Lessons, Tips and Tricks for Making Money With Interviews

Back when I was in the LAPD police academy in 1994, I had a classmate who had just come out of Special Forces in the Army. His commitment was up and he decided to take his skills from the military and become a police officer. I still remember the first week of the Academy. For him it was like a day at Disneyland compared to his Green Beret training. About Day 4 we were out in a dirt lot at the top of a hill after running about 5 miles to get there. We were doing push-ups and I had lost count – a big no no.

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.

creating content, starting a membership site make money online

Every once in a while I get a bad case of blog post jealousy. I read a post on someone’s blog that I wish I would have written. Today I read, “How To Become a Millionaire in Three Years” by Jason Baptiste.

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.

creating content, online entrepreneurs, starting a membership site how to become a millionaire

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

Taking action, even if your content or website isn’t perfect (is it ever?) has been a major theme here over the past few weeks. So I wanted to talk with a relatively new membership site owner who decided that taking action, even if his membership site wasn’t chock full of content yet, was important.

Tom launched his membership site, YourMoneyHouse.com, at very reasonable pricing and did so with just a handful of videos behind his membership wall. He continues to grow the content as he grows his membership numbers, and I wanted to show an example of how anyone can start a membership site with just a small amount of content and grow from there.

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:

Lynda.com
YourMoneyHouse.com

Transcript:

Tim Bourquin: Hello everybody. Welcome! It’s Tim Bourquin from MemberCon.com. I’m here talking with a membership site owner. As we’re going to just try to start doing a little bit more, we always get some nice response and nice comments from every time I do an interview with a membership owner. And today, we’re going to be speaking with Tom Wachowski and he has got a website that is a membership site, a paid content site called YourMoneyHouse.com. And we’re going to talk to him about why he started this site and kind of how he decided on the format and the content and pricing and all that good stuff that we membership site owners are always interested in. So Tom, thanks very much for joining me on the phone today.

Tom Wachowski: Oh, it’s no problem at all. I appreciate your time.

Tim Bourquin: All right. So, this was not the first site that you had started. You started others before you kind of got to this point, right?

Tom Wachowski: That’s correct, this was the first membership site I started. However, previous sites were really more sticking my foot in the pool and brochure type of site. So, Your Money House was my first membership venture.

Tim Bourquin: And talk about the premise of this site. What are you offering for a fee?

Tom Wachowski: Well, what we’re offering is access to a library of short videos on personal finance. The whole concept of the site is simply money subjects made simple, and so somebody can subscribe to the site and when they have a personal finance question, they can find a video related to that. Now, we really arm them to make the right decision with their money so that they know what to ask somebody who is perhaps trying to sell them a product or a service, and they kind of have both sides of the story. And because the site is not ad or revenue sponsored, in other words, I don’t have insurance companies, I don’t have investment companies advertising on the site, the information hopefully is more trustworthy, and I can give the pros and cons without having to worry about offending a certain type of investment or an investment or insurance company.

Tim Bourquin: And the reason I like that you went out and did that too is because a lot of the membership site owners, the first thing they think of is that well, there’s already a lot of free information out there and there is certainly is with financial products. But, you’re right. You never quite know the quality of what you’re getting.

Tom Wachowski: You’re right. And it’s amazing. I’ve spent the last seven years in that industry and kind of have, learned what drives a lot of the information that you see for free and make no mistake about it. Not all of it but a great amount of it is biased simply due to where it’s funded from.

Tim Bourquin: Are you doing these videos yourself? Are you doing interviews? What exactly is the content?

Tom Wachowski: The content is videos of me giving lessons on all kinds of personal finance subjects from life insurance to 401(k) to annuities, to emergency, savings account, stocks, whatever you can think of. We’re adding on a weekly basis content to the site with regard to personal finance. So, they are me and it’s simply because I feel pretty confident in teaching things and making them simple, not taking here is a mutual fund and making it a big complex thing. Just breaking it down so people only need to know what they need to know to make the right decision.

Tim Bourquin: And I see you’ve got the pricing there. It’s very reasonable, $5.95 a month, $15 quarterly, and $50 annually. How did you kind of come up with that pricing model?

Tom Wachowski: I wanted something that was going to be a pretty good value for the client or for the subscriber I should say, and I also wanted when I say value, as the site when we started, we launched late last year in late ‘09 and we only had about, five or ten videos up. So, it would be crazy to ask somebody for a whole bunch of money for just a little bit of content. So, the pricing went basically set in something that I thought was a great value for somebody. There’s no contract so somebody can punch in for a month for $5.95 and punch out, and get what they need to get. As we add more content, that pricing will go up.

Tim Bourquin: And I like the fact that you went ahead and launched the site and offered it for membership even though you only had just a small amount of content because I think that’s another mistake people would they think that they have to have years of content built up or certainly months and months before they launch, and I like the fact that you decided not to do that.

