Fred Gleeck’s 1st Annual Information Marketing JV Partner Summit
by
Fred Gleeck
Smashwords Edition
* * * * *
Published by Fred Gleeck at Smashwords
Fred
Gleeck’s 1st Annual Information Marketing JV Partner
Summit
© 2012 Fred Gleeck
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in retrieval system, copied in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise transmitted without written permission from the publisher. You must not circulate this book in any format.
This is a transcript of an audio interview and has only been edited where necessary to make it more readable. This being the case, it will read differently than a “traditional” book.
Find out more about the author by visiting: fredgleeck.com. And, to get your FREE Information Marketing Course (worth $397) go to: http://bit.ly/pYxQ0S
BILL DEWEES
Fred: Okay so our next presenter, Bill DeWees, Bill actually found me online, came to one of the bootcamps recently and is in the voice over training business and so he’s going to give you some information about becoming irresistible.
Bill: It has nothing to do with your cologne or perfume or anything like that. After what Bill O’Hanlon said about the story of origin I need to give you my Reader’s Digest version. I worked in radio for 20 plus years as a morning personality, as a program director and eventually as a station manager and then I made the transition into higher education and taught media communication to undergrads, did some graduate work in business administration and became an MBA instructor and then got involved in corporate education. I was the vice president of business strategies for an instructional design firm, so my job is essentially to market and to sell instructional design services in the corporate or in the Fortune 500 companies. And then did some doctoral work in the training and performance improvements. So I really, as I look back over my life I really love the media part of it, I love working in front of a microphone but I really enjoy working with people and the training and the program director getting to mentor talent along the way. It was very compelling for me. Well my story was this that I was laid off from my corporate job, instructional design job several years ago, not laid off, actually I was downsized to where I mean essentially it made me a part-time employee and I couldn’t support my family so it was sometimes necessity is the mother of invention. So I decided that was a good time to pursue my dream of, I really wanted to become a voice over talent but I didn’t know if I really had that skill set to compete in the larger marketplace on a more regional or national level; but really when you have no safety net at that point that’s the time to take your dive which I did. And the big revelation by the way and that’s what they say I’m a professional don’t try this at home. I am a professional and my job is to try to get you to do this at home and it’s my job to teach you how to do that. So you know that’s what I’m all about.
The big revelation once I transitioned into this was that there are a lot of talented practitioners in voice over, a lot of great technicians not just in that but really in any given endeavor but that does not necessarily and in most cases does not translate into being successful in business and being a business person. So being a marketer it’s one thing to know your stuff but can you sell it and can you help the people your teaching to sell that as well.
And just to illustrate that I had lunch with a voice over actor, a very successful voice actor in Chicago and right now he has something, he has a big national ad for Alstate Insurance and he has a part in that, he gets his residuals and he’s been doing it for years and you know he still has flurry with 6 figures for several years and but now it’s dried up because the marketplace is totally changed and he said my agent doesn’t call me very often. He said I want to know what your doing to be able to consistently generate you know 6 figure income on voice over and so I told him my story and his response to me was that sounds too hard, you know, I don’t want to do that.
So really when you’re ready to make the transition from being good technically what you do into taking it to the marketplace it’s a completely different mind shift. And I look back over my career and thought what is it that helped me to be successful in the things that I did and I really came up with 3 things that I think to help me somewhat irresistible to the people that I did business with and you know there’s a push and pull strategy and the push is where your really out selling and I’ve done my fair share. We’ve talked about door to door sales last night, I sold books door to door and I put myself through college, you know, I sold instructional design services to larger companies.
But then also I love the marketing strategy which is really a pull and I think being a good marketer is being a good set up, you do have to do some sales but being a good marketer makes that job much easier. Bill O’Hanlon was telling us earlier at breakfast that he’s naturally, I hope I’m not telling tales out of story, you’re actually a lazy person unless you’re tapped into your true energy and that really motivates you. Well I’m kind of the same way, I would much rather pull people into me, attract them then me being on pavement knocking on doors.
And so there are three things that I found that I think are really make a person or a company or a brand irresistible a it starts off with an irresistible outcome for the people that you’re marketing to. What are, some people refer to it as there brand promise and as a brand, as an information marketer what is it that your offer, what’s the outcome and I really think you have to identify, not only be affective and successful, you have to identify what that outcomes is up front and it will be different for everybody.
For me the outcome as an information marketer is that I am going to teach those that I work with how to generate a full-time income within the course of a year to 18 months, hopefully a 6 figure income based on, you know, the talent level that they come in at but the outcome has to be, it has to be strong and bold because it has to also be true by the way, you can be strong and bold and not be able to deliver. You better be able to deliver on your promise. But there is incredible competition in terms of marketing messages and I use to actually keep track of you know the number of messages that were exposed to a given day and I’ve given up on that because it has grown exponentially over the years you know with the advent of new technology, they were constantly being bombarded, not to mention the mental chatter that we deal with and all of our obligations at home and at work and so it really starts with a bold promise and it has to be clearly communicated, it has to be very specific.
