Michael:          Mark, my hardtofindseminars.com site is designed to get you there, to get you hooked, to get you lost in the site and loving every minute of it, and hopefully if I’ve done my job right, you’ll come out on the other end and buy something from me. 

                        Hi, this is Michael Senoff with Michael Senoff’s www.hardtofindseminars.com. In the next 60 minutes you’re going to hear a rare live interview where Mark Joyner was interviewing me about how I use audio for my website to create, develop, and sell information products. We also talk about how one can use audio to leverage their time. I think you’ll find this valuable. Enjoy.

Mark:              This is Mark Joyner. This is a live event with our guest Michael Senoff. We’re going to go ahead and get started folks, talking about Michael and using that digital audio interview to create, to market, and to sell information products. Now, Michael is actually quite an expert on this. He has got some of the best websites in the world on this topic. In fact, the thing that really connected me up with Michael initially was his website, www.hardtofindseminars.com. Hard To Find Seminars is just one of the cleverest and most interesting websites on the Internet. You can go and take a look at what is there, but basically what you’ve got is you’ve got recordings of some of the greatest marketing experts on the planet. He’s got Joe Vitalie, Vic Conant, Gordon Lewis. He’s got a whole heap of great people and he’s got over 50,000 different students online from different parts of the globe. As far as I know, this is the world’s largest free resource for audio marketing interviews and it’s listed in the top 1% of most visited websites in the world. Now, I don’t have time believing that statement because this is probably the best website I’ve seen with recorded audio interviews with some of the great, great experts of marketing. So that said, Michael, welcome to the call.

Michael:          Thank you, Mark. Thanks for having me. I’m excited to be here.

Mark:              In Simpleology, we talk about using people’s time and energy to get the things that they want and in a sense, even though you sell digital audios or you actually give digital audios away on your website in addition to just selling them on other websites, you felt that was about time management in a sense. Now, what do you mean by that?

Michael:          Everything I’ve been doing for the last few years in relation to this website is censored around these audio recordings. And because of a particular time in my life right, I’m 41, I’ve two young kids, and I’ve got a pretty busy schedule as far as my business. I work right out of the home. I’ve got a lot of family responsibilities as probably all the listeners out there on the call right do, too. It is very hard to manage your time and this website and doing interviews and offering free audio has really allowed me to leverage my time enormously. It has also set up and provided systems for me to sell information products that have all been centered on these audio interviews that I’ve been doing. It’s just been a real blessing. So, I believe, just based on my own experience--I’m sure there’s a lot of other great people who do audio and audio interviews and I’m just going to share information based on what I know and what I’ve been doing over the few years and I can talk about some of the affects that its had on my life and on my business. I see audio and doing audio interviews as one of the greatest forms of leverage to sell things and to provide value to people who want to learn something, as you provide value with your Simpleology, these events. I mean you have a whole collection of wonderful interviews that I’m sure your Simpleology members and guests get a lot of value out of and you know this to be true, as well.

Mark:              Absolutely, there’s no question about it. I think I know exactly what you mean when you say that. What I might ask you to do is to clarify that a little bit because I know there are some folks who don’t really know what we mean when we say using an audio interview is the best way to leverage your time. They may be scratching their head a little bit. What does that mean and why can we say that and as compared to what else, I suppose? Maybe that’s what people are thinking. So, doing an audio, how does that really leverage your time?

Michael:          What I can do is I can go over some ideas on the ways I use audio to leverage my time and maybe some of the listeners who hear how I’m using it, they can relate it to exactly what they’re doing and they can maybe do the same thing.

                        When you do an audio interview with someone, you position yourself as an expert. If you think about it, who are some of the most popular people or the highest paid and most well recognized faces around. Oprah Winfrey, Larry King, Dr. Phil, Barbara Walters and what do these people do. They interview people. And are they experts? They’re not necessarily experts. They’re just a person asking the questions, but because they are associated with other experts or other famous people, they kind of go up to that person’s level and they increase their appearance of an expert or as a personality. Another thing that I find with audio, it allows you to bond with your prospects. For example, you and I, when we first met, I met you on www.hardtofindads.com. You had emailed me and I provided you with some information and then I invited you to do an audio interview. And because of that time we spent together where I interviewed you on my website, that gave us a chance to somewhat bond and you reciprocated by inviting me on the call.

But as far as leveraging, anyone out there listening who has a business or who has a product or who has a service to sell, if you’re out there selling it individually, maybe knocking on doors, or if you’re using telemarketing and your using your own person to sell and to labor and to provide your sales pitch to that prospect, if you’re doing that over and over and over again, there’s always so much leverage you can get on that. By using digital audio, it actually gives you the leveraging power of delivering that sales message and it also gives you the ability to create your best sales presentation. When you’re on your best selling day and you’re feeling really good and you’re hot and you’re on fire and you’re having a great day, you can capture and clone that and I’ve got to give credit to that to Gary Halbert because when I learned his stuff…Gary Halbert is a famous copywriter…and when I was first introduced to his stuff, that stuff really hit hard with me. Can it and clone it and your audio allows you to duplicate and deliver your sales message with you even having to be there.

Mark:              That’s just so right on. And by the way, I’ve got to say it’s great that you give props to Gary. Gary is actually a good friend of mine. I bought him a telescope for his birthday. He’s probably out there using it in his high-rise in Miami out there right now. I’ve got to tell you, he’s the genesis of a lot of these ideas a lot of people are using right now. Not just in offline direct marketing, but also in online direct marketing because really what we’re doing online is just an extension of what folks like Gary pioneered many, many years ago offline. And when you said can it and what was the second part.

