Get Into The Marketing Mind Of Michael Senoff As He Shares Marketing Secrets for Building a Successful Internet Marketing Business

Michael: Hi, it’s Michael Senoff with Michael Senoff’s www.hardtofindseminars.com. I’m proud to introduce to you one of my most complete live audio interviews that I’ve ever done. Now, it is edited, but for some time I’ve been meaning to do a complete update of what I’ve been up to for the last several years and finally I’ve done it. I’ve done it with a gentleman named Jim Peake. Jim Peake is one of the founders of a wonderful website called about success.. He’s been interviewing experts on marketing, copywriting, advertising, business growth, self-help, and I’m really excited to see what he’s going to be doing in the near future. He invited me to be on as a guest and I told him that I wanted to give my most complete interview yet. So, what you have is a three part interview of Jim Peake from www.mysuccessgateway.com interviewing me on all aspects of my marketing.

Here are some of the things you’re going to be learning on the call. You’ll hear a brief introduction. You’ll hear about current research and statistics on how we waste our time. I’m going to review some secrets about the stats and the website traffic to www.hardtofindseminars.com. You’re going to hear descriptions of my best seven audio interviews with experts over 70 years old. You’re going to hear about 13 other valuable resources that you can find on my site. You’ll hear a list of other interesting audio interviews that can be found on my site. You’ll learn cost effective tools that can increase your sales and automate your sales process using audio interviews. I also discuss how audio interviews in detail can help your business make more money even if you’re not a sales expert. You’ll learn how to record and make audio interviews and publish them online to the Web. We’ll talk about audio editing and some of the secrets I use in my editing process. I’m also going to reveal 17 marketing methods that I use to market my website www.hardtofindseminars.com and get great distribution for my audio recordings. We’ll also talk about my magical time saving tips that I’m personally using every day to save tons of time. You can use these same tips that I describe in this interview. We’ll go through some closing comments and then I have a special offer for anyone who listens to the interview, the same offer I made to Jim’s subscribers that I think you’re really going to enjoy.

So, get ready. Three-part interview. Runs right around three hours and I hope you enjoy.

Jim: Hi, this is Jim Peake with www.mysuccessgateway.com and today, I’ve got another fantastic interview with Michael Senoff of www.hardtofindseminars.com. Michael’s been in the business creating audios online for the last several years and his site provides a wealth of information that really I don’t think you can find anywhere else on the Internet today. And most of the work that’s in there is primarily sales marketing information for folks that are entrepreneurs and building their businesses. So, Michael, I’ve got you online.

Michael: I’m here, Jim. Thanks for having me. I really appreciate the opportunity.

Jim: Hey, you’re one of my mentors and you don’t know it yet, but when I found your site, it was probably one of the most exciting days of my days on the Internet because there’s just so much great information in there that I was amazed that you were just giving it all away.

Michael: I do hear that a lot. That’s one of the most common remarks I get from people is I must be an idiot or crazy for giving all this stuff away for free. They want to know what my angle is and maybe we can talk a little bit about that today.

Jim: That definitely we want to get into that. So, the purpose of your site is for anybody that wants to increase the sales of their business. Can you share with us a little bit about what the purpose is?

Michael: Sure. I want to keep in mind that a lot of your listeners maybe very new to Internet marketing. You may have some listeners who are very experienced. So, the purpose of today’s call is I’m going to share as much information I can in the time we have available. But I also want you to keep in mind my selfish, ultimately goal. This is all consistent with what I’ve been doing at www.hardtofindseminars.com, but I want to give you so much value that you absolutely will not be able to resist going over to my site www.hardtofindseminars.com.

Now, why would I want to get you over there? I want to get you over to www.hardtofindseminars.com because I want to get you addicted to my audio recordings and if you become addicted, I have a chance on selling you on me and selling you my trustworthiness and selling you my ideas and selling you my products. And if I’ve done my job right, you will come out as a customer of mine.

Now, we’re going to talk a lot about audio and I know there are a lot of other great audio recordings out there on the Internet, but I’m going to just share some of the tips that I’ve learned over the years doing audio recordings and audio interviews. And I also want to say that the most valuable resource we all have is our time. I also want you to know that I’m very aware of the people coming to your site, Jim, www.mysuccessgateway.com. The people are there looking for solutions and one thing we all don’t have enough of is time. And the ideas I’m going to share to your listeners today are to show them how to leverage their time. So, hopefully, I’ll be able to accomplish this in the time we have.

Jim: Excellent. So, Michael, you talk about saving time and your site is all about saving time. Can you share with us a little bit about what you mean by that?

Michael: I did a little research on time management. I came up with some pretty interesting statistics and stats and I just want to read a couple. I don’t want to bore anyone, but they were really eye opening to me and I’ll read a couple of them just because this all does have to do with saving time. A study last fall by Basics, a New York research firm, found that office distractions ate up almost 2.1 hours a day for the average workers. On a typical day officer workers are interrupted about seven times an hour, which adds up to 56 interruptions a days, 80% of which are considered trivial. And as I read these statistics, this just reminds me of my own life. I mean don’t you know in your own life there’s always something that comes up. Could you relate to that?

Jim: Oh, totally. I mean there’s always another phone call, there’s another email, there’s always something coming up.

Michael: There’s always something that’s going to try and get you off track. I mean you’ve got 365 days a year, but if you really break it down and look at all the days you have to be productive, to work, to make money, and you take into consideration all the time you need to spend with your family and doing other things, really your time is very limited to what you have to do.

Jim: So, what does all this have to do with audio?

Michael: Well, because of these interruptions in my life, audio allows you to massively leverage your time. Audio allows you to can it and clone it. It allows you to deliver a sales message without you having to be there, taking you out of the picture. Using recorded audio and audio interviews and delivery over the Internet allows you to duplicate yourself. Right now, I could go and look at my stats on my control panel and I may have 50 people listening to some recording on my site from all over the world. But right now, you have me live on the phone. So, I’m 50 Michael Senoff’s right now pitching, selling, teaching, educating. So, I’ve duplicated my time 50 times at this very moment. Does that make sense?

Jim: Yes, that makes a lot sense. It’s almost like broadcasting it to a stadium. So, Michael, can you share some information about your site and the content that’s in it?

Michael: Sure, absolutely. My main website with all my audio recordings is called www.hardtofindseminars.com. Now, I have about 150 hours of free audio content on my site. There’s another additional 50 to 70 hours of audio that is not free, but it’s up on my site, which is used for products that people purchase. So, this is audio that’s being delivered to people who purchase information products that I have for sale. The site was first published in January of 2002. Now, back then I was just a guy selling pre-owned Jay Abraham seminars on Ebay. That’s how I got started in all this. This was when Ebay stock was going through the roof and they were getting tons of media and I’d learned about the auction atmosphere and I loved it. It was something I wanted to do. I was also living in Pacific Beach in San Diego, California and I was one of the very first people in the country to have high-speed cable access with Time Warner Road Runner. So, even back in 2002, I had high-speed access and if you remember going online with the 28.8 modems, you can imagine how painfully slow it was. But they were testing cable in Pacific Beach where I was living and they were testing it in New York City. So, I’ve been very fortunate to have that edge and high-speed access to the Internet. But I always wanted to sell something on Ebay and without going into too much detail, I was selling pre-owned Jay Abraham marketing seminars up on Ebay and I had a great success of it. But originally the site was nothing but a one-page sales letter explaining that I bought pre-owned Jay Abraham seminars. People would pay $20,000, $15,000 to go to these seminars and I would sell them for 10 to 20-cents on the dollar. So, I was offering a lot of value. And even though I was having success on Ebay, you had competition there so I had to kind of get away from Ebay and create an identity outside of Ebay so I didn’t have to compete with the other people who were into the marketplace.

But I call this site the $5 billion dollar site. Why do I do this? If you were to add up all the combined sales from all the experts and people I have interviewed on this site, it would come to about $5 billion dollars. Now, that’s with a “b” not an “m.” And I also did another calculation. The interviews that I’ve done with the experts on my site, some of them charges thousands of dollar an hour and if we added up all the consultation fees that these people would have charged you to listen to this advice, you would have paid probably over $50,000 in fees. And this is very similar to what you’re doing at your site, www.mysuccessgateway.com. The value you’re bringing with your recordings is incredible and I’m enjoying listening to them and I’m going to continue enjoy listening to your recordings because we can never have too much free, good audio content out there.

You can get over 150 hours of free audio interviews similar to this at www.hardtofindseminars.com.

Now, on my site I’ve done something really unique that I’ve never seen done before. The visitors who come to my site get to learn four different ways. When you come to www.hardtofindseminars.com and you see a description of an audio recording that looks interesting to you, you can absorb it four different ways. You can press a little green button, which is a Flash audio player. Flash is a way of delivering audio content where it’s streams over the Internet so you don’t have to wait for things to download. So, by the time you click the little play button, you’ll start hearing that audio interview while being online. Now, also a lot of people don’t like to sit there and be tied to the computer so I offer PDF transcripts. Some people can get through reading faster than they can audio, so you can download the word-for-word transcripts of each one of the audio recordings. I also offer the transcripts in an HTML page where you can click onto a web page and you see all the word-for-word transcripts right there. Now, this is something a visitor to the site can actually increase their comprehension of the content because they can listen to the recording and at the same time read the transcripts of the recording and they can increase their comprehension by using two senses, their eyes and their ears. By far the most favorite way the visitors like to access my information is by downloading an MP3 file. They can download this audio recording onto their computer and play it later and they don’t have to be connected to the Internet, or they can download it to their portable iPod or MP3 player. Now, as far as the transcripts, I have 6,750 pages of typed transcripts. Virtually all of the audio content on the site has been transcribed for people who like to read.

I get an average of 550 visitors a day to www.hardtofindseminars.com and these are unique visitors, different visitors. They come from all over the world, including Singapore, Germany, Australia, the Netherlands, Canada, United Kingdom, Japan, France, Mexico, Thailand, Hungry, India, the Czech Republic, Columbia, Brazil, China, Viet Nam, Taiwan, Kuwait, South Africa, Italy, Israel, Indonesia, Switzerland, South Korea, Norway, Sweden, Malaysia, Russia Federation, the Dominican Republic, Spain, and Slovenia. So, it really amazes me that I have people coming to the site from all over the world and all these great countries.

I do no paid advertising, so the traffic coming to the site is almost all generated by word of mouth and referrals. Sometimes people will find it on some of the search engines, but the traffic stats, which will bore a lot of people, to just give you an idea, the average hits on my site, that’s when someone is clicking around to a recording or to a different page on the site, the average hits per hour is 648. The average hits on my site per day is around 15,500, files per access is 8,212, page views can be up to 3,000 a day, and again, the unique visitors a day is around 550. I have about 18 products that I offer for sale on my site. Twelve of them I either created totally on my own or have co-ventured with experts to enhance them and my products sells for anywhere from $97 up to $20,000. Almost all of my products have a 30-day trial where the visitor who comes to my site and wants to trial one of my products does not have to pay anything for a digital product and if it’s a physical product, all they’re paying is the shipping and they have 30 days to try. If they don’t like it, they can call me and I won’t charge their card. So, this has been a real valuable way in increasing sales, as well.

You’ve got a money back guarantee, which the people still have to pony up the money. They’ve got to hope that the seller is really going to honor their guarantee. I take it a step further. I want to create as little resistance as possible for someone to try my product and if I can do that, I’m going to come out ahead. There’s always going to be some people who are going to take advantage of you or they’re going to put fake credit cards in there or they’re cards are going to decline, but it’s worth it to me because even if a guy has intentionally tried to steal a product by using credit card fraud and if they actually listen to my product even though they haven’t paid, I still have a chance to sell them on myself and maybe down the road his finances will be better and he’ll come back as a customer. So, I’m fighting anyway I can to get my audio in the head of a potential customer. Does that make sense?

Jim: That makes a lot of sense.

Michael: And you should, too, which I see you’re doing.

Jim: I’m going to follow your lead, Michael.

Michael: I know you are.

Jim: So, share with me a little about some of the folks you’ve interviewed on the site.

Michael: Well, there’s so many, but I really like interviewing the older guys and I’m going to tell you about a few of them who are all over the age of 70. I mean, obviously, if you’re interviewing someone who has more life experience, you’re going to be able to gain another 30 years. I mean if I interviewed someone who is 30 compared to someone who’s 70, the guy who’s 70 is got twice the life experience and it’s a good leverage of my time to interview the guys who have lived more than other people because we can stand on the shoulders of them.

But some of the most exciting interviews I’ve had, there’s a gentleman named Glenn W. Turner. He’s 73 now and you can hear a recording of a speech that Glenn Turner that generated over $500 million in sales. Now, this was back in the early 60’s. He was called the greatest pitchman that ever lived. He was born from an unwed Mother. He grew up very poor. His mother’s prenatal illness of scarlet fever caused Glen to be born with a cleft pallet and a harelip. He overcame huge adversity and this guy started a multi-level marketing company called Koscot and later to be called Dare To Be Great. Over his career in the MLM industry, he had sold over seven million books and audio taped programs. He’s created over 800 millionaires in business with his Dare To Be Great personal development products. There was a book about him called Con Man or Saint. Have you ever heard of that book?

Jim: I’ve heard of it, but I’m not familiar with it.

Michael: Have you heard the name Glenn Turner?

Jim: Yes, I have.

Michael: Okay. Now, this is really weird, Jim. I remember ten years ago reading this book Con Man or Saint and I didn’t read that many books ten years ago, but I did read this one. And it’s just really wild to think that I’ve actually interviewed that guy ten years later. He is incredible. He’s taught me a lot and it’s fascinating interview and to hear this audio pitch is pure proof of the power of audio and the sound of someone’s voice. And you can find that at my site www.hardtofindseminars.com.

Now, another expert is a gentleman named Barry Bedell. Barry Bedell is the son of the late Clyde Bedell, and I’ll talk about Clyde in a minute. But Barry has been responsible himself for over a half a billion dollar of sales through some of the enterprises that he’s been involved with, so he is a great ad man and I’ve a two and a half hour audio interview with Barry. He’s the living son of the great Glyde Bedell. Now, who is Clyde Bedell? Clyde Bedell was one of the greatest educators on advertising of all time. He was the author of what many copywriters consider the bible of copywriting. It’s How to Convert White Space into Advertising. He also has a book called How to Write Advertising That Sells. Now, this guy was doing seminars back in the 50’s traveling all over the world, mainly the U.K. He was doing seminars there with experts in the advertising field. And I made arrangements with Barry and we had digitally re-mastered one of Clyde’s most famous lectures back from the 50’s, it’s called The Advertising Job. And you see a lot of experts out there on copywriting, but I don’t care who you are today, no one could touch this guy Clyde Bedell. And if you go back and find out who everyone studied, Clyde Bedell’s name will always come up. I find many people who already have his book of his teachings, but it’s a phenomenal seminar to listen an advertising expert do a seminar back in the 50’s. It was really interesting and a great experience.

