Lessons, Tips and Tricks for Making Money With Interviews

Paul Colligan is a veteran internet marketer and membership site pro. One of his first big successes in making money online came as a fluke – a fluke he turned into over $250,000 in one year. It’s a great story anyone who owns domain names will enjoy. I also talk to Paul about the dreaded long sales page and if video sales pages are replacing those in terms of conversion rate success.

Watch the video below or download the mp3 file for audio only.

Transcript:

MemberCon: All right, I’m here with Paul Colligan. He’s one of the veterans first of all of Internet marketing, knows everybody and has tested a lot of different things, know what worked and what hasn’t worked. And so, Paul, I want to start and I told you I was going to hit you with this. I want you to start with one of the very first stories you told me about your first experience making money online and because it’s a fascinating story. Why don’t you just take it?

Paul Colligan: Well, it wasn’t my first but it is a fascinating story. Back in ‘95, I grabbed the domain name get the job. I had a dream of competing with Monster and it never made it. It never happened but domains are cheap and so I held on to it. Into ‘99 and early 2000, a buddy of mine calls up and says, “Paul, I heard the ad for Get a Job.” And “What?” you know, I said, “Oh man, I probably let the domain name go,” and I look it up. No, it’s still my web site. “What you mean you heard–?” “No, no, dude you’re on the radio for Get a Job.” “No, I wasn’t.” I go in, I look it up and there were 5000 visitors that day. It’s like about 2 o’clock in the afternoon so probably 5000 more to come. I’m like, “Man! What’s going on?” And that will tell you if they came from a web site, it will tell you what web site they came from. So, all right, okay, where are they coming from? I look it up and, well, they typed it in. They either typed it in or it was a bookmark and it couldn’t have been a bookmark because why would somebody bookmark a site that never worked?

MemberCon: Did you have anything on there at that point?

Paul Colligan: Yeah, just, I mean a shell, I mean it was, you know, I mean I think there was like a search box but then you search and you’re given errors or something like that. So, I said, “While I got traffic, I should make some money.” So, I started putting an affiliate program and the next day, a guy that ran that affiliate program called and he’s like, “Who are you?” “Well, I’m “Get a Job”. Well, you know, I have 1800 affiliates and you signed up and I doubled my traffic.” Well, of course, we’re “Get a Job”, you know. I have no idea where the traffic was coming up. I mean it’s a good name but it’s not that good, you know what I mean?

MemberCon: It’s easy to remember.

Paul Colligan: Yeah, yeah.

MemberCon: That’s for sure.

Paul Colligan: You know what? My whole thing was it was going to be pitch to the generation X. It’s like, “Get a job.” That was going to be sort of the web site. So, I started going with the affiliate, “We’ll start making some great money with it.” It was fun and it literally took me about three months to figure out what was going on. I found out that there was a company who had found a web site called “Got a Job”, G-O-T-A-J-O-B. And what Got a Job was doing was Got a Job drank some really funky Internet Kool Aid that said that online advertising was dead and the only way to advertise was off line. And so, they were advertising on radio stations like my buddy heard. They were advertising on television. Those were the two big ones and some schools, posters in schools and what not. But it was all visual or you hear it and you go home and you type it in. And, you know, nobody types in got a job. It’s in the past tense and there are no web sites in the past tense. And the funny thing was if I got caught in a blitz that will give me 5K for the domain, I would have done it in a heartbeat.

MemberCon: You didn’t truly know what the future would hold. I mean nobody really knew what domains were worth back then.

Paul Colligan: Yeah, and it was like, whatever. To make the long story short, the traffic gets better and better. I started negotiating better and better contracts, and soon I find out that Got a Job is one of the sponsors of MTV spring break weekend 2000, and I leveraged that power to negotiate a really good affiliate deal and this was right at the height of the bubble so I was just getting paid silly money, just absolute silly money and just made a ton! And basically this company, you know, had claimed they were going to have an IPO but everybody and their mother had claimed they were going to have an IPO. And so, one of the two things were going to happen: They were going to go through tens of millions of dollars in advertising and implode or they were going to go public and they would public, they’d have to get the domain from me.

MemberCon: Did they know about you? Did anybody call in to say, “Look, you’re sending all your traffic to Getajob.com.”