Michael:          Can it and clone it.

Mark:              Can it and clone it. I think that’s just absolutely beautiful. Did Gary say that originally or is that…?

Michael:          Yes, that’s directly from one of the headlines on one of his tapes from one of his seminars.

Mark:              It sounded like Gary, doesn’t it? And it’s a genius thing. In Simpleology, we talk about three sources of power: time, energy, and money. And then we say that later on in a future Simpleology course, we’re going to be talking about leverage. Well, what Michael was talking about here is an ultimate, extremely powerful way of leveraging yourself. And just to counterpoint or underscore what Michael was saying, if you have to do face-to-face selling in any way or even if you have to do phone-to-phone selling, if there’s any way you can automate that process, it cuts down the amount of effort that you have to put into contacting other people.

So, think about that. If you’ve got a message, that’s like a little salesman sitting up on the Internet for you. Or in the old days before the Internet, you said when Gary said that, he’s probably talking about having a dial-in number where somebody could call in and listen to a recorded message or maybe even a direct marketing message you put in a magazine or a newspaper. What you’re doing is, again, instead of having to personally contact all your people or have a crew of people contacting these people directly, you’ve got them passively coming to you and it happened while you sleep, any time night or day. And an interview like this, now that Michael and I are talking, we can have this recorded message, it could be listened to one hundred years from now, and you know what, in a sense a hundred years from now, this will still be relevant.

I don’t know what technology is going to be like ten years from now, but what I can tell you is that the basics of interacting with people, the basics of human psychology, the basic essence of marketing, I am pretty sure will not have changed because I don’t think it has changed in the thousands of years of the history of commerce. Do you agree with that, Michael?

Michael:          Yeah, I would agree with that.

Mark:              I’ve seen some amazing things that you’ve done with these interviews. Is there anything unique that you’ve done that you’ve brought to the table with www.hardtofindseminars.com that people can look at and learn from?

Michael:          What I’d like to do, if it’s all right, I’ll just go over just some information about the site. And as I said, everything on my site is all centered on doing audio interviews or doing audio recordings. And I just want to give you a picture of what this site is doing for me so if this is something you choose to do…and I welcome anyone on the call to duplicate what I’m doing. Take my ideas. Copy them because we can’t have too much good audio information and content out there in the world.

Mark:              Right.

Michael:          But you may think I have thousands and thousands of hours, but I only have about 150 hours of audio content on my site right now. Now, most of that is free audio content. There’s another 50 to 70 hours of audio that I’ve produce that I use for different products that I sell. But the site was first published in January of 2002 and I was really just using the site at that time as a one-page site because my main business, what I was doing before I kind of fell into all the audio interviews was selling pre-owned seminar materials. So, when people would go to live seminars and sometimes they would pay $5,000, $10,000, $15,000, $20,000, they would come home with all the material. I got into a business and fell into the business of, all for my own need wanting to get a hold of this seminar material where I didn’t have the money to pay for it, and I started buying pre-owned material from the actual people who went to the seminars and the I was selling it up on Ebay, the auction site. And then I kind of had to go off of Ebay because there was price competition and other factors and I created this site, www.hardtofindseminars.com not really having anything to do with the audio recordings on the site, but to sell these pre-owned seminars on my site. But I did a little calculating and the interviews, the combined sales of all the experts that I’ve interviewed on my site currently is close to $5 billion. If you added up all the sales of some of these experts that they’ve been responsible for it would be around $5 billion and that’s with a “b” not an “m.”

                        Let me ask you, Mark, what do you charge for an hour of your consulting time on a one-on-one situation?

Mark:              Well, I hardly to it anymore because I really don’t have the time to do and, frankly, it’s not worth to me what I get paid. But I know that’s going to sound--I mean for someone who is just getting started in the business, I’m a semi sort of a pompous jerk when I say this, but I mean that’s just the situation I’m in and I mean we’ve all got to gauge our time. The short answer is, I charge a few thousand an hour, but I might be raising that because I just can’t justify it at this point. And I imagine that’s probably not too far out of the ballpark of a lot of the people you’ve contacted. Is that right?

Michael:          That’s right. If we calculated the consulting fees of the people I’ve interviewed on my site, you’re looking at about $50,000 worth of consulting and these are one-on-one intensive interviews, as if I’m the client. I mean I am grilling these people for all they’re worth to try and milk out and get as much valuable information for my listeners. So, there’s a lot value that anyone who visits the site would save just in consulting fees alone.

                        On the site I’ve got about 6,750 pages of typed transcripts. Each one of my audio recordings I have transcribed word for word and there’s a reason I do this, which we’ll probably get into later, but when someone goes to the site, they learn four different ways. I deliver that content for anyone that relates to their style of learning. So, for instance, you can go to my site, press the green play button, which is Flash. It’s a way of delivering audio on the Internet, which plays very quickly. And for people who like to read, they can download the transcripts of the audio in a PDF document. Also, I have the audio transcribed and put on the site in HTML. So, I have the transcripts up on the website. Now, this is something really unique that we’d never seen done. We give the visitor to the site the ability to increase his ability to absorb and comprehend the information by listening to the audio and reading the text at the same time, all on the same page. And then the most popular form is an MP3 file. This is a file that one can go to the site and right click and download onto their hard drive or onto a digital device like an iPod or they can play it on their computer or they can burn it to a CD. And this by far is the most popular way people absorb the audio content.

