095 – Turning Content Into Cash with Tim Conley & James Schramko

Podcast: Download (Duration: 52:57 — 48.6MB)

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James Schramko talks to Tim Conley from Foolish Adventure about how you can turn your content into cash even if you are just starting out and with minimal budget….

Action Steps From This Podcast

1. listen to the whole podcast before you start
2. start with a business purpose mindset approach
3. find a need you can serve
4. plan to run a webinar with an expert (or you if you are an expert)
5. get access to a webinar platform like GoToWebinar
6. approach an expert
7. put up a squeeze page on your website
8. start getting registrations
9. create a slide deck with plain slides using a learning structure – why, what, how, what if include a call to action
10. get a second screen
11. practice your webinar
12. setup an offer page on your website /go
13. run the webinar
14. interact with your expert and answer audience questions
15. record the webinar
16. pitch something on the event
17. edit your recording with a nice front and back. Optional chop it into small parts.
18. upload the webinar recording to your web page using Wistia or vimeo for streaming and Amazon S3 for the download
19. Email your email list about the webinar recording
20. re-purpose your video as audio and transcription

Transcription:

James: James Schramko here and today’s special guest is going to be talking to us about turning content into cash and for this I’ve gone and found an expert in this topic and his name is Tim Conley from FoolishAdventure.com and it’s a great podcast show I’ve been listening to it and I was also a guest on that show recently, welcome to the show Tim.

Tim: Hey what’s up James!

James: Well I’m still travelling at the moment Tim and we’re recording from Paris today and I imagine you’re probably in Phoenix?

Tim: Yes I’m just on the North side of Phoenix, a little out on the desert.

James: Are you sitting in your cupboard today?

Tim: Yeah, yes I am in my studio that I’ve converted from my walk-in closet so.

James: I think this could be a potential topic for us because I know that when people think about the idea of turning content into cash they probably have visions of a high expense professional studio equipment and certain things that would be barriers for them to be able to do this, I want to ask you, is this something that they should be concerned about?

Tim: No, I think that’s the problem with a lot of people when they go in any kind of business, they focus on non-essentials and not on the things that will create a minimum viable business, so if you’re going to. If you want to create a podcast don’t go out there and buy mixer and buy all these things unless you are an audio engineer don’t do any of that nonsense.

James: So keep it nice and simple.

Tim: Yes.

How Tim Started Monetizing Content
James: Okay, now Tim, perhaps you could just give us a very brief background as to how this has become your topic of specialty and that would give us the reference point we need and then we can step into some of the steps that people can follow to make this happen for themselves.

Tim: Okay, so I got into doing this podcasting thing called the “Foolish Adventure Show” a couple years ago now and a lot of the questions that kept coming to me and it was a lot of these bloggers who blog about blogging and it was really pissing me off because they were giving business advice without ever knowing anything about how to run a business and a lot of it was about not actually making any money. Don’t worry about making money for one to two years with your blog and say “that’s not business”, that may be a hobby but that’s not a business, and so, it was bugging me that people were spending a couple of years of their lives wasting it on just creating loads and loads of content and never making a buck. And that’s, that’s something that it, it just really just bothered me so I figured out that the best way would be to spin that around and turn that content into cash.

James: Right, so you’re taking the business need first where people would come in and say, “Tim, I need to make a little bit of income online, how can I do this without having to set up a podcast and wait a year till I see something from it?”

Tim: Right, and that comes down to having a business purpose for whatever it is you’re doing. You’re actually out there solving someone’s problem. That’s the fastest way to get to any kind of income is to find the need and come in and serve that need.

So, you can do that either through a service business or through a physical product and you can even do that with information. And a lot of people are getting into blogging or any kind of information business without ever actually finding out if there’s a need for it. Or that people would pay to have that solution delivered to them.

James: So, it seems from my perspective that some people are doing it because it’s perhaps their need to maybe express themselves or to develop an idea they have, but it starts from a selfish place rather than looking outside themselves and to the marketplace.

Tim: Well, there’s nothing wrong with that, but it’s not “business”. It’s your, you know, self-expression; it’s your hobby; it’s something that you should do if that’s what you feel compelled to do, but don’t complain that you’re not making a dime.

Turning Content Into Cash With Webinars
James: That’s it, the topic is turning content into cash, do you have some favorite methods for doing this?