So that’s and you know how are you different from your competition. That’s another big thing, if you can be clear, be bold and be different from everybody else in the marketplace. As an example in voice over training the big thing is everybody’s a performance coach, you know, if you want to become a voice over talent for the most part 90%, 95% of the content is how do I perform better but very few people or at least there not delving into any detail, how do I build a business as a voice over talent and there are thousands upon tens of thousands of talent voice over talent throughout the world, very, very few of them can make a full time living, while I shouldn’t say can’t, they don’t make a full time living. Either out of ignorance or like my friend who just doesn’t want to do because it takes, you know we jokingly call it blue collar mortality but it really does. You really do have to work at it pretty hard or at least that’s been my experience; but it does work. So you have to have a bold or have to have an irresistible outcome that you can offer your perspective clients.
The next thing is irresistible communication and one of the things I was grateful for in my career is my first real job outside of either Dairy Queen or working at grocery stores was that I was a commercial copywriter, when I was in college my first media job at a local radio station and I wasn’t very excited about it in all honesty. It didn’t sound sexy or glamorous as working behind the microphone which is what I wanted to do; but what I learned during that time with being a commercial copywriter really was the bedrock foundation that allowed me to do or succeed at rally anything that I did after that because if you can clearly communicate and I’ve seen the research that shows, one stat I heard was 85% of your job success and your job career is based on your ability to communicate affectively. So I think regardless of the market that you’re in you really have to understand some communication skills and I think if you do commercial copywriting to me is like the essential communication skill set because you have to do it succinctly and quickly and powerfully and cut through the crap and be able to move people to action.
And just quickly here’s the template that I use and I apply this to when I’m writing an email, whether I’m, you know, when I contacted Fred actually I decided to get into seminars for voice over training and such and I found what I was looking for in joint venture programs and this is the template I used when I emailed Fred. I play this to almost everything that I do and the first thing is you have to know your audience in terms of who they are, where there coming from, what they want. One of the biggest mistakes that we make as human beings is we assume or we speak from the standpoint that everybody wants what we want, they have our background, they see the world through our lens and they don’t and so perhaps the biggest challenge is to understand well who are they and ultimately what do they want and it’s only when you understand that can you begin to do the rest of it.
The next thing is you really need a powerful headline and so in an email that might be your subject, in a letter it might be, and I did a lot of, when I worked at, I managed a non-profit radio station for awhile, I did a lot of direct response fund raising type stuff, and the headline was everything. So did a lot of studying on how do you craft a headline to grab the reader’s attention.
But your headline, should again, be short, succinct, powerful, appealing to the self interest of the person who’s reading it. And whether you’re sitting down to talk with your boss or an employee, or your writing a letter or an e-mail or you’re doing an ad campaign. You have to get their- you really have to get their attention quickly and you have to let them know it’s in their best interest to listen to you.
So a strong headline is very important and has to be compelling. It can’t be cliché by the way. Cliché kills communication. And for instance, this time of year, what’s the most popular thing, the local ads on the radio, what are they leading with? Spring has sprung. Spring is here, buy your lawn car, get your car service. You know. ¾ of the audience has tuned out after those three words, or attention homeowners. Attention mom, attention dad. Those are just a couple of examples, but clichés in communication kill.
Next thing is, communicate benefits as opposed to features. Features are simply what does something do, and the benefit is what does the recipient get out of it. One of the great – when I used to teach marketing, one of the great case studies is the Chrysler Mini, Chrysler introduced the mini van in the early ‘90s and the classic mistake was they advertised it from the standpoint of their engineers. They had a laundry list of all of the features. Everything that a mini van did. The extra space, whether it was all wheel drive or 2 wheel drive, and I don’t even know what all of the features were. But it was a laundry list of features, and it really didn’t take off the way they wanted until they analyzed their copy and their ad campaign and realized they were speaking in features not benefits.
Benefits, what are our audience, what do they get out of it? They can keep their kids safer, they can – it’s more convenient cause they can haul their kids around to their soccer games, and on and on it goes. So communicate benefits. Let’s see here, let me just move on to the next one cause it seems like time is running out.
Becoming irresistible by association. That’s my final one. And they say the ultimate way to know if you have arrived in your niche or your market is if people know who you are by your first name. So if you say Fred, in information marketing, you know you’re talking about Fred Gleeck or whatever the case may be. In psychotherapy if they just refer to him as Bill, then you know you’ve arrived. If they don’t know you by your first name, then you’ve got to find ways to kind of elevate yourself and becoming irresistible by association may mean associating yourself with the other people – other people you’re going to work with.