Mark:              I’ve got to say that it’s such a great option, by the way, too. Everybody’s got these MP3 players and if you’re driving or running, this is time that you can be using to dump stuff in your head and a lot of people call this the university on wheels. And so, you offer all of this stuff for free download on your website or are you selling the downloads or how does that work.

Michael:          On the site, all the content there is free, but there is a method to my madness. I mean I’m in business like anyone else and that’s to earn a living to support my family, to pay my mortgage, but I do provide incredible quality of material. All the audio there, there’s a lot of free material, very similar to what you’re doing with Simpleology. You offer something free and you give the visitor a chance to know who you are. You have a chance to build the relationship. You’ve the chance to bond with them. You have a chance to gain their trust. And if they like what you have and if they’ve learned something and you’ve given value, that comes back to you and they want more. And that’s what the site is about and what I’ve been doing over the last couple of years is using audio to create and develop my own information products, information products that I control. I’ve got 18 different products. Some of the products I control, some of them are joint ventures, some of them are where I find experts to interview and I enhance the products that they have and negotiate deals. So, the site is designed to get you there, to get you hooked, to get you lost in the site and loving every minute of it, and hopefully, if I’ve done my job right, you’ll come out on the other end and buy something from me.

Mark:              Well, you certain had me hooked when I went to the website. I think the first one I went to was www.hardtofindads.com. I believe I contacted you right away because the process just pulled me right in and I was amazed. These are some ads that I’d been looking for, for ages. And by the way, this is just another website of Michael’s where he uses a very similar process. Instead of using audio, he’s using printed matter to run people through the same sales and marketing logic that he’s teaching us here tonight. And I’ve got to say, you do a beautiful job of that. I don’t think people who have an interest in marketing can go to either of those website and not be lost in that content. I suppose that’s the design.

Michael:          I’ll use a perfect example of how we met. You were on www.hardtofindads.com. You had inquired about some of the transcripts to some of the ads and I saw your email. I’d heard of you, of course. We had never talked. And I emailed you the file. I just sent it. But I sent it to you for free. And why did I do that? I could have charged you a little bit for it, but that wasn’t my purpose.

Mark:              I would have paid.

Michael:          And you would have paid. But look where we are now. If you paid, we may have never talked again. But because I gave it to you free, I had a license to contact you and that’s what these audio interviews will do for anyone who gets into it. It gives you a license to start building a relationship with someone. After I interview someone for two hours, when you call them the next time, they’re like old buddies and that is the magic of audio. But in your situation, Mark, I gave those transcripts to you and then I invited you to do an interview on my site and then you reciprocated and offered me as a guest on your site and that’s all because of that reciprocity.

Mark:              Well, I have to say, in your case, it worked amazingly well and I normally don’t go back and forth with people over email. I get so much email that I really can’t answer it all myself, and so, I’ve got a PA who answers all of that. And so, I purchased the product from a secret email address that nobody really has except for just a handful of people out there and that gave you a back door, cutting through all that. I mean I will tell you, to counterpoint this; my good friend _____ was not always my good friend. In fact, he spent an entire year trying to contact me when he first got online. And he was really, really persistent and I was just really busy and I just didn’t have the time to do it. I don’t say this to be a jerk or to be full of myself. It’s a matter of fact. I simply could not do that. But you cut all through that in a split second by having that website.

Michael:          Well, look, most people out there, they can’t even get their wife or their partner to listen to them for five minutes. When you approach someone and invite them to do an audio interview and you’re sincerely interested in learning more and you want to record a call for them, they’re loving that. I mean how many people in your personal life really want to hear your passion about Simpleology and marketing. It’s a very small world. And when someone wants to interview some, and I find this across the board, and when you give someone the chance to talk about themselves and talk about their accomplishments and talk about their expertise and talk about their products and talk about all the great things and things that they spend their whole working life doing, you instantly build a friendship and a relationship that really shortcuts years of other methods in doing so.

Mark:              Without question. I can’t remember exactly the process you went through, but I want to just underscore what you said about giving the product away. I have met so many people who are very reluctant to do that and very few people I’ve talked to will hesitate to give me a product or something because they know it’s going to open up a relationship at this point now. But I remember back in the early days when people were getting started, people really didn’t understand that whole dynamic. Their thinking was well if I give it away I’m just throwing away money. Well, no, actually you’re not. I mean most of the products the margins are so high. Digital products don’t cost you anything to give that product away, but what you have done is, not only everything that Michael has talked about the relationship, but you’ve also opened up the door to potential new sales because a lot of these people who have got clout in a particular field, they can go out and promote it or even just mention it to a few people and that can multiply anything that you would have made through that one single sale.

                        Let me just point out one other thing out here, an extension of this. You could go out, if you wanted to, and start finding people who are well known in a particular industry who have a good customer base, who have a good sizable list of any sort, who own a magazine, whatever, give copies of whatever it is that you’re selling for review to those people with a nice letter. Make it personal. Don’t send out a canned letter because that’s going to destroy the whole affect. And then follow up with them. You probably won’t even have to follow up if you do that first letter properly and you really make it personal, as if you really, really wrote it and not just cut and paste nonsense, but really say stuff about them that you really mean. You’re probably going to get some kind of a contact back from them. I get stuff sent to me all the time and I don’t have time to respond back to everyone, but when somebody sends a personal note and I can tell they actually put time into it, I feel like I’ve got to do that just out of kindness because they took the time to do that for me. And you mentioned the word before, Michael, reciprocity. This is one of Chaldinie’s grand principles of influence and it works amazingly well, doesn’t it.