Tim: Webinars, Love, I love webinars, I call it the “expert panel”, that’s one of my favorites because it does a lot of different things; it connects you to other experts in your marketplace. So, let me define it first before I go into like its full benefits. An “expert panel” is where you get together three or four, maybe as many as six or seven different experts in your marketplace and you can interview them individually, or you can get them all onto a single webinar and have people get on there.

They cover a topic and then people can ask some questions. It’s a really simple format, easy to do and then it gives you these benefits of being able to network with the top people in your marketplace, it gives you traffic because these top people in your marketplace, you’re going to send traffic to your site and it’s also going to attract a lot of people in your marketplace because you’re creating this event that they haven’t seen before. So, it’s going to bring a lot of people to them. And then the third is that you become one of the top experts in your marketplace.

So that’s one of my favorite content into cash strategies, is to create an expert panel because you can sell it before people come onto it and you can sell it after they’ve been on the live webinar.

James: Awesome. So, I want to develop this a bit because I’m sure there are some questions around this and I see my job as asking the questions that people would want answers to, even though I might know the answer. So, this is like a more powerful “Oprah” model where you’re not just interviewing one person but you’re interviewing multiple people, and almost becoming one of those people when you facilitate this.

Now, you mentioned that this is easy. I want to challenge that and just ask, I guess, some technical things.

How do you get people to the webinar? What platform are you using? How do you record it? I’d love us to go through some technical steps here so that someone might get a feel for what things would be on their checklist, if they are going to implement this idea.

Tim: Okay. So, you caught me on on this “easy” thing and this is something that happens to people who have been doing something for a while, you forget just how hard something really is when you’re first starting out. So, I’ll apologize for that, it’s like you know, you go to the gym, you start working out, lifting a hundred pounds was difficult when you first got there. Years later, it’s easy. Okay, so, I’ll try to refrain from those “easy” comments.

Setting this up, I like to use GoToWebinar. It’s not perfect but it is one of the best software solutions on the marketplace right now. So, I like using GoToWebinar for doing my webinars, and they have a registration process. It’s pretty ugly, but it does tend to convert fairly well when you send traffic to it.

If you want to also build your list at the exact same time, I’ve been using this little plugin for WordPress called Webinar Bridge. It’s also not a very good piece of software but it does work. It will put, when anyone opts in to get onto your webinar it will put their email address onto your autoresponder sequence.

So, it could be Aweber or Constant Contact or whatever you’re using, it’ll put them on there and they’ll be able to register for the webinar all at the same time. So that’s the getting them on, and let’ see, I think the technical side of it is not really the toughest part. The toughest part is actually getting the experts and then getting the experts to actually promote for you.

James: Okay. Just a little side note there, if any of my listeners are using Nanacast, they can integrate GoToWebinar with their autoresponder with an affiliate program which is a handy little tip for driving registrations to a webinar. And my tip there is set the affiliate commission to one cent per opt in, so that affiliates can track their conversions. I just wanted to just jump in with that.

Now, let’s go to the getting the experts. How do you convince somebody to get onto your webinar?

Gathering Your Experts
Tim: Okay, There is a bit of psychology that comes into this. One is that people love to talk about themselves, and most experts are in a position where they want to continue to promote their business. And they are very willing to come into things that don’t take up a lot of their time, but give them a huge impact. Especially, since you’re going to be doing all the labour to run this webinar to get the marketing out into the marketplace.

Since you’re going to be doing all that work and all they have to do is show up and be an expert, they tend to be more willing to do it. But the big thing is getting them to even pay attention to you in the first place. That’s the hard part, that’s the question I get all the time when I say, “Hey, you should interview someone” and they said “Oh, how do I get them to contact me?”, and it’s not really that difficult.

My first start now, years ago, you just have to get them on the phone, or you had to email. I’m not going to go back how old I am and how far back you would have to use just phones, but going now to the point where I get on Twitter, and Twitter’s this awesome communication tool that lets you reach out to just about anyone, and I can get on Twitter and say, “Hey I’d love to be able to have you on my show, I’d love to build, create this thing”, and just get started right there.