Like for instance, whenever I market myself, I talk about the fact that I’ve recorded projects for National Geographic, for Warner Brothers, Toys R Us, Verizon, Clear Wireless, American Express, Dollar General and I’ve got this long laundry – truth is, about 10%-15% of my work is done for those clients, but I don’t talk about Bob’s Automotive down the street, because there’s more key value in those, in associating – and I do that even in my e-mail signature. Select credits include National Geographic, American Express. I had a guy the other day say, “I didn’t know if you’d want to work with me or not, because I see all the people you have worked for.”
Well I raised my brand by associating with another brand. Another thing to keep in mind also is you can kill your brand by negative association. BP Oil spill, Tiger Woods…need I say more.
So let me quickly wrap up. Oh one more thing I want to say here if I have time, is another way to do this, to become irresistible by association is to find a parade and get in front of it. I didn’t invent that, but I learned that early in my days on the radio, especially working with low and no budget situations. And if you can find an event or a cause, a movement and you can place yourself at the front of that, in some way shape or form.
For example, the Ted Williams homeless voice over guy, you know, that’s a great – and this is what Burke is all about, PR, you find something that’s happening in the news, something that’s high profile and you get in front of the parade by positioning yourself. And there are many examples coming out that I can go into.
I will give this one quickly in closing. I was programming a contemporary Christian radio station in Columbus, Ohio, and Ohio State Fair decided to bring in the very first ever Christian music concert to the Grandstand, not the Pavilion, the Grandstand at the Ohio State Fair. And nobody wanted to touch it in the media because they didn’t understand who the groups were, they didn’t understand the artists, but we took it on. We turned it into a cause, which is much what you were talking about earlier, George, something that was bigger then us. So this was not about the music, this was about the fact that if you come out and are a part of this, you could be part of history, because we want the Ohio State Fair to continue to do this on a regular basis.
So we hit that drum like it was the biggest thing that every happened since sliced bread. Long story short, the day of the event, I show up at the Ohio State Fair. Coming out of the Grandstand are two lines as far as the eye can see in either direction. That day Columbus dispatch reported over 50,000 people showed up to that concert which was the most highly attended afternoon concert in the history of the Ohio State Fair. It was because – not because it was necessarily the musicians, but because it was a cause. People were placing their vote to see that happen again and again.
So irresistible outcome, irresistible communication, become irresistible by association, which will help make you irresistible to your perspective customers and clients.
Fred: And as a good voice over artist, he hits it with 10 seconds remaining on a 15 minute thing.
Bill: Thanks.
Fred: Any questions? Questions, comments, ideas? Thoughts? Nothing? I have one. With regards to the whole sort of feature benefit thing, everybody has been sort of told that when they write copy or anything else, do you think that, you know, with people’s thoughts intention being what they are and they’ve gotten pretty savvy about seeing all these different kind of sales letters, is it still okay you think to sort of pair them together and say, here’s the feature and that does, blah, blah, blah?
Bill: Yeah, my opinion is if you pair them you’re fine. I think the problem is, any step you can eliminate in the process, in other words if I just list a feature, then they have to mentally make that jump. If they’re going to buy, they have to figure out what that benefit is. And it may seem like no brainer to us, because it’s our stuff. But again, we’re competing with all sorts of outside influences so we have to be – we’re counting on them to make that leap and you can’t…but I say it’s fine, as long as it’s there, we help them make that jump. I do that a lot.
Fred: Good. Any other questions? Okay. Yeah.
George: I’ve got one, so Bill, one of the things, just as a suggestion, critique for your own business and your own information course, one of the key factors that you want to differentiate yourself – the difference, is most of you go to a voice over training course school, they teach you how to bring out your talent. It’s more of a talent school.
Bill: Right.
George: Where I am different is I teach you how to make money.
Bill: Right.
George: So you want to kind of…
Bill: Yeah and that’s really, actually you’ve taken it to the ultimate step, and that’s really, actually I was talking about a feature, you know, I’ll teach you how to build a business but you’ve actually, the benefit is, they’re going to make money, they’re going to make a living at this and that’s…it’s on me to communicate that, so that’s exactly what I’m talking about. Yeah, and fortunately for me, I just don’t’ see anybody, now I see it mentioned on some occasion with some material, but I never see a large emphasis placed on it, which makes it easy for me to carve out that niche.
Fred: Let me ask you this, how many voice over talent’s making over $100,000 a year are also MBA’s?
Bill: I don’t know any.
Fred: I’ll bet it’s low.
Bill: Yeah.
Fred: And how many are MBA’s who are also teaching voice over training, specifically how to get into the business and make money? I bet that becomes one.
Bill: Yeah. And whether I can turn that into a benefit or not.
Fred: I certainly would think, you know, there’s a case to be made, one would think, for the fact that yeah, you can get voice over training from someone who’s an expert performer. A voice over artist, but they might teach you how to perform, but if you can’t market your services, that’s what I’m all about, my whole background.