Paul Colligan: We don’t know. We were advised by legal. Legal said, “Either they don’t know about you. If they don’t, shut up. Enjoy the ride. If they do know about you, then they haven’t called you for one or two reasons. Number one is because they’ve gotten some sort of bad advice that whoever calls first doesn’t have the good advantage, you know, for negotiation.” So, if that’s what they believed, definitely they’ll be the first one to call. Or the other thing is, maybe they got some sort of legal advice that if we ever mentioned in public that we were getting the traffic that they could come after us. So, all three possibilities were shut up and enjoy the ride. So that’s exactly what we did. And they burned through their money really, really quick.

MemberCon: There must have been a time when they were tracking because they would have seen, “We’re spending millions of dollars and we’re getting half the traffic that we thought or–”

Paul Colligan: The funny thing was the vice president of sales and marketing, when she accepted the job, she sent her acceptance letter to getajob.com. Okay, so the VP in sales and marketing thought it was Get a Job. They put a post in the paper looking for resumes and I got like 52 resumes, you know, emailed to me kind of thing.

MemberCon: Oh gosh. So, how much traffic do you think? Did you get 80% of their typed in traffic? Did you get half?

Paul Colligan: You know, no way to tell but I would project it was that high.

MemberCon: Wow.

Paul Colligan: You know, and it was funny because we found a couple of radio stations, you know, and apparently they were paying rate card, and oh boy, if you get to take home anything from this interview, never pay a rate card. And apparently they’re paying a rate card and so like radio stations were feeling guilty and there were a couple of radio stations that wanted to give them links, a couple of match they linked to us.

MemberCon: Oh my gosh, so everybody was making this mistake.

Paul Colligan: Oh, yeah. Oh yes. I actually got an email from a mom who was chastising me for, you know, advertising in the school and not having a good web site. But it was fun. I would get calls from marketing guys going, “Hey, you know, how’s your ad campaign going?” Like, “Well, it’s pretty good.” “But if you can do better you can get all our business.”

MemberCon: Wow.

Paul Colligan: You know, then they’d freak out and of course when I tell them, well we don’t pay.

MemberCon: But you wouldn’t tell them that you weren’t Got a Job because otherwise, they might go straight to those guys and say, “Hey, you got these other guys–”

Paul Colligan: Right, yeah, yeah. We were just careful.

MemberCon: Now how much money did you think you made over that year in 2000?

Paul Colligan: Oh, oh, multiple six figures. I mean and it was just the most pleasant of surprises. I had some partners at the time so unfortunately it wasn’t all mine. Like if it was all mine, who knows, we might not be even talking today.

MemberCon: All right. Let’s talk a little bit about the membership site because there’s a couple of key questions I have for you. It seems to me like the long sales page while they’re still out there, seems to be dying. Everybody seems to be going with the video, they opt in email and name right below or to the right side. Is that a fundamental shift here in Internet marketing we’re seeing?

Paul Colligan: Internet marketers unfortunately and still my best friends are Internet marketers so I can speak with them in vain. Unfortunately, they tend to find something that works and then assume that that is gospel and, you know, there was one Internet marketer who had a major event, major event that he does every year. So, I mean I won’t tell you what it is but I will tell you it is a big seminar. This particular event, you know, the guy, in one of his big seminars, had a traditional sales letter which sold like crazy and then the next year, he did this all out crazy, you know, video sales letter which with wonderful special effects, green screens, the whole nine yards and he kind of decried, you know, the depth of the sales letter and what not. And then it was kind of funny because when they marketed the next big seminar, whatever that was called, he went back to the sales letter largely because he had a sales letter in Microsoft Word that he could cut and past and put up and he didn’t have the time to go to the studio and the thing still converted. And the fact of the matter was the sale did not happen at the web site. The sale happened through affiliates and that kind of stuff. So, I mean video sales letters works. I mean if you don’t believe video sales works, go to a home shopping network. Sham Wow is the popular one right now. Video sales works but so does text sales. Junk mail is not going down because of the Internet. Some people buy the written the words. Some people buy by video. Some people buy by audio. Some people buy by the recommendations of others. And so, what you want to do is you want to find what makes the most sense to your particular audience.

MemberCon: You seemed to kind of chosen it halfway. Yours is…look at the “Podcast Secrets” anyway. It’s not a long sales page but you’ve got some content there with your opt in box and then you take them to what, a longer sales page?