Start opening up the relationship with the person before you hit them with, “Hey, I’d like to get you on this big thing” and I’m going to charge money for it, and it becomes this convoluted message. So, the first thing is to just reach out and get in touch with them and find some kind of common ground to connect with them, and then you can start moving into how to get them onto this actual expert panel.

James: Yeah, and I’ve seen your style before and it’s really effective. It’s just going for that low resistance thing. In fact, from memory, the reason that we ended up doing a podcast was because you’d commented on someone else’s podcast with me that it wasn’t long enough and that you’d like to get me on your show, and I simply replied and said “Yeah, let’s do that”.

So, it was a really nice social media approach that is low resistance and it puts the idea out there. So, obviously, you’re not afraid to ask for what you want.

Tim: Yeah, I think that’s the big key is that if you never ask, you’re never going to get. So, yes some of these experts are going to say no, that’s going to happen. But you shouldn’t be afraid to ask them because the upside is so huge, and the downside is what – a “No”. That’s the downside.

James: And you may not even cry yourself to sleep. Okay. So, just keeping pace here, we’ve decided a good way to get this content turned into cash is to run a webinar. We know we could use a platform like GoToWebinar. We can even use a trial if we wanted to see how it works before we commit to that.

We, more than likely, are not going to get a whole bunch of people on the first one if we’re just working through this the first time, and we’ve managed to approach someone and convince them that they should be on the webinar. And we’ve probably set a date, put up a squeeze page and started getting some registrations. Now, I guess this is where the fear might start kicking in.

Have you got any tips to ease through the next stage? Is there some pre-preparation things or, you know, what should you do before you actually get to that, you know, the hand moves under the clock when you’re supposed to go live?

How To Prepare
Tim: Oh yes. Practice first. Get some friends to get onto GoToWebinar and practice. Practice recording, practice all sorts of the different the functions on GoToWebinar.

If you think you’re going to do a poll, practice running a poll. Practice doing every bit of tech, because guess what, as soon as you’re running a webinar, it’s going to mess up. I don’t think I’ve ever had a webinar go perfectly smooth. Ever! I don’t know why but stuff just happens.

There’s always some kind of technology issue and if you’re doing it for the very first time, you’re going to panic and you’re not going to get your recording done. So, don’t do that.

Make sure you spend time and practice, maybe you have to practice a few times and bug your friends a whole bunch and have them come on so you can practice doing your webinar. That’s on the technical side. Practice those things so that you can make sure that you’re going to get the kind of recording that you want, because to be able to sell this afterwards, you have to be able to record your webinar.

And the nice thing is that GoToWebinar actually has a record feature, and if you’re on Mac, in just like a month or so ago, they put in the ability for Mac to record. So, it’s fantastic now. You just hit the record button and Boom! Now you have your webinar, but definitely you have to practice.

James: Now, do you also do a backup recording? Do you ever use other devices?

Tim: Yes, because that’s the other thing, the recording is going to fail.

James: That’s it and you know what, in the case where I’ve lost recordings before in every single case, one of my attendees has got a screen version of it. Which has been handy, but I have one of my team members log on and just record it as a backup and then after my rendering is complete and I’ve uploaded my product I say, “Okay, you can go and delete it now”, so it is likely to happen. I’ll give you another tip here, if you do lose the recording, then the best thing that you can do is, as soon as possible, is to facilitate another run-through and just capture it while you possibly can.

You know, it’s harder with experts; you probably never get the same product. But if you happen to be the expert or if you only have one expert, then there has been a time in the past where it was just me on the webinar, and for technical malfunction reasons, I just re-ran the webinar to myself and recorded it and uploaded the replay because that ended up being the next best thing. But just accept that there will be technical challenges and prepare for that. And I love your tip about practicing.

I remember the first webinar that I ever ran; it was the most unusual feeling. Sitting there talking to myself for an hour, without having a lot of interaction, it was just, I could see people chatting. I felt like a radio DJ.

I was pushing all the buttons and people asking questions and me asking them. I tried to do the mute-unmute thing but that can be a challenge if it’s your first time. And later on you’ll get experienced. Do you use two screens when you run a webinar?

Why Having Two Screens Is Useful
Tim: At first I didn’t And then it just became too much of a hassle. So, if you actually want to interact during the webinar with your audience then you need two computers, because you’re not going to be able to handle it on one screen and be able to make sense of it. Especially, if you’re doing something like Keynote or PowerPoint, because it’s going to take up your whole screen. So, you can’t see the GoToWebinar control panel.