Michael:          Yes it does Mark. That’s the basis of the entire website is giving away free content. A lot of people say people don’t respect things that you give away, but it depends on what you’re giving away. People are smart enough to understand when someone’s giving real value compared to something that just doesn’t have any value. So, I trust that people are smart enough to differentiate that even though they get it free. They know when there is value. So, if you’re giving away value and if you’re producing audio or interviews that are top quality and you take your time to edit them and make them the best way possible, I mean if you think about a recording artist. They may spend an entire year just to make an album, like Bruce Springsteen will spend a whole year or maybe two years to come out with just 12 songs. Or any movie you see in the movie theater, years are spent in the editing process and developing that one and a half hour film. But if you put that kind of love and passion into your audio recordings, those recordings can feed you for life.

Mark:              That’s right. And you’re so right on in saying that you have to do this, even the ones you give away. And there’s a great marketing truism that probably came from one of the old greats that you have on your website. You might even be able to know who said this originally. But the saying goes; you can’t give it away if you couldn’t originally sell it or something to that affect. I think that whoever said it, said it far more eloquently than that. But the point is if you’re going to give something away, if it’s something that you wouldn’t buy yourself, you’re just hurting things because people aren’t pay something for free that they wouldn’t otherwise buy. So, it’s absolutely essential, and I think you totally understood this, because I would have paid many times over for just about everything on your website.

Michael:          Well, I appreciate it. You only have one chance to make a first impression. It’s just like when you meet people for the first time. The first time someone clicks on one of my audios, and believe me, there’s more audio sitting on my computer, but I’ve tried to put the best stuff up on that site because I want to make an impression with that first time visitor. I want him to like what he’s hearing, I want him to have value, and I want him to keep listening because if I can keep him listening, I can have that chance to build that relationship and I can have that chance to have him come in a little step higher as a product purchasers; maybe for one of my lower end products. And then slowly move him up the scale. As long as he’s getting value, your customers will remain loyal to you and if you’re doing your job right, they’ll buy from you for years to come 

Mark:              There’s an interesting corollary in what you said, which relates to advertising copy and I believe it’s the same psychological principle really, but one thing I’ve heard said, and again, this probably comes from one of the great guys you have on your website, was copy can’t be too long, only too boring.

Michael:          Absolutely. That’s right.

Mark:              That same principle goes to an audio interview. If you’ve got an audio interview where people aren’t saying things interesting or if it’s just a long lecture--and by the way this is why we keep everything here in Simpleology very conversational and very simple--because people will shutdown when things are too complicated, they’ll shutdown when they’re boring. You’ve got to make sure that it’s exciting. You’ve got to make sure it’s interesting. One thing that you talk about that you teach people is that the sound of someone’s voice will connect them with a prospect more than anything else.

Michael:          Video will probably outsell out sell audio because you’re using more senses. You’re using your ears and you’re using your eyes and your brain. When you’re using more senses, you have a better chance of connecting with that prospect. But audio is more convenient. When I interviewed Vic Conant of Nightingale Conant, he talked about this. I asked him why there wasn’t that much video on his site and over the years through the testing that he’s done, his customers prefer audio because it’s so convenient and so forgiving. They can take it to the gym. They can listen to it while they’re multitasking. Video, your eyeballs have to be on the TV screen or the monitor, what have you. I think you can get a lot more through, through the sound of someone’s voice. I think it’s more dimensional than just words on a piece of paper, even though good copywriters can do that very well. But when you hear someone, you can hear their sincerity, you can hear their passion. It’s just like a good song; a good song that goes to number one is connecting and resonating with that listener and that’s something you can’t get from words alone.

Mark:              That’s right. You can’t find a formula for soul can you?

Michael:          No, you can’t.

Mark:              It’s interesting; I’ve met some people who are just so absolutely polished in everything they did. They do what Joel Bauer calls rapping the packaging. He’s got a great suit on. He’s got his hair trimmed properly. Gives you that nice firm handshake. Looks you in the eye. Smiling at you. Everything is all right on, but there’s just something missing. You don’t trust him one hundred percent. Either that or you that wow, this guy really doesn’t love what he’s doing and you can tell. Man, you can tell so easily. I think people have got a built-in BS detector and they may not know it immediately, but there’s some kind of uncomfortable feeling. And they may not stand up and say this is BS, but do you know what they’ll do, they just won’t buy anything from you. So, I think that people really have got to take that to heart and they go out and create this content. They’ve got to go in and make sure these are things that they’re personally interested in. Would you say that holds?

Michael:          Yes, that is a great point. The things you see on my site, I mean it’s such a blessing to be able to interview these experts and I get so much value out of them. I mean who is really the winner? I’m the winner. I get that time to interview someone. I get to learn about the things I’m interested in. I mean I’m learning all the time even after the audio recording is done and I got back and do the editing. I mean we may spend five hours just editing one audio. It just depends on the speech patterns of the person I’m interviewing. But those five hours, I’m never wasting time. I’m still learning as I’m doing the editing. That’s advice. If anyone did start doing interviews or wanted to create a collection of audio recordings, do something that you’re interested in. Why do something just for the money? Everyone’s got some similar interest. If you like to barbeque, go interview ten of the greatest barbeque restaurants in your area or in your city or in your country. Do something that you love and then it never seems like work, even though it is a lot of work in some cases.