Bill: Yeah, yeah, and I think that is the point of distinction, differentiation between me and most everybody else that I’ve seen.
Fred: I agree. Any other thoughts on that?
A: Going back to the features and the benefits, what’s an example of that?
Bill: Well use that mini van or just a car, if you’re talking about for instance…
Fred: How about voice over stuff. Put it in terms of the voice over artist.
Bill: Okay, here’s one. A lot of people talk about, like you get into the technical issues like what kind of equipment do you use? Well, I use this mike or I use this mike you know? The microphone I use is an Neumann TLM103 microphone. It’s pretty expensive mike, pretty good mike, and people who are into the know are fairly impressed by that. The bit, here’s the benefit, that’s the feature, my studio has that mike. The benefit for me, and really one of the only reasons why I use it, is because I work with a lot of studios in other markets where engineers care what I use. So for me it’s a marketing thing. That microphone gets me business. And that’s what I’d tell a voice over person. I would say if you want to market to these studios, if you want to get their business, then you need to use this microphone.
Fred: Do we need to use the microphone or just tell them we have one?
Bill: They can probably actually tell, although I’ll tell you, some of the real savvy guys, the mike – I was doing national level work on a, here’s a feature – it was a Marshall MXL2001 microphone which you can buy on eBay now for about $60. Most people aren’t that discriminating, obviously even audio people, you know. But that’s for, that’s how you turn it into a marketing, that’s the benefit, is it will get you business and it has got me business.
Fred: Okay, sounds good. Thanks!
BILL O’HANLON
Fred: Okay our next presenter Professor William O’Hanlon author of over 30 books; I think its 33 books, correct me if I’m wrong.
Bill: That’s right; I want credit for every one of them.
Fred: What I wanted you to do is Will try to get things a little bit opening so people can see that but Bill O’Hanlon, go ahead.
Bill: Hello everyone, I, yes 33 books. Started with a guy who didn’t write well, didn’t have any desire to write. So what people asked me obviously when they hear I’ve written 33 books and I’ve been on Oprah how did you do it? I’ve always wanted to write a book, how did you do it? So this is my Cliff Notes, the short version, what I learned over the years from clueless to clued in because I truly was not only clueless about writing, I was clueless about the publishing process, the marketing of books process and I had to learn it all because I had a great passion to get my ideas out in the world. That’s the only reason I did it.
So my story is I started out speaking before I wrote books and people kept coming up to me saying, “You’ve got to write a book. Where’s the book on this” I mean Bill said that to me this morning, I mean, “Which of your books” “Sorry I haven’t written that one” he says, “You’ve got to write that one” and people would say that when I would speak. I would be talking about some stuff, I would get them excited and they would say, “Where’s the book” “No, no, no I don’t do books. I’m too hyper to sit down and type and you know I just can’t do it”. So I didn’t know how to do that process but more then that I just didn’t know, it’s daunting as anybody who has written or published a book they don’t, there’s lot of people who want to write a book, it’s hard to get it published, everybody wants to be an author. I just have no idea how to do it.
So I went from clueless to clued in and the first way I did it is I got pissed off actually. I think there are 4 energies that push anybody into doing finding there direction in life and figuring out what there suppose to do and I just made this sound bite of them, blissed, blessed, pissed and dissed. If one of those or a combination of them.
So blissed that’s easy, I mean that’s when you find what you love, it’s that flow stuff, the stuff that jumps you out of bed and you know keeps you up at night. Fred was saying the other night he just couldn’t go to sleep because he was so excited about something, so that’s bliss. You love what you do. You know Steven Spielberg is not a great student, not doing well in his life, parents went through divorce, he was a miserable kid, he convinced them to buy him a home movie and he goes out in the back yard and he finds his bliss. That’s what he wants to do with his life, he wants to make movies. So if you find that, that’s great.
And some people do that. Some people discover it because there blessed. Somebody takes and interest in them and encourages them, says, “You’re a funny guy. You should be a stand up comedian” or “Wow you’re a good listener you should be a therapist”. That’s how a lot of people, I was training a therapist guy in that profession. All there friends started coming to him and asking him for help and after while people say, “You should do this for a living. You have a mentor, you have a role model, you have somebody who just says you can do this, you should do this, your good at this or go pursue this” so they give there permission. That releases your inhibition.
But some people have the bliss with the pissed and the dissed, the negative side of things. And you know our host here patiently gets a little righteously indignant and you can see he really gets exercised when people are ripping people up. It’s just like there telling the wrong information, ripping them up. You can see Fred just revved up. We were kidding him last night because we were like just mentioning some Internet marketers thing, just mention it and Fred’s all, you know, and it’s one of the things that I actually say subscribe to his newsletter all these years because I love that he fights for the little guy, he fights for good information, he hates rip offs, he hates scams and I’ve unsubscribed to almost every newsletter I got except Fred’s because he comes through, his passion comes through those newsletters. And the capital letters and the exclamation points and you know the stuff that he writes about.