James: Exactly.

Tim: And so you’ll need two screens to do that.

James: And if you use presenter mode with your PowerPoint or Keynote you can see what’s coming up, you can put your prompts in the presenter’s notes on the spare screen and you have your chat pad and the audience will be able to see it in there. I’ve had such a low Internet speed sometimes my screens jam up or don’t go through fast. So, I found by having plain pictures or black and white, it’s actually helped webinar flow better and by adjusting my resolution.

If you use a huge monitor, it’s good to drop it down a size or two, so that it flows better. And your audience will tell you if your screen jams up or if they’ve stopped being able to hear you. It’s important that you can keep an eye on those comments during your webinar.

Tim: Right. And a lot of times what I’m doing is I actually wait till the end to open up for questions, so I can run through that and then, but still, like you said, being able to see if there’s a problem. And like we said before, there’s going to be a problem.

James: Okay. So, let’s just get to the stage now, we’ve got our expert to agree, we’ve got our squeeze page up, we’ve got people turn up, we’ve practiced, we go live and we’re running the webinar. And now, we’re interacting with our expert. We have a Q & A section and we’ve recorded it and everything has run smoothly, what happens next?

After The Webinar
Tim: Okay. So, a lot of it them comes down to the content. What kind of content are you actually delivering to your market, and whether or not this is a paid webinar or one that you’re giving away for free and using it as a marketing strategy?

So, if it’s a paid webinar, give them everything. Don’t hold back. Give them as much as you possibly can, so that they walk away and they feel like they have gone through a complete training program.

Don’t hold stuff for later just give them as much as you can because what’s going to happen is, they’re going to be so blown away by the amount of content that they’ve gotten, one that they’re not even able to absorb it all in the time-frame but they’re going to be so blown away by it that they’re going to want more from you. They going to want you to do this again and again, and they’re going to be clamoring for it, so if you hold back then they’re just going to be like “Oh it was alright.” and then they’re not going to want more content. In a free set up, what you need to do is, you’re most likely doing it for marketing purposes to sell something else so you’re going to need to have call to actions set up inside this webinar to get people to actually buy something after the webinar.

James: Okay.

Tim: Yeah so those 2 different ways in using the exact same setup.

Structuring The Content
James: Now I’m going to ask you a few technical questions on the content here. Do you a have a structure or framework that you use to prepare your webinar sequence or slide deck?

Tim: I do a base upon whatever the content is, but I do set up a Keynote presentation since I’m on a MAC instead of Keynote presentation and I run through. These are different stages and I know about how much time each of those stages is going to take. So you really do kind of need to break up the content in the segment so that you can have a decent segue between one topic to the next topic and that it has a logical sequence especially if you’re trying to get people to take some sort of actions at the end, you need to have them driven to get that outcome.

James: Great and are there any sequences or stages that you are using time and time again or are they flexible each time?

Tim: They’re fairly flexible each time but you always have your introduction and you have your end, and so at your end, you run through a summary, essentially there’s old speakers training that says ,”Tell them what you need to tell them. Tell them what you’re telling them and then tell them what you just told them.” Okay.

James: Great.

Tim: So if you follow that, start at the beginning, tell them what are you going to tell them, then you actually tell them during the webinar and at the end tell them what you’ve just covered. And so if you follow that it’s very hard to go wrong.

James: Cool, I’m going to give our listeners a little checklist as well that I used from my content and this will work for a sales pitch or a free content like a paid content delivery. I used a format that you learnt from a speaker training but it was why, which is why it is important to you. It’s what is it and then it’s how it works and then there’s the “what if” which is cover all for as we would know sales, collating all of the objections and that’s where you put your call to actions as well if you’re going to sell something.

But I will also give a huge tip here that has made me millions, is that even a paid delivery content should still have a call to action and that should be in the next solution that is suitable for even your paid participants, so even if someone has paid for product then, there’s is probably a product or service. Hopefully you have or can affiliate with that is the next appropriate step, even if it’s staying in a recurring community or coaching environment, in that case you have a membership don’t you Tim?

Tim: Yes. I have a membership site that’s where I do a lot of my trainings so I want to make sure that in those cases, when I’m tell people to go or do something else in that training it’s a related training module.

