the motivation and success space this month – stay tuned for tons of test results and tips on how we’re building it from scratch.

email marketing, site marketing, starting a membership site creating membership site content

We’ve been talking a lot lately about using simple videos to promote your content – even if it is just simple slides put together with your audio interview. The learning curve for doing smart web video is getting shorter and shorter, thanks to web video experts like Dave Kaminski.

Dave shows people how to use web video in a way that is engaging and attracts attention. In this quick interview, I talk to Dave about getting started and the future of video. We talk about the mess of formats and why it shouldn’t stop you from creating video now to make your site more compelling.

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:

WebVideoClass.com

Transcript:

Tim Bourquin: Hello everybody. Welcome to another show at MemberCon.com. You know, I’ve been talking a lot about the power of using videos to promote your content whatever you may be producing on any subject and the gentleman I have on the line today is Dave Kaminski. He’s got a really popular site that deals with obviously that subject which is WebVideoClass.com. And so, Dave, thanks very much for joining me on the phone today.

Dave Kaminski: Thanks for having me, Tim.

Tim Bourquin: Well, so you obviously get a lot of people who kind of realize that video is the way they want to go ’cause they see so much of it online but they’re not quite sure where to start. Is this something where I can come to you and kind of if I have no video editing experience I can kind of get up and running?

Dave Kaminski: Yes. The training that I provide, it’s meant for the person who has never touched a video camera in their life, and basically I walk you through step-by-step and, you know, everything you need to know about as far as equipment, technology, and best practices, as far as business and marketing and, you know, walk you through things step-by-step so you can start off knowing absolutely nothing and as fast as possible get videos online that are helping your business.

Tim Bourquin: Now, the thing I see people doing is two different types. So basically, are doing real video of people in the video itself or they’re doing some sort of slide presentation that’s accompany — is audio. What do you think is the best way to get started with that?

Dave Kaminski: There’s not one clear advantage as far as one over the other. What I actually do is I actually combine the two most of the time, but basically you have live video and by live video that’s going to be video that you shoot with a camera, and then you’re going to have screen capture video and that’s where you see like the PowerPoint slide presentations. And they both require different software but like I said, you know, I combine the thing so, you know, as part of my training, what I do is I show you okay, let’s take some live video and let’s take some slide and mix them all together. Now as far as someone who is just starting out is probably going to be easier for them to master the screen capture part first and then move on to live video.

Tim Bourquin: A lot of people are saying that the video is the best way to either put on your squeeze page or your homepage down instead of the text and long sales page. What are your thoughts on that?

Dave Kaminski: I would agree with that. I’m going to agree with that based on the successes of my students and based on my own experience. You know, video is a much more engaging format. If you go to a website and it just kind of a text opt-in well, you know, you kind of hesitate. You know, do I really want to opt-in? So I really want to get my email address to this guy? When you see a video and you see the person on the screen and the person does a real good video where they’re what I call transparent, meaning they’re showing you that they’re a real person and not trying to be something that they’re not, then the video is going to be far more effective than just plain text in that regard.

Tim Bourquin: The trend I kind of see now is people doing these longer maybe 30 or even 40 minutes, even an hour long videos and doing four or five of them after they opt-in to sell maybe a course at the end of that. Are people really paying attention for that long, for that many days? It seems like it used to be where it was 10 minutes, right? Anything that would fit on YouTube is what you want to do. What are you thoughts there?

Dave Kaminski: Well, statistically, people have a very, very short attention span when it comes to web video. Usually, it’s in around two minutes. They’ll watch it for about two minutes and then viewership drops way off. So what you’ll see a lot of marketers or internet marketers are doing is now disable the control bar on the video player so people are forced to watch the entire video from beginning to end. They can’t scrub through it. But statistically people have a very, very short attention span. I think on YouTube alone, I believe by the 60-second mark, I believe 75% of viewers are already gone.

Tim Bourquin: And I’ve seen that a lot too where the player buttons are gone. Does that really work? I mean is that the right thing to do to force our users to kind of play by our rules, do you think?

Dave Kaminski: I’m not a fan of it. I think it’s poor etiquette as far as putting up web pages goes. You know, you never want to do anything on your web page where you’re taking control away from the viewer and in that case where you’re disabling the control bars, the viewer’s only option is to go to a different web page to get rid of that video. So I’m not a fan of it. I haven’t seen any statistics that says, “Hey, it works great” or “Hey, it doesn’t work great.” But like I said, it’s just in my opinion, it’s not very good etiquette.

Tim Bourquin: How about the other part of that where you go to a website and the video plays immediately rather than me having to click on the play button. What do you think about those?