So pissed is another thing, it’s a negative energy. Now if you’ve gone into the NSA and sprayed them with AK47 that wouldn’t have been good use in that energy. You have to take that negative energy and turn it into a contribution. That is help other people, help the world. If you can take that negative energy of pissed or dissed and dissed is where you’ve been wounded. Where somebody disrespected you or somebody you cared about.
And so for me my story of how I wrote 33 books and positioned through being clueless to finding out how to write books and get them published is a story of blissed, blessed, pissed and dissed.
Let’s start with the dissed and that is I was depressed when I was younger, when I first went to college I was a hippie, I took a lot of psychotropic drugs and I loved those but they made me question reality which sort of undermined my sense of what was going on and I didn’t trust it so much plus I was very shy and I was very isolated and I got more and more shy and more and more isolated and more and more depressed and I just lost my sense of meaning, like why do people get out of bed, like what’s the point. Why do people get out of bed? So I just got depressed. So I decided to kill myself. I almost did. A friend talked me out of it. She just said you can’t do that and she made me promise not to do it. So now I’m stuck here, depressed and I thought okay now I’ve got my escape hatch is gone, I can’t kill myself so what I do I do. I thought I better figure out how to get happy or find meaning in my life and it brought me to psychology. I started reading psychology and got more depressed because I figured out how much more I was screwed up then I really knew; but then I came across a part of psychology that would actually excite me, it’s called psychotherapy and it was how to help people change, not just analyze and figure out what in there childhood messed them up. This is how to help people get happier and find meaning in there life and I was like I love this stuff. I couldn’t stop reading it, you know, I just read everything I could. I snuck into workshops when I was just a student, a undergraduate in professional workshops. I would just pretend I was a therapist because I wanted to know everything about bliss. I found something I was excited enough about to get out of bed, pursue, get excited about and then I wanted to tell everybody about all the cool stuff I was learning.
I came across this weird eccentric psychologist named Milton Erickson and I didn’t have enough money to pay him and I talked him into being his gardener while I was in graduate school to get his learning and he was a really big influence on me so he blessed me. He basically said you go out and do this. You can do this. He also believed everybody could change. So he affected me with that.
So when I became a therapist this is when pissed came in because I got my first job and about half my colleagues didn’t believe that people could change. There like oh these people are too messed up, there childhoods where too terrible, they have bad genetics, bad chemistry or they really love to be miserable and I am some peaceful, kind of hippie at that time, I felt myself wanting to leap across the room and throttle, I was so pissed off. I was like if I encountered this person when I was depressed I’d probably be dead because the attitude they have that I couldn’t change or I love being miserable. I found myself just enraged. I would try and go and sit in my office and see my clients, my patients and I couldn’t sit still for it. I just thought those people are out there screwing people up and I have to go tell them there’s a better way. So I just got righteously indignant ala Fred Glee, I just wanted to tell people there was a better way and so shy as I was, messed up and disorganized as I was I made myself start to speak to people about this because I thought who do they listen to? They listen to the experts in the field, I have to become an expert and I have to tell them there’s a better way and I knew Milton Erickson who was kind of in this mysterious character and I have this mind that can organize things. So I organize and went out and told people about Milton Erickson.
And then after about 10 years of doing this people said you’ve got to write a book. I was like oh no I can’t write a book but because I was so passionate about this because of my wound, how I was dissed, you know, I was wounded in this way and because I was pissed and because I found my bliss they all came together in speaking and writing.
Fred: You’re at the half way point by the way.
Bill: Thanks. So I learned, I made myself learn the things that would get a book written and published and one of the first things I learned was shocking, after passion because you got to have energy to write a book and persist through the writing and the publicity and marketing and sales part because that takes a long time to get it out there and make sure everybody gets to know about it. You have to do PR, Burks here, that’s an author, it’s not enough to just to write the book and put it out in the world. If you build it they won’t come necessarily. They will not come. So you have to let people know about it and your passion infuses that process. You have to infuse your passion into the whole thing.
The next thing I learned was importance of platform. This is the buzz word in publishing land that basically it means how well known are you and how much can you get the word out about the book and what’s your reputation. So I learned this in a really important way, I, long story obviously and I’m shortening it.
One of my books got picked up by Oprah. I was on Oprah and I had an agent at the time, when you do books for the general public called trade books you have to have an agent to sell it to a big New York Publisher and I had a an agent that was the agent from hell. She routinely lost my stuff, she would tell me to revise my, you know, my proposal which is how you sell the book and I would revise and then I would send it to her and she said, “Why did you make all these changes? They’re terrible. The last version was better” and she had totally forgotten she told me about this.