James: Exactly, that increases your tension for your membership?

Tim: So one of the things that I want to add to this is that you can have the ability to repurpose content. A lot of people who already blogging and they’re already creating loads and loads of content, so you can actually take some of that content to repurpose it into these webinars.

James: Great tip, so we’ve got our webinar, we’ve structured our content, we’ve run it and we’ve recorded it, and if it was a free one then we’d made an offer that people should look at. How do you handle that offer? Do you have a /go or do you email them the offer, at what part of the webinar do you put the link, do you have a time limit?

How To Handle The Offer
Tim: Okay, so for people listening on the /go, if you’re using WordPress, there’s a redirect plug-in so then you can just say “Hey go to this short URL and then it’s going to take you over you to a longer URL where your offer page is sitting, that’s a little technical tip there. So I usually have a domain name, if I’m wanting to sell a product, I want an actual domain name for it, so that it’s always sitting there.

James: Great.

Tim: And I try to make something as a shorter possibility like, Get this training now.com or whatever.

James: Good tip. And I guess you’re doing that on a basis, you might get more than $8 per commission.

Tim: Exactly!

James: It’s a good idea, and where do you mention the call to action? Is it only at the end or somewhere else?

Tim: I’ve taken to doing at least 3 times. So some of the training that I’ve heard in the past, ages ago, I think it’s this guy named Jim Edwards who is one of the first doing, how to do webinars stuff, years ago back, when it was really hard to run a webinar. And he would say do a call to action in about the first 10 to 15 minutes of the webinar and then at the end.

Well, it depends on the length of it so if you’re doing something just like in an hour of training and then maybe another half hour of Q and A. Then about 20 minutes in, I do a call to action and then before I go to the Q and A, I do a call to action and then during the Q and A or at the end of the Q and A I do the call to action.

James: Fantastic. Okay now, let’s talk about bundling this up and you mentioned earlier that you do stuff with this webinar, sell it or put it somewhere else. What are some of these things we can do to turn this content into cash?

Selling Your Content
Tim: Okay, So the first selling access to just get on the call if you want to be on it live, you can sell access to that. So that’s point one. Then you have the ability to sell it afterwards, after the facts.

So you go out to the list of people that registered and out of the people who register maybe half are going to show up. Sometimes as little as 40%, sometime even less than that will show up. Lots of people will sign up but never come.

Well they’re your first people to go out to and say, “Hey! You didn’t show up and you missed this really great training but you can get it now in this download form for just x dollars.” So that’s your first pitch right after that webinar. And I wouldn’t wait too long.

I’ve seen a lot of people try to wait after their webinar like 1, 2, 3 days. You can do it immediately after, you can send out, hey get the webinar now. Especially like the people who just attended, you can send them out an email immediately, and you’ll probably have higher conversion rate because it’s all still fresh in their minds.

So those are the first people you’re going to hit, and then you’re going to go out to your list, and you’re going to say “Hey we did this great webinar, and there’s this is amazing training so what you need to do is get into this program here, just click the buy now button and get access to for just x amount dollars.”

James: Terrific.

Tim: And that’s just on your side, that’s just you and the other is as you were saying, using an affiliate program, then you can have the experts actually promote to their list, and that’s going to get you more and more sales and you’re going to split that with your experts.

Prepping The Recording For Replay
James: Fantastic, okay now, a technical question here again. How do you replay that webinar.

Tim: Okay so, I usually don’t do webinar replays, I like doing mine live, I like selling them or packaging them into my membership site afterwards. But I do know a lot of people who do run webinar replays and there are, I don’t know if you can even do with GoToWebinar because I’ve never even tried, but I have seen there are a few other software services out there that will do webinar replays and like I said I can’t really speak to it because I don’t do it, because I love doing mine live and always change it up if I’m doing the same topic again. So, I know you’ve done this before right?

James: Well there are a few points around this I’m hoping we can cover. Now firstly, when you email out and say, “Hey you missed the webinar, buy it now.” How are you representing that? I guess that was the intent of my question. Like what’s your technical process once you’ve recorded it to get it to streaming or downloadable. What’s your process?