Jim: Okay, so two things are coming up for me, one with Glenn Turner in the sense that Glenn overcame a lot of adversity to become very successful. And the second thing is that Clyde Bedell, lot of the principles that were used back then to become successful in advertising are still being used today.

Michael: Oh absolutely. Human nature does not change. People are people are people. They’re the same as they were thousands and thousands of years ago. So, the principles of success and the principles of advertising and the principles of what makes people buy will never change. That’s why it’s so great studying copywriting and selling and marketing because once you study these things, you never have to relearn it. I mean compare that to studying computer programming where every six months or every year everything you’ve learned has been a total waste because it’s obsolete. So, when I’m studying advertising and marketing and I’m interviewing experts on success, I’m never wasting my time. Everything I’ve learned can be compounded on anything new that I’ve learned and that’s why I recommend anyone get into this field and learn the principles of selling, marketing, advertising, copywriting because, again, we go back to leverage your time. You never have to relearn it. You can remind yourself of it and every time you learn something new, it compounds. It’s like compounding interest. If you have 500 hours of education in your head on copywriting, marketing, and advertising and you bring in one new concept, that one concept has a chance to blend with 500 additional hours, which can give another 500 hours of different concepts. Does that make sense?

Jim: That makes a lot of sense.

Michael: And this is where you get a lot of these breakthroughs. It may be just one little thing you learned from one of the guys you interviewed or one person you studied that can be your ticket to success.

Jim: A big ah… ha… moment.

Michael: Yes. Now, I’ve got some more experts that I’d like to share with your listeners. There’s a gentleman I met on Ebay who was selling his old inventories of his business opportunity course. He name was Arthur Hamel. Arthur Hamel, I think is now 74. He’s in southern California. Back in the 80’s, this guy was all over TV. He was traveling around with Joe Cossman and with Robert Allen and he was in the seminar business teaching people how to buy businesses. He was the expert, the guy with the mustache that was on infomercials all over the country selling his information on how to buy businesses. Now, I found him selling this old course on Ebay and I was looking for new products to sell on my website and he told me about this and I interviewed him and I was able to buy out his existing inventory of his business buying seminar. But this man now over the years has been buying multi-million dollars businesses. He’s bought over 200 businesses in his lifetime, most of them now over $1 million using investor’s money. So, I’ve been fortunate enough to be able to interview him over the last couple of years. I have about 13 hours of free audio content with interviews with this business buying expert and I’ve learned an incredible amount of information from him, as well.

Jim, have you heard of Jay Conrad Levinson?

Jim: Yes, Guerilla Marketing.

Michael: Guerilla Marketing. Guerilla Marketing, according to Jay, is the number one marketing brand in the world. He sold over 16 million of his Guerilla Marketing books. They’ve been translated into over 39 different languages and I was able to interview him for an hour and a half. I mean I really picked his brain and I had questions coming from all my site visitors. So, that is an incredible education alone that anyone can listen to for free.

Now, here’s an amazing man I met. Now, I don’t have this audio interview published on my site yet, but this is a man named Harve Brodie. He was guy who really, according to him, put Jay Abraham on the map. And he’s, I think 74 now and let me tell you what’s he’s doing now. Have you ever been to Home Depot and gone into the paint section and seen that little black pistol grip that fits on the top of a paint can?

Jim: Yes, I have.

Michael: Okay. Well, there were a couple of competitors about three or four years ago, but currently he’s taken over the entire market. He owns the intellectual rights, the worldwide patents, and the tooling to manufacture that product and he has sold over 50 million units of that product today. He also used to be in the publishing business. He’s a man who got Jay Abraham hooked up with Howard Ruff. Have you ever heard of Howard Ruff?

Jim: I have.

Michael: Howard Ruff at the time had a newsletter. He was the largest newsletter in the industry. I think this is back in 80’s and according to him, he hooked Jay Abraham up with Howard Ruff and that got Jay Abraham his start. But he has worked with greats like Bud Weckesser of Green Tree Press. He actually worked for E. Joseph Cossman, the great late mail order mail who wrote, How To Make A Million Dollars in Mail Order. He was the guy who was renting names to people like Chase Revell of Entrepreneur Magazine. He’s a personal friend of Ben Suarez. He was also renting names to Joe Cargo and knew Joe Cargo. He had seen my site and he contacted me and I’ve had several hours of conversations with him. And I’m just like the luckiest guy in the world to be able to brainstorm with guys like this.

Another incredible man is a man named Eugene Schwartz. This guy was a world-class direct mail copywriter. His copy was the copy that launched Boardroom Reports. Have you heard of Boardroom?

Jim: Absolutely.

Michael: Okay. His copy has sold hundreds of millions of dollars of product via direct mail. He wrote the classic book on copywriting called, Breakthrough Advertising, and that old book, Breakthrough Advertising, was not published at the time, but it was selling for up $700 on Ebay. Now, since then, Boardroom has republished it and you can buy it from Boardroom for about $80. But he had done a famous speech to a group of copywriters for Agora Publishing and Agora was one of the largest newsletter publishers in the world. Now, I hired an actor to recreate the speech and I have that recreation up on my site that anyone can listen to for free. I’ve had people who listened to this speech on copywriting thank me up and down because this guy was a master copywriter and he talks about subjects of marketing and markets and copywriting and demand that you won’t find anywhere. And anyone considering getting into copywriting, I would recommend they listen to this guy’s speech four or five times before they study anything else.

There’s another gentleman named Sam Bowman out of Nashville, Tennessee. He’s in his 70’s and he was in the marketing consulting business. And he was a successful marketing consulting and he was an HMA trained marketing consultant and this is a system for going out there and getting client as a marketing consultant and I interviewed him for about an hour and a half in detail. So, you can hear exactly how to go out and present yourself and to get and acquire a client and to do marketing consulting for them.

And then there’s one other guy over 70 I’ve got to talk about and I call him Uncle Mort. This is an 82-year-old guy. He’s out of New York. His brother owns the Bitter End in New York. Have you heard of that?

Jim: I’ve been there many times.

Michael: Now, this guy was doing door-to-door sales back in the 50’s. His expertise is in selling dealership and distributorship. He’s one of the first to invent the mobile pet grooming business. He was the largest seller of a product called Bendix brakes where he sold distributorships for these brake pads to auto dealers and gas stations. He had over 5,500 dealerships. He sold swimming pool dealerships, pool table dealerships, and over his career in sales, he’s been responsible for over $500 million in sales and this guy is hilarious. He’s such a character and you can find the link to that recording up on my site.

Now, these are just the guys over 70 and we don’t have time to go over all my guys over 70 that I’ve interviewed, but these certainly are some of the most compelling and interesting and entertaining interviews that I’ve been fortunate enough to do.

Jim: Well, I think that’s very valuable information, especially since you’re sharing that information with us as far as which are the key ones to go to first because I think that learning the basics in copywriting and in marketing will certainly help people become successful in selling their ideas and their products as small businesses and entrepreneurs. I almost wish I’d listened to something like this when I first got to your website, the reason being it almost guides me through your website.

Michael, what are some of the other valuable resources that you have on the site?

Michael: Thanks for asking. The site is so big, but let me just go over a few of the other things that you’ll find at my site. One, there’s a testimonial page with hundreds of testimonials and stories about what these audio interviews have done for others. Included in this downloadable testimonial collection are some special offers for my first time customers, so there’s dollar off offers on almost all of my products. If you go to the testimonial page, you can download all the stories and case studies and you’ll see those offers.

Also, if you go to my site and you go the Products page, along the left in light blue you’ll see a link that says “Michael Recommends.” What you’ll find there are links to all the information and all the tools that I use to personally my website. So, you’ll see who I use to accept credit card payments. You’ll see all my timesaving tools for recording audio. It’s just a collection of all my personal resources and the companies I recommend that you want to use to help your Internet business go easily, smoothly, and without problems.

Jim: Where’s that link again?

Michael: If you go to www.hardtofindseminars.com and you go to the Products page.

Jim: Got it, right at the top left.

Michael: And then on the left side in light blue you’ll see “Michael Recommends.” So, these are just some of my favorite links to tools and resources that I use currently for my Internet business.

I also have a section on my site with 40 free copywriting interviews. So, these are interviews I’ve done with copywriting experts including the great Bob Bly, Brian Keith Voiles, Carl Galletti, Ben Settle, Herschel Gordon Lewis, Joe Vitale, Eugene Schwartz. You’ll also hear some audio clips from Gary Halbert and John Carlton from some older seminars that I have the rights to resell.

There’s also 22 hours of free audio on marketing consulting. I currently market and sell a product called HMA System, which teaches people how to become a marketing consultant and I have 22 hours of training. I have enough training for anyone interested in becoming a marketing consultant that will train you how to go out and how to present and take a business through something we call an “opportunity analysis.” Now, you will hear me actually doing this live. You’ll hear me getting clients in these recording for real. You’ll me selling clients on my services as a marketing consultant and you’ll hear it for real. So, when I pitch this product and I offer it to someone who wants to become a marketing consultant, I not only pitch it, but I prove that it can be done and I do it personally right up on my site and you can listen to those recordings there. And that is on a page, page “H,” as in Harry, of all my audio clips. So, if you go to Audio Clips at www.hardtofindseminars.com, you’ll see there’s pages “A,” “B,” “C,” “D,” “E,” “F,” “G,” “H,” “I.” If you click on page “H” that whole page is nothing but recordings on how to become a marketing consultant.

Also, we talked about Art Hamel, the guy who bought over 200 businesses. I have 15 hours of those exclusive interviews up on my site at www.hardtofindseminars.com. If you go to the site and you go to the Products page and scroll down, you’ll see a link called “business buying” and you can access 15 hours of those audio interviews I’ve done with this master business buyer.

Another wonderful resource that I think you’re listeners may enjoy, there’s 31 hours of free audio downloads and these are some of my best recordings on how I create and develop information products. These are information that you can see using audio interviews and audio recordings that could sell for as much as $299, $599, $3900 or more. And you’ll see a report there on how to take your $28 book or an idea in your head and turn it into a $3900 information product. And at the end of our call, we’ll have a special offer just for your listeners, Jim.

Now, when I started this whole business, as I mentioned before, I originally started by selling pre-owned Jay Abraham marketing seminars and I have the unofficial largest collection of pre-owned Jay Abraham seminars in the world. And if you go to the Products page, you’ll see Jay Abraham. You click on that and you’ll see all the pre-owned marketing seminars. These are seminars he sells, his live events, anywhere from $5000 to $10,000 to $15,000 to $25,000. Some even $35,000. And the people who go to those seminars, I hunt them down and I make an offer to buy those audio recordings of the original seminar, the videos, the CDs, the transcripts, the bonus books; all that material I’m able to negotiate and buy it and offer it to the people who don’t the $30,000 or $15,000 to go and be able to offer it to them at 10 to 20-cents on the dollar.

Incidentally, this is exactly where I started. When I was down at the beach living in a one-bedroom apartment. I kind of sound like Tony Robbins. Remember he was living in a 400 square foot one-bedroom apartment. But I was in a one-bedroom apartment down on the beach in San Diego and I had heard about Jay Abraham and I heard about these $20,000 seminars. Well, I said I’m not paying $20,000 to go one of his seminars, not because I wouldn’t pay it because I didn’t have the money. So, I had to come up with a way, how could I get a hold of one of these seminars. And a little later we can talk about how that happened if we have time.

One other valuable resource is I have biographies and histories on some of the best advertising in direct marketing men of all time, including P.T. Barnum, Clyde Bedell, Leo Burnett, John Caples, Robert Collier, E. Haldeman-Julius, Claude Hopkins, John E. Kenney, Albert Lasker, David Ogilvy, Rosser Reeves, Maxwell Sackheim, Victor Schwab, and James Webb Young and those can all be found on the Products page along the left side of the site in light blue. You’ll see biographies, links to their work, and some great information on them, too.

Jim: This Jim Peake at www.mysuccessgateway.com interviewing Michael Senoff with www.hardtofindseminars.com.

So, Michael, it sounds like you’ve definitely got a lot of information up on the site. What are some of the other audio interviews and other topics that you might have that you can share with us?

Michael: There’s going to be something for everyone and I mean you can’t come to the site and not find something that has some interest, but the topics we have here at www.hardtofindseminars.com cover advertising, classified advertising…we talk about barter or the trade industry, something called Barter Secrets…real estate investing…we talk about foreclosure, business buying, copywriting interviews as I said with Brian Keith Voiles, Carl Galletti, Ben Settle, Bob Bly.

There are audio clips from some of the old Bill Myers’ seminars called the Direct Mail Boot Camp from the 1990s. These include Gary Halpert, John Carlton. I’ve interviewed Joe Vitale. We’ve got a wonderful recording for employers on personality profiling. We talk about Internet marketing…marketing consulting…angel investing. This is a fascinating field if you have a business looking for angel investors if you need to raise money and there’s a huge group of angel investors who look for fast growing companies that they can invest in. There’s recordings on direct mail…product sourcing and labeling…MLM…sales and selling…how to make cold calls…how to buy plastic injection molds…time management…asset protection…how to set up a corporation in Nevada. We talk about referrals and sales scripting…how to develop a USP…how to use creative brainstorming to come up with breakthrough ideas…the excellence of customer service…how to buy rare books…how to seal your driveway.

We’ve got an interview with the world’s foremost expert on Yellow Page advertising, Barry Mar. We talk about nurture, which is a system Jim Cecile, he used to be on the panel of all the Jay Abraham seminars back in the 90s and he talks about drip marketing. We have an expert named Kim Ellsworth where he talks about persuasion. We have an expert on how to buy newspaper advertising. We have how to start a business cleaning offices…study skills for students who want to enhance their study skill. We’ve got an expert, Paul Stevens where he gives you tips on how to increase the effectiveness of your study skills.

A lot of people need to make fast money. They’re in desperate financial situations, so I’ve got some of the quick cash methods like installing peepholes in doors…painting address numbers on curbs…how to start a lawn business…how to clean gutters; and these are free interviews where you can get all the information on how to go out there and start making money within 24 hours doing these simple things. We have advice on story selling and how to use storytelling as a way to sell. There’s an expert on how put on tent promotions outside of large mass retailers to sell products…how to buy trailer homes for profit…how to turn around businesses…how to make money in the watch repair business.

And then I’ve got a whole new section of interviews with Wal-Mart millionaires. These are people who have sold to Wal-Mart millions of dollars worth of products. There’s a few recordings on joint venture marketing and also printing secrets, how to buy your printing for less. And these are just a few of the topics that one can learn at www.hardtofindseminars.com and there’s a whole lot more and we keep brining out even more interesting topics.