Paul Colligan: I have never done a long sales page with Podcast Secrets. The model there is we’re moving people from the world of podcasting and should be free so you should be paying a thousand dollars to take our course, you know, and that jump is not an easy jump to make. So, what it is, is we get the people the opportunity to buy essentially the first lesson for 20 bucks with a year money back guarantee. And they go to the affiliates on the one. The affiliate says, “Hey, look Paul knows what’s he’s talking about. It’s a $1000 course. You get this first chunk for 20 bucks. Trust me it’s worth it. You got a year to get your money back.”

MemberCon: I know you say it’s a $99 value. It’s $79 off. But you put the code right there and you say, “Type in this code and it’s yours.”

Paul Colligan: Yup.

MemberCon: So you don’t hide the code. You don’t have to do Google search for the code.

Paul Colligan: Nope.

MemberCon: But you found that that converts better?

Paul Colligan: Well, you know, honestly that’s another one of those Internet marketers, you know. It’s worked in the past so why mess with it?

MemberCon: Okay.

Paul Colligan: I have not tested that. It’s one of those things where that $20-call model works. I mean the conversion on that is great.

MemberCon: Because you actually paid out mostly even the 20 bucks to your affiliates when you get that.

Paul Colligan: Yeah, we gave $18 to the affiliates because the goal on the $20 call is not to make money. The goal on the $20 call was to find people who are willing to pay for content and to prove to them, you know, that the product was worth it. So, yeah, we gave 18 bucks.

MemberCon: When you do that call then, are you up selling them immediately or you waiting for the call to then up sell them to the next level of product?

Paul Colligan: Up sell them during the call. Before I get you to trust me about something that you know nothing about, you don’t have to trust me about something I know something about, you know. There has to be some sort of connection. Now, that’s why speakers always come out on the stage. Speakers always come out. They tell a story about their dad. Everybody in audience has a dad. Pop bands, movies, that kind of stuff. You make an instant connection with the audience and then once that connection is made, we teach them and we teach them so well that even they go, “Man, if I got this for 20 bucks, what am I going to get if I sign up for the class?”

MemberCon: And how do you decide where that line is? How do you decide how much to give them on the $20 call that would potentially be part of the bigger class?

Paul Colligan: The idea was to give them the 25,000-foot overview. I mean Podcast Secrets 2009 is probably going to pass about 70 hours of content this year. So, I can’t give everybody 70 hours of content that night. So, what I do is I give them, you know, the 25,000 for overview, which is a good training lesson in and of itself. And then they walk away going, “Okay, yeah, this is real and then they’re willing to pay accordingly. And you make it easy, money back guarantees, good customer support desk, and be approachable.

MemberCon: How is the Web 2.0 part is, the Twitter? Everybody says, “We’ve got multiple ways to reach everybody now. It’s so much easier to make that connection.”

Paul Colligan: I use Twitter as a commentary on what I was doing and that kind of stuff. Twitter is sort of the language of, you know, interpersonal day-to-day stuff. So, you know, I might make a comment that if you should really buy the $20 call, I might have made a common on Twitter that man a lot of people are buying the $20 call and then we’d have the link accordingly. Now, I can issue something on Twitter. I can get a couple of hundred clicks. It’s not to be sneezed at but I can send out an email and I get 400 or 500 clicks. They use to convert better. So, the options are there. You just got to know what you’re doing with them.

MemberCon: So, what’s working for you right now?

Paul Colligan: The most effective way to close the sale is email.

MemberCon: Still?

Paul Colligan: Oh yeah, absolutely.

MemberCon: Well, that’s good and we all have access to emails, probably the easiest thing to do.

Paul Colligan: Yup.

MemberCon: Everybody seems to be using A Weber. Is that what you use?

Paul Colligan: Yeah, and the thing about A Weber is that these guys are in the business of email deliverability. If you want your email delivered, you know, you want a team of somebody who’s in the business of email deliverability.

MemberCon: We talked a little bit about this to the affiliates. It seems to be huge in that game, these guys that are doing millions of dollars in their membership sites. What percentage of those do you think come to them from affiliate?