Tim: Okay, so if I’m using GoToWebinar or even recording with Screen Flow on my side I’m going to end up with a .MOV file and so that’s going to have my audio, it’s going to have my video. I like to clean up my audio so that in the replay afterwards they’re able to get a really crisp sound. So I like to pull the audio out, run it through Adobe Audition. Through a couple of filters and then that gives it a nice rich sound.

I have a tendency to kind of whistle my “S’s” in audio terminology it’s called sibilance and so when I run it through my filter, I sound like I have a radio voice. So it’s kind of nice that way.

James: Yeah, if people could hear what you really sound like.

Tim: Oh yeah, they’d be like, “Oh my God! I can’t listen to this guy.”

James: Just kidding. Okay, you probably scared off the technophobes there and I just want to assure audio files…

Tim: You don’t have to do this right.

James: It’s simple.

Tim: Yes you do not have to do it because you can take that raw file and maybe open it up in Screen Flow or Camtasia or iMovie or Windows Movie Maker and cut off the messy beginning and your messy ending and maybe tack on an intro and an outro and now you have like this professional recording.

James: Yeah.

Tim: You can do that. I’m just kind of a nerd and I get really anal about making sure that I have really nice sound and stuff like that. So you don’t have to do what I do. You can just use the recording in the raw if you want because it’s done for you by GoToWebinar.

James: But where do you load that to the internet for people to get?

Tim: Okay. I use Amazon S3. So I’ll put it up on Amazon S3 because I get a better delivery than if I put it on my own server. I don’t want to slow down my server. I don’t want to take up a ton of storage on my server for something like this. So I’ll put it on Amazon S3.

James: Are you doing that as a streaming file or just as a MOV that people can download?

Tim: Just as a download. In my membership site what I’ll do is I’ll also load it up to Vimeo because I love Vimeo’s player. I love the way it looks. It’s got a nice look to it and it’s a smooth playing streaming feature. That is one of the reasons I like it.

I know you like to use Wistia. I like using Vimeo for its ability to stream smoothly and so I’ll do that for my members. If they want to watch online I put it into Vimeo also. So the download file, they get it from S3; for watching it online, it’s on Vimeo.

James: Great. That’s where I was hoping to get to. I just want to make sure that people understand how easy this is. I don’t recommend people bother to encode and upload streaming versions to S3 and make their own players.

Now I suggest they load it to Vimeo or Wistia for private memberships. Publicly displayed ones put it to YouTube then get the benefit of that public exposure.

Tim: And the search.

James: The main point is that by loading it to any of those 3 programs they will multi encode it to play on just about any device. You don’t have to be technical and it’s going to be easy for you to use. So that’s it.

From Webinars To Courses
I’m just going to develop this one more section because what I do with my webinar replays is I will have it in Screen Flow as an MOV. I will definitely cut the front and the back. I won’t separate the audio and clean it up. I don’t even know how to do that but what I will do is I’ll take a 60 minute webinar and I’ll actually chop it into 6 or 7, 7 or 8 min modules and I now make an entire course from it.

If I go back 30 days ago, I ran a webinar called Own the Racecourse and when it was finished, I chopped it into about 7 modules.

So I had the intro module which was about 12 minutes and I give that away for free on its own website and then I sell the rest of the course from that. It’s in little bite-size pieces by topics. I found that people have a pretty short attention span and it makes the product appear more substantial when you can turn a whole 6 or 7 module product from 1 recording. Then I load those modules into my paid membership area as separate topics and then underneath those modules, people can ask questions and I can answer them on the most relevant topic that they’re looking at and it gives people that focus.

I did this because I want people to actually consume and engage and learn from that information because I know that that helps them left the next purchase. That’s like the full blown turning that content into its own complete product with its own name, its own graphics, its own affiliate program and banners, its own website and it now sells every single day all by itself with affiliate traffic. What I’m doing is doing one of those each month. I do one for my paid members in SuperFastBusiness and at the end of the webinar I turn it into its own product.

In the last 6 months I’ve added 6 brand new information products like Content Assault, Own the Racecourse, SuperFastConversions, Think Way Bigger and I just ran one called Lunatic Millionaire and that was a funny one Tim because my internet connection was so poor that I think I lost everyone on the webinar and because I’ve run so many, I didn’t skip a beat. I simply just ran it to the end, hit stop on Screen Flow and I still got the full recording and I can cut it into modules and send everybody who registered for the webinar the product and they’ll get a better version. (Sidenote: all of these are included inside SuperFastBusiness).

