Michael: This is the thing. If you’re going to do it right and I’d recommend don’t do it like I did, sloppy from the beginning, because I was very sloppy when I first started. Do it right from the beginning. It’s either time or money. So maybe either you got the time to do it yourself or you’re going to have to pay someone to do it. Music

Michael: This is Michael.

Christian: Michael, hi, it’s Christian Mowery.

Michael: Hey, Christian, how are you?

Christian: I’m doing good, sir. How are you?

Michael: Good. Nice to talk to you.

Christian: Yeah, nice to talk to you as well. I’ve enjoyed going through your products and I’m glad that we’re having an opportunity to chat here.

Michael: I remember you from before and I’m at your www.GuruReporter.com and I have an idea. I think you want to do what I’m doing which I thinks is great. I don’t know how much work you really know it’s going to be.

Christian: My goals obviously are to start contacting some of these gurus that I have listed on my site to nail down interviews with them. So really I kind of like to talk strategy and how I may be able to do that. I will tell you that I have been working with Sylvie Fortin who is one of the gurus on there. We initially started a coaching program together.

Michael: What’s her name?

Christian: Her name is Sylvie Fortin.

Michael: Is she related to Michel Fortin?

Christian: Yes, that’s Michel Fortin’s wife.

Michael: Okay, and what is she doing?

Christian: I initially started working with her back in August-September of last year. We kind of came up with the idea for that site together. Officially, what differentiates it from any other sites out there that you may see involving the gurus is it does have a rating feature.

Michael: Yours has a rating feature?

Christian: It does have a rating feature. When I was kind fumbling over ideas for the slogan of the site, we came up with “Unbiased News, Reviews and Interviews” and my goals were and my hopes were that the interviews would help build credibility on the website, which I think for the most part it will. However, now that we’ve reached the point where we need to get the interviews conducted and secure the interviews from the gurus and so forth, that’s where I was hoping that you would be able to help me with strategy.

Michael: Sure, sure. So here’s the question. You’ve got a website, let’s say you have the interviews. What are you going to be selling? How else are you going to make money from it? That’s what you got to be thinking.

Christian: Well, I’m thinking that in order to help me secure the interviews with the gurus, my approach would be to contact them via email and let them know that I plan on not only featuring their interview on my website, that I would like for the results to be that we would package the interviews from say 10 gurus at a time. Right now, I’ve got 10 gurus that will be featured on the site. My next goal would be 10 more. So my goal would be to package the 10 interviews as an audio info product, pay for the sales page and put this in a downloadable product and actually give the gurus themselves full rights to the products to sell their list along with master resell rights. The goal being twofold, one is to build my own list from the people who go to the site to purchase the packaged interviews and two is to start building traffic and, you know, build credibility among my sites where people feel like they can go to the site and get valuable information.

Michael: I think it makes sense. So you got to ask yourself what’s in it for the guru? Okay? Why is he going to do an interview with you? So you explain to him you want to interview him, you want to position him on your site. Obviously, any promotion is good promotion for him. He can talk and plug whatever products or whatever he’s doing at that time. So that’s good for him, right? And then also give him a reward for doing the interview with you? So you’re going to be creating an information product with his interview and nine other gurus’ interviews. And are you going to give him the total rights to do whatever he wants with it where he doesn’t have pay you anything?

Christian: I’m not quite sure how to handle that.

Michael: I think your fear on that is unfounded. You don’t have give them master resell rights to your package. You got to have the attitude, okay? Did you ever watch Fast Times at Ridgemont High?

Christian: Oh, several times.

Michael: Okay, remember Damone, he had the attitude?

Christian: Yeah.

Michael: Alright. You got to have that attitude. You’re doing him the favor by interviewing him.

Christian: Right.

Michael: He should be kissing your ass but you’re interviewing him. Because you’re getting ready to launch your site, you don’t know how well you’re going to do. I know other gurus are super busy and you do have to make it worth his while and so when you make a proposal to him or you invite him to do an interview, you know, he’s going to want to know, “Well, what’s this guy going to do if I trade my time in doing interview?” By him going to your site, he’s going to say, “It looks like this guy’s got the potential of getting my interview out to people.” So in your presentation, your offer or your invitation to do the interview with him, you got to have some meat there that he can sink his teeth into that looks like, “Well, this GuruReporter, yeah, he’s going to probably get my interview out and I get to plug my own stuff, so that’s good business for me.” Right?