Jim: That’s such a wide array of information and expertise. I did an interview with Andy Andrews and he talks about masterminding with other leaders and having a board of directors. And you are the master of masters as far as that goes.

Michael: I appreciate it.

Jim: So, Michael, how do you personally use audio in your business as a cost effective tool to increase your sales and automate your sales process?

Michael: Okay, again, I want to remind the listeners and yourself that audio interviews and audio is the driving force behind this entire website and my entire Internet business. Audio is magically. The most amazing thing it allows you to do is to position yourself as an expert. Like let’s take this interview, for example. You’re interviewing me. You’re just asking the questions and I’m basically giving you the answers. Now, I may be perceived as the expert to the list of your visitors to www.mysuccessfulgateway.com, but just by you interviewing me, it’s done something magically for you and you probably have already recognized this with some of the experts you’ve learned. It actually elevates Jim Peake’s status as an expert even though you’re just a guy asking the questions.

Jim: That’s exactly right.

Michael: Because you are linked to me, my expertise or my image online is a little bit rubbed off on your because we’re talking. And this is one of the most magically things that a complete nobody or someone who is totally unknown can very quickly raise their level of notoriety or publicity by interviewing experts. And I want you to think about who are some of the highest paid and most famous people in the United States, Oprah Winfrey. What does she do?

Jim: She talks.

Michael: She talks and interviews people on her TV show.

Jim: All day long.

Michael: Larry King, what does he do?

Jim: Talks and interviews people.

Michael: Look at our newscasters, the high esteem and regard they have.

Jim: Katie Couric.

Michael: Katie Couric, Ted Coppel. What are some other examples?

Jim: You’ve got Morley Schafer, you’ve got Mike Wallace.

Michael: All these guys, they’re just people asking questions interviewing other people. And just by doing that, look at the level of status they have. I’m not saying it’s all from the interviews, but that is one of the magically things that you get by interviewing people.

Jim: Yeah, and I could also share with you, Michael, that it’s very easy to get started doing this. Just go out and do it.

Michael: Oh, absolutely. It’s very simple. Audio allows you to deliver and distribute your audio message very fast and very inexpensively. I’m delivering hundreds of hours of audio monthly for a very cheap rate. All you need is a website to upload them to, and as you know, you can get a website and a URL very inexpensively. So, it’s a wonderful way combined with the Internet to deliver your information very inexpensively. Also, audio, you can use to increase the sales value of any product you have and I’ll give you a perfect example. Remember I was talking about Art Hamel, the guy I met on Ebay?

Well, his course was originally done back in 1985 and you would think that it’s almost 20 years old now and that it wouldn’t really have any value because it’s old, but it still had a lot of value. I took his course and then I use audio interviews with him to bring it back alive. So, anyone who’s interested in taking an old product or something that’s old and increasing the value, you can do additional interviews around the subject or with the expert who created the old product that’s not doing anything and you can quickly increase the value.

Now, Jim, as you bring on more experts on www.mysuccessgateway.com, the more experts and the more interviews you have, would you say the value of your website is going to increase?

Jim: Substantially.

Michael: The more good quality audio content you have on your site, the more valuable it is, and I have a saying; the more you talk the more you make.

Another great thing about audio is you can use audio to create great copy for your products and promotions. So, I work with a couple copywriters and before we create a sales letter we always start with an interview. If you ask someone to write a letter and you have that blank piece of paper in front of you, it’s unnatural to just start writing copy. You need somewhere to start. Good copywriting is really copy editing. It’s taking content and editing it and formatting and breaking it apart and pulling out the benefits and pulling out the features and organizing the sales message. Now, it’s a lot more natural for someone to talk to someone than it is for someone to sit there and try and write a letter. So, on almost all of my products, we always start with audio content, audio interviews like the ones we’re doing now where one can be free flowing, their thoughts are governed, they’re feeling hot, they’re not worried about what they’re saying and a lot of great copy comes right out of the mouth of the person you’re interviewing, especially when they forget they’re being interviewed.

Jim: That makes a lot of sense because you’re using common language in a sales letter from the interview.

Michael: That’s right. You don’t want your sales letters to sound _____. You want to use the exact words that came out of the person you’re interviewing or out of the expert you’re interviewing and then you have all that transcribed and you give those transcripts to your copywriter who’s going to create your sales piece or your article or whatever. So, it makes life a lot easier when you start with an interview process and give those transcripts to your copywriter and give them something to work with. That’s a great time saving, valuable trick that audio allows you to do.

Here’s another advantage I’ve seen over the years that audio has allowed me to do. As you do interviews with experts, by the time you finish the interview you’ve formed a bond with that person you’ve interviewed and this opens the door for a better chance of doing joint ventures deals. I’ll give you a perfect example. I did an interview with a guy who controls a website called www.fita.org. They’re a website which is like a clearing house for importers and exporters and they get a huge amount of traffic and I interviewed the expert who spent the last ten years of his life creating and developing this website, something he’s extremely proud of and that he probably doesn’t get to talk to too many people about all his work that he’s done. So, we did an hour interview and then at the end of the interview it gave me an opportunity to ask him to do a joint venture. We’re creating a product called Wal-Mart Secrets: How to Get Your Product Into Wal-Mart, which we’ll be marketing and selling to manufacturers around the country. And if I had not done that interview and just approached him and say hey do you want to do a joint venture. We’re creating this product on Wal-Mart, would you like to do something? I guarantee you 99% that he would have said no. But because I spent time and had a chance to bond with him and asked him all these important questions about his website and let him talk about himself, we formed a bond and it opened the door for a joint venture. I won’t work all the time, but it will work most of the time. After our interview today, I’m sure you will be more open to doing a joint venture with me and I will be more open to doing a joint venture with you, correct?

Jim: That’s absolutely one hundred percent correct. We’ve got a lot of commonalities in our two businesses, but they are separate and distinct.

Michael: Another great benefit that I don’t see being done at all on the Internet is combining audio recordings and audio interview with copy, with sales letters. All my sales letters just about on my site that sell a product or service have audio on them and this gives me a better chance of selling that interested prospect on my product or service. He can read the sales letter. If he’s too lazy to read, he can listen to an interview about the subject. So, it just increases my chance of getting the information inside his head. So, if you have a website or you something over at Click Bank and you have a sales letter, add an interview at the bottom of the sales letter and watch your sales increase. Audio allows you to interject stories that sell. As we’re doing this interview, I’m interjecting all kinds of stories that hopefully are interesting to some of your listeners and stories are the ultimate sales tool because I’ve got two young kids and what do we do every night, we read books. We read stories. Stories are very powerful for having your listener be in the place of the character and you can do this with audio. Stories really sell. So, with audio, you have the ability to simply interject stories in your audio message and to increase your selling power of that audio recording.

Jim: Absolutely. The human race has been telling stories ever since the beginning of time.

Michael: That’s right. And people can relate to stories, they’re open to stories, and stories have proven to be one of the most effective ways of selling.

In my audio recordings, you also have the chance to advertise and promote your stuff. As someone goes to my site and they listen to some of my audio recordings, there’s something I’ve been doing. I have a whole list of these tips and tricks that I try and educate people about my site. And at the end of each recording I’ll say, Hi, this is Michael Senoff with www.hardtofindseminars.com. Here’s another tip for you the listener of www.hardtofinseminars.com. And it gives me the opportunity to advertise, to tell someone more about my website, to point out a new product that I’m coming out with, to give them advice on how to get through the content faster and better, to show them where all the recordings on copywriting is. Now, when you download an audio recording, with our bandwidth increasing and the ability to download faster and faster, how long does an audio recording need to be? You may have an audio recording of an interview with someone that maybe an hour, but there’s no law that says you can’t put 15 minutes at the end of some kind of sales message or some other message. When someone’s listening and they listen all the way through to the end of that 60 minutes, you’ve still got their attention. Don’t just end the recording; offer something else. Put the beginning of another recording in there. Read one of your sales letters into the microphone and direct someone to do something, to take action, to order your free CD, to buy something. Use that time that you have that captive audience listening to your recording to benefit you in some way. So, you have the ability to do that, as you would with copy. You would just add more pages. But with audio and because it’s digital, you can this advertising, especially if you control the audio recordings, for virtually no cost.

Now, by transcribing the audio recording, you can have transcripts and I asked people what is their favorite way of learning and I get answers all across the board. Some people love watching videos, some people like audio, but some people don’t like audio and they like to read. But it doesn’t mean you don’t have a chance to get your message because you just take the audio recording, you transcribe it into the written word and you have it as a download or you can print into a booklet, so you still have a chance of providing that audio interview that did in a transcript form, which is more user friendly to that person who is a reader.

Jim: So, what percentage of the people are streaming, downloading an MP3, and reading?

Michael: I haven’t figured out the detail exactly, but I do remember being in there and noticing that I think compared to just people clicking on the green button to downloading the MP3, downloading the MP3 is by far the most popular.

Jim: And that makes sense because there’s a lot of iPods out there in the world today.

Michael: Absolutely. Not only iPods, but cells phones and that is the future. With these devices and as prices are coming down, iPods, cell phones, PDAs, everyone will have a device that will allow them to play audio content on them. Everybody. It’s just a matter of time, at least in the United States. I’m not talking third world countries. So, you have a built in tool or device in peoples’ hands ready to deliver your content. You’ve got all the phone companies spending hundreds of millions of dollar to get these phones into their hands. I just bought a Chocolate phone, you know, the Chocolate you’ve seen on TV, the LG Chocolate?

Jim: Yes.

Michael: You can download MP3s; you can just play your audio right there. You can put a whole gig of audio content just like on an iPod, but this is exciting especially for me with audio because as the younger generation gets older and older they know how to use this stuff. They know how to go online and download and this is the future, playing video and audio and music on their little devices. So, I have a lot of opportunity. My job now really is to sell them on the idea of listening to my stuff in addition or compared to music. Do you see?

Jim: Absolutely.

Michael: And all the tools are already there. All I need to do is create the content that appeals to them.

And there’s one other really important magical aspect about audio. I call it the voyeur aspect. Do you know what a voyeur is, when they’re looking in. It’s kind of like when you want to look into the room and you have one of those old time doorknobs and you’re looking through the keyhole. Well, there’s a voyeuristic aspect of someone listening to an audio interview and being totally anonymous. So, someone at their home or on their computer, those people listening that we have no idea who they are and it’s appealing to listen in on a conversation of two people. It’s naturally appealing. Do you know what I’m saying?

Jim: Well, it’s just like they’re sitting down here at the coffee shop with us.

Michael: Yes.

Jim: They’re part of the conversation.

Michael: But it’s like you and I are in one booth and they’re in the booth kind of spying on us.

Jim: Exactly.

Michael: It’s exciting to spy on someone and to hear what they’re saying, to listen in on their conversation. It’s like gossip.

Jim: It is.

Michael: Look at the National Enquirer. That sells more copy than I think the Bible.


This is Jim Peake at www.mysuccessgateway.com and this is Part 2 of our interview with Michael Senoff of www.hardtofindseminars.com.


Michael: I am on the line Jim. How are you doing today?

Jim: Excellent. I really appreciate your time on the first part of the interview and there’s a few more things that we’d like to cover. One of the things that is coming up for me is audio interviews. Obviously, we’re using a lot of them here at www.mysuccessgateway.com and you’ve been doing it for a long time on www.hardtofindseminars.com. How can listeners use audio interviews to make more money even if they’re not sales experts?

Michael: Well, that’s a great question, Jim. The first thing I would say to listeners is doing audio and audio interviews probably on onset seems like you have to be a real techno geek to learn how to do this and is probably a mystery and it sounds really confusing, but it’s nothing of the sort. It’s actually very, very simple. And there’s also some hidden benefits in doing audio and audio interviews and using these to sell whatever product and service you have. But one benefit of doing audio that really stands out is it is cheap. It’s extremely inexpensive for the tools that you need to do an audio interview and record and get it published and get it delivered online.

There’s also another hidden benefit when you’re doing audio interviews with people that are designed around selling a product and service you have. I call it recording magic. For instance, you invited me to do an interview here for your website and I know that there’s going to be a lot of people listening to it as you start promoting the website and getting more and more exposure. So, do you think I’m going to come on to your show and give my worst effort or a half-heated effort in providing value to your customers? You’re going to get the best of the best from me, at least I hope to deliver the best of the best. And this is what I found. When you’re doing an interview with a subject and they know that that audio recording may be broadcast and listened to by hundreds of thousands of people, you better believe they’re going to be on their best behavior. And even though they’re doing the interview for free, they’re going to give, in most cases, all they have. So, I call it recording magic. Your subject that you’re interviewing is going to give you their best and they will, many times, give you all they know without holding anything back and they’ll do it for free. So, this is a great technique whether you’re doing research with no intention of publishing the audio, but because of the positioning your have, you’re going to be able to get incredible information from them virtually for free; the same information that they may charge their clients thousands of dollars per hour for.

There’s another real hidden benefit of doing audio interviews, to use to sell and market your products or service. And the thing is you’re doing them a huge favor because you’re educating them in a simple way that is natural to be educated by and it’s through the spoken word. In the end, your customer is really the one who’s benefiting you. For example, all of your audios, Jim, here on www.mysuccessgateway.com, who’s the real winner of this website? Of course, you’re a winner, but the real winner is the listener out there. You interviewing these experts on marketing and advertising and copywriting and advertising testing and by you giving freely and putting this together and providing audios for your website members, they’re the real winners. And then your listeners who choose to do audio interviews and provide this content for their prospects and their potential prospects, they’re doing them a huge favor and that favor isn’t lost. They’re going to remember that. They may not buy from you right away, but they may buy from you or become your client years from now because of some valuable piece of information that you provided them on an audio recording. You never know who’s listening to your audio right now or a year from now or five years from and that always comes back to you and that comes to that natural law of you get what you give, you sow what you reap, the right of reciprocation. It’s a nasty little trick, but by you providing all this great value, it is going to come back to your for sure five and ten times somewhere down the road when you least expect it. And that’s another magic benefit of using audio recordings and interview to promote products and services that you have.

Jim: I totally agree with that. And just going back to the recording magic point that the subjects will give their best, one of the things that I’ve noticed, Michael, is the fact that when people get going on an interview, it’s really hard for me to interject because they just want to give so much information in such a short period of time.

Michael: That’s true. And you know as being the interviewers, in many cases like us, it’s very tempting to get in and to keep within the interview. You want to be a part of the interview, obviously, because you’re the producer of the interview and I feel the same way in many cases. You want to control it. But what I have found is your best bet is just to shut up. Let the guy talk because after a while he’s not being governed, he’s not thinking about being recorded. He’s in a groove and he’s rolling and if you just be quiet and listen to the person you’re interviewing and don’t interject, only when it’s absolutely necessary, then you’re doing your listeners the biggest favor because your listeners are really there not to hear you, Jim, and they’re not there to hear me. Over the years as I’ve done audio interviews and recording, you’ll notice that I talk less and less. Many times you’ll barely even hear me in the interview.