It’s now changed from a webinar style to just a presenter style because I’ll trim out the Q&A’s and everything and I just have me answer the question and that way I can preframe the question with, “Okay, you might be wondering what sort of plugin I’m using here.” Instead of someone typing in “What sort of plugin are you using James?” I’ll restate the question and then answer it and that becomes a one-sided content piece.

Tim: Nice. I’m taking notes over here because I’m going to start doing that. I do this on a regular basis like you were saying about having the breaking it up into small pieces. I only started doing that a year ago.

I was making the mistake of leaving these 1 hour, hour and a half long videos and people just weren’t going to finish them. And so I started breaking them up. Then I realized when I was breaking them up that I needed segments because it’s a lot easier to cut apart a training, if you have the different segments that you’re going to go from one to the next.

James: Exactly. So people can learn from all of our mistakes and our experience. In fact it was only Lunatic Millionaire I literally put a part 1, part 2, part 3 and I went all the way through to part 12. When I get to that slide, that’s when I stop the edit and that’s the module and I go to the next one.

It doesn’t matter if it’s 1 or 2 minutes by the way. I looked in my Wistia heatmaps and I noticed that a 60 minute webinar, the audience really fades away by the end, even if they’re dedicated and whatever. Facebook opens up or the phone rings or they’ve got to go out, drop the kids off to school or whatever. But anyone can sit through a 2 – 5 minute module.

And the heatmaps show you get an 85% engagement instead of 25% through those little modules. And it’s easy to eat an elephant in small pieces than to try in one bite.

Tim: Yeah I want to throw in one more technical tip because you said like nearly everyone dropped off, your connection was so bad. There’s the technique in when you’re recording that if you’re recording from your side with your computer, then your sound is always going to be crisp. So even if it’s crackling, your internet connection’s crackling, you have another speaker and they’re not coming through clearly, your side is always going to be crisp.

So if you’re just doing an interview style like we’re doing right now, you’re recording on your side and I’m recording on my side. So if we have a dropout with Skype, what’s going to happen is when we put the two together it’s going to sound perfect, as if we’re in the same room together.

James: Exactly, and I now know that you’re going to tune up your “S’s” before you send your side across. Listeners probably have the new and improved, enhanced version of Tim.

Tim: Yeah, that way I sound better in their ears.

Multimedia Repurposing
James: Okay so we’ve now turned our initial webinar into either paid upfront or we’ve sold something on the webinar for affiliate commission or one of our other products or the expert’s products and we’ve cut it up, edited it, put it online and do you do other things? Do you ever transcribe it or turn it into MP3’s like I do or do you just run with the video version?

Tim: Always, always. I’m a big believer of re-purposing and that’s like another topic of doing content for cash. So as mentioning earlier, re-purposing is huge. If you have a video, and there’s a lot of audio there’s no sense in doing just video.

I love audio. I put all my MP3’s, my podcast and stuff on my phone. I go out walking my dog for a couple of hours, I get to listen. There’s no way I can go out and use that same time trying to watch a video so I know that there’s a lot of people out there who have a different learning modality and they’re going to want audio and then there’s the other kind that are going to want to read instead of watching a video. So I do.

It’s easy; when you’re splitting up the audio like I’m doing and make sure that my audio sounds nice. I’ve already pulled the audio out. While I’m doing that I can convert it into MP3 before I put the high quality file back into the video. So I get the audio and the video immediately.

If I use just a transcript, which I’m not a really big fan of transcripts, I don’t really like reading them so I don’t like to make them. But you can have a transcript done very quickly and then you need to edit it up so it’s readable. Because the way we talk isn’t a way people like to read. You need to clean it up and turn that into a workbook.

Sometimes what I’ll do with the workbook is instead of actually doing verbatim what was in the webinar, what I like to do is actually take the main topics out of it and of different paragraphs about it with action items for that segment. So that it’s like, “Okay so you just learned this now you can take action on it. Here’s how you will take action on it.” so it becomes more of a workbook instead of just a transcription.

James: Great tip. What we do is my team will do a full word for word transcription but I give them permission to make me sound better than I did in the audio. A little clean up, if I do an “um” or an “ah” or say something verbose they’ll just shrink it and make me sound better. So a big thank you to the team.