Mark:              I think you said it so well and this is a point that’s come up in a lot of different calls. I think sometimes people will sort of indiscriminately say well just follow your passion and the people will shutdown and they’ll say well I haven’t found a passion yet. So, they go back around to waiting. And I think you can be successful without finding a passion or without really knowing what it is that you’re totally passionate about, but you’ve got things you’re interested in. And if you are interested in something, when you hit that bump in the road that is always going to come or there’s a hundred bumps in the road that are going to happen every year that you’re in business, you are going to find it a lot easier to go over that because if you’re not doing something that you’re passionate about or that you love or that you’re really, really interested in, when you hit that bump in the road you’re going to ask yourself why the heck am I doing this. And your answer is going to be, you know what, I don’t really know and then you’re going to stop. So, I think that that’s a really good thing to do.

                        Mike, you’ve got a really excellent speaking voice. Have you cultivated that in any way or were you just born with that?

Michael:          I have not cultivated. This is just how I talk normally. I have people who call me and they maybe have listened to 50 hours of audio on my website and they call me and I pick up the phone and I say Hi, this is Mike and they say, God, you sound just like the same as you do on the recordings. I haven’t cultivated it in any way. I think what it comes down to is passion. You talk about that BS detector in people. If anyone chooses to create audio and do interviews with people, that passion is going to come through. So, if you’re doing something you’re really interested in, you’re going to naturally ask the questions that you want to learn. So, it becomes a natural process. And those people listening to your audio, they’re going to feel that passion, they’re going to know that it’s real, and you can’t get that if you’re interviewing someone about something you’re totally disinterested in. The advice there is stick with something that you really are interested in and create and develop a product around it if you choose.

Mark:              Yeah, I think that’s one hundred percent more important than going out and actually technically cultivating a voice because, again, you could have a highly technically cultivated voice, but I don’t think that’s what really makes people resonant with what you’re saying. It’s the truth and the intensity of what you’re saying will really get them to listen.

Michael:          I want to interject. There are a lot of people out there who maybe insecure that their voice isn’t good enough. But that’s not going to stop you from this process because you don’t have to be the person doing the interview. You can hire someone to do the interview and you can structure an interview very simply without having to adlib. I mean you and I right now are going back and forth and we’re kind of winging it in a way. When I’m doing audio interviews, it’s a lot easier for me because I’m the guy asking the questions and I may prepare and have all my questions in front of me and it’s the guy I’m interviewing who really has to do all the work and has all the pressure on him.

Mark:              That’s interesting. I have an interesting take on take and I don’t really prepare too much for the interviews that we have coming in and I think that I just found that that works a lot better for me for two reasons. One is if things are spontaneous, you’re more likely to get really, really useful, really honest information. If people are sitting there ready with pat answers for a list of questions, you don’t find that passion so much and you don’t see them breaking out of their comfort zone. What I want to do is I want to break someone out of their comfort zone. I want them to say wait a minute, I’ve never really thought about that. And then for the audience to sit and listen and go you know what, that’s a genuine moment. These guys aren’t ready for me and I want to try to get that every time. And I think that we’ve been very lucky in that we’ve had a lot of guests here at Simpleology and we’ve had some great, wonderful people come in, but we’ve been pretty lucky at getting everybody to hit that point where they’re not quite ready for that question. They think I really didn’t know that Mark was going to ask me that and then that’s when the real honest truth comes out.

                        Let me just get to another topic here. We have just about ten more minutes here before we close up. This went by so fast. You talk about using audio interviews to actually increase the value of a product and service and I know you actually are going to give people free access to trial something here that you have that is actually a product put together to show people how to do that. And we’ll give that URL in a second, but it sounds really, really interesting. I haven’t seen this myself, but I want to check it out for sure. But could you tell us a little bit more about that? How have you done that in the past?

Michael:          I’m going to give you three examples. Two of the examples are existing products I sell. About four years ago, I was on Ebay and I was selling a lot of stuff on Ebay and I saw a seminar. It was called Business Opportunities. It was from a guy named Arthur Hamel and he is a guy back in the 80s who put 100,000 people through his seminars. He taught people how to buy businesses, just ordinary businesses at that time. But over the last 20 years he’s been buying million-dollar businesses. And so, I contacted him because I was looking for other products to sell on my site and he was just getting rid of this inventory. He used to sell thousands of these things through TV every month and he had a falling out and he had extra inventory in his basement so he was dumping them on Ebay. So, I did an audio interview with him about him and his expertise and what he did and I started selling his old seminars back from 1985. Now, we started selling that seminar for $297 and I had a sales letter and I had an audio interview to sell it. But over the last three years, I’ve done an additional maybe ten hours of audio interviews with this expert. He’s in his 70s and he’s still very active buying million-dollar business. So, just by doing additional audio interviews with him, recording them, editing them, and providing them as additional content to the old seminar that he did back in 1980s, we’ve increased the value of that product up $597. It’s a $600 product. And we’re even thinking of increasing it even more. So, you can use audio that way.