Paul Colligan: Oh, huge percentage, I probably say 70 to 80%. But you see, you got to think of it, Tim, in terms of sales psychology. If I were to say that I’m cool, well of course, I’m going to say that I’m cool, you know. Every sociopath says they’re cool but when Tim says that I’m cool, now we’re on to something. The sale will always be better when it comes from the recommendations of somebody else. Our top affiliate, a gal by the name of Christina Hills and she’s just a dynamo. What she promised was, “Hey, if you buy Podcast Secrets through me, we’ll have a private Mastermind group of our own where after each session, we’ll kind of go over everything and kind of make sure that we made sense of everything,” you know. And the great thing was to have Christina Hills’ recommendation and to have her give that bonus made the deal, you know, incontestably more profit that I could have made.

MemberCon: Yeah, that’s the new trend it seems as well because everybody’s got through affiliate program but they’re each offering something a little bit different. So, not only do you have to check out what you’re going to get through the program itself, but then who’s offering the best deal.

Paul Colligan: Oh yeah, everybody likes a deal. I mean there is a great book. Have you read “Predictably Irrational” yet?

MemberCon: No, but you’ve mentioned that to me before, I think.

Paul Colligan: Oh man, pick that boy up. And the thing is we love to think that we’re rational. We’re not. We’re irrational. We’re completely and totally irrational. But the funny thing is we’re actually predictably irrational.

MemberCon: The pricing seems to be going crazy too. It used to be that $495 was expensive. Now, you’ve got these guys charging $2000, $5000. Is that because they are the top 1% of all Internet marketers or what’s going on there?

Paul Colligan: Well, value is a funny thing. When I used to sell templates, when I used to sell front page in Dream Weaver and HTML web templates, the biggest customer support problems always came from the $10 templates and the least amount of customer support always came from the $150 template packs. So, I would make 15 times as much money and I would have less customer support by selling the template packs. And that’s the way it goes for the bigger ticket items. You know, the flip side of it is though, with the bigger ticket items, you can actually afford to do the customer support. Could we do Podcast Secrets as a $100 course and still make money? Yeah, we definitely could but a couple of things would happen: A, we’d have an audience that only expected $100 for the content and the expectations that you go in with are extremely important. B, we probably have 10 times as much customer support and really it’s not a question of how many people would pay a hundred. It’s a question of how many people would not pay $997 who would pay $100. That’s the question you want to look at.

MemberCon: Is there any system that I can employ that you employ other than just pulling a number out of the air that we think the market with bear?

Paul Colligan: Survey. Survey. You build a list. You survey. You ask them, “How much does this content worth for you?” and then you just run the spreadsheet. If 100 people said this is worth 10 bucks a month, and only 10 people said it’s worth 100 bucks a month, well take the 10 people at 100 bucks a month, same amount of money but a lot less effort. So, you find out how much they’re willing to pay and then you draw the line on the spreadsheet. You figure out where this thing makes sense. Typically, people go, well, everybody wants to pay $10 a month. Yeah, but you got these 8 people who are willing to pay a $100 a month or these nine people willing to pay $1000 a month. All these products have cost associated with them. It cost us. I mean we send out a physical product with Podcast Secrets. And so, for every dollar more we could charge, that was straight profit.

MemberCon: I’ve seen Frank Kern’s Mass Control, which are beautiful CDs and the beautiful covers. But isn’t that…weren’t we supposed to be getting away from all that? Was the beauty of Internet marketing is we didn’t have to deliver a physical product? Is that changing now?

Paul Colligan: Well, now, you’re looking at the marketing issue of what Armand Morin calls the “thump value”. And thump value is huge. I mean if I spend $1000 on something, if I spend $2000 on something, if I spend $3000 on something, I want to know. I need to know that I got my money’s worth and packaging does that for you. I mean the Formula Five product is gorgeous. I mean there’s never been anything as good looking as that in the history of Internet marketing. And as a result, you’re looking at it and go, “Darn it, I got my money’s worth.” Now the funny thing is, is the videos inside of those DVDs are some of the most boring visually. The content is stellar but boring visually, you know, in the entire world but because you got that gorgeous package. The more you pay at the restaurant, the more highfalutin that stuff is going to be delivered. So, the fact of the matter is a good meal could come on paper plates but just when you pay a certain price, you expect packaging accordingly. One day Internet marketers are going to say, “All right, I’m going to sell half as the thump product. I’m going to sell half as the virtual product and I’m going to see what my returns are.” Returns, let’s face it: Me sending back the Formula Five notebook is a lot more effort than me saying, “I deleted your podcast. Give me my money back.” It’s just sales, man.

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