Jim: At the beginning of and at the end of the interview.

Michael: The beginning, the end, and maybe a short question and then I just shut up. And so, we’ve got to keep in mind as interviewers what we’re trying to accomplish and to understand that the people coming to our sites listening to our audio recordings are really not there to hear us. They’re there to listen and learn from the expert that we’re interviewing. And I would say anyone considering doing audio interviews, this can be one of the hardest things, but it can be one of the greatest assets to your audio interviews to not interject too much because understanding that your listeners want to hear the expert, unless you’re being interviewed on a subject where your positioned as the expert. In this case, like with me.

Jim: Absolutely. So, can you share with us a few more points that people can make money on with audio?

Michael: Well, here’s something really interesting that you would never think would happen, but as you do these audio interviews with these experts, you are elevated to their status. So, if you do enough of these, you in some way become an online celebrity. This is the magic of being the interviewee and we talked about some of the most famous people. Look, Ed Bradley from 60 Minutes just died. He was a reporter and they ran special on him and he was a huge celebrity all because he did great interviews. He was never really the expert, but he was known for being an incredible listener and a great interviewer. Larry Kind, Oprah, Dr. Phil, Barbara Walters; all these great names are all due to being good interviewers and good listeners. So, that celebrity status is something that will naturally come along with you doing audio interviews and recordings of experts.

Now, another thing, I call it the luck factor. The more you interview people and the more you stick with interviewing experts on your subject or topic, the more doors open for you. And I can give you countless examples. When you interview someone, like we’re talking today, and as we’re talking, we’re building somewhat of a relationship and because we spent this much time on the phone, there’s going to be potential opportunities for us to do something, whether it’s now or down the road. Doing an audio interview with an expert gives you a license to invite that interviewee to some type of other business arrangement or other joint venture or other business venture. So, it’s a great way to build rapport and get in the door into the sphere of possibly doing more business just by simply doing an interview with someone and inviting them to do that and spend some time on the phone. So, you’ll find that you’ll get additional business after the initial interview that may be totally unrelated to the initial interview that you did.

Jim: Yes, and that’s already happening today. I can’t talk about it right now, but we’ve got several things in the works.

Michael: You’re going to see, the more you interview the luckier you get.

Here’s another incredible benefit that’s growing by leaps and bounds. I saw the news clip right up on your site when I was looking at www.mysuccessgateway.com and it was a press release on Microsoft coming out with a cordless iPod.

Jim: My understanding of it is it’s like an iPod. You can listen to MP3s on it and what you can do is share those MP3s wirelessly with your friends. So, we could take this call and I could have this on my Zune and then transfer it to your Zune.

Michael: See, this is an exciting time for both you and myself because the technology out there is moving so fast and we talked a little bit about this, but iPods and digital recorders and PDAs and cell phones that now can play audio. So, if you’re a person listening and you’re considering using audio to sell a product or service, you have to understand that almost the entire modernized world will have a device that can deliver your audio message and can deliver it in a way where they are almost one hundred percent focused on it. It’s like having one of your salesmen right there with your prospect giving your best sales presentation on why they should consider hiring you or buying your product or service. The hardware is already out there where hundreds of millions of dollars are being spent to educate the public on how to use these devices. Once they know how to use it and you have your audio content, it’s just a matter of publishing that content and making that person aware that this content is there available for them to listen to immediately, probably in most cases for free, and that’s going to provide them some benefit by listening.

Jim: Absolutely. And really, Michael, it’s all about syndication and getting the right information into the right people’s hands. So, if the topic on this particular is audio interviews and one person listens to this interview, they know somebody else that wants to get more information on audio interviews, guess what, with a product line a Zune or RSS or Technorati, they can share that information with other folks that have like interests.

Michael: That’s right and this kind of fits in some way with that recording magic that we talked about that your interviewed subjects are going to give their best because the best audio you have is naturally going to be shared with others. I’ll give you a perfect example. My dad sends me these emails and he says take a look at this. You know this stuff that flies around the Internet? It was a video clip of a magician, kind of like a David Blaine magician, doing this magic trick and he walks into this aquarium and he gets some people around him. He does a card trick. He has a girl write her name on this card and then he flips the card against this aquarium with fish in it and then there’s one card stuck on the aquarium and they try and scratch it off, but it’s on the inside of the aquarium. And then they run around to the other side of the aquarium and then he actually sticks his hand inside the glass. It goes all the way through and he peels it off the inside of this aquarium. This is with water and fish in there. And it was just so amazing. Seeing something like that, you naturally want to share it with someone else. So, my father-in-law was over here for dinner and I say Al you’ve got to check this out. And so I showed him. And it was my son’s birthday over the weekend so we had the whole family over and then my wife’s brother was over here and my father-in-law said hey Leslie, you’ve got to check out this trick. So, this is the type of viral stuff you want with your audios. You see it become viral. People want to share it.

Now, I want to interject something really important. Why do people want to share that with someone else? Well, I was really the one benefiting by sharing something really cool that would entertain my father-in-law. And then he did the same thing with his son. When you do the recording magic and you interview someone and they give you a great interview and you take your time and you edit that thing, you make sure it’s presented extremely well and it is high class and done right, that’s the type of viral marketing you’ll get with your audio. Now, couple that with the technology coming along, with the iPod revolution and the PDAs and cell phones and the digital players and the wireless technology, this just plays hand in hand for natural viral marketing.

Jim: What are some additional benefits that users and listeners can reap from audio interviews?

Michael: Here’s something that you’re going find as you’re getting started doing these audio interviews and I’m sure you’ve thought about this. The more audio interviews you do the more packaging options you have. Each one of your audio interviews can be a standalone product that you can deliver for free, that you can use to promote your website, that you could sell. How many interviews have you done already?

Jim: Two dozen.

Michael: You’ve done 24 interviews. So, as you know, you can take any one of those interviews and you can start packaging them. You could start creating separate products. You can create a 10 CD set of 10 of your interviews on advertising. You can break them down into subjects on personal development, on copywriting, on marketing, on business, on sales, on telephone sales. And even though you have two dozen interviews, you may be able to create 24 different packages that can appeal to 24 different markets. Does that make sense?

Jim: Yes, that makes absolute sense. That’s leverage.

Michael: That’s leverage. So, you could do one audio interview once, like we’re doing this two-part interview, but you may be able to create a headline or an angle to promote the audio to 24 different markets, but you’ve only done the product one time. We’re talking about a lot of different things here and as you get this transcribed and you read through the transcript, you can come up with all kinds of ideas on how to position and market this one audio. You’ve just got to decide how you want to use it. So, anyone out there doing audio interviews, as they do more and more interviews, they have immense packaging options not only for the digital audio, but the transcripts can be packaged into books. As you transcribe each one of the audios, those can be individual books or you can create a series of interviews that could be a book on this topic. So, your packaging options increase with the more audio content and more audio interviews you do and those can be sold, as well, to create additional income.

Jim: And we work out licensing agreements with the subjects that we’re interviewing?

Michael: That’s correct.

Another thing, we talk about books, audio allows you to break the book stereotype. If you ask a hundred people out there how much does a book cost, most people are going to tell you a book costs anywhere from $10 to $29 because when you go to a book store, that’s what a book cost. Rarely do you see books in the bookstore, unless they’re the big books that have beautiful graphic arts, the coffee table type books that you see sell for more than that. Well, with audio, you’re able to break that book stereotype. We’ll talk more about this in my product How To Take A $28 Book or Idea and Turn It Into a $3900 Information Product. The magic of audio allows you to get out of that pricing stereotype. With what I do, when you’re creating information products, you don’t want to sell books. Books sell for $10 to $20. You want to sell systems. You want to sell programs. You want to sell seminars. Those sell for thousands and I advise anyone in this business, if they’re selling and marketing audio, to sell them for good margins because that’s why we’re in business, after all, to make a profit.

Another fear that keeps many people from getting into doing audio interviews is they feel they have to be the expert and we talked about all the experts out there, Oprah, Larry King, and all these great interviewers, and you must understand, you don’t have to be the expert to sell with audio. You don’t even have to do the actual interview yourself. You can set up the interview and hire an expert on the subject to do the interview for you. So, that’s another real benefit and a myth that believe they have to be the expert in doing these audio interviews, which is absolutely not true.

Jim: That’s a great point. I like that a lot.

Michael: A lot of people are insecure with the sound of their voice. They may be insecure because they have a foreign accent. But they can certainly be the puppet master. They can set it up and just get it done and make sure that they retain the rights and get someone to do it better than they could in the first place.

Another advantage of doing audio is you’re able to dig deeper with an audio interview compared to writing alone. When you have a two-way dialog, you’re able to be like a little kid. You can say well why. What can you tell me about that? Why is that important? Just like a little baby, they’ll go why, why should I do that, why, why. And if you keep asking why to your interview subject, you can allow them to go into deeper reasonings behind some of the benefits of their product or service.

A couple more benefits I want to outline that your listeners may experience doing audio interviews is doing audio interviews and creating the final product is very fast. If you have the tool and you’re skilled in doing them yourself or you hire someone who knows how to record an audio interview and know how to do the editing, you can put out a product within hours from the time you do the actual audio. Another great benefit is the huge margins and we talked about selling systems and seminars. By having audio, you’re really making it convenient for your listener to absorb that information and we also touched on it with iPods and the mechanisms out there to deliver your message. One of the best benefits is the convenience of getting that information into your potential prospect’s head. Enthusiasm can really be transferred effectively with audio, more so than you can get in the printed word. There are good copywriters who are very effective in doing this, but I don’t think they can touch the emotional impact in the inflection of the human voice. One of the interviews I did, he had said, you can’t create passion. You can hear the passion in the voice of the person being interviewed or the interviewee and audio interviews allow you to transfer that passion to your listener in a way that can’t be duplicated on paper, in my opinion.

These are just some of the main benefits I’ve experience and that I know any of your listeners who start using audio and audio interviews to promote their product or service will find to be true.

Jim: Absolutely. And it’s like you’re basically opening up your kimono, Michael, share with us the business model that you’ve set up for yourself that is providing you with a lot of success.

Michael: I’m just telling you like it is. If you asked me three or four years ago, would I think this to be true, I wouldn’t have any idea unless I did them. So, I’m just showing you the results and what I have found to be true just by doing audio interviews and recordings for my own business.

Jim: That’s very much appreciated, I know for our listeners. So, you’ve sold me and you’ve probably sold a few other listeners on starting their own audio programs. What’s involved as far as the technical aspects are concerned? What sort of equipment do we need and that sort of thing?

Michael: All I can do is share what I’m using currently. Now, there are other website and other people who sell all kinds of expensive equipment out there that push the idea that you need the highest quality recording to be effective in doing this. I disagree with that. I don’t think you need to sound like a professional radio station delivering this super high content of audio. Every once in a while I’ll get people who say the quality of your audios aren’t just that good. Now, four years ago when I started doing audio interviews, I was using some online software called ModemSpy, which wasn’t a very high quality audio. But now I just use a simple digital recorder. So, let me tell you what I’ve been using currently and there may be better tools out there, but this what I’ve been using very inexpensively and very effectively and anyone can do this for very little money.

So, the first thing you’re going to need is a digital recorder. The particular digital recorder I use is a Sony ICD-ST25. It’s about twice the size of a pack of chewing gum and you can pick it up Circuit City for probably $80. This will record your audio. Now, how do you get the audio onto that recorder through the telephone? You need to go to Radio Shack or go online to www.radioshack.com. If you walk in there, tell them you’d like the unit that allows you to record phone calls both ways and they have several units. There’s one that has a little suction cup that sticks on the phone. Maybe someone has seen that. You do not want that, but there’s another one with a little black box and there’s a wire that will plug directly into your digital recorder and then there’s a wire that will plug into the back of your phone and then there’s another wire that will plug directly into the wall socket. It’s a little confusing to get set up. I know I had a hard time getting it set up, but once it was done, I never touched and it has always worked since then. One very important thing is when you’re doing your audio recordings, you want to be doing it from a corded phone. When you do an interview, you make sure you tell the person you’re interviewing you do not want them on a cell phone, you do not want them on a headset, and you do not want them on a cordless phone. The reason being is you will get interference and static. The best way is by making sure the person you’re interviewing has a corded phone, a good old corded phone that plugs into the wall that has the wiggly cord and they’re holding the piece right up to their mouth. Now, you may experience some cases where it’s not possible, so you can test a cell phone and I’ve done interviews with people on cell phones that have gone good. But you do want to make sure you’re getting the best connection possible.

Now, preparing for the call. Before we started this call, Jim, I pressed on my phone here in the United States, I pressed star 70 and I have a call waiting service where if a call came in, you would naturally hear it beep, but because I’ve pressed star 70 on my phone, I eliminate calls coming in so I’m not interrupted by that annoying beep. Now, you want to have in your digital recorded fresh batteries. The Sony recorder I have takes AAA batteries. They do have another model that you can plug into an electrical outlet where you do not have to go through batteries and I would probably recommend that because I do go through a lot of AAA batteries. So, try and find the device that doesn’t rely solely on batteries. Another thing I do when I’m doing the actual recording is I turn my computer speakers off, I turn the lamp or any kind of electronics off.

Jim: Cell phones.

Michael: Yes, cell phones. I get the other phone in the other room off and the ringer off and I don’t want any kind of electrical interference, as well. Sometimes your digital recorder will do some funny things and maybe out of 10 or 20 recordings, you may get one that has all this interference and you can’t figure it out and I still haven’t figured it out, but I want to make sure that I eliminate anything like that so I turn off any kind of electrical components that may interfere with my Sony recording. So, this is all in preparing for your call.

Many people ask me, well do I need to get a recording release. That’s like a legal document that they have to read, fill out, and sign. I have found in my experience that it always inhibits getting the interview done. When I get on the phone with them, I just say you understand I am going to be recording this call. I let them know that I will be using this recording on my website, www.hardtofindseminars.com. Down the road I may package this recording and sell it as a product and I need to make sure before we start doing this interview that I have your permission and that you understand this. And they’ll say yes. You have your recorder on, so you get their verbal permission on the phone right before you’re doing the recording and then over all these years I’ve never done a recording where its ever been a problem.

Jim: Got it.

Michael: How are you handling that, Jim?

Jim: The same exact way, just by intuition, really.