                        Another example is let’s say I have students who ordered this Art Hamel course to learn how to buy a business. Questions will come in from them and they will call me with questions. Well, I may not have the answer, but what I’ll do is I’ll call Art Hamel. We have an agreement that I can record any call. I will have the questions from the students and I will ask the questions to Art on the student’s behalf. He will answer the questions, we’ll record it, and I will add that as part of the package. So, what I’m doing, I’m constantly recording things and I’m turning them into additional value for existing products that I have.

                        Another example is a marketing consulting system called the HMA System. It teaches people how to be a marketing consultant. I was marketing another system for a gentleman and we had a falling out and I found an expert who is an old Jay Abraham protégé from 1989. He had a video training that he had charged people $10,000 to come through his training. He did a live event on how to be a marketing consultant. He wasn’t doing anything with it. This thing was about ten years old and we took that product and we developed it and we created a series of audio interviews with him by phone and we enhanced the value of the product all by using audio. Taking those audios and turning them into transcripts and we now sell that product, which was just a set of videos, which was pretty good, but we really brought the value up to a $3,900 product. We have consultants all over the world who use this.

I also use audio as a way to train the consultants. So, a big problem when someone is selling a system is the customer service and the training on the backend. Well, in the example I gave with Art Hamel students, we record all the questions from students and we put those up on a website so we’re never duplicating our training by phone. We’ve leveraged our time and we have a whole page for the customers where they can hear the actual training calls with people who have the same questions as they have and it really cuts down on the labor for training purposes, as well.

Mark:              I think you’ve really nailed just the whole process of all of that. I mean every little detail you’ve thought of is right on. Let me ask you one thing. I want to do two more things here. Would you be willing to talk about some of the technical things? What software you use and all of that to record the interviews, how you actually get the phone recorded, and all that.

What I want to do before that is I want to give people a URL you have, and by the way, after I give you this URL, we’ll talk about what you’re going to see there and then we’re going to give you a little bonus session talking about-- and Michael and I didn’t plan any of this, this is totally impromptu--talk a little bit about some of the technical issues of getting these recordings up and how to distribute them and all that. And this is a gold mine guys. If you haven’t figured out all this stuff one your own, you can go out and fiddle fart around for a year trying to figure out the best way to do it or you can hear what Mike is going to say in a second here and actually know the technical things that he does to make all this work. So, this is really, really good information.

Now, before we do that, Michael, you have set it up so we’ve got something special here for Simpleology members. Can you give a URL for that and tell us a little bit more about what’s going on there?

Michael:          Sure. The URL is www.hardtoseminars.com. That’s h-a-r-d-t-o-f-i-n-d-s-e-m-i-n-a-r-s.com/joyner.htm. This is an offer. It’s a product called How To Turn a $28 Book into a $3,900 Information Product. And it contains some of the stuff we’ve talked about tonight, but it’s mainly a series of reports that I worked very hard on putting together all my ideas and everything I’ve learned over the years on how to create your own information product, whether it’s an idea in your head or a book you have that you never got launched, or someone else’s book that maybe out of print on a subject that you’re interested in.

You’ll learn how to take that idea and turn it into your own information product, products that you can sell anywhere from $297, like I do, to $497, $797 all the way up to $3,900 like I do. In the series of reports, you’ve got seven fatal mistakes that will kill the creation of your audio programs stone dead. There’s a report with audio. As a matter of fact, you have a downloadable report and this is a totally digital product.

So, as you look at this, I want you to also put yourself in my situation and understand what a great thing it is to sell a totally digital product because after you try the product--I have a 30-day risk free trail. You pay nothing unless you like it. You have 30 days to review and only then do I charge your credit card unless you get in touch with me and ask me not to. So, it’s a totally risk free offer. But look at it on my end. If you had your own product like this and you could sell it. The only labor I had involved in creating it was just creating it. It is now totally automated where I don’t have any labor involved and the margin is 100% now that the labor has been done. There’s no cost whatsoever except the hosting of the audio recordings on my website, which is very inexpensive.

But you’re also going to get a report called 17 Road Blocks That Can Stop You Marketing Your Information Product and How To Get Around them. There’s something called the Fast Track Audio Creation Guide. That’s 17 insider secrets to planning your audio in the fastest time possible. You’ll get the full report and audios. And you also get one half hour, one-on-one audio information product consultation with me. If you decide to keep the product after 30 days, you call me and we will talk by phone. I’ll look at your ideas or what you want to do and I’ll give you my best advice.

Now, you’ll also see those best consultations that I’ve done. There are about 10 different recordings that I’ve done with students who have ordered the course and took me up on the 30-minute call. I’ve recorded those and I’ve included those in the package. So, that’s just me building value into a product ongoing. And the more I talk, the more I make because the more audio recordings I have in there with consultations, the more valuable it is and soon I can raise the price to $300 or $600 and I don’t think it would make a difference in the orders.

One other bonus I was going to offer just for your listeners is I’ve taken some time and I’m going to show you all the different tools that I use to leverage my time. I mean the one diminishing resource we all have in common is our time. And there are tools that I’ve been using online for years that give me the ability to really leverage my time and I’m going to share all those with you. I’m also going to share the links to these tools and that’s going to be free, as well.