Christian: Right.

Michael: Look, everyone you ask isn’t going to do it but you don’t need everyone. So you approach 100 gurus and you get 10 to do it, then you got 10 gurus and you do have an information product that you can sell. Now, I’m going to give you a website. You can take a look at it. I just received a promotion from a guy and this is exactly what he’s doing. I don’t know how well he’s doing but it’s called www.LegendaryMarketers.com. This is a guy who’s going into their homes and videotaping the gurus. Did you see that promotion?

Christian: I’ve seen that, yeah.

Michael: He’s just doing it video-wise. A lot more work. I ordered the product. It was a $97 product because I love learning from these guys too. So you know, I didn’t even read the whole sales letter but he interviewed Matt Bacak and Rick Raddatz and Russell Brunson and he did video interviews. But he also was smart. You could watch the video or download the AVI file but he also allows you to download just the MP3 of the video. So you could put it on your iPod and take it with you. So I ordered it. I was a little disappointed and I didn’t read the whole sales letter. He had lots of names on there but what he was selling was really a promise. He said: “I’m going to be doing an interview with this person, this person, this person and this person.” He had clips from some other experts but he hadn’t finished editing and putting all these video interviews together and man, if audio is hard. I mean the video editing production must just be brutal. I can’t imagine him popping these things out real fast. I could see why he’s only got three done already. They’re done well and it was kind of smart. He sold a promise, he did deliver three or four that you can watch once you paid your 97 bucks with the promise that you’ll be getting another 15 videos.. So that’s pretty good. And he had a nice joint venture with Rick Raddatz and I’m sure he sold a bunch of those. So yeah, it can be done and all he’s doing is selling interviews with gurus. Absolutely. So number one, I don’t even think you have to give them the rights to the interview. If it comes up and they want it, why not give it to them?

Christian: My initial approach is just to try and tell them that I am basically building a website promoting them and their products as part of my strategy and go for the agreement.

Michael: Yeah, you have a website GuruReporter – Unbiased News, Reviews and Interviews. I can send you an email that I used but you know, I thought I’d use my positioning to help get the interview and because now I’ve got so many interviews, if someone goes to my site, you know, I back it up with proof. But that’s okay, you can do an invitation and like I say, these guys, they understand marketing, okay? They understand that an interview is an effective way of getting their name out and if they’re selling a high-end something, all they need is one sale from someone listening to the interview anytime in the future and they know that makes good business sense. You know what I’m saying?

Christian: Absolutely.

Michael: I’ll send you the letter that I used. You can modify it and just tell them

what you have: you’ve got a blogger website GuruReporter – Unbiased News, Reviews and Interviews. You’re interviewing all the gurus. You’d like to schedule an interview with them where they could talk about their experience and what have you and promote anything they want. And you just invite them to it. It’s as simple as asking.

Christian: Oh okay.

Michael: But you don’t have to give them the master resell rights to your product. You keep that for yourself.

Christian: Okay, good.

Michael: Another thing I usually say is, “Look, I’ll do the interview, I’ll do the reporting, I’ll do all the editing, I’ll pay for all the post-production work, you’ll write a description for it and you’ll have it available on your site to anyone who visits your site.” You can say you’ll be launching a massive marketing campaign. You know, you can tell them your plan. So then when you have to do everything you say, you’ll be creating 100 articles about the GuruReporter, you’ll be doing press releases to all the media. You know what I’m saying?

Christian: Oh absolutely.

Michael: So everything that you would be doing in your launch or in your marketing, you’ll be doing joint ventures with other expert marketers. Another good thing is if you’ve made calls, let’s say you made calls to five or six of these guys already and then you’re calling me and you’re inviting me and say, “Look, I’ve already got calls to Matt Bacak and Michel Fortin and he’s agreed.” You know, you start dropping names of who’s going to be on there and that’ll help you get the interview too.

Christian: Okay. So let’s say someone does take me up on the offer. I would imagine then it would be the best time to start trying to nail down a time on the calendar, not beforehand.