I had a co-author his name was Ray Levee and I told him like we’re going to sell this book through my agent but she’s really disrespectful and not a good person but she sells the book for a lot of money and he goes, “Oh no problem”. After a couple months he called me up and said, “She keeps calling me Roy Levee and my name is Ray Levee. I tell her every time” and then she asked me to send her one of my tapes and I said the only copy of this tape I have’ and she said, “Send it. I need it overnight”. She didn’t use it for a month and then she put it in her machine and it ate it and she called him up and said, “I need another copy of that tape” Levee said, “I told you I sent it overnight to you that it was my only copy” and she said, “You sent me your only audio tape. What a jerk you are.” So then I thought I need a new agent. I was just on Oprah, there going to be pounded down my door. I send out to 5 agents and I didn’t hear from any of them. What the hell. I don’t understand this publishing business.
So I told my then wife because she always complained I bought too many books. I read a book every two days, I said, “I am going to buy 40 or 50 books on the publishing business. I’m just going to get this” because I want to get my work out to everybody. So I read these books and about at number 40, sitting on the coach I just looked off and I told her, “I got it. I know what to do”. Now I know the publishing business and it’s a little similar to what Bill said and that is you got to think like them. I was thinking like me. They’re going to love this book because it’s a cool idea. That doesn’t move them. That moves them a little; but what moves them is platform. So the next time I sent out my proposal, I sent it with my little video clip of Oprah, the Today Show, Canada Ham, and some other stuff and I really emphasized my platform, that is how well known I was, how well I could do on the media. I got a call from an agent the next morning, this was my targeted agent, next morning she said, “Have you thought of anybody to represent you yet” I said, “No, you’re the only one. I researched you. I think you’re a good agent. I’m talking to people about you. I really want you to be my agent” she said, “I would love to be your agent Bill”. One day I got a response from an agent because I led with platform not my great book I did.
The next was the good book idea but platform was so important. I didn’t realize that and how you get your platform across and a passion to the book and the idea about the book is a proposal. You really need to have a proposal that’s your sales brochure and represents your book to people. Some people write the whole book, I say in non-fiction you never write the whole book before you sell it because you want to have a sales brochure for your book, a quick summary of it, people won’t have time to read the whole book even if you’ve written the whole thing. So you need a great book proposal and there all predictable elements of great proposals.
The other thing that needs to be in the proposal and in the project are 4 other p’s and we’re doing 6 p’s, they are focus and differentiation and you have to have a, we’re talking non-fiction though, you have to have a problem that your going to solve for your readers.
The second thing is you have to have a promise. I promise if you read my book here is the benefit you’ll get. Here’s what you’ll get if you get to the end of my process. You differentiate yourself or your book by the population you’re targeted at or the positioning like that’s what we were just talking about at the end of your presentation. What makes you different as a voice over, teacher? And so you have to differentiate. What’s the slant that you have that nobody else has? That’s what Rich and I were talking about this morning too. What does Rich have that’s like the Grateful Dead, nobody else has? Jerry Garcia said it’s not enough to be the best in your field you have to be the only one of what you do and that’s a hard thing to do. So a unique slant or positioning.
And then you have, and one of the ways to make it unique is you have to have a program or prescription. They sometimes call non-fiction sort of self help books, prescriptive non-fiction. That is your telling people what to do. So you have to have some sort of program and your program might be what makes it unique.
You know I always joke that you can have, if you were writing a book about turning impotence it could have the firm method of carrying impotence, you know, nobody else has it, it’s FIRM:
F – Focus on feelings not orgasm or erections.
I - Intimacy and making sure.
R – Relationship.
M – Rule out medical problems or something like that.
I just made those up; but you get the idea.
Fred: Not bad
Bill: Not bad, but the idea is nobody else has the firm method of treating impotence so to speak. So you differentiate yourself by population, the promise that you make, the position you make or the program or prescription you have. So these P’s are the essentials to conformulating your book and selling your book. End of story.
Fred: Excellent. You ended on the same exact point I did, 14:45. Okay questions.
A: Did you just really make that up?
Bill: I did, yeah. I think of the initial things like okay 3, 4 initials to differentiate your stuff. Like in my voice coach training, you know, voice over training we have the, you know, the voice method is:
V – You have to have visibility
O – You have to have, I don’t know, you know your area
I - You have to have the instant knowledge.
Fred: I think that’s really important, really, really important that whole idea of coming up with an acronym at all, so titling which I heard about at this last thing that reminded me of how important. People as little import as we might place on what the title is of a program people, other people who see it go oh it’s the blah, blah, blah method, I get it.
Bill: So you know what I call this little presentation is the 6, sorry let’s go back here, the 6 P’s to writing and selling your book. Nobody has the 6 P program. Now that’s not that memorable, I just made it up for this particular presentation because Fred said I had to have 3 things and I have a habit of going on and on and on so I had to have 6.