And there’s one other bonus I’m going to show you and this is pretty amazing. It’s something I learned just through the experience of editing audio. I’m going to show you how to speed listen. I’m going to show you how to listen to audio at twice the normal speed. Your brain can absorb listening to audio content a lot faster than you think and I can show you that it will also increase your comprehension because you’re going to be paying attention to it more to try and hear what you say. I’m going to share a tool that will allow to get through all the audio on my website in the half the normal speed that you hear it now.

Mark:              I think I have a feel for what you’re going to reveal on that. I’m not sure, but if it is what I think you’re going to show them, that’s amazingly clever. In fact, I think I heard you talk about this first, as a matter of fact, and I’m just going to leave people dangling with that because I really want them to try this 30-day free trail.

                        I’ve got to say, Michael, I really love the way you’ve set this up. You aren’t even going to charge our credit card for 30 days. So, they go and they place the order and their card isn’t even touched until after they’ve had a chance to look at it. 

Michael:          Their card is not touch. The order comes to my email. I print it out. It goes into a 3-ring binder and it just matures. After 30 days, if I haven’t heard back from you, then the card is charged. So, I totally take the risk away and I do this will almost all of my products. And I found this an extremely valuable way and lesson in increasing your response and sales. I put the burden on me. You’ve got nothing to risk. And so, it’s a very generous offer.

Mark:              I think that’s brilliant the way you’ve put that together. Listening to you say all this, I really want to get that. I’m especially interested in that time management resource that you’ve put together. You guys, just to put this into context of Simpleology, remember the three sources of power are time, energy, and money. Remember that the most valuable of those is certainly not money, and energy, you can also do things to increase your energy, but your time, once you lose that, you never, ever, ever get it back. And if Michael’s going to show you resources he’s put together to help him save time, I would definitely snap that up and take a look at that. Michael clearly knows how to manage his time. I mean look at what he has done on his own in such a short period of time. I mean really you got started on the Internet in 2002, is that right?

Michael:          Yeah, that was the very first time I put up a website and I really knew nothing. But I really got serious about two years ago.

Mark:              And look in two years, I mean now you’ve got two of the most popular websites on the Internet right now and certainly two of the most respected resources in the field of marketing in the world. So, that’s just awesome. Let’s give that URL just one more time. It’s www.hardtofindseminars.com/joyner.htm. Let me spell it out for you just one more time incase you missed it. It www.h-a-r-d-t-o-f-i-n-d-s-e-m-i-n-a-r-s-.-c-o-m/j-o-y-n-e-r.htm. Michael has put that together exclusively for Simpleology members. You guys can go check that out right now. A great, great deal that he’s put together for you. I think you’d just be crazy not to give that a shot

                        So, let’s say somebody has tried it 29 days and they’ve got to ship it back. Can they send you an email on day 29 and say you know what, I’m really sorry it’s not working out for me. The package is on the way. It may not arrive in the 30-days. Is this okay?

Michael:          Yeah, that’s right. But it’s actually not a physical product. It’s a digital product, so there’s nothing that needs to be shipped. Once you place that order, you’ll be redirected to a page with the product, everything ready there for you to listen to.

Mark:              I can do it right now.

Michael:          Yeah, you can do it right now.

Mark:              I’m fired up about that. I’m going to check that out myself. I’m actually not even online right now. I’m just like thinking how can I get online fast enough to check this out. All right, that’s great.

                        Let’s take a few minutes now to talk about the technical side of marketing. And by the way, just one more last time with that URL just incase you missed that. I really hope you don’t. Sounds like great stuff; www.hardtofindseminars.com/joyner.htm.

Let’s take a couple of minutes here. We promised we’d talk about some of the technical side of recording audio interviews. I’ll give you a little bit of the information I have on this and I bet Michael has probably some more sophisticated and cool ways of getting it done, but right now what we’re doing is we on a teleconference service. The service that I use--I’ll just tell you the name of the company. It’s www.aitelephone.com and despite the technical issues that happened earlier tonight, it’s probably not their fault. It could very well be the fact that I’m calling from a line in Australia. Maybe there’s some issue between this line and theirs. I’ve never had a problem with these folks before, by the way. They’ve always been extremely professional and very, very reliable, www.aitelephone.com and it’s very reasonably priced. They will record the interview for you for a fairly nominal fee. I think it costs you about $20 each time a recording comes through. Then they will just upload the MP3 file of the recording for you to the website. That’s what’s happening right now. This call is being recorded and the call will be uploaded within 24 hours of us getting it done. The recording is not one hundred percent perfect. Everyone who has been to the Simpleology website and has listened to these recordings, you know that they’re not great because we’re dealing with people over the phone, but it’s the content. And people still are interested in listening.

Now, Michael, you’ve probably got a much better way of doing this. How do you handle all this?

Michael:          Well, the difference in what you’re doing, you’re doing live teleseminars and I rarely do any live teleseminars. I’ve maybe only done one in the past. I usually don’t do live events. This is what you need.

One great thing is it’s very inexpensive. You don’t need thousands of dollars of equipment. There are people selling equipment for thousands of dollars to have super professional sounding audio and I think that’s a detriment. I think if your audio is not perfect, it causes the listener to kind of have to listen in a little harder. It gives it more authenticity. All you’re going to need is a digital recorder. You can go to Radio Shack and get a digital recorder. I use a Sony ICD, which is a $100 digital record that I got from Circuit City. You can find them on Ebay very inexpensively. So, you need a digital recorder that gives you the ability to record digitally and gives you the ability to save the audio recording as a .WAV format.

