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

Hi!  I’m Michael Senoff!  My goal is to help you seek a better life—to help you do more, be more, dream more, and take more action than ever before.  Jim Peak asked to interview me in November, 2006.  Jim interviews experts on marketing, advertising, and personal development. Although I originally said no, Jim won me over to his way of thinking—that of giving back to the world in an unselfish way, through his work. In this three-part, three-hour interview by Jim Peak I will share with you some of the strategies and secrets that make my Web-based audio marketing business, product development, interviewing secrets, and much more really work—secrets you can apply to build your own business. By listening to this three-part interview, you will learn about How you can find solutions to what you need, as well as how you can save your time and money by taking advantage of the wealth of audio information on www.hardtofindseminars.com. Descriptions of interviews I conducted with key experts and millionaires How I built my Web marketing business, what you will find on www.hardtofindseminars.com, and how to use it Tips for audio interviewing, copywriting, editing, distributing, marketing, and other time-saving techniques Testimonials of success stories from others who continue to apply the principles and teachings found on www.hardtofindseminars.com How I can assist you. Press the green play button for each part or download the mp3 below. You can also download the transcripts to reinforce your learning. FREE REPORT reveals in detail how you can take your own ordinary $28 book, e-book or even an idea you have in your mind and turn it into a valuable information product you can sell for $97 up to $3,900 or more. Click here for details.

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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