Lessons, Tips and Tricks for Making Money With Interviews

Ryan Lee is the Continuity King.

After I wrote that sentence I thought, “ContinuityKing.com is a great domain name – wonder who owns it?” Ryan Lee does.

I called Ryan to do a quick interview about his thoughts on membership sites, growing an online business with integrity, and dealing with the time pressures of being an online entrepreneur.

As usual, four different ways to listen, watch or read:

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

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

Transcript:

MemberCon.com: Hi, everybody Tim Bourquin here from MemberCon. I’m going to talk with Ryan Lee today and a lot of you probably know of ryanlee.com. He’s a pretty much a leader in terms of membership sites and giving advice and education and coaching for membership sites, but I met Ryan at Blog World Expo really briefly. Ryan thanks very much for joining me on the phone today?

Ryan Lee: I’m excited to be here.

MemberCon.com: I watch your videos and of course you notice right away that the domain is your name, you’re branding yourself as the product, was that a conscious decision because I always think down the road of selling it and branding yourself as a person is tougher to sell while, but you make more money while you own the site. Was it a conscious decision to kind of make it your brand?

Ryan Lee: Yeah. And you know what it’s a great question because for years I fought it. I fought branding myself because of your exact reasons like it’s really hard to exit, but for me this is one component of my business is something I’m going to do forever. Like I’m Ryan Lee, just like Donald Trump, he’s Donald Trump, Martha Stewart is Martha Stewart. She’s not going to sell Martha’s. She’s always going to be doing whatever she’s doing, but what I’ve also done is build a lot of other business that aren’t depended on my name. I own a lot of membership sites. I own one called strengthcoach.com. My own software called Fitness Generator, a Nutrition Generator, and I own a lot of different properties that are not necessarily tied into my name. So Ryan Lee is kind of the umbrella for a lot of my Internet marketing stuff, but there’s still a ton of things that I own that are not my name. Like I have a new magazine coming out, it’s going to be called Dot Com Lifestyle and I could have called it like I could have been kind of an egomaniac and called it Ryan Lee Magazine or something like that, but I wanted to build a separate kind of brand, and I set up some separate corporations for some of these and separate merchant accounts. So if I were to sell those, it’s easy to just slice off little pieces of it.

MemberCon.com: Yeah. I’m glad you brought up about the magazine again too because I want to talk to you about that. You’ve got the recurring revenue report, which is a printed newsletter and a CD.

Ryan Lee: Correct.

MemberCon.com: And then you talk about doing an actual print magazine now?

Ryan Lee: Right. In case, I don’t have enough on my plate.

MemberCon.com: OK, you’re right, exactly, exactly. But I’m curious about that decision because of course prints are having a tough time right now and Internet is all about making it easy for digital downloads and things like that, did you find that people are signing up more for membership stuff these days if they get something physical on mail?

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legal issues, online entrepreneurs, starting a membership site, subscription pricing continuity income, membership sites, recurring revenue, Ryan Lee

Membership site owners are making more videos, audio files and podcasts than ever before. It’s a terrific way to add depth and fresh content to your subscription site on a regular basis.

The trouble is that the quality of that audio can be so bad sometimes, that it interferes with the message. But it doesn’t need to.

I shot a quick video recently about how I do my telephone interviews using a digital hybrid. I’ll be the first to admit that getting great audio from an interview is tough. A lot of variables go into it and much of it depends on the quality of the phone line connection you have. You’ll never realize how crummy most phone connections are until you try to record it.

I recently signed up for Ryan Lee’s Inner Circle membership and purchased the archives of his Recurring Revenue Report during the upsell (his upsell procedure was great – got me to buy in and I’m a tough sell, cynical dude).

I’m getting a ton of great information from the past interviews, but the audio levels between Ryan and his caller/interviewee force me to ride the volume on my car stereo while I’m listening – turning it down when he talks and up when his guest talks. And when I forget to do it or when Ryan surprises me an jumps in – WHAM – eardrum pain.

Regardless of what you decide to use – Mac or PC, Skype, digital hybrid, IM, OoVoo.com, etc – there is one tool everyone should be using: The Levelator.

Our friend Doug Kaye at the Conversations Network offers it for free and it takes your audio file and “levelates” the audio so that your caller and you are at the same volume. Drag your .wav or .aiff file onto the Levelator and it spits out an even audio file in the same folder as the original. It’s the last step I take before I turn any recording into the final mp3 version.

It’s great for making conference calls or teleseminars, where inevitably one presenter is 10 times louder than another, sound a heck of a lot better as well. Even with videos, I suggest you split the audio out, Levelate it, and mix it back into your video – your viewers and listeners will thank you.

Simple, elegant, FREE and no more eardrum pain.

creating content Doug Kaye, Levelator, Recurring Revenue Report, Ryan Lee