George: You said a lot of people watching this program are newbie’s and so when you say the platform how well you are known in the field, well nobody knows me, I’m Jack Smith, I don’t know anybody here, I’m nobody. So how do you overcome that problem?
Bill: Well I think Bill already talked about it, I think by association, you know, you write the Harry Potter dictionary and then you write on Harry Potter’s platform, that’s number one. I saw a book when, “Who Moved My cheese” came out, somebody wrote a book called, “Who Cut the Cheese”. They didn’t have a platform but they wrote on somebody’s platform. So platform by association, you get a famous person to give you a blurb and when I coach people I tell them how to get blurbs from famous people, there is a strategy for doing it.
Fred: And by the way if people want to find out more about this where do they go to?
Bill: Publishingabook.com but the other thing is you go to Fred’s program and you learn how to do an information mark and you build a platform. It use to be hard to build a platform. You had to get a television show, now with the Internet people build a platform. The guy, he started Tweeting shit my dad says. He didn’t follow anybody on Twitter; he actually followed the guy who played Jordy on Star Trek, who was that guy? He followed one person because he first went on and said, “Oh that, I remember that guy I’m going to follow him”. He has like 6 million followers or 200,000 followers and he follows nobody except Jordy.
Fred: You know they made that into a television show.
Bill: They made it into a television show. He built a platform within a year or two because people loved those leads; he built his platform on Twitter, that’s an incredible thing. The woman who did Julie on Julie and Julia she did 365 Julia Child recipes for a year and blogged abut it. By the end of the year she had lots of followers and a New York Times profile and agents were calling her night and day saying we want to publish your book.
So with social media, information marketing you can build a platform way faster then I did because I built it through speaking. So I was a speaker and my publishers said he’s out in front of thousands a people a year so become a speaker, become an information marketer, learn to use the web, learn to use Google, Google is your friend, it can be your friend, build your own platform or ride on somebody else’s platform.
Fred: By the way, just a quick thought here and Man whenever he goes to seminars is an avid note taker, I notice that the rest of us in the room look like we aren’t but one of the things that you may want to do, this is just sort of completely random thought and George I think you were at one of these events where this woman showed up. A woman showed up at a seminar many, many years ago who was like a really meticulous note taker and what she did was she said, “Give me $20.00 and at the end of the seminar I will send you Microsoft Word copy of all my notes.” And at any seminar that you do you will find someone and this woman use to make $800.00, $900.00 in a seminar by collecting $20.00 from all these people and selling her meticulously taken notes. So if you do any presentations and you find someone like that offer to pay them or offer to have them get money doing that.
Bill: And if you want these slides go on Billohanlon.com, click free stuff, then click slides and they’ll be on there in a week.
Fred: There you go. Other questions for Bill. We still have a little bit of time. Feel free, any questions?
A: Can you speak a little bit to the changes in publishing and how your kind of riding that wave and capitalizing on it?
Bill: Yeah, I think that there’s all these, you know, dire predictions like movies, like music, it’s all going, it’s changing, it’s not like it was 10 years ago. It’s never going to be like it was 10 years ago. I moved to Santa Fe and I should have been here in the 60’s. I met the people that were there in the 80’s and they said you should have been here in the 70’s. It’s always going to change and I figure people want this material in as many forums as possible. They want it on there Kindle, they want it on the iBook, they want it on there Nook, they want it as a Vook, which is a video/book, they want it as an audio book. We were just talking about this; we listen to Seth Goan as an audio book. I sometimes buy his books and I sometimes buy E-books and I sometimes buy as an audio. I want it as a movie version, you know, the 6 piece, go see the movie. I want the video version, I want the Tweeted version, I want the Facebook version, I want it all. I’m putting in as many forms as I can and I want my outsourcers to turn it into those forms. I want it as a series of email tips, whatever it may be. As many forms and then you won’t have to bet on, you won’t have to be the, you know, procrastinator who knows what’s going to happen in the future. Some people are good. George knew shopping carts were going to happen but I had no idea. If you’re not that great at predicting the future hedge your bets by diversifying the forms in which they go out.
Fred: This is a good teaser but if I want your help with getting my idea into a book what are my options?
Bill: Publishingabook.com, we, you know Fred and I talked about this. We put out a lot of information products on how to become a writer and publish your books and get your books published and a certain number of people like you people in this room take this stuff and you run with it and we’ve noticed that the vast majority of people do not so they need a little more ongoing support via coaching and we found, you know, that and there’s an offshoot of that which is done for you.
Fred: Yeah and you know what’s really wild too is the people that will take the material and run with it, I had some people come up to me at a seminar one time and say, “Oh you know what way back blah, blah, blah I bought that program of yours. I built this 4 million dollar publishing company and sold it”. I’m like I didn’t even hear about you. I don’t even know who you are.
