How to Build a Six-Figure, Internet-Based Information Products Business From Home
An in-depth interview with Bob Baker
© 2009 by Bob Baker
All Rights Reserved
Published by FullTimeAuthor.com, PO Box 43058, St. Louis, MO 63143 USA.
No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means – electronic, mechanical, recording or otherwise – without the prior written permission of Bob Baker.
Contents:
The transcript of a one-hour interview with Bob Baker, conducted by Jeff Smith. For details on how to obtain the original audio recording, visit www.FullTimeAuthor.com
Your Six-Figure, Internet-Based Information Products Business Checklist. A rundown of 68 ideas from the interview and additional thoughts by Bob Baker
Other titles by Bob Baker
How to Build a Six-Figure, Internet-Based Information Products Business From Home – interview transcript
Jeff Smith: Hi folks. My name is Jeff Smith, publisher of HigherTrustMarketing.com and InfoMarketersZone.com. Get ready to learn insider tips, techniques and strategies for building your own niche market information publishing business from an authority on the subject.
We’re going to talk to Bob Baker of www.bob-baker.com. Bob may not be a household name yet, but within his niche, which is music marketing tips for independent artists, he’s become one of the top authorities in his field, especially online. Do a Google search for music marketing and Bob’s name comes up three times in just the first page of results alone, and on thousands more web pages beyond that.
Bob has authored a number of titles on his topic, including the top selling Guerrilla Music Marketing Handbook, a book that demystifies the confusing topic of marketing for independent musicians and helps them use the latest technologies to promote their talents.
One of his customers said that Bob’s book is “The most directly applicable, start-tomorrow, creatively inspiring book I’ve ever seen on promoting your music.”
But that’s not all. Bob’s other titles include MySpace Music Marketing, Unleash the Artist Within, Branding Yourself Online, 50 Ways to Promote and Sell Your Music on the Internet, How to Use Video to Promote Your Music Online, and many more …
He produces an Artist Empowerment Radio podcast, publishes a blog at www.MusicPromotionBlog.com. Earlier this year, Bob launched his private music marketing membership site at www.MusicMarketingInsiders.com.
And if all that were not enough, he also maintains a terrific blog at www.FullTimeAuthor.com, where Bob dishes out advice on how to make a living with your self-published books and info-products.
Get your pencil and paper ready, you’re about to learn information publishing secrets from a true master. Now I can’t wait to get started. So without further delay, let me welcome you, Bob. Thanks for taking the time to share your tips and strategies with us today.
Bob Baker: It’s my pleasure, Jeff. It’s great to be here. I’ve enjoyed your writings on the Internet for some time, and this is a real thrill for me to be joining you today.
Jeff: A real meeting of the minds. Bob, you’ve accomplished some amazing things – I mean six paperback books, several more ebooks and special reports, audio programs, your own private membership sites. Can you give our listeners an idea of your background and maybe what led you to such a successful info-publishing business?
Bob: It started with an unlikely source – music. Thanks for that great introduction, and you’ve already made a number of references to my niche. I started off with a passion for music in my teens. I started playing the guitar and playing in rock bands, and I’ve been singing and doing that on some level ever since.
But early on, I also had an interest in writing and in journalism. And even back in my 20s, I had aspirations to write a book about how to start your own band. Because I was always looking for information on this topic and wanted to – even for my own benefit – just wanted to do the research. I didn’t publish a book then though, but what I ended up doing is publishing a local music newspaper.
I live in St. Louis, Missouri, in the States. Born and raised here. In my mid-20s, I started a local music newspaper that covered the local music scene. I did that for 10 years, and I learned a lot about writing and editing and preparing files for the printer, which became helpful years later. During that time, I started writing these little columns with music success tips for musicians, how to attract fans and sell more music and book gigs and all this stuff. They were really well received, and I continued to have aspirations to publish a book, but I really didn’t know how to go about it at the time.
So what I did is I started this little mini mail order catalog offering books by other publishers in the music business, and that led me to a connection with a guy who was putting out these books. He ran a small company in San Diego. And it turned out that he published my first book, which was called 101 Ways to Make Money in the Music Business. And once that came out, once you open up that first carton of books that arrives and you actually hold the paperback book in your hand that you created, it’s just an awesome … it’s like giving birth to a child. The light bulb went off and I said, you know, I think this is what I want to do for the rest of my life. So I’ve been pursuing that ever since.
I put my paper to rest about 10 years ago. I self-published an early version of that book you mentioned, called the Guerrilla Music Marketing Handbook, and I continue to crank out titles and a whole line of products now and made the transition to being a full-time author. That’s where I am today.
Jeff: Interesting. So the early experience you had writing music tips and the newsletter really kind of let you in on the demand, I suppose, for this type of information.
Bob: It really did. I mean you have to balance out the feedback that you get because you shouldn’t be out to please everyone. Actually, you probably are doing good if you’re alienating some segment of the population. But you definitely need to pay attention to what people are responding to. And it’s great when what you love writing about is also what people want to read, or a certain segment of the population wants to read, and those were definitely clues that I was on to the right path. Definitely.
Jeff: And again, based on your own experience and coming from that field, I guess you had a pretty good sense of what kind of struggles the musicians had in the first place, so it always helps if somebody can come at this from a point of experience.
Bob: Absolutely. Yeah, I definitely was not looking at this from the sidelines doing research on music. I was out there playing the clubs and knowing what it was like to try to pull teeth to get people to show up at one of your shows, or to make money from it is quite often a challenge for musicians. Again, I was learning about it as I researched it and wrote about it and ended up helping other people in the process.
Jeff: Bob, Guerrilla Music Marketing Handbook was one of your first self-published books and now your longest running, I guess, and best selling title. Can you take us through the thought process that led to it. So you kind of started to let us in on some of the history, but maybe explain why it continues to resonate so much with your audience after all these years.