Michael: You mean, if you talk to them and they agree and they’d say, “Yeah, let’s set it up”?

Christian: Uh-huh.

Michael: Yeah, schedule it. Offer him a couple of dates. Just say, “You know, whenever you’re ready. If you could do it early that next week or the next day or whatever, whatever is good for you.” Say, “Look, I’ve got Tuesday open at 9:30 or we could do Wednesday. We could do anytime next week. What’s good for you?” And you just nail down a time.

Christian: Okay, perfect.

Michael: Alright, so then you nailed down your time, so you’ve got an interview with this guy. What you’ll also want to do is when you nail down the time with them, you want to ask them what they are working on, what they would like to promote at the end of the interview. You know, I don’t know whether they have a membership or they’re selling a seminar or whatever. But you got to understand that’s why they’re doing the interview. They want to get their name out there but they also want to offer something to your listeners.

Christian: Right, absolutely.

Michael: So what are they promoting? So ask them what they’re promoting. If they’re promoting a seminar, ask them for the URL; if they have sales letter to it, where it is. So let’s say they had a seminar. Matt Bacak is selling, I don’t know, whatever he’s selling. But you decide what are they promoting, then you’ll go to their web page and you’ll go look at their sales letter and you’ll look at all their bullets in you’ll see what they’re selling. And then that sales letter is there to sell someone on their training and it’s going to tell a lot about that person, about the guru, their history and where they came from. You’re going to have all these bullets in there. You’ll going to be able to pull all your collections from that sales letter. You know what I’m saying?

Christian: Oh yeah. You’re listening to an exclusive interview found on Michael Senoff’s HardToFindSeminars.com.

Michael: You just look at the bullets, you know, how to get a flood of traffic to your inbox and say, “Well, man, how do you get a flood of traffic to you inbox?” Every bullet that they’ve probably spent a loft of money with a great copywriter, look at any of Michel Fortin’s letter. You look at his letters. You should be able to come up with so many questions from one of his letters. You know, all the questions are right there. You’re just turning that sales letter into and audio sales letter.

Christian: Exactly. It makes total sense.

Michael: So that should be easy. That’s if someone has a sales letter. If they don’t have a sales letter, you can go to their website and you look at their history. So you can do questions about them and how they got into the business. By looking at their content and learning about them, you should be able to come up with plenty of good questions for the interview.

Christian: If I had a ballpark figure, if I’m looking to have anywhere between 45 to 60 minutes interview, how many questions should I have on hand?

Michael: It’s hard to say. It depends on what the guy’s style of talking is. Some people just won’t shut up and some people, their answers are very short and succinct. I’d definitely have plenty of questions. But when someone answers a question, they may say something – and you got to be a real good listener – that sounds interesting, you’ll say, “Well, tell me about that.” You can expand the question on and on by saying, “Tell me more about that.” Or let’s say their answer is “Well, I had a student who took my course and he made $10,000 last month.” You say, “Can you tell me about that? Who was he?” So you can go off on tangents on questions and you’re looking at your time. You can keep an idea of how much time you have left. Let’s say you scheduled an hour interview, depending on what his schedules like, you can say at about 45 minutes, “How are you doing on time? Would you have another 15 minutes to keep going?” If you know you got a lot more questions, and then just ask him. So if he’ll give you another 15 minutes right there to make it an hour and 15 minutes, that’s great. Then you’ve got more questions to go through. If it’s a great killer interview and you keep going, I’ve done this before several times, you got to say, “Man, I just have not gone through all my questions. Let me ask you this: can we either keep going or can we stop right here and just let’s finish up tomorrow or two days? I’ve just got a few more questions for you and you can do a two-parter.”

Christian: Right, okay.