George: If somebody has never published a book before and they don’t really know what they want to publish a book on at the moment because they really don’t know what there expertise are would you recommend that they go, try to do a publish a book through a publishing house or self publish?
Bill: Well if you don’t know what the book is on you shouldn’t do any book. It’s the first thing, just like Fred micro niche, you should focus, focus, focus if you haven’t done that don’t perceive. Once you do that some will naturally kind of proceed towards self publishing or E-publishing and some will naturally proceed, you know, like I think George has a publishable trade book product because it’s a bigger market, he’s got a unique slant, he can build a platform, he knows he can convince them, I can build a platform and I think he should get together with Burke or somebody and get a boatload of publicity for this idea which is hot right now and then do a trade book with an agent and get at big events. But some people they come and they tell you there ideas and you think that’s probably not a book that an agent would grab. So do that as a self published book, an e or self published and then build a platform and then your next idea maybe that’s when you should go out to a big New York publisher and get paid in advance or whatever and maybe those people would go away because there business motto is not sustainable at this point but meanwhile they still need to give you $50,000.00 or $100,000.00 to write a book, I’ll take it until they go out of business.
Fred: Are you hedging your bets kind of by building the list just like all of us?
Bill: Absolutely and I make most of my money now from my list. I use to make most of my money from speaking and my books and now I make most of my money from other things, information, products and services because I never want to make myself vulnerable to the speaking profession or God forbid there’s another attack and the planes are grounded and I can’t travel or do my speaking I want to have again diversification of income, multiple strings of income as we talked about.
Fred: Bill thank you very much
Bill: Thank you.
JEANNA POOL
Fred: Okay our next presenter Jeanna Pool and she is done the book, “Marketing for Solo’s”. Jeanna is one of those people that helps individual entrepreneurs to better market and sell there business, better market and sell there services right?
Jeanna: So yes again I’m Jeanna Pool, MarketingforSolos.com. What I do is I specialize in one person businesses. So the one man or one woman small business owner who is there business meaning they go away, there business goes away and I work with those businesses that sell there expertise so coached, consultants, people in the medical area such as chiropractors, doctors, designers, architects. Basically the one man or one woman business who works one on one with clients.
The big problem that solos have is being in two places at once meaning they work one on one with clients, they can not market themselves while there doing that. While there marketing themselves they can’t work one on one with clients so that’s the big problem that solo’s have and it was actually a problem in my business when I started and what happened was it was this roller coaster income, feast and feminine kind of thing and so basically what I did was I created a marketing system called “The Marketing for Solos System” and that’s what the book is about, “Marketing for Solo’s” and it teaches the solo small business how to market there services when there too busy to market there services. It teaches them how to be in two places at once and it teaches how to make marketing manageable and doable with limited time and limited resources. So it’s the book for marketing a one person business. And that’s what I do.
So Fred wanted me to talk about how I was able to make my book, “Marketing for Solos” and Amazon number one best selling book on the release date and he said, “Try to teach us in 3 easy steps” and I said, “well I can’t do that in 3 easy steps” but I’ll give you 3 keys. I can tell you it took a lot of work, a lot of preparation because it was a huge, huge launch.
So what I’m going to talk about is basically 3 keys that you need to think about if your going to launch a book or launch a product or even launch a business and even if your not you can think about these keys for marketing a solo business kind of in general.
And what happened on the release day of the book it hit number one in marketing, number one in small business and entrepreneurship, number one in hot new releases, number two in business management, I have to read here because there was a lot of categories which was awesome, number two in movers and shakers, number 4 in business and investing and number 24 in overall sales on Amazon. It was really, really cool because I beat George W. Bush’s book which was really cool.
So that was fantastic and basically the overall concept of what I did with the release of the book was based on the whole concept of product launches and service launches and many of the Internet marketing space we’ve heard of that. And I love giving credit where credit is due. I’ve learned a lot from Jeff Walker and really taking that and being able to position it for a book, position it for services and that type of thing.
So here are some keys to think about. Key number one is it takes a village and I’m borrowing a phrase from Hillary Clinton’s book, ‘It Take a Village”. You know I heard a quote once and I think it was Donald Trump that said this, “That nobody gets successful alone, nobody gets rich alone, nobody succeeds alone” and it really takes a lot of people to help you market a book if you’re going to try to make that Amazon run.
So here’s some keys for everyone, you need to have everyone you possibly can promote for you. That means friends, that means family, that means business associates, that means doers in the industry, that means companies and organizations who maybe are not in our space, not in a marketing space or the Internet marketing space but you need to think about anyone and everyone that can help get the word out about what your doing that relates to your business and relates to the book and I’ll talk about the book but understand too this can be for a business launch or a product launch but not necessarily a book launch on Amazon.