Tom Wachowski: Yeah, and I’m looking back and I’m glad I did that too because I had a lot of reservation. I mean, I had that thought you just described. I need to have this giant library of content, and I sat down and thought about it. What do people really need right now? And those are the first videos I put out. I’ll give an example. We have a YouTube channel that had some of the videos on there for free, and it makes it very easy obviously to track the analytics on YouTube. And one of my first videos was on emergency fund. I think it was titled “What is an Emergency Fund?” And I’m telling you, as simple I guess maybe to me because I have this background on finance, but as simple as that subject sounds, I expected just a few hits. I’m like, “Ah, this is easy. We’ll just get a few people to watch.” That has been the most popular video, so that really affirmed to me just get the thing launched. Because you know what, that one video might have saved somebody from some predicament because they learned what an emergency fund is, how to set one up, et cetera, et cetera, rather than if I had waited to launch that site. I mean, I can’t tell you that somebody was, in a better spot because of my video, but who knows? Launch the site, get the information out there. What are you waiting for, you know. I mean, this is a short game. We’re only on this planet for so long. What are we waiting for? Launch the site. Help people.

Tim Bourquin: That’s a good thought. Now, how do you decide how much free content you put out there versus just premium content?

Tom Wachowski: it’s really I don’t have a structured method to decide that yet because I’m still doing a lot of testing on what people are interested in and what people are not interested in. So, when I decide to put something up for free, well first of all, right now there’s a three-day subscription to the site for free so all content in essence right now is free for three days. But, that will be changing to a we’re going to be changing that format to just “Hey, you’ll get three free videos. You can pick any three but you get three and then you got to start paying.” And how I decide which of that is free, and which I put on YouTube and which is protected behind the premium packages really I feel when I complete a video, I kind of go “Well, is this something, where is the value in it? Is this sort of a video that would be valuable?” Not so much in monetary compensation to me or monetary loss to the, to the I think the subscriber ’cause he is going to pay for it, but where is the value and how much this would help somebody. Is this something that could drastically change somebody’s life? That will really put a lot of weight on just putting it out there for free ’cause you can always take it off, you know. You can always put it behind the membership site. And, well probably as this site progresses or just cycle through, there will be a video that will be in the membership site and I will throw it out for free for, a month. And, I’m not out to make billions of dollars here. I’m out to help people make smart decisions with their money. So there’s really no structured method to what I put out there for free and what’s going in the premium area.

Tim Bourquin: Now, is this sort of a way to get clients as well or have you decided this is going to be a stand-alone product and you’re not going to use this?

Tom Wachowski: I really do not want it to be a way to get clients because that raises the conflict of interest, and I don’t want that. What I want is people to be able to go to the site and go, “You know what? I can trust this content. There is no bait and switch here. He is not trying to get me to become a client,” for example, as you say. “He is really trying to help me make the best decision.” And I talk a lot about this with my wife. It’s like, I’ve almost thought in my head to take it to the extreme. Anybody who would want me to work with them from a financial planning standpoint, if they had gone to the Money House site, I’d almost they know, but I haven’t decided on that and I haven’t had that issue pop up yet, but there’s not a way the intent is not to get clients. No.

Tim Bourquin: Now, you mentioned YouTube. Is that then your number one place to get traffic back to your site or are you using other methods?

Tom Wachowski: We’ve got a YouTube site. We’ve also got a Facebook page and a Twitter account. So we, as we add content, we update via all those avenues, and I honestly couldn’t tell you which one of those are sending the most traffic to the site. I just have not advanced enough in my analytics ability as to be able to pinpoint that, so I don’t know the answer to that. I don’t know which one is sending the most content. Now, when I look on the analytics, Google Analytics, the majority of the traffic is coming from direct to the site. So I might be able to read that as people going to YouTube and saying, “Oh, go to Money House and type to get in the browser.” I don’t know. I’m just not a I’m not I’m not yet up to speed on all the analytics stuff quite yet.

Tim Bourquin: Now, that’s good. It’s a work in progress for all of us of course. Now, why videos? Did you try text and maybe just audio too?

Tom Wachowski: Well, because I think it’s easy for somebody to sit down, press play, and watch a video for ten minutes. Reading on the internet is cumbersome I think. I don’t think a lot of people like to read. So, the idea of the video really came from A, people are really, really good at sitting down their couch, picking up the remote control and turning on their TV. They know how to do that. They are much easier and much more they’re more friend what’s the right word? They can really wrap their head around that motion versus going to sit down in a chair and pick up a book, which essentially would be similar to reading something on the computer screen. So I really thought “Hey, people know how to watch TV. They’re really good at it. So let’s make it easy for them to learn. Let’s put it on TV. Let’s put it on video.” That’s really where the concept originated from, that making video over text.