Michael: Good. A lot of people ask me well how do you get the content for preparing for your interviews? There’s several different kind of interview styles. One of the easiest is called the outline or the table of contents interview. Let’s say I’m going to be interviewing an expert on how to buy cars. Well, I’ll go to www.amazon.com and I’ll type in how to buy cars and I will find probably 10 or 20 books on how to buy cars. And on Amazon, they allow you to look inside the book. In all cases, they allow you to look at the table of contents. Now, you may have some best selling books on how to buy cars that the editors and publishers and the authors have worked very hard in developing the content of that book. Well, you have all the subjects right there of things that you can talk to your interviewee subject about right there in the table of contents of these books up on www.amazon.com. So, when doing the interview, you want to have potential subjects to talk about. Now, these have already been organized. You could take three or four or five different books and compare all their outlines and take the most common talked about subject and these can become the subjects that you ask your questions about. So, that’s called the outline interview and you’ll never run out of stuff to talk as long as you have a table of contents that you can borrow from www.amazon.com books that are already published. Is that easy or what?

Jim: That’s too easy.

Michael: Another great way if you have a customer list or people that you can survey, this is called the questionnaire interview and these are by far one of the easiest types of interviews. What I do is if I’m going to be interviewing an expert, I may send out an email to my list that says on Tuesday I’ll be doing an interview with Joe Vitale on how to make money doing hypnotic writing and now is your chance to ask Joe any question you want on the subject of copywriting, NLP, and hypnotic writing. When you email me your question, I will mention your name and your website. And you let them know in the email that this interview will be played thousands of times to people all over the world and they have a chance of their website being heard on the audio interview. So, you give them a reason why they want to send in their best question. And the reason most people would think would be because they want to learn from Joe Vitale and that is partly true. But by throwing in an extra incentive, by saying that you’ll mention their name and their website, they get a chance of having someone listen to the interview and go to their website. You’ve basically got to bribe them in providing a question. So, I’ll email this out to my list and I’ll get tons of questions that come in.

And then I’ll print out all the question or I’ll organize them and then I’ll send them to my personal assistant and I’ll have her categorize these questions. And if the interview is going to be an hour, I’ll have her pick out the best questions, the most provocative questions. I’ll have her eliminate the doubles because you’ll find many people have the same questions. And then I’ll have this list of questions in front of me and then when I’m set up to do the interview with Joe, I say well here’s a question from Jim Peake from www.mysuccessgateway.com, and Joe he asked, well, Joe how is it one can start out as a hypnotic copywriting expert and then I shut up and I let him answer. And then I just go on with here’s a question from Jane Marrow and you just go through the list. And the hard part is done, asking him a question that’s going to get him talking about a subject that someone’s interested in.

And the magic about this form of interview is you are surveying the market of what they want to learn. Your market is telling you exactly the information they want to know from this expert and how can you beat that. This way you don’t have to dream up what your potential prospect wants to know. You’ve asked him directly. So, you are delivering the exact content that your market has asked you for. And then as they’re answering these questions, you can interject and dig. Remember I talked about being a little kid? You can say why is that, how can I benefit from that, and that’s your job is to be a little kid, be a little pest and dig and make them go deeper and shut up and just listen. That’s the survey question type interview.

Jim: Michael, just to go one step further on that digging, that’s really where you get a lot of the detailed information and the gold out of the expert.

Michael: Some of the greatest interviewers, we were just talking about Ed Bradley, what was it about him that made him such a great interviewer. And it’s the interviewers who aren’t afraid to ask the hard questions. No one likes a softball interviewer. You want the guy who’s going to ask the questions that everyone else is afraid to ask. And that’s one of the characteristics of being a great interviewer, not letting your fear get in the way of asking the good stuff, the stuff that you really want to know, which is the same stuff everyone else wants know but they’re too afraid to admit it. So, you’re doing a real service by asking the questions that you know everyone wants to know, but is too afraid to ask.

Jim: Yes. Absolutely.

Michael: One additional type of interview is what I call the story interview and this is just a chronological event type interview. It’s very effective and it just allows you to ask questions in a timeline. You would start off, Jim, where were you born, what was your childhood like, what did your mom do, what did your dad do. And then where did you go to school and how did that get you into doing this. You just talk about all the previous experiences they had up to the subject that they’re going to be talking about. Now, these initial questions, you do not necessarily have to use this content in the final production of the interview, but it will allow you to build rapport and what I have found when doing audio interviews, your best stuff really comes later in the interview. The first part of the interview is a little uncomfortable maybe, depending on who you’re talking about, but your interview subject as time goes on, as they get in the groove, as they’re sharing, as they’re more comfortable, they really start to open up and that’s where you’re going to find the best stuff. Now, the story type interview is effective in giving them time to get to that point. You don’t necessarily, again, have to use this in your final production of the interview, but it does allow time for them to get warmed up, as I would say. So, you can just go through a chronological event, their work experience, how did they get into Internet marketing. If I asked you, how did you get into Internet marketing, Jim, and how did this whole idea of www.mysuccessgateway.com start and you just answer the questions chronologically and then we just record that and you still dig deeper like a kid.

So, those are the three types of interviews that I do most and some of the easiest ways. There may be other, but these are the ones that I found to be most effective.

Jim: I’m intuitively using those styles myself without even realizing I’m using those styles.

This is Jim Peake, by the way, from www.mysuccessgateway.com interviewing Michael Senoff of www.hardtofindseminars.com.

So, we’ve got the interviews set up, we’re doing the interviews, we’ve got the technical equipment, we’re all set to go, we’ve recorded many calls. Let’s talk about how we’re going to edit this in a format that makes the most sense so that the listeners are getting a quality product out the door.

Michael: Well, first I want to say I believe a listener can get a quality product with unedited interview. I used to not edit my recordings and the reason why it’s easy not to edit them. It’s hard to edit recordings. It takes time. It costs money. It’s very labor intensive. But in the final end, I believe an edited audio recording you’ll have a finer product that is more valuable and the most important thing is you doing your listener a favor by editing the recording. People don’t want to listen to interviews where they hear a bunch of ums and uhs and they hear jokes and interruptions and phone calls beeping in and things like that. It’s just in my opinion sloppy work. And there is a time for it and a place for it, but the interviews I do now, I edit all of them. I may edit an hours worth of audio, it may take five hours to do the editing. But I believe each one of those audio recordings is a little money making machine. You would never put up a rough draft of a sales letter on a website or you would never send a rough draft of a direct mail piece in the mail would you?

Jim: Not at all.

Michael: It’s the same thing with audio. You’ve got to start looking at your audio interviews and your recordings as digital selling messages; selling messages in audio. A lot of people ask well what do you edit out? Well, it depends who you’re talking to. Some of your interview subjects may be you won’t have to do any editing. I find myself editing out myself when my ego gets in the way and I want to interject and get involved in the interview and maybe ask questions. When I go through it, I’m usually editing a lot of the stuff that I say in the interview out. I’ll also edit out any beeps or crackles. In many speech patterns you’ll find the interview subject may say and or and uh or um; things that you would edit out in a sales letter, unnecessary words, unnecessary long pauses. There can be a lot of different things to edit out, but by the time you do the editing, you have a much better product and your listeners will thank you for it.

So, the editing process can take some time and it some skill and some experience, but I would recommend anyone doing audio interviews to find an editor or to learn how to do that editing. Now, I’m going to give you the software that I use to do my editing. If you go to a website called www.goldwave.com, this is the software I’ve been using for four years. I find it to be the fastest way to edit audio recordings; at least it is for me. I haven’t tried too many others and I use a 4.y version. It’s an older version. They have newer versions, but I can’t figure out how to use. I use what I’m used to using and this works fine for me, and it doesn’t take long to learn the software. So, you’ll find with a little practice, you’ll become an expert editor, as well.

Jim: Are you doing the editing yourself or are you outsourcing that?

Michael: I’m kind of like when you to a dentist and you get your teeth cleaned, you have a hygienist and the dentist comes at the very end. Right now I have two editors who I work with who are kind of like the hygienist. I’ll do the audio recording and then I will send the entire recording to my editors, they go through and clean up the recording, get out the obvious stuff, the beeps, the crackles, the uhs, the ums, and with some experience they have even been able to do a little more. They send back the recording to me and then I’m like the dentist who comes in and checks everything out. But I will also go through an initial edit process and I will do the final editing. So, I’ll make the important decisions of what to edit out. I may move something from the front to the back.

Now, there are a couple things. Everyone’s gone to the movies and the reason they go to the movies, in many cases, is because of the trailer. At the beginning of each one of my audio recordings, as I do the editing and as I listen to the entire recording, I will listen for a part of the recording that is emotionally charged. It may be a statement that came 45 minutes into the recording by my interviewee subject where he’s emotional and excited and I’ll take that sound byte, that clip and I’ll move it to the very beginning of the recording. It’s kind of like taking a headline for a sales letter and I’ll put that emotionally charged sound clip at the very beginning of my recording and then I have some music. Anyone listening to my audio recordings knows my signature music lead in before I start my audio recording. And I do this because when a listener clicks on that button or they download and they start listening to that audio recording, it’s kind of like people will make a snap judgment. They’ll make the decision within the first few second of whether they want to spend an hour listening to your recording. So, I’ll take a headline and create excitement from the very beginning because I want them to stick to the recording and listen all the way through.

Another way to keep your listener listening is by doing them a service and by offering an introduction of what they’re going to be listening to. Set the stage. Introduce yourself. Tell them who you are and tell them what this interview is about and outline some of the benefits that they’re going to hear in the interview. Give them context of what they’re going to be spending and investing an entire hour of their life listening to and tell them reasons why they want to listen this. This is really critical in keeping the listenership of your audio interviews because you can’t sell if you can’t get them to listen. Now, I also go back to servicing your listener and doing them a favor and making their life easier. You don’t want them to go into an interview without them knowing what they can expect. That’s not going to benefit them, so I always do an audio introduction in my own voice of what they can expect and learn from the audio interview.

Also, you’re doing something Jim very smart and I’ve started doing this. These audio interviews are your intellectual property and they are your medium to do advertising. You want people to get back to your site, www.mysuccessgateway.com. Now, in an hour interview, I will interject--I already have them prerecorded and when I do the editing--it’s three little clips. I’ll say this is Michael Senoff with www.hardtofindseminars.com or I’ll say you’re listening to an exclusive interview from Michael Senoff’s www.hardtofindseminars.com. I’ll do this ten minutes into the recording and then I’ll do it 30 minutes into the recording, and at the end I’ll say for more interviews like this go to www.hardtofindseminars.com. Because after all, what do we want our interviews to do? We want to provide value and we want them to get back to our website to listen to more so they can buy something from us. Or in the case of someone listening to this recording who’s selling consulting services or accounting services or different products, we want them to contact you. So, tell them what they’re listening to, remind them where they can go to get more, or how they can contact you.

Jim: And Michael that makes a lot of sense because a lot of times what happens is when these interviews are posted up on the Net, they’ll get lags and they’ll go on to other sites, so you want to make sure that those people that listen to these interviews get back to the origin of the recording.

Michael: That’s right. Now, I have a lot of different material and subject up on www.hardtofindseminars.com. At the end of each one of my interviews, you may hear 10 or 20 minutes of I would just call it advertising. I tell them here’s another tip from Michael Senoff’s www.hardtofindseminars.com. See, if someone listens to my interview and they’re going for a walk or they’re running or they’re at the gym and let’s say the interview is 40 minutes, well with high speed bandwidth, I may have an hour and ten minutes of audio on there. I may want to fit 15 minutes of promotion to educate somebody about my website that gives them new tips and tricks, that tells them where they can learn about copywriting recordings. I use that extra time to sell and to educate the listener on other things that will bring them back to my site again. So, when you burn a CD, do you know you can put up to 80 minutes on a CD-ROM. Well, you may have an audio interview that’s only 60, well don’t waste that 20 minutes. Use that 20 extra minutes to put something else on there; to promote a new product or a new service or give someone 20 minutes of a 60 minute interview and at the end of the interview say to listen to the rest of this interview, go to www.mysuccessgateway.com. So, use this valuable real estate to educate the listener on different things that you have at your website or different services or products that you’d like to sell them.

Jim: So, let’s talk about distribution Michael. Now we’ve got the site, now we’ve got the edited audios up there, how are we going to get that information out to the rest of the free world?

Michael: The first and foremost and number one way I would recommend anyone get traffic back to their site or back to their telephone or back to their office or back to their mailbox is to produce an excellent product. A product so excellent that people will naturally tell others about it. But there’s other ways that I’ve been using online to capture names, addresses, phone number, email addresses, fax information about my site visitors and one way I’ve been using very effectively is by giving out a free CD-ROM. If you go to my website, at the home page you’ll see Free CD in yellow and this is a collection of 61 hours of what I feel are my best audio interviews. They’re all in MP3 format and they’re all one on CD-ROM. But it’s not like a CD you put in your CD player and listen to. It’s not an audio CD, it’s a data CD. So, you have 61 hours of my best audio interviews. If you put the CD-ROM in your computer it will open up, you’ll hear an introduction. Now, I offer to send that CD to anyone in the world for free and I even pay for the postage and I’ve been doing that for years. So, I’ve been sending out thousands of free CDs all over the world absolutely free. Well, why did I do this? To get that free CD-ROM that person who comes to my website has to enter their first and last name, their email address, their phone number, their fax number. I ask them what kind of business they’re in. I ask them for their URL. I ask them how many customers they have on their mailing list. I ask them if they’re open to joint ventures. And I demand that to get their CD they have to give me one idea about my website that could benefit the website. They have to give me a suggestion, and they’re not going to hurt my feelings, to tell me a way to improve my website. So, I’m trading a CD and the cost of shipping to get it to them for feedback on how to improve my website and I have all this information, not only email addresses, but physical mailing addresses. This allows me the potential to do direct mailing. It also, most importantly, allows me to do email. They’re put into an automatic autoresponder and sequence. It allows me to keep in touch with that visitor to be able to educate them and treat them, provide them free content and ultimately to sell them on a product that I have to sell or a service that I provide. That’s number one.

I also offer the duplication and marketing rights to this actual CD. So, anyone who gets this free CD will automatically get the duplication and marketing rights to the CD, meaning they can take the CD, they can duplicate it. They have to use my same artwork that’s on the CD and they can give it out freely. They cannot sell it, but they can use it as incentive to get someone to buy an additional product or service. There’s a lot of value on this CD, so if they’re selling a product for $100 and they offer this CD with 61 hours of free content, that can increase the value and help them close more sales of whatever they’re selling.

Now, at the end of this interview, I’m going to show proof and evidence how this CD was able to make me money. You’re going to hear a real testimonial with an interview you did with a gentleman named Jeremy Wood and exactly how this CD was the very start of him becoming a customer of mine; of him listening to my audio recordings, being sold on me, and because of him listening to the audio recordings, you’ll hear how he continues to be an ongoing paying loyal customer of mine all because of this free CD.