Michael: You just kind of gauge it with practice but definitely have plenty of questions there. The last thing you want to do is draw a blank and not have any questions and he’s willing to answer. So it should be a real smooth process if you do your research before and have all your questions organized in front of you. A lot of these gurus will have forums and you can see what question shave been asked on their forum and this is a real powerful way in creating a great question-and-answer interview because you’re giving the list of exactly what people are asking. You look at the forum questions and you could copy those. If there is a bunch of people in the forum and they’re asking each other how do I do this, how do I do that, you’ve got real questions from real people that people want to know. And so you can ask the guru those questions that are being asked in their forum. That should be cake. This should be very easy getting plenty of questions. The email strategy for landing the interview, I will email you my letter that I use. You can do an email. You can even pick up the phone. You know, a real effective way is—email sometimes won’t work at first—take your email and just print it out on your printer and get a brown manila envelope, like 8½x 11 one, just a regular brown envelope, stick the letter in there and address and send it to him. Just mail it to him. I just got an interview with a guy who creates a product called Faster Audio; it’s a piece of software that allows you to fly through audio. Its speed listening. I emailed him a couple of times and I didn’t hear back from him and he is in Canada. So I printed that email out, put it in a brown manila envelope, sent it off, sure enough he called me. That’s real effective. Email sometimes isn’t going to work. If you really want to land the good interview, they appreciate someone who goes through the extra effort to send them something really unique and I’m not talking about like a gift or anything.

Christian: Something that catches their attention.

Michael: Yeah, anything. Like I mail out my CD in a flat popcorn box, the really unique people love that. We went to a garage sale this weekend and picked up a pack of these jumbo playing cards from China. They’re bigger than a postcard but you can put a stamp on them. You can get the ace and write in black Sharpie marker: “You’re an ace marketer and I’d love to interview you. Give me a call. Christian.” And put your phone number on it.

Christian: Right.

Michael: I’ve got a promotion I’m going to be testing out shortly. I went and ordered from an aluminum can manufacturer. You know what a paint can is? You know, like a paint can that you get a gallon of paint in? Well, you can buy these from this manufacturer. You can get these lids, these giant paint lids, you know, the lid that you hammer on when you got to close up the paint. They’re made of aluminum, they’re real light. You can put three or four stamps on them and you could mail those: “I’d like to blow the lid off your marketing with one of my interviews.” Just simple stupid stuff like that. So you shouldn’t have a problem getting their attention. Start with email because it’s the easiest but don’t give up on them and do something different and unique that gets their attention.

Christian: Okay.

Michael: What part of the audio interview process can I outsource to my team? This is the thing. If you’re going to do it right, and I’d recommend don’t do it like I did, sloppy from the beginning because I was very sloppy when I first started. Do it right from the beginning. It’s either time or money. So maybe you got the time to do it yourself or you’re going to have to pay someone to do it. So you’re going to ask yourself what kind of capital you are willing to put into this project. I mean, I’ve put thousands and thousands and thousands of dollars into my sites. It’s expensive.

Christian: Oh, I can imagine. Yeah, I’d like to outsource whatever I can before working up another deal with you.

Michael: Do you have the capital to do it?

Christian: I don’t know. You know, I don’t know what the costs are.

Michael: Do you want to outsource the interviewing too?

Christian: I don’t know. Is that possible?

Michael: I don’t know. If you’re the GuruReporter, you know, when they go GuruReporter, one thing is they’re going to say, who is the GuruReporter? I think you need your face on there, a personality.

Christian: Right, I agree.

Michael: And a little bit of a story, you know, what’s the site all about. You could say, “I was an information product junkie. I’ve spent thousands of dollars on this and that and that and I’m just fed up and now I don’t just buy anything. I really investigate products and since I’m so used to doing this, I thought I could give you my opinion on things that I’ve looked at and give you the real scoop on what’s going on.” You got to have a little story behind it.

Christian: Right. Well, then if I purchased the equipment that you’ve suggested in the materials that I purchased from you, and I’m able to secure the interview, form the questionnaires and nail down interviews and conducting interviews, what then can be outsourced because I know there’s a whole heck of a lot more to it than just that.

Michael: Okay, so let’s say you record your interview on your digital recorder. From then on, you could outsource the rest of it. It’ll take some work getting someone to set up to do this, someone reliable. So you’ll need someone to do the editing.

Christian: Can I use your team to do this? What are you suggesting can be outsourced?