Bob: I put out the first version of that in 1996, now beyond a decade. Every couple of years I would update the content; I’d remove old chapters and add new ones and update the packaging too. So it’s definitely evolved. But I think the reason that it did well then and continues to is because a lot of people, creative people in particular, are confused about marketing. Well, I think people, in general, are often confused about sales and marketing. But creative people, in particular, focus on their art and their craft, and when it comes to sales, they feel like they’re cheapening their integrity or something, or they’re just confused by the whole process.
So here was a book that … I have a knack, or developed a knack, for taking these complicated topics that musicians think are all business related, and I break them down into easy to understand steps and use analogies and things that they can understand.
So I just think there are always going to be new generations of musicians that are equally confused, and even some of the older people that have been around a while still don’t know what marketing is about. So I think there is this eternal ongoing need to understand well, now I’ve got a CD or now I’ve got a band, now what do I do?
Another thing that I did that wasn’t part of my strategy, but it worked in my favor, was that – I don’t know if you’re familiar with the music business, but in the 1990s, when I was first starting to write about this stuff, the major record labels, and the traditional music industry was in its heyday. They were making more money than ever and bands were getting record contracts left and right, so the whole focus for most aspiring musicians was to get a record deal. But back then, I was talking about why be so focused on the industry; take your career into your own hands. I had this kind of self-empowerment message about do it yourself (DIY). But I was sort of like a lone wolf in the forest back then with this message. There weren’t a whole lot of people preaching that message.
In the years since then, CD sales are down, the record labels are struggling. Now being “indie” is a cool thing. It’s the way to go. The message is slowly getting out that you don’t need a record label to help you. And so here I was positioning myself when it became cool to be indie and bands want to know how do I do this on my own; I had already established this reputation in that area, kind of set myself up to be, like you said, like the leading authority in that field. That’s another reason why I guess I just … I don’t know if I would say that I lucked out, it took a lot of work, but I was in a good position to benefit from this trend, which I think is going to stick with us.
Jeff: Absolutely. I think a really good lesson for anyone listening too is to understand the potential leverage and longevity of an information product. I mean if you’re picking your niche right, your book has been on the market for over 10 years now, largely, likely in its original form. I mean you’ve likely added to it over time, but largely it’s in its original form.
Bob: Definitely some of those chapters are still similar to what I wrote back in the 90s, but I’ve updated them with references; there is a lot of new material in there, but some of the concepts are just timeless on marketing.
And the thing is too, I mean there are tons of marketing books out. You go to any bookstore or library, the walls are filled with them. But a musician is definitely going to be more attracted to a music marketing book than just a general marketing book. It’s the same way with any other specialty area.
Again, just the longevity, the time around, the name recognition – it just all worked into my favor and put me in a pretty good position here.
Jeff: Right, and to focus on specialized knowledge. As I mentioned, you have many different titles in various formats, when we introduced you, all geared towards musicians and other creative people. It seems like you crank out more titles every week.
Bob: Well, it’s kind of funny because a lot of people consider me to be prolific, and there are times when I recognize, yeah, I guess I’ve got a number of titles out. But from my point of view, quite often I’m frustrated that I haven’t been able to produce more.
I gotta tell you, my strategy to it – a long time ago, I started this file on my computer, just in a Word file, and it was where I kept my list of topics and potential titles. So I have a place to capture all the ideas. And so it was kind of funny too because I remember in the early days of writing these columns in the paper way back in the 90s, when I was in my 30s, a friend of mine – a guy who was an editor for the paper at the time – he goes, “Aren’t you eventually going to run out of things to write about?” I remember thinking, No, there are just so many different angles and ways to slice and dice these things. So even within the topic of music marketing, there is publicity, there is how to get live shows, there is how to sell your stuff on your own web site … there are just so many ways that you can slice and dice.
So I keep a running list of these titles. Another thing that I do is keep my ear out. I’m constantly in touch with my readers and my fans (I can use that word because that’s a word that they use – that they’re fans of my books and my writings), and I listen to the common themes too. If I hear people asking about the same type of problem that they’re having, then I know this is probably something that I would maybe raise a little higher on the priority list of things to work on.
But as far as how I crank out titles, I know I’ve read this on your blog – it’s all about chipping away, chunking it down, trying to write a little something on an information product every day, even when you’re distracted by answering emails and regular life, try to at least devote a little bit of time to writing something.
Another cool thing – of all my six books, I think only two of them did I actually sit down and write start to finish like a traditional book, like you think you’d start with an outline and then you’d write it from scratch, all the way until you’re finished. A lot of my books are actually compilations of either articles that I had written over the course of years or blog posts. And I know this is becoming more and more common; have you heard this term called “blook” with a combination blog and book?
And this is another way too – if you publish a blog, or you publish a series of articles, that’s another way to sort of trick yourself into writing an entire book, by just writing little chunks of it at a time, and then you compile it all together and arrange it in an order that makes sense and you’ve got yourself the material for a book.
Jeff: That makes a lot of sense, and I think it’s the psychological hurdle of having to sit down and complete something from start to finish that that piecemeal type work breaks up.
Bob: Right. And a lot of novice authors – I’m sure you’ve encountered this – will say, “If I’ve already published a lot of this stuff on the Internet, why would somebody pay for it?” Well, you’re doing them a favor by compiling it all into one attractive package and also, you’re putting it into a book form. It’s one thing to hunt down things on the Internet or print them off on your inkjet in your office or at home; it’s another to have it in a nice-looking paperback book that you can reference.
When I first started doing this, I actually braced myself – “Somebody is going to complain that they read this …” But I don’t think I’ve ever gotten one complaint of a book that I put out that way where somebody said, “I’ve already read this stuff.”