I also set up another website called www.hardtofindads.com, and this is one of largest swipe files of hard to find advertisements, editorial style ads that one can find. And copywriters and people doing promotions and sales letters can go to this site. They have to fill out all their information to access this site to see all the ads. And this is a way for me to collect more names. So, what am I giving out? I’m giving out hard to find ads that no one could find, world-class copy written ads by Brian Keith Voiles, from Gary Halpert, Jeff Paul, Claude Hopkins, Eugene Shorts, and many others. So, if someone goes to www.hardtofindads.com they’ll see a totally free site, but to get in, they have to trade me their information. And I’m also asking for more valuable information. How many people do they have on their customer list? Are they open to joint ventures? What is the one thing that really frustrates them about copywriting? I’m fishing and collection data that I can use to sell them down the road; that I can learn about my customers. So, this site provides me a lot of traffic and it also naturally leads them back to www.hardtofindseminars.com where I have products that I want to sell.

The most effective way that I’ve used to generate traffic to my site is by having just my free audio recordings on my site. And as I mentioned, I have them in transcript form and PDFs. They can read the HTML transcripts while they’re listening to the audio or they download the MP3s. And these free audio have intrigued people enough to get them to come back more and more and to recommend their friends go.

Jim: So, are you doing any banner ads or pay per click ads or link trading or anything of that sort?

Michael: I am doing none of that. No banner ads, no Google ads, no advertising whatsoever except for these methods that I’m talking about here.

Jim: So, that’s very cost effective for you.

Michael: Other than the production costs of my audio recordings, I’m not paying for any outside advertising except to host my server and my websites.

I also built another site called www.executiveaudioinstitute.com. Now, on this site is just the audio recordings section on my www.hardtofindseminars.com site, so there are no products being sold. But it’s a site that just offers the audio recordings, the transcripts, but as people listen to the recordings and as they download the transcripts, it is designed to lead them to my main site, www.hardtofindseminars.com to sell them a product or a service that I have available. The transcripts are very effective in generating traffic to my site. As I say, I want to make it convenient to get the content in people’s head, so I transcribe every word of each one of my audio recordings and I upload that transcript and convert it into PDF. I have the introduction that you would see on my site all there in the transcript. Each transcript could act as a book on its own and this makes it very convenient for people who like to read. So, having convenience and having the printed transcripts of each one of the audio makes my site more valuable and pleases the customer and the listener or the reader in this manner on the other end, therefore, getting them back more often.

Here’s something I’ve used very effectively, using podcasts. Why don’t you explain your definition, Jim, of what a podcast is.

Jim: Well, a podcast is a digital file being sent down to a digital MP3 player device and the iPod is obviously the leader in the industry--the 800-pound gorilla. They can be audio files or it can be audio with video. You’ll see a lot of music videos, as well as audio files such as this.
Michael: Right. So, if you go to iTunes and you go to the podcast section and you type in you’re searching for marketing, the podcast is like its own little search engine for audio files. So, if you type in marketing, you are going to see my recordings, the same recordings that are at www.hardtofindseminars.com, but you’re going to be capturing a new audience, an audience who is interested in listening to podcasts. They’re going to see my recordings and they’re going to see a description in the podcast directory on iTunes Michael Senoff’s www.hardtofindseminars.com. They’re going to see the title of the podcast and they have the ability by clicking on that podcast, downloading it, and listening to it instantly or loading it onto their PDA or their cell phone or their iPod and having access to that information instantly. But more importantly, they have the ability, if they’re online, going directly to the main source of where the podcast is published and it gets them back to my site www.hardtofindseminars.com.

Jim: That’s a great way to get distribution. Do you find that more people are downloading your files from there or from www.hardtofindseminars.com?

Michael: I don’t know the exact answer to that, but I do know that I started doing the podcasts just about a year ago and I get a lot of traffic from the podcasts. I get people all the time who say I listened to your podcast. So, good marketing is having a small success with a lot of different things. So, my whole goal, like I said from the very first part of this interview, is to get you hooked and to get you back to my website. To use my audio interviews to intrigue you, to educate you, to service you, to get you hooked and wanting more, coming back to my website. And the more I can keep you there, the more I can build trust with you and hopefully I can sell you a product or a service that will make me a profit down the road. But podcasting is growing bigger and bigger every month and I have also taken advantage of this by submitting all of my podcasts to podcast directories. There are website popping up all over the place that have directories of all these podcasts and some of these directories have great search engine rankings in the search engines. So, if you type in Michael Senoff, some of the very top rankings on Google, you will see are my recordings and the descriptions of each one of my recordings listed in these podcast directories. And if you’re having a hard time getting site indexed with Google or any of the other search engines, you want to leverage off good ranking with directories. Google and the other search engines love directories. And by being in that directory and having enough content and having your name in the description of the title of your recording or the description of what that audio recording is going to be about, is naturally going to give you a better chance of getting someone back to your site, even though you may not be listed.

Another very effective way of getting exposure and getting traffic back to your website is by using some of the top website out there and Ebay is something I’ve been using even before I started doing audio recordings. Ebay’s listings are from what I understand indexed daily. If you have an auction up on Ebay that may say Jim Peake’s My Success Gate Way Membership, okay, and you have a ten day auction that costs you 35-cents to list, you’ll have exposure on Google or some of the top search engines for ten days for 35-cents. Now, if you go onto any of the search engines and type in a product or a service, you’re going to see Ebay come up at the top; to find this product or service, go to Ebay. Ebay is spending hundreds of millions of dollars, I’m sure, to be in these top rankings because they want to move the search engine traffic over to Ebay to produce sales and to increase sales volume. So, you can leverage off that by having auctions of products or services that you offer listed on Ebay so when you have people searching for different things, your listing will come up in Ebay. I can’t go into all the details of how I use this, but basically I take the transcripts that can be 20 or 30 pages of content rich text and I sell a link to the audio recording even though I’m giving it away for free, I sell it to people who come to Ebay for $1.00. But for that $1.00 auction and for the listing for 35-cents, I have all that text in the Google index optimized where it brings me search engine traffic all leveraging off Ebay.

Jim: That’s a great, great idea.

Michael: It takes a little work to get it set up, but it’s very effective and if you have 150 auctions all on different subjects, having the transcripts of each one of them up there continuously on Ebay, you’re going to capture traffic of people looking for information on that subject, not only on Google search engine, but on Ebay’s as well. So, it’s designed to get them back to your site. When you go to Ebay and see Michael Senoff, which is my screen name on Ebay and they want to learn more about Michael Senoff, they can click on a little red and blue icon called about me. When they go that about me section, it gives me a chance to sell myself and you’ll see testimonials from people who come to my website and benefit my audio recordings. And you are legally allowed to have a link to your website in that about me section on Ebay and it brings them back to my website. You cannot have a link to your website directly in an Ebay auction. They will take your auction down very quickly. So, you have to play by the rules with Ebay and if you do play by the rules, you can be creative and use Ebay’s immense popularity and traffic to direct people back to your site to buy the products or services that you want to sell.

Jim: That’s just great information, Michael.

Michael: Here’s another great one. Each one of your audio recordings, as your listeners develop audio recordings that are designed to sell a product or service, they take those transcripts and those transcripts are a book. That becomes a book. Why is it a book--because you call it a book? You can have the transcripts of question and answers and call it a book. It’s published content and you take that book, turn it into a PDF, and you could offer that book for free or to sell that book either in a digital format or a printed format on a wonderful website called, www.lulu.com. I have each one of my audio transcripts up there listed in Lulu. You get to write the headline of the book, the description. You can upload an image of what your book looks like and you can offer it for free or you can sell it. But why do I do this--because I want the exposure and I want to leverage off Lulu’s incredible search engine ranking. If anyone goes to Google right and they type in Michael Senoff, they will see Lulu’s website, probably three or four up from the top, which gets them to one of my descriptions of my books. And obviously if you like that description and you want to see what else this publisher, which is Michael Senoff, has available, you’ll see over 100 books or 100 transcripts each with their own description and headlines all designed to educate and get them back to my site. Lulu is a wonderful way to leverage their status in the search engine rankings and I’ve been using that, as well.

Another wonderful way is using Amazon’s immense popularity and you can get people to leave you testimonials on Amazon and Amazon’s pretty sophisticated. You can go into Amazon and do reviews and write testimonial reviews on books within you niche. So, I can go in and review Joe Vitale’s book or any marketer’s book and I can include my name and tell my story. I could say this is Michael Senoff, CEO of www.hardtofindseminars.com. I’ve read Joe Sugarman’s book, Triggers, and here’s what I really liked about it, here’s what I didn’t like about it, and I can list my name and I may even be able to even drop the name of my website or interject a story about why I liked it and include something that is designed to get people back to my site. So, you’re leveraging off existing websites that have great search engine status.


This is Jim Peake at www.mysuccessgateway.com and this is Part 3 of our interview with Michael Senoff.


Another way I use to market my website is a website called www.ezinearticles.com. Now, many of your listeners have probably heard of writing articles or article syndication or article distribution. So, what I do is I write articles and I submit them up on www.ezinearticles.com. This I’ve only been doing for less than a year and I have had tens of thousands of views on my articles and I’m quite certain its generated quite a bit of traffic to my website. You see, you never know where that one customer is going to come from and what I said earlier is great marketing is doing a lot of different things well. Getting one new customer from many different sources from many different marketing methods is what makes it all come together, but Ezine Articles has been very valuable. All you have to do is invest the time in creating and writing your articles. Now, if you get into doing audio interviews, this is going to become a lot more simple than dreaming up articles because all of my articles are taken directly from the transcripts of my audio recordings. In essence, you’re able to talk your articles. Once you have your transcripts of your audio interviews or audio recordings, you simply go through them and look for main ideas and points that you talk about and create a simple article. And remember what I said about great copywriting is really great assembling, and of course, the real value of Ezine Articles or any article syndication service is having that resource box. The resource box is an area where you have a description about who you are and why you’re uniquely qualified to write the article and then also having a link directly back to the site. Remember I said getting them back to my site is my main focus and this is the main reason anyone does article distribution--to get them to the site to potentially gain and acquire a new customer. For article distribution, I would recommend www.ezinearticles.com. There are some other services that do article distribution that are pretty valuable and it’s definitely something to consider if you’re willing to take the time and write good quality articles. And that brings up a point. You want to write good quality articles. Most people are doing it very poorly, so if you’re within a certain topic or niche, you may find yourself having competition, but that’s good competition because you’re going to write a better headline, you’re going to write an easier to read article, one that’s more compelling and interesting, so you’re going to gain all the attention of that market with your outstanding headline and article and you’re going to glean all the business from that category. So, that’s another way I generate new business to my website, article syndication.

Another wonderful way and very powerful way is testimonials. I have a whole section of case studies and stories of how people have benefited from my audio recordings up on my website. I’ve combined those into a PDF. I think I took 108 of the best ones and created a downloadable book and then inserted through the pages of the book I have dollar off offers for each one of my products. So, it looks like a coupon and it maybe $20 off my joint venture magic system and that coupon has a live link that you can click on that will take you directly to the sales letter of my joint venture product. So, I have 13 different products listed in there. Each coupon is a direct hyperlink to the sales letter of the product. Again, it’s designed to offer an incentive for someone to try my product, but mainly to get them to the sales page, to read the letter, to listen to the audio that’s on the sales letter, and to sell them that product or service. So, couponing can be an effective way in initiating initial sales for first time customers.

And here’s one really interesting technique that you may want to check on your site or anyone who has a website. There’s all kinds of hidden assets in your website that you may not know about. One is, if anyone goes or talks to their web master and they’ve had a website that’s been up for a while, all kinds of things happen to your pages if you have a lot of pages on your website. You want to go in and you want to look at your error log. An error log is when someone maybe on any of the search engines and let’s say they intend to look for you or they got to a page that somehow got indexed in the search engine and there’s nothing there. You get that 404 error. And when you have a lot of people coming to your website, you can look in that error log and you may see over a month’s time a thousand errors. Well, you can get your web master to create a little piece of software on there that if anyone gets an error that will automatically redirect them to your home page. So, you want to look at how many times a month or how many times every couple of weeks people are hitting on your website, but they’re getting an error page. They may be spelling something incorrectly, but it has your main root. It may have www.mysuccessgateway.com/ a word that they’re typing in incorrectly and if they meant to go to there, but they typed it incorrectly, they’re going to get an error page. But if you have this redirecting link in any error page that takes them back, you’ve prevented a potential visitor from never coming back to you. Do you see what I’m saying?

Jim: Yes. I think that a lot of sophisticated users will peel back that URL and maybe go back to the root domain, but then there are quite a few others that don’t have the time or won’t make the time to do that.

Michael: That’s right. It all comes back to servicing your potential customers and if they meant to go there, but they made a mistake or there was a down page or there was a spelling error, it gets them to where they want to go or at least keeps them within your loop.

So, these are just a few of the marketing techniques I’ve been using to get people back to my and to optimize that natural search engine optimization stuff. And this is all without any outside paid advertising, without paying search engine optimization experts, or any kind of advertising whatsoever.

Jim: It’s all good information, Michael. To summary, though, it sounds like using audio is a great way to leverage one’s time. Is that correct?

Michael: Audio, in my opinion, is the best way I have found to date to leverage one’s time. The audio in combination with the ability to deliver it online for very little money has been the best way I’ve found to date.

Jim: Okay, Michael, so it sounds like audio is a great way to leverage one’s time and I think our listeners will totally understand that after they have listened to this interview. Do you have any other ideas on you personally are leveraging your time that you can share with the listeners?

Michael: Sure. I’ve had to become a master at this because I’ve two small kids. I would out of the house. My wife still works three or four days a week. So, I’m playing Dad most of the weeks. And because I work out of the house and time is limited and I have so much to do and so much I want to do, I had to come up with creative ways to leverage my time. Having audio interviews and audio content to deliver my sales message is my number one way, but I have several other things that I have found to save me a ton of time. And as we know, time is money.

One thing I found really effective is very simple and that is to have a to-do list. I use a simple Excel spreadsheet where if I have things to do, I’ll just type them in. So, it’s a simple to-do list. Many people who have Microsoft Outlook or Outlook Express may have a database manager. Some people use organizer books. Do you have an organizer book yourself?

Jim: Absolutely, yes.

Michael: You have a physical book you write in?

Jim: Yes, I have a physical book and I use Microsoft Outlook.

Michael: Very good. Outlook is great. It’s impossible to keep all these things in your head and it’s going to drive you crazy to try and remember it, so if you have goals and things you need to do, make a list. It can be a list on a yellow legal pad and make a list of these things so you don’t have to keep them in your head. And then as you accomplish them, scratch them out or take them out of the database list. But I find working off lists to be very effective in getting things done. If ideas come into my head, I put them on the list. I may not get to them right away. I can categorize them by giving them an “a,” a “b,” a “c,” for importance. But having that list and seeing it on the list knowing that I have to do it and I have to accomplish it and I just work off that list. I keep knocking them out. As it’s done, I take it off and before you know it, you’ve accomplished so much. So, it’s really kind of like writing your goals down and tackling them one by one.