Tim Bourquin: I don’t see a live box or an email newsletter box of some sort. Are you not building an email list at this point?

Tom Wachowski: We are building an email list and that’s a great point you bring up. When we had this site designed originally, we had an email box in there, and the developer who I hired to build the site really had trouble making that work. Looking back, I now know he probably didn’t know what he was doing. Phase two of this which hopefully will be phase two of the homepage I should say which will hopefully be done this year will absolutely include, a free list or a list-building mechanism, unlike the AWeber forms. Those are pretty common. So that is a critical error in the site right now, which is on the front burner to be fixed when we do a remake of the homepage here this year.

Tim Bourquin: And the site is beautiful. I mean, even phase one, it’s very attractive. Can I ask what you paid for a site like that or what you paid for the site?

Tom Wachowski: Yeah. We hired a company out as customers only to put that together and we paid just over 10,000 to have that site done. That includes all includes everything, incorporating the membership, aMember and all that stuff, and I shopped around to about five different developers because this is not my my area of expertise, Tim, is in teaching money. My area of expertise is not in building websites. I tried. I tried to do the WordPress thing. I tried all that stuff. I tried learning and I sat down and realized, “Don’t do what you’re not good at. That’s a waste of time.” So, we found a company that we really liked and we paid them right it was just over I think like 10,250 or something like that, and they did build an absolutely beautiful site. It was a lot of I mean, there were a lot of candid meaning, to get what my vision was onto that computer screen, but they did a beautiful site. Now, I’ve since learned that the coding in it is not the most search engine-friendly thing. So, we talked a minute ago about on the front burner of getting that signup box on the homepage. On the burner right behind that front burner is doing a coding cleanup and that’s going to be part of the change that we’ll do this year.

Tim Bourquin: Right, And you mentioned at the beginning, and I didn’t really touch on it right then, but you said that you’ve got that three-day free trial. So, it sounds like they could theoretically, people always seem to think the worst, right? Somebody could go and grab all the content and leave before the free trial. This is why you’re kind of going with maybe just the three videos and that would be the trial.

Tom Wachowski: That’s exactly right.

Tim Bourquin: All right. And, the reason I like the pricing too is that at $5.95 a month, it’s almost like, it’s a Venti Latte or whatever at Starbucks at that point, right?

Tom Wachowski: Right.

Tim Bourquin: And so once you get people on board, I would imagine the stick rate is pretty good at that price.

Tom Wachowski: Yeah, exactly. Now again, I’m shy in analytics so I couldn’t give you numbers ’cause I just don’t know them. I just don’t I need what I need to do is find an expert on analytics and hire them.

Tim Bourquin: Right.

Tom Wachowski: I just want to sit down and then look at the screen and see the numbers, how to actually gather the analytics. I just don’t have I have no interest in them but I know that’s an important part of any internet business. You have to be able to measure things. That’s a big deal. So, we’re getting there. We’ll get there.

Tim Bourquin: Yup. And that’s Again, it’s about putting it out there and not waiting for every single piece of the puzzle to be in place before you put your shingle out there which is great. Now, the videos themselves, did you have to teach yourself video editing?

Tom Wachowski: Oh yeah, absolutely. It’s actually a funny story. I the short of it is, Final Cut Pro is the premier editing program out there. So, going into this, I thought I don’t do I’m one of these guys that kind of try to do things right the first time. I thought, “Final Cut Pro, bam! We’ll do that.” So, it’s a $1200 program. Well, thanks for that and a college roommate that worked with Apple that was able to get it for me half off. And I tried that program in and I couldn’t even figure it out. For two days I sat in front of the computer, I could barely get a footage offloaded to it. So I ended up downgrading myself to Final Cut Express. I learned that programs using Lynda.com, a great site for learning computer programs, and taught myself how to edit in about two or three days. And my editing, if you watch the videos, is nothing fancy, you know. It’s very simple editing. So I do all the editing myself. Now as we speak, I have a bid out to hire an editor so we’ll see what happens with that, because it really takes, I’ll do 60 minutes of footage and we’ll produce about four videos, and to edit 60 minutes of footage is a good two to three hours for me, and my time, I need, I’m hiring that out. If you get what I’m saying, that will be I delegate it to somebody who knows how to do it better and can do it faster.

Tim Bourquin: Sure. Yeah. And so that you can create on doing what you love and it sounds like you’re on the right track there. You’re not willing to spend all kinds of time on doing stuff that is not your forte.

Tom Wachowski: I tried. I dipped my toe in the pool and it was too cold, so enough of that.

Tim Bourquin: In addition to the membership sites, have you thought about in the future doing other products that are one-off based, maybe individual purchase type of things?

