Bob Bly

I’m very happy to be here and I am ready.

Bob Bly

I worked with a lot of the more mainstream internet marketers, such as Health Sciences Institute’s, Newsmax, Agora Publishing, and Dr. Sears. What these guys found, is that if all your messages are sales messages people will be turned off. They will unsubscribe and your sales rate will actually go down.

If you make a percentage of the messages pure content with useful information, they  will appreciate it more. They will become more loyal, bigger fans and they will buy more.

I think slightly over half of your emails should be pure content and the other half should be pure sales messages. It has been a difficult choice, but based on  the economy and  a lot of personal experience and observation, by me and my clients that this is what works the best.

Bob Bly

Nobody beats Ben in the email game. What I would say is maybe he misrepresents himself because he says, “Every message should sell”. And yes, he does sell at the end of a lot of messages, but when reading them it’s obvious that there’s a lesson, some great content, and a story. They’re really not pure sales messages.

So I think, whether he admits it or not, he sort of follows this rule.

Bob Bly

First, you decide whether the product should be audio or video.

Then think about the method you’ll use to teach your online training courses. There’s four different learning modes which are, audio-listening, video-watching, reading, and experiencing it. Different subjects demand different media.

For example, if you’re playing golf, you pretty much have to do a video. People have to see the swing. Like there is a guy out there named Bill Dewees who teaches people how to do voice overs. It’s got to be done through audio. You need to hear him do it.

For other topics to put in your online training courses, it’s really your choice. The reason I mix it up is two-fold. first, you do have some customers for whom the audio method of learning is their preferred mode. They don’t want to read a book or watch a video.

Bob Bly

Yeah! Can you imagine that? It’s actually upsetting to me as a book addict.

Bob Bly

I know you guys are too young to remember Howard Shenson, who was very big in information and consulting in the 70s and 80s, but he made the statement, “People will pay over and over again for essentially the same content in different formats.” So that’s why it pays to have your content in multiple formats. That’s why I like audio.

The other reason I recommend audios to other people, is that a lot of people approach me say they want to get into information marketing, but they either can’t or don’t want to write. They find it an exhausting mental chore to needs be avoided at all cost.

And I say to them that they could put together any informational product without writing a word and of course ironically, an audio is much easier and quicker to do as well.

I do have products on Amazon. I do have a membership site as well, but  really, my preferred method of selling online training courses is to generate hot traffic and send emails from my lists and my affiliates’ lists to my landing pages.

Some people prefer the Agora Publishing model. The model works the same way, by building a responsive house list, making deals with affiliates who have also done responsive house lists reaching to the same audience, and market your products by sending emails. This will drive the traffic to your product’s landing pages.

Bob Bly

I know you guys are too young to remember Howard Shenson, who was very big in information and consulting in the 70s and 80s, but he made the statement, “People will pay over and over again for essentially the same content in different formats.” So that’s why it pays to have your content in multiple formats. That’s why I like audio.

The other reason I recommend audios to other people, is that a lot of people approach me say they want to get into information marketing, but they either can’t or don’t want to write. They find it an exhausting mental chore to needs be avoided at all cost.

And I say to them that they could put together any informational product without writing a word and of course ironically, an audio is much easier and quicker to do as well.

I do have products on Amazon. I do have a membership site as well, but  really, my preferred method of selling online training courses is to generate hot traffic and send emails from my lists and my affiliates’ lists to my landing pages.

Some people prefer the Agora Publishing model. The model works the same way, by building a responsive house list, making deals with affiliates who have also done responsive house lists reaching to the same audience, and market your products by sending emails. This will drive the traffic to your product’s landing pages.

Bob Bly

That’s a smart method that people will love. There’s another method where you put up your own little survey page, but not using SurveyMonkey. It’s just a little landing page where you ask questions and list topics about how you can increase the quality of online training courses.

Let’s say, the topic was climbing Mt. Kilimanjaro. The questions are:

1. Do you want to know what gear you need?
2. What’s the best way to get to the mountain?
3. What kind of guides would you hire?

You ask them to say, “This is important, can you drive? There is a lot of traffic there.” Then you can reward them by saying, “If you fill in the form and click submit, we’ll give you a book  that will tell you more.” That’s another way to do it, but I like what you suggested even better.