Jim: A lot of people have done that. I know that I think Mary Kay Ash and Charles Schwab attribute a lot of their success to doing just that.

Michael: Very good. Now, here’s something I’ve had. It’s called an online cheat sheet. You’re going to find in your business you’re going to be answering the same questions. If you look through all your sent emails and you’re selling a product or service, you’re going to find a common denominator in all of the emails where you’re doing customer service, where you’re replying to questions from potential prospects or existing customer and you’ll find that you’re repeating those same things over and over again. Now, I have a page on my computer that’s HTML. Let’s say it’s 20 of the most commonly asked questions and instead of me answering those same questions over again, I have basically form letters that I can open up this page, copy and paste, pop it into an email and send it. This page also has all my passwords, it has all my most visited links, it has all the information right at my fingertips in front of my computer that I can have access to within seconds instead of having to keep looking for it over and over again. And if you remember in Part 1, we talked about all the statistics of how much time is wasted looking for information. So, organizing your information in one place and being able, if you have an Internet business, to copy and paste the same answer to the questions you get over and over again will save you an immense amount of time. It has for me, as well.

Now, this brings me back to another thing that really takes up a lot my time, especially if I’m online and that’s typing in passwords. And my computer guy told me about a little piece of software called www.roboform.com. So, this little piece of software you download. I think it’s about $35 and you never have to type a user name or password into any of the websites you go to. You never have to fill out forms again by typing them in. It automatically does it through this RoboForm software. I would definitely advise anyone to go get this little piece of software. It is a huge timesaver and it also organizes and keeps all your password in one place and it keeps them safe. It has the ability to create a master password so no one can get in there and steal it. It’s been downloaded millions of times. Go check it out, www.roboform.com.

When I’m answering emails, I try and keep them short and to the point. I get emails from people who will write paragraph after paragraph after paragraph and it must have taken them an hour to put an email like that together. I simply don’t have the luxury to do that, but I keep my written emails short. But I do have the luxury to expand on an email that I’m too lazy to write or that I don’t want to take the time write and I use a service called www.instantaudio.com where you can call 1-800 number. You can talked into the phone just like I’m talking right now and I can leave a detailed answer to an email question that’s been sent to me in my own voice. I can talk quickly, I can interject feeling and enthusiasm, and I can email a link where the receiver of that email can hear my message. And they’re very appreciative. They get all my best advice, but I would never take the time and write it. By talking it into the phone is ten times faster and easier for me and it also provides more value for that person asking the question. So, www.instantaudio.com. It’s a service that you can talk into the phone and provide answers to audio directly through email. I would highly recommend that.

Another thing that I’m sure is plaguing a lot of listeners out there is spam and this has been a constant problem and there are a couple different pieces of software out there I found to be effective. One is called www.spambully.com. You can download a free trial of the software and it really eliminates all the spam. It separates the good mail from the bad mail. But also at the same time, Microsoft Outlook has some pretty good spam features in it, as well. And I would probably explore the Outlook spam technology before SpamBully, but getting a handle on your spam email is going to be critical if you have an online business and you’re receiving lots of spam.

Another wonderful piece of timesaving software is a piece of software called SnagIt, it’s by a company called TechSmith. This piece of software allows you to capture screen shots of any screen on your computer. Let’s say you’re at a website and you want to share it with someone, you open up the software, you can highlight a region of the screen and save it as a PDF, as a GIF file; any kind of format you want. I find myself using it all the time. If I want to explain something, it’ll also allow you to capture the entire page. Like if you wanted to share some of my audio recordings to someone, you could go to the page on my website and this SnagIt software will turn the entire web page into a beautiful PDF document that you can send to someone.

Another real valuable tool that I learned about through editing audio records. This is amazing and it’s going to save you a lot of time. I’m going to show you how to listen to my audio recordings on my website at twice the normal speed. We talked about this piece of software called www.goldwave.com. If you download www.goldwave.com, this is the software that I edit my recording on and it allows you to listen to the audio content at a higher speed. So, you know who Alvin and the Chipmunks are, Jim?

Jim: Yes.

Michael: They sound like their voices are really high.

Jim: Yes.

Michael: So, you can speed up the play of the audio recording you listening to and you will find with practice you’re able to listen to audio and comprehend it, sometimes even better, because you have to pay attention a little harder, but you can comprehend the content of this audio at twice the normal speed. So, with this free trial piece of software, you can download audio recordings and play them on your computer at twice the normal speed that you’re listening to right now and this is a great timesaving device that anyone who really wants to get through my content or any audio content can do at their computer.

A couple more and then we’re going to wrap it up, Jim.

This is a great tool. I send out free CDs all over the world and it’s a label printer. Do you have a label printer?

Jim: I do.

Michael: So, I’ve got a Dymo label printer. My handwriting is terrible, I’m sloppy, and this has been a lifesaver. You can print labels easily and effectively. If you’re mailing labels or CDs, this is a wonderful inexpensive device that allows you to print professional looking labels for your mailing.

Jim: Labels and envelopes.

Michael: My little thing is just a label thing.

Jim: Okay. I think it will print envelopes, as well.

Michael: That’s great. Now, if you’re selling a physical product and you’re going to the post office, I’m going to show you how to stop that. I don’t think there’s a person out there who can’t relate to wasting their time standing in line at the post office. And did you know you can do all of your mailing online? If you go to www.usps.com or if you’re listening from another country check your country’s postal system, you may find they have all postal services, the ability to mail, the ability to buy postage, you can do it all online and without ever having to go to the post office. You can leave your mail right outside in the front of your house or the front of your business. So, if you’re going to the post office and wasting time and fighting traffic and standing in line, you can eliminate that by taking advantage of this service from your post office.

Hi, it’s Michael Senoff with www.hardtofindseminars.com. For more great interviews like this, go to www.hardtofindseminars.com.

Ebay, ordering products and services on Ebay. Now, a lot of people like to go shopping and like to travel around and get stuck in traffic, but if I find that I need things and I can eliminate a trip to the store, to the computer store, or for printing paper or what have you, I’ll go online, I’ll order it on Ebay and I’ll have it mailed directly to my house. So, using Ebay is another very efficient service for saving time.

If you’re online and you don’t have a high-speed connection, you could really increase your timesaving assets by getting a high speed connect. You can get DSL or cable. Many people are areas where they believe that they don’t have access to high speed, but if they check around, they may be pleasantly surprised that high speed is in their area. They’re going to have to do some digging and if they like to go online, it is critical to have a high-speed connection to be able to do it efficiently.

Online banking, if you’re mailing checks through the mail and addressing envelopes when you’re paying your bills, you’re wasting your time. You should do online banking. Have all your vendors online. It’s a matter of typing in the numbers. You can write all your checks and do all your banking online. This is a huge timesaving service.

And as far as payment, www.paypal.com, I use it all the time to be able to pay your vendors or buy things by using PayPal. Getting set up with PayPal is another timesaver. Are you using PayPal, Jim?

Jim: I am, yes.

Michael: That’s going to wrap it up for my timesaving tips. There’s more, but these should definitely get off to a good start.

Jim: That’s awesome, Michael. It’s wealth of information here and a lot to take in and I highly recommend that people not only listen to the audio, but download the PDF file of the transcript and all the information is right there.

So, Michael, you’ve shared a wealth of knowledge and information over the last few hours on this call. Is there anything else you’d like to listeners as far as additional information?

Michael: Yes there is. I want to say that, look I have talked a lot about myself. I’ve talked more about myself in this interview than all of the interviews combined on my site probably because I’m usually not the person talking about myself. I’m usually the guy asking questions. So, I’m not moving into a more proactive mode of marketing myself by positioning myself as the expert on audio interviews and selling using audio.

I’ve talked a lot about my website, my business. I’ve talked a lot about money I’ve made. I’ve talked about why I’m here now doing this interview with you, Jim, and all of this has been made possible because of me taking action to talk and record another person, to be interested enough in another person, generally interested and wanting to learn from that person and by simply asking questions. I’m really a simple guy. I would consider myself a family man, two kids and a wife. I’m living in a blue-collar neighborhood here in beautiful San Diego, but all of this has been possible by doing audio interviews.

I just had an interesting experience while I was wanting on you. I received an email from a customer of mine and I want to read this because as I read through this email, it kind of brought back a lot of the things we talked about in this two-part interview and if you will, let me read this to you. It says:

Hi, Michael. I’d like to start off by saying thanks again for what you have offered in the form of free information, as well as incredible value for what you sell. I’ve spent thousands of dollars on information pertaining to real estate and it’s debatable whether or not that the information is good as what you are offering for free in the area of marking and business. I bought Art Hamel’s Business Buying course from you back in 2004 and have put it on the back burner because I’m busy rehabbing and selling houses. Where I live in Michigan, I buy a house for $15,000 in a low-income area, rehab it for another $15,000 and I can resell it for $60,000 to $80,000 with my special financing program. We will finish a house today that I have owned for a month and I will profit $30,000. Oh, and I got a few thousand dollars at closing when I bought rather than making a down payment. I have thought of teaching others to do this, but the market is flooded with similar information. That’s not to say I could do it and still profit. Within the next few weeks I’ll be turning over the operations to my project manager who is currently part time and I will have all my time back. That is when I plan to buy your HMA system and do a hybrid of that and what Art Hamel teaches. Everyday I strap on my MP3 player and I listen to interviews for hours. You have earned my trust through your interviews and by the value I got when I purchased the Art Hamel course from you. When I first the price of the HMA system, I said forget it. But then when I considered the cost of not having the information, I saw that it was a bargain. I just have to make sure I am ready to put it into action.

And this gentleman’s name is Jeremy Wood. He’s in Fruitport, Michigan. Now, I just got this email and there are a lot of things he mentioned in this email. I guess some form of a testimonial. It’s not really written to be a testimonial. It’s just him emailing me with a question because he had some questions at the end that aren’t pertinent to this interview. But if I recap what he just said and relate it to what we just, he talked about the immense value of free information and we’ve talked about how if I didn’t offer it for free, I wouldn’t have had him come back and buy something from me. He talks about the incredible value of what I offer is worth more than the products he’s paid thousands of dollars for. He also, in 2004, became a customer of mine. He purchased a product called the Art Hamel Business Buying System. That was in 2004. Now, he also mentions that because of him listening to hours and hours of audio recordings on his MP3, which wouldn’t have been possible three or four years ago. How long have MP3 players been out, do you know?

Jim: Probably about that long or maybe a little longer, but they’ve really gotten mass appeal over the last couple of years.

Michael: So, as the technology is increasing, I’ve had the chance because of the technology for him to listen to my content for hours and hours and he admits it right there--hours a day he’s listening to my content. That has given him the opportunity to have trust with me and he mentions it right in this email. And now, look at what’s happening. Because of that trust, he’s considering a purchase of my HMA System. So, there will be potentially another product purchased because of my free content, because of the ability of the technology to get it into his ears giving him time to build the trust with me and he becomes a customer. And there’s one more very important thing he mentioned about this thing that he’s been doing with flipping houses and earning $30,000. I mean when I hear that, the light bulb goes off in my head. This guy has got a valuable business opportunity product. This guy has been buying low-income houses, rehabbing, and making $30,000 to $40,000 profit on each one. Now, he says something that he believes is true--because the market is flooded with similar information--but if the market is flooded with similar information, there is a reason for it and just because it’s flooded with similar information that should mean that he should even jump on it even faster because he will be the guy who does it the best. All those other people who are marketing products like this, I guarantee you are not doing it in the best way possible and they just offer free promotion, free education of the public out there and if he works with me and he hires me to create and develop his audio information product, this business opportunity, I’ll make sure that he’s got the best product out there and know how to market the best way possible. So, this, again, once I get back with him can be a potential client that could mean tens of thousands of dollars in developing a product like this. And I said it already in my closing statements; this is all due to giving away and doing free audio interviews on my site.

Jim: Yes. And it’s amazing. The more you give the more you get back like you said in the very beginning.

Michael: That’s right. Well, I didn’t invent that. That’s been in the Bible. That’s a natural law.

Jim: I think that’s the law of the universe.

Michael: That’s right.

Jim: So, Michael, you shared a lot of information with us. You’ve got a lot of information on your website, what would you recommend for somebody that wants to get started with one of your products that can provide a lot of value as far as saving time and making money?

Michael: Here’s what I would recommend. I’ve a low entry product. It is called How To Turn Your $28 Book Or Idea In Your Head Into A $3900 Information Product. And I’ve given away a lot of secrets in this audio recording here, but I haven’t revealed everything. In this product, it’s a hundred percent digital product; you’re going to learn exactly how I’ve been able to do this. How to take a $28 book and create products for $597, $797, $3900. You’ll learn seven fatal mistakes that will kill the creation of your audio program dead. You’ll get the full report and audio download. You’ll get front line secrets from the trenches, breakthrough audio creation report--this goes into the details I was talking about and how to actually create the audio interview. You’ll learn how to package your audio interview. You’ll hear 10 of my best audio consults with people just like yourself who have questions and ideas about creating their own information product. You’ll hear me doing one-on-one live consultations all related to their ideas and products. So, this is a product I give you my all; all the secrets, all my details and the offer is very simple. You don’t pay anything and you have 30-days to review the product. Only after 30 days, if you like it, do I charge your card. So, you’ll provide your credit card information at a special link, which I’ll provide, which is www.hardtofindseminars.com/msg. So, it’s going to be www.hardtofindseminars.com/msg.htm, and there you’ll find a special link with information about this product that I have available. It’s three payments after 30 days if you decide to keep it.

Jim: Can you say that URL one more time, please, so that the listeners that might not have gotten it can hear fully all the way through?

Michael: Sure. It’s www.hardtofindseminars.com/msg.htm. There you’ll see a report explaining how you can turn your $28 book into a $3900 information product. The listeners don’t have to pay anything, only after 30 days if they’re satisfied.

Jim: That’s awesome. I really appreciate the time that you’ve invested with us and with our listeners and sharing all this valuable information.

Michael: Well, Jim, I appreciate you having me on and it’s been a pleasure. I’ve tried to give as much value as I could in the time allotted and certainly with the product I’m offering here, you’ll really get me for more hours and really all my secrets are revealed in that product and hopefully your listeners can benefit from that risk free.

Jim: Awesome. I’d love to have you come back again Michael, and we can talk about some other marketing techniques and opportunities and share those with the listeners, as well.

Michael: I’d love to do it. And I just want to say you’re doing a great thing and I’m really looking forward to seeing the great things that come from your site here in the near future and I’ll be keeping a close eye on that.