Michael: Look, after I do an interview, my team, I outsource all the editing or the initial editing, then I’ll re-listen to it and I’ll do the final editing. I don’t know if you’ve heard me explain that I go on to the dentist, you got the hygienist who cleans all the crud off your teeth and then the dentist comes in. I’ll always go through the final recording to do the final editing. I’ll put the intro on there in my voice and the ending and the little promotional things in the middle. But the editing is very expensive. Well, it is very time-consuming. My editor may spend four or five hours editing just one hour of interview and then I go through it and I may spend another 30 minutes to an hour finishing it up. And then once it’s finished up, I send it to a writer who listens to it and writes a headline and a description for it and then I send to a transcriber who transcribes it. Once it’s transcribed in Word, I send it to my graphic artist where we put a cover, convert it to PDF and then it’s ready to publish. I have all these different people: I have the editor, I have the writer, I have the transcriber and I have the graphic artist – all four different providers. But once you get it going, you know, like my writer has been wonderful. I think I got her on Craigslist. You can find a talent on Craigslist to do all this. One time, my editor, I just had her doing so much work, I put an on Craigslist for someone to do audio editing and I found some capable people willing to do it. I’ll tell you what you can expect to pay your costs if you outsource it yourself and not including the training time in getting someone up and ready. If you want to pay him enough where you’re not going to have problems, for an hour audio interview, I’d say a hundred bucks for the editing if it took five hours for an hour audio interview to be edited. If you’re paying someone 20 bucks in the US, that’s good money to sit on your ass and edit audio, okay? It’s someone you can keep for a long time and it may even be too much but I think $20 an hour would give you the ability to get someone to do a really good job where you can expect a meticulous and they would be happy to do editing for you at that price. So figure a hundred bucks for the editing, for the description, someone to do it right, another 50 bucks and then the transcription. I would say it’s going to cost you to build a team about $225 to $250 bucks per interview. That’s what it’s going to cost you to produce and that doesn’t include your final time. But I think that paying someone $20 bucks, you can train them to do this stuff that you would be doing.

Christian: Okay. What would you charge if I were to outsource the interview portion to you?

Michael: I’d have to think about it. I can get back with you on that because I keep my audio editor, she’s just like gold to me because she’s so good at it. She’s been doing this along with me and I have her constantly busy editing and relying on her. I don’t really have any other editor right now that I use. So any stuff I’m editing for you is taking away stuff I’m editing for me. But sometimes there are gaps. So I could get back with you on that and think about that.

Christian: Okay.

Michael: But you’re better off building a team. You can do it with some effort. There are lots of capable people who are hurting. I mean, GM’s laying off at four plants. There are so many people who need work right now and who would love to be able to just work from home, from a computer with high speed internet access with a little bit of training. Craigslist. Where are you located?

Christian: I’m in Dallas.

Michael: You’re in Dallas. Have you ever used Craigslist?

Christian: Yeah, as a matter of fact, I have not too long ago.

Michael: Alright, in the gigs section, gigs, just say, “I need an audio editor.” You can have them come to your house and someone who knows how to edit audio. There are a lot of audiophiles out there who know this stuff. I got a lot of responses when I did my audio editing. A lot of very capable people know how to do audio editing.

Christian: Okay. That’s reassuring.

Michael: You don’t have to overpay. Twenty bucks is a nice high end.

Christian: Yeah, I’m willing to pay 20 bucks.

Michael: Do it right. You got look at that $250 bucks per interview. That’s just real estate. So if you did 10 of them and it cost you $2,500 bucks to put your product together, a kick ass product, it was really done well and you had great questions that provided great value, that’s nothing. You got something you can sell over and over and over again. And don’t give the rights away to the people you interview. You need the whole control on this.

Christian: Okay.

Michael: Then you’ll probably ask, “Well, do I have to get a contract or whatever?” I wouldn’t. Just a handshake thing. Just say, “Look, you understand I have the rights to sell it.” You get them to say that on your original audio interview.

Christian: Alright, perfect. Michael, I appreciate …

Michael: I know you got to go. There’s a lot to it but, look, all those recordings in there, I know you probably haven’t gone through them all but I explained all this stuff in there. Just take your time and go through it and just get your first one lined up.

Christian: Okay, well, I’ll do it. If you don’t mind, I’ll shoot you an email every now and again to see if I can give you feedback on my progress.

Michael: No problem, anytime, and I’ll send you that letter real quick that I use.

Christian: Thanks so much, Michael. Have a good day.

Michael: Have a good one to you too.