Dave Kaminski: That’s something that I’m personally not a fan of either. Again, that’s controlling — that’s taking away control from the viewer. On all my videos, what I do, you know, people come to the site. They’re going to click the play button, they control it. It’s a little fussier than taking away the whole control bar but it’s something that right off the bat I wouldn’t recommend people do.

Tim Bourquin: And then a lot of people are trying to add clickable links within the video itself. Is that something you see growing in popularity and what else do you see is kind of the future of video here?

Dave Kaminski: Well, as far as clickable links, that’s something that right now can really only be done with flash video players and it’s becoming more and more popular. The problem is we’ve got HTML5 video coming around the corner and HTML5 video is the newest big thing. And basically, what people need to know about HTML5 video is that it was designed to make it simple. It was designed to make web videos simple. It was going to define a single web video format and it’s going to make it real easy for people to get web videos on their web pages and it’s going to make it real easy for people to watch web videos ’cause they don’t need any plug-ins for their browsers.

What’s happened is Google and Apple and Mozilla Firefox and all the powers to be they turned it into a big mess. No one can agree on what standard video format will work with HTML5. There’s different browsers supporting different formats. So as far as a big thing being HTML5 video, right now it’s a mess and most of the people on the internet who are not using mobile devices, they’re still going to watch flash videos which means you can go back and use a flash player where you can have the clickable objects.

For example, I offer a player where at the end of a video an opt-in form can come up or people can click a “buy now” button. Again, stuff like that can only be done with a flash player and it hasn’t been determined yet but flash might be on the way out and it might be replaced with HTML5 where we can’t do all these fancy things with video players but HTML5 isn’t going to take a hold until, you know, all the powers to be, get things sorted out and agree on one format for web video.

Tim Bourquin: And then, of course, all the editing software is going to have to be updated to save and whatever — what is the format that it goes into?

Dave Kaminski: Well, for HTML5 video — well, first I’ll back up. You know, if we’re talking normal video like you go to YouTube and watch, all that is flash, and video editing software actually won’t convert your videos to flash. You need to use third-party software that will convert it to flash and there’s a number of tools available on the internet both free and paid for, but with HTML5 video different formats.

First, we have H.264 which is a codec which is the code that produces a video and H.264 codec can actually be used in a flash video player. A lot of the videos you see on the internet right now that are playing in a flash video player including my own, they’re all encoded with H.264 and it’s a codec that gives you really good video quality at really small file sizes. But not all of the browsers, when it comes to HTML5, support this codec.

For example, only Safari supports it and all mobile devices such as iPads and iPhones, they support H.264. Google Chrome supports H.264. Now as far as the other formats, we have Firefox, they do not support it because it’s not an open source codec. They support what’s known as the AG format and Google just released a new open source video codec called WebM. They did it yesterday and that’s supported by Google and Firefox but it doesn’t work with all the other guys who are, you know, arguing over which format to use.

So right now for someone who wants to produce web video, what I recommend they do is produce it in an H.264 format. It will work in flash player and it will work on majority of the browsers out there excluding Firefox.

Tim Bourquin: All right. Well, obviously, there is a while lot to learn here and if you’re new to video like I am, I’m just getting started doing some of these PowerPoint and audio screencast together, Dave’s site is a terrific resource for that so you can go to his site right now by clicking on the link below this video here and find out all about the offerings there because obviously if you’re not using video now, you’re getting behind the times that most people will tell you that you’ve got to start getting that interactivity on your site very soon so… Dave, thanks very much for your time. I really appreciate your time on the phone with us today.

Dave Kaminski: My pleasure, Tim.

Find out more about Dave at WebVideoClass.com

creating content, site marketing using web video

One of the conventions I founded a few years ago was the Podcast and New Media Expo. We sold it two years ago to Blogworld.

One of the keynote addresses a few years ago was a Vice President of Blendtec, a blender company. Why in the world would a blender company be keynoting a new media convention? Because they were using online videos and new media to get a huge amount of traffic to their site (and actually selling a heck of a lot of blenders) by blending anything and everything.

They blended an iPhone the day it came out and they blended an iPad they day it came out.

It’s a brilliant strategy. Buy whatever is the hot gadget getting lots of attention and immediately have the company founder destroy it in one of their blenders. It’s hugely entertaining and is the perfect way to prove your blender rocks.

If it can blend an iPad, just think about how great it works on your smoothie.

As you watch the video, be thinking about how you could grab attention in your industry by doing something similar:

By the way, during the keynote the speaker blended a garden rake and a cell phone. It was a huge hit.

site marketing blendec, membership site marketing