Jim: Well, thank you very much. This is Jim Peake at www.mysuccessgateway.com closing out an interview with Michael Senoff of www.hardtofindseminars.com. Michael thanks very much and I look forward to seeing you out there in cyberspace.

Michael: You got it. Go have a great day.

Jim: You, too.

Michael: Bye.

Jim: That’s the end of Part 3 and this concludes the interview with Michael Senoff and Hard To Find Seminars.


Jim: Hi, this is Jim Peake at www.mysuccessgateway.com and today I’ve got a testimonial interview from Jeremy Wood out of Grand Rapids, Michigan and Jeremy has been applying many of the principles and the teachings from www.hardtofindseminars.com, Michael Senoff’s website and wanted to get a feel for how its impacted Jeremy’s life and share with the folks that this too can be applied in not only the real estate industry that Jeremy’s involved with, but probably many other industries, as well.

Jeremy, I’ve got you on the line. Why don’t you share with us a little bit about how you found Michael Senoff’s www.hardtofindseminars.com and what sort of happened over the period of time that you started executing on some of his teachings?

Jeremy: Well, I’d been learning a lot about real estate and how to rehab houses and I bought a book, I can’t even remember the name of the author, but it was just a $20 book I found on the Internet. And I got the book and the book was decent and there’s a CD just slipped in the book cover and that was the 61 hours that Michael was joint venturing with a lot of people getting that CD out. And I put the CD in and I was just blown away. I had planned to sit at my computer and listen to it for a couple minutes and I ended up sitting at my computer the rest of the say just completely blown away by what I was hearing and wondering how and why someone would give such good, complete information for free. And I got very excited about the Art Hamel course at that time and then I went to Michael’s site and just started listening to all the different recordings and I was just blown away at what was there. And so, over the course of time, I just kept going back to his site and listening to different things and I would say that most of what I know about marketing right now is from his site; just the things that he offers for free. And I did go on to buy the Art Hamel course and I’m planning to purchase more from him in the future just because my theory is anybody who offers that much for free, imagine what you must get when you actually buy a product. And that was my experience with the Art Hamel course.

Jim: So, what type of work were you doing before you picked up this book and found the CD in it and started listening to the CD?

Jeremy: I was working in a factory job that was very much a dead end job and I wasn’t very happy with that job at all. So, what I would do is I’d just print off pages and pages off Michael’s site and ever break I had at the factory, I just started reading that and that was quite an important part of what ended up getting me out of the factory, which was just what I do with real estate now, rehabbing house that I bought and then selling them. And a lot of the way that I have sold them, I’ve definitely been influenced by what I’ve learned on Michael’s site. I wouldn’t even know where to start, honestly.

Jim: I know that he’s got a lot of information on the site. So, how much money were you making when you were working in the factory?

Jeremy: I was making about $30,000 a year. Now I make about $30,000 per project and the one that I’m just finishing up now that I should have wrapped up this week, I’ve only owned that house for five weeks, so substantially more cash flow than what I had at the factory. And I love what I do and I’m probably only working 15-20 hours a week on it, on top of that.

Jim: So, I take it that’s substantially changed your life, not only from an income perspective, but as well as a lift style perspective?

Jeremy: Oh absolutely. Just listening to all the recordings on Michael’s site, I found that my self-confidence was lacking a lot and just from really being able to listen the phone interview and I mean basically being a fly on the wall, it kind of did something to what I believed I could do also. It goes deeper than just learning information about marketing or business. What I felt like was that his site basically let me into a whole world that was exclusive before where I could listen to how things really work and understand how things really work. I’ve got to tell you, I’ve paid probably literally thousands of dollars for real estate courses and books and all those combined, I don’t know if I could say that that information is more complete or valuable than what I’ve been able to get from Michael Senoff.

Jim: Wow. That’s quite a testimonial to Michael Senoff and www.hardtofindseminars.com. I too have found it a very strong resource for all kinds of information, especially on the marketing and business building side. So, you’re able to apply many of the principles and the marketing techniques that may or may not necessarily be in the real estate space, but you’re able to apply those to the real estate space and see results.

Jeremy: Absolutely.

Jim: Can you give us a quick example on how you’re doing that?

Jeremy: Yes. One thing that I do is when I have a house done, there’s an attitude in my town and maybe all over with investors where when you’re doing a house, you don’t want to do too much because you’re just selling it anyways. And what I found was that if I took that attitude and just did away it and I go bigger on everything I do with my rehabs and then when I sell the house, I pay all their closing costs, I furnish them with all their appliances and what I found is that by the time that sale is done closing, all that extra money that I spent on that, I’d made way more than that from being able to actually sell at a higher price because I was servicing my client, my buyer, at a level that nobody else was willing to. And that kind f goes along with what I’ve seen Michael do. He’s willing to service the client at a higher level than most others are. And what happens is people will spent the money if they trust you. And so, I see how important that is to really build the trust and give away more because it does come back around. And that’s just one small area that I would say it’s kind of affected how I would approach it.

Jim: Yes. I mean I think what goes around comes around and obviously Michael is giving away a lot of great information. So, the Art Hamel course, do you want to share with us a little bit about who Art Hamel is, the teachings that he has?

Jeremy: Art Hamel is a retired--well, I say retired. He’s still pretty active just because he loves what he does, but he’s a businessman in California. I think he started on the East Coast somewhere. And early in his career, he started out I think with a small motel and then ended up getting into a chain Burger Barns, I think it was where he had over 20. And then he became a business broker and went on to teach seminars and also at the same time continued to buy businesses moving into manufacturing businesses. And just kind of his seminars and training course was real world, no bull, very innovative kinds of thinking and it just really opened my mind studying that. I don’t know everything with his history, but he was very highly respected. I know he was in demand in the 70s and 80s a lot with his seminars. And the course that I got was actually, I think it was 1984 that I found a date on and here’s what blew me away.

I was toying with the idea of moving up to northern Michigan and buying a business what had been a hardware store and this guy bought a hardware store and then five other businesses and he moved them all under the same roof and he was selling it. It looked like a pretty good deal from what I could tell and I’d been studying Art Hamel’s course at this time so I knew what to look for. And I took one of my friends with me and we went up to look at this business. And I got talking to the guy and the questions that I started asking him were actually surprising me because I couldn’t believe just how much I learned from this course. And it turned out the business wasn’t something that we wanted, but just from the way I was able to ask questions, steer the conversation, and then also understand what he was telling me, we got out to the car and my friend said how on earth did you know all that stuff and I said just that Art Hamel course I was telling you about. And so, it really surprised me just much I understood about how businesses work.

Jim: Yes. Are you familiar with a guy by the name of Andy Andrews?

Jeremy: No, I’m not.

Jim: Well, Andy’s on our site at www.mysuccessgateway.com and one of the things that he talks about is seeking wisdom and seeking wisdom either by reading books or listening to tapes or connecting or networking with people that are outside of your current sphere of friends, but really seeking the advice from people that have been there and done that before. And you’re applying that principle--he calls it the board of directors. So, Art Hamel would be technically on your board of directors, even though you haven’t probably met him, but you’re seeking his wisdom and apply his wisdom in your area of business.

Jeremy: Yes, absolutely. And one thing Art Hamel really talks about is taking the time to find a good business just because if your rush in and you buy a business that’s not quite as good as another one you could have if you just spent the time and the energy and were patient. That kind of changed my whole mindset because I got to thinking; well that’s the same with real estate. There’s a lot of these houses I come across where yes the numbers do work, but there’s only so many right now that I want to do at one time. I mean basically I just want to do one at a time back to back right now. I’m pretty happy with how that’s working. And what I found is just applying that, just waiting for the right deal to come along and I stay busy. There’s plenty of deals out there and I watch all the other investors go and buy a house down the street and I buy one after them and I’m done before them. I check the sale prices later down the road and we both are all done and find out that it came out better. So, just holding out for better, too, is one thing that I really learned in there.

And the one thing with the Art Hamel course is I mean it’s not a pie in the sky. When I listened to it, I could understand it well enough to kind of get the overview, but it’s one of the things you have to go over and over because there’s so much in that course and it’s so different from most of what I’ve heard. I’ve bought a couple other books on the subject and I mean Art Hamel’s course just was very, very real by comparison. And I haven’t yet bought a business, but that is something I’m looking to in my future after I get my real estate business turned over to my main guy here running it for me. I actually plan to pursue that a little more seriously than I have in the past.

The information that Michael Senoff, not just has on his site, but that he sells, it’s just incredible. I’m really impressed that he’s been able to assemble the people that he has because I’m sure he gets a lot of information that is not really as innovative as what he has on there and his judgment on what he’s pursued has really made his site it is, also.

Jim: Yes, I think he’s a very good interviewer. He asks a lot of the right questions, so he’s able to glean the information out of the folks that he’s speaking with and provide those nuggets for pretty much anybody. So, are you still listening to his site on a regular basis or going there on a regular basis?

Jeremy: Actually I’ve even stepped it up a bit from that even. When I got back on his site, I found I just couldn’t dedicate the time that I really wanted to sit here because I have to be out and about doing things. So, what I did is I bought an MP3 player and he puts everything in MP3 form too, so I just dump it on my MP3 player in the morning for what I want to hear and Michael’s voice is in my head pretty much all day long. And part of what it is too is that I’m eyeing up his HMA course that he sells and I really like what I see with that and I would buy it right now except that it’s one of those things where you do it, you’ve got to be serious and you have to put it into practice and I’m probably about a month and a half away from being to that point just because I need to get my real estate business on autopilot more and it will be soon. See, I would never have considered that system except just the way he has put all his dialog with people who are looking at the system and then have gone on to buy the system and then seeing how he worked with them when they even ran into problems and then seeing how everything turned around and just how it all works. He’s won my trust. I don’t know that at point that there’s anyone else that I would spend that kind of money with for a course, but he’s proven himself to me.

Jim: Yes. That’s really great. That’s one of the things that we’re attempting to do here at www.mysuccessgateway.com is to be able to identify program like www.hardtofindseminars.com and share back the results that people are getting by implementing some of the teachings and some of the programs that are available at www.mysuccessgateway.com.

Jeremy: I had actually stepped away from his site for a year just because I had kind of gotten bogged down in other things I had going and I just kind of put it on the back burner and I ended up going to a real estate boot camp that I paid a few thousand for. And by the time I got back from the boot camp, I was kind of feeling like all the information I learned there wasn’t really any more complete than what I can get from Michael Senoff. And I turned back to his site and just found that he had added a whole lot more again. And I honestly I haven’t even tapped into everything he’s got on copywriting on that site yet. I haven’t been through that stuff. I mean it’s just incredible what he’s able to assemble. And like I said before, anybody who gives away that much for free, just image what you get when you actually do buy the product and that was my experience with Art Hamel course and that’s why I’m willing to lay down the money for some other things with him.

Jim: Yes. Well, we’re giving Michael a really big plug and I think justly so since you’re able to apply the ideas and the teachings and the principles of what he’s got as far as information is concerned.

Jeremy: I’m gratefully.

Jim: Yes, you’re able to turn that into real world success and that’s the bottom line.

Jeremy: The other thing that surprised me is just how accessible he let’s himself be. Probably two or three times in the last year I called him up with a question and he’s willing to talk. And that’s really great, too.

Jim: Yes, that’s absolutely correct and I’ve been able to do the same thing and he always picks up the phone and is certainly accessible. Well, listen Jeremy, this has been very helpful for our listeners and I can’t thank you enough for your time sharing your experience with Michael Senoff’s www.hardtofindseminars.com.

This is Jim Peake speaking with Jeremy Wood out of Grand Rapids, Michigan talking about his success that he’s applied using www.hardtofindseminars.com. This is Jim Peake of www.mysuccessgateway.com.

Michael: Jim, here’s a thing I want to talk about to your listeners and something really dear to my heart and it’s something we haven’t talked about and you don’t hear that much of, but because of technology, it’s something that definitely needs to be discussed. What it is, is it has to do with editing your audio recordings. If anyone of your listeners is using online audio or offline audio to market or educate their prospects, this information will be some of the most important information I share on this three-part call.

Editing your audio content before you publish it to your site simply gets better results compared to unedited audio content. Now, we’ve talked a little bit about this, but think about this. A new song on the radio may be in the editing studio for months before it’s released to the public, or a new movie for that matter may be in the editing for years before they release it to the big screen or on DVD. A well-written sales letter or online copy or online promotions or books and commercials are all meticulously edited to perfection before they are released. You wouldn’t dream of releasing an unedited version of any of these sales vehicles, so why would you publish unedited audio? Unedited audio content has been proven to be abandoned by the listener faster. It produces less sales and it actually somewhat erodes the credibility of the publisher.

Why are we seeing so much unedited content on the Internet? The reason is simple. Until now it’s been very expensive to edit audio. It’s very time consuming and very labor intensive. Also, there are very few people who really understand how to edit audio content right. There are very few professional and there is virtually no services offer it for online audio. I tell people editing audio is like plastic surgery. Its part skill and part an art form. You need someone with both skill and someone with an artistic ear, and having someone who understands marketing and selling can be one of the greatest investments of someone who edits their audio. But a poor result can be gained by both a skilled surgeon, as well as a good editor, so having the skill isn’t the only way to get the result. You need that artistic ear and someone who has the understanding of the marketing. So, who you choose to do your audio editing can be one of the best investments in your business.

Here at www.hardtofindseminars.com, we have been editing online audio for over six years. I have perfected a proprietary editing system that gets your customers listening to your audio content longer and more often and this results in more sales more often and many times when you have a professionally edited piece of audio content, you can demand more for it because your sales presentation is better. It’s more compelling. It is more likely to get this listener to buy what you have to sell, whether it’s a product or a service. Like in life, you only have one chance to make a first impression. Every time you publish unedited audio content, you’re projecting a poor, sloppy, I don’t care attitude that turns off your prospects. Do your prospects a favor and give them professionally edited audio message, interviews, teleseminars, and selling promotions by editing your audio.

For anyone listening who is interested in doing this, we provide full audio editing services. I have a team of editors that I’ve been working with for years who I’ve personally trained. I’m involved in all the editing, as well. Depending on how busy we are, it’s pretty fast and at a very reasonable rate. Now, we know that editing your audio content can easily pay for itself ten times over. If anyone of your listeners is doing audio and using audio to sell or doing teleseminars, I encourage them to give me a call. I’ll spend some time on the phone. We’ll discuss what they’re doing and I’ll give them an evaluation on how their audio is by listening to it. All they need to do is contact me (858) 274-7851.


Hi, it’s Michael Senoff with www.hardtofindseminars.com. That is the end of this marathon, super interview with Jim Peake of www.mysuccessgateway.com. I hope you found it valuable and if you have any questions whatsoever, don’t hesitate to call at (858) 274-7851 or email me at Michael@michaelsenoff.com. Thanks for listening.