You’re going to need some editing software. Now, this is only if you choose to edit your audio recordings. Like this recording is going to go right to your site and it is unedited. So, in your case, you don’t editing software. I choose to edit all my recordings, so you can get free trials of editing software. The one I started out with and still use is something called Gold Wave. If you go to www.goldwave.com, you can download some editing software. Now, they’ve upgraded to some new software, which I have found very hard to use, so I use the old 4.7 version of Gold Wave. If you choose to but it, it’s $35.

Now, preparing for a call, if you have call waiting and you’re doing an interview with someone, for instance, I press star 70 here in the states. That keeps any calls from beeping in so you don’t want any interruptions. You want to make sure you have fresh batteries in your recording device. You’re also going to need to record the calls a device from Radio Shack. If you go into Radio Shack or go online to www.radioshack.com and search record calls, you’ll see a little black box and it’s got a switch and it hooks into your wall and it hooks into your digital recorder. It’s a little bit of a challenge getting it set up, but once it’s set up it’s very easy to use. When you pick up the phone you press the record button, and you’re recording audio digitally--a very good quality.

                        Before I do a call with someone, I usually get their permission to record the call. Now, some people ask well don’t I need a release if I’m doing a recording. I’ve tried releases in the past, but they usually inhibit the process. People don’t get them back. So, what I do is when I’m on the call I just explain we’re going to record the call. I may want to use it for my site. It maybe turned into a product down the road. Is that okay with you and I get them to say yes that’s fine and I have that on the original recording. I’ve never had a problem in all the years that I’ve done this.

                        Now, there are different types of interviews. There’s an outline interview. For instance, Mark, what we did is when I recorded you for my website, all I did is I sent an email out that said I’m going to be interviewing Mark Joyner. This is the time to ask your questions. The questions came back to me, so there was really very little preparation for me. I used the assets. I used my customers and my members to my site to ask the questions that they wanted to know the answers to and that’s always a good strategy because you’re giving your market exactly what they want. And there’s another type of interview you can do, which is an outline type of interview. So, for instance, let’s say you find someone who has an ebook, but he’s got no audio or he’s got a regular book. Well, he’s created an outline for that book and you can just look at that outline and come up with all the questions for the person you’re interviewing and that also becomes a very easy process for knowing what to ask the person you’re interviewing. A lot of people will get hung up and they say well I don’t know what to ask the person, but any expert you’re interviewing, these questions have been asked before. So, that’s another great way.

                        And then there’s another interview style that I do called the story interview. And that’s just starting from the beginning. Mark, how did you get started in all this marketing and you’d take them through a chronological process of everything that they’ve done and you dig deeper and you say well how did you do that or why did you do that or what made this work. You dig deeper and deeper.

                        So, those are some of the processes and types of interviews that I’ve done over the past that have made it real easy for me.

Mark:              Wow, that’s just a whole whack upside the head full of information there. By the way guys, this is stuff that’s probably taken Michael really at least over a year to figure.

Now, by the way, just one more thing on the technical side of this, there is another way you can do this. There are probably several others, but one other way that comes immediately to mind is that you can use one those Radio Shack boxes and you actually plug them right into the back of your computer. If you use that audio editing software, a lot of it will write or record right to it. Now, some is better than others. Some is more stable than others for recording long bits of audio, but one problem with this is and one challenge, which sort of justifies why Michael is doing it the way he uses it with an offline MP3 player that you record directly into is when you do it on your computer sometimes the computer crashes in the middle of that recording and you can lose everything single bit of what you recorded. So, if you are going to do it that way, it might be wise to somehow get a splitter, if that doesn’t kill the sound quality too much because sometimes when you split the signal across two different wires both end up sounding really terrible. But if you can do that, you can boost the signal enough, you can get a backup happening on a physical player and another recording happening on the computer. Now, the nice thing about recording right into the computer is you don’t have to download from the MP3 player. On the computer you just go bam right there and start editing it if you are going to do so. Again, with the Simpleology live learning events, these are totally unedited. These are just straight up, right to the gut conversations that we have with folks.

Now, Michael has got a very different way of doing stuff. He’s got a super professional edited process. It’s just a canned way of getting all this done. I don’t want to use the word canned really because that makes it sound like it’s not all that great. But the quality of what he puts up is absolutely phenomenal.

Now, to close this up, Michael, I want to give this URL just one more time just to let folks know about the free 30-day trial. You won’t even charge their credit card until after 30-days. You can check it out and then if you don’t like it, on day 29 just shoot Mike an email and he’ll just say all right, hey no problem, I won’t charge your credit card. It’s as simple as that. And you can get access to this instantly without paying a dime. I think that’s wonderful. It’s www.hardtofindseminars.com/joyner.htm.

Michael, I want to thank you so much for coming out tonight. And you are one of the real experts out there. There are a lot of people out there teaching marketing. You are the real deal. You’ve always kept it honest and in the process of that, you yourself have become one of the world-class experts. I want to thank you once again for taking this time with us tonight.

Michael:          Mark, I really appreciate it. And really, it’s an honor to be here. Thank you very much.

Mark:              Thank you. Good night, folks.

Michael:          That’s the end of this interview with Mark Joyner and Michael Senoff. I hope you’ve enjoyed it and I encourage you to check out Mark Joyner’s Simpleology site and also to review some of the other audio recordings at www.hardtofindseminars.com. Thanks for listening. For more information on Simpleology go here .