Tom Wachowski: Yeah. As a matter of fact, right now, I’m working on a site called PayMyFamilyIf.com, Pay My Family If, and what it is going to do is market an e-report or an e-book on how to buy suitable term life insurance at the best price. My venture is in the industry of financial planning, you know. Life insurance ends up being one of the foundations of the Money House, going back to the Money House analogy, and what I found is people don’t even know where to start. They don’t even know where to start. So, we’re going to try this, this report and see what happens.

Tim Bourquin: I like the idea too as we finish up here. You’ve got a gifts link, what you don’t see in a lot of membership sites. I’ve maybe only seen one other one. In fact we interviewed them almost a year ago. What made you think to put up a gift there so that somebody could actually buy a membership for somebody else?

Tom Wachowski: Because if you look at the statistics on uncomfortable conversations, you have conversations about religion, you have conversations about politics, and above both of those is conversation about money. Families don’t like talking about money. And eventually, what that leads to is a lot of pain in families, because for example, somebody may die and, nobody knows where the money is and then brothers and sisters end up fighting over it. So what I wanted to do is have a way to non-threateningly or non-intrusively people could offer the ability to learn about money to, somebody that matters to them, to their brother or their mom or their dad and not be like “You need to do this.” It’s more along the lines of “Hey, here’s a great resource. I thought of you. You could learn about money. Check it out. Here’s a gift. I paid for it. Go on there. Watch videos.” A way for people to help other people without getting uncomfortable about it.

Tim Bourquin: Right. Well, this has been great. I really wanted to do an interview with somebody that was relatively new with their site because we’ve been talking a lot on MemberCon, the blog, about just getting started, just not waiting for everything to be perfect and just do this business. The site looks like fantastic. I’m sure you’re going to do well. I’m sure you’re going to get all those puzzle pieces in place. But just to have to show an example of somebody who said, “I’m not going to wait for everything. I’m just going to put it up there and get started.” I like that a lot. So, congratulations on that.

Tom Wachowski: Absolutely. Absolutely. What are we waiting for, you know. Let’s go.

Tim Bourquin: Right. All right. Well of course you can go to YourMoneyHouse.com to check this out. We’ll link to it above the transcripts of the video and audio as well. Tom, thanks very much for your time today. I appreciate it.

Tom Wachowski: Thanks, Tim. I really appreciate it and hopefully we’ll help some more people out there.

Other membership site owner profiles:
- Selling Content to a Passionate Community: DVDs to Membership Sites
- On Launching a Membership Site – Part 1 (membership site owner Jeff White)
- On Launching a Membership Site – Part 2 (membership site owner Jeff White)
- Membership site owner profile of Don McCalister, Part 1 and Part 2

creating content, membership pricing, online entrepreneurs, starting a membership site membership site owners, membership site profile

One of the things I enjoy about making our contact information readily available is that the phone actually rings once in a while. Not as much as you may think, but at least a few times a week someone will call with a question about selling content online or their membership site. Most people online hesitate to put a phone number on their site, but I think they are missing out on both sales and interesting conversations that could actually improve their site.

(Balancing doing free consulting every time someone calls vs. having a quick phone call is the subject for another post.)

After we chat for a while about their particular challenge, I always ask how far along they are in the process of starting to create content on their blog or website. Often times the answer is, “Well I haven’t started yet because I’m waiting until I have [X].”

I think it’s human nature to want to know all the steps in any process are taken care of along the way so that we can see the end result – even if the picture is a bit fuzzy. But the problem is that we never quite know if the path we are plotting without actually taking action is the true road. 99% of the time, you’ll find that actually taking the steps and getting something up and running will show that the issues you thought you’d have aren’t really issues at all.

Don’t have a website? Use blogger.com and use the standard template.

Don’t have any recording equipment for your podcast? Use BlogTalkRadio.com and do your interviews that way.

Don’t know how to edit video? Go to Pixorial.com and edit your videos online.

Will it be perfect? It never is. Will it be pretty? Probably not – but it’s something.

And something is always better than nothing – especially when it comes to content creation.

Don’t worry about step 7 until you’ve started step 1. Your audience will forgive the odd transitions in your video and the yucky blog template. And in the meantime you’ll be building an audience, search results and the foundation for the awesomely beautiful and hugely successful website you have in your mind.

Related Reading:

- Perfect is the Enemy of Content Creators Everywhere (Membercon)
- How To Overcome Procrastination (Standout Blogger)
- Warning Signs You Might be a Blogcrastinator (Copyblogger)
- How I Generated One Years Worth of Content Ideas In One Hour, And You Can Too (ViperChill)
- Why You Are Putting Up Major Roadblocks For Yourself and How to Overcome Them (Robert Plank)

creating content, starting a membership site content motivation, just do it