I have a medium to a medium small list of 65,000 subscribers. So when I publish my newsletters, I get a lot of white mail. I get a lot of people replying to these emails. I find out from what they say, what they want to know. People ask me questions by phone also, but mainly by email. Those questions tell me what they want to know about and what will go into your online training courses.

Bob Bly

Well first, if you don’t mind, I don’t think we should talk about how to create online training courses, because the outline and the questions are the raw materials for it. But how do you actually create the mp3 file and the recording? Well, there are a couple of options for doing it.

Bob Bly

One of the best ways is to be invited to some venue, to an internet marketing conference or a trainee association meeting, to speak on your topic where it’s a big event that they’re recording, you make a deal with them. Normally, they have you sign something that says they make all the money from the event and they keep the recording. I say to them, “You can do all that, but I also get a copy of the mp3 and I co-own the rights.”

A lot of my informational products are audio and video files that I’ve delivered in front of live groups. The advantage of that, is that it has the same energy and feedback of a live audience. So that’s one method.

My favorite method is to work with a partner who can be either just the interviewer or a fellow subject matter expert and essentially to have the interview or conversation. This is much more dynamic than just you sitting in a studio by yourself, reading the bullet points and questions and then answering then them. This is very monotone and won’t keep the listener interested.

Those are 2 of my favorite ways to sell them.

Bob Bly

Yeah. I’m not used to podcasting, although my younger son is a podcasting addict. So those are couple of the ways that we create online training courses.

Bob Bly

In terms of selling them, different people will use different mechanisms, but I will either take an audio and sell it as a stand-alone product or I’ll bundle it with other stuff I have. When you do something that’s bundled in multimedia, you can charge a higher price as it has a higher perceived value.

So those are the two ways I packaged an audio product. I still offer them both as a downloadable mp3 and in a CD format, which a lot of people do not do anymore.

Bob Bly

No. We either let them download the mp3s for the online training courses or we send them a CD album. My demographic is older and lot of them like to put a CD in the radio of the car and listen that way. The younger people will tend to want a digital form of the online training courses for one of their devices like a laptop or an iPad or they’ll download it to their iPod.

Bob Bly

What I do when I’m doing it, with a friend who’s really a pure colleague and also knowledgeable in the topic, we tend to sit at a table with a nice high quality digital recorder. Each of us has a nice high quality digital microphone. And we have a conversation about it. And one thing that shocks people, we don’t edit it. It is pure raw, right off the first draft and it has the spontaneity that a lot of editing will take away from it. And also we can do it in much faster time.

And just to give you an idea of the numbers, one of the early programs I did with my partner Fred Gleek, I think we were recorded it for maybe 5 hours. That was our complete labor in it, no editing. That time, there were no mp3s. We gave it to our fulfillment house to do CD’s and we sold well over $120,000 in sales worth of those online training courses. So in an hourly rate, that’s pretty good.

Bob Bly

It’s funny and I worked in the corporate world in the late 70s. We were taught if you’re going to do a marketing video, it has to be as close to broadcast quality as possible, but today that’s not true. People do videos on their smartphones with their webcams.

Bob Bly

It’s very strange to me but that’s the way it is.

Bob Bly

That is the problem. In writing the standard is higher. I had someone called me up and complain about one of my books.

Bob Bly

Yeah. They said on page 3 and 33, you misspelled whatever. I said, “Not for nothing but that book is a hundred thousand words long. You know what error rate that is to have one misspelled word out of a hundred thousand?” And I did the math for him but yet, when people see a typo, they have a very negative reaction.

If you noticed, none of us wants a regular job on this calI. If you’re looking for a job and you have one typo on your LinkedIn profile or your resume, that’s it.

Bob Bly

No because it was not an eBook. It was a paperback book published by my regular publisher and there were 5,000 copies in the warehouse.

Bob Bly

So I wrote them a letter and said, “On the next printing, could you fix this?” Whether they actually will remember to do that is another story.

Bob Bly

I have found that with video and audio, if you can find one or if you have one, putting a really good 2-minute excerpt as an autoplay video on the landing page really helps. Give them a little sample. And we do that with a lot of our audio and video files.

Bob Bly

I really enjoyed it.