But what they do is they take screenshots from my slides and they put the pictures so it turns into like a picture word book and what I make sure I do when I’m developing the slides is I put the action item at the end of each module. So just before I wrap the module I’ll say, “So the action item here is to review your website and to find one conversion element you’d like to test. So it turns the transcription into an automatic action check book list.

Tim: Nice, I’m going to start doing that.

James: If you look at Own the Racecourse you’ll see that it’s virtually an entire checklist program. The whole training was my checklist from start to finish explained with context and the slides end up being a checklist and I think on the lifestyle business podcast, Dan actually published a picture of my whiteboard draft for that product which was the checklist steps. Most of my products actually start from a checklist.

From my bullet points in Evernote they get expanded into a demonstration or a case study or an explanation. Then they get reduced back into a checklist for implementation. That’s my preparation thing. Do you have a different way of preparing?

Tim: I take the kind of professorial approach where I have a topic I want to cover and I try to give them first an introduction, then depth and then summary. So that’s been my approach. I haven’t done the checklist style and having the action items built into the presentation.

That’s definitely something that I’m going to implement now. Because I think that’s just a better learning process. But I have been taking essentially the lecture style and then turning that lecture into something actionable at the end. I think the way you’re doing it is so much better to be able to have the action items along the way especially when you know you’re going to be cutting it up afterwards.

James: Well in my case it came from observing how people use the material and also the way that I like to learn. One of my mentors taught me that a book is essentially just like 10 or 20 bullet points turned into an entire book and our goal is to really strain it back down to the 10 or 20 bullet points. Interestingly that’s how the products are created. The other thing that I learnt that’s really interesting is rather than overwhelm or complicate things to make people feel like they’ve got value, the best value would truly be if you could deliver the minimum product possible that gets the maximum result.

I’ve heard it explained the best by Dean Jackson. He used that example, if you had a membership where people pay a thousand dollars a month and on the second day of the membership you sent them a check for $1200 a month and they didn’t have to do anything, then that would be a terrific membership. Even though there’s no product to consume, no words, no videos, it’s a $200 a month profit.

So the question is how can we take our training and our webinars and reduce it down to the essential items that will help someone solve their problem, which is what you said right in the beginning we’re solving problems and we’ve talked about some of the technical ways that we can do that now. I’m pretty sure after listening to this somebody could understand why they should be turning their content into cash. The cash part is the big hint there.

What they’re supposed to do, that is to organize an expert, facilitate a webinar, get people to turn up, take some money for it or make a recommendation that turns into a reward. Bundle and produce that into a package that we can then sell later. We even talked about how they might upload the video for that and store the audio for that.

We’ve given some technical tips there and we’ve covered a couple of the psychological angles. The things that might stop somebody in their tracks and hopefully with a bit of practice and accepting that it will be more difficult in the beginning than it will be after their first 6 or 7 or 10 turns at it. I think somebody’s probably ready to take action on this now. Have you got some final thoughts Tim?

Closing Tips
Tim: Just take action. I mean, it’s going to be scary at first but as soon as you start taking action the fear goes away and once you get through your first webinar then you’re going to feel like an old pro and you’re going to do it over and over again. As you can see it’s something that is a fast way of making content that people will find valuable.

That’s the big difference between just sitting around blogging all day and actually creating content that people will pay for. It’s in the presentation. It’s in the way that you solve a problem. So just go out and do it. That’s the only advice I can give.

Identifying People’s Problems
James: Cool. Well I’m just going to ask you one more question and that is, how do you know what problems people need solving?

Tim: Oh okay yeah. It’s like oh we’re starting another episode here.

James: I imagine someone who is listening is thinking, “That’s great guys, but what topic, what experts, where do I find this information out?” And if it is another episode, then I’m going to invite you back and say do you want to cover a research or tips for solving problems episode.

Tim: Okay, so I’ll try to do this pretty quick. First we’re going to assume two different things. One is you’re already in a market and you’re already doing something so you’ve got an audience, maybe you’ve got a list already.

And the other is you are just getting started. You have nothing. So if you already have something, then ask, just ask your audience. They will tell you. They’re going to tell you what they want from you specifically.

That’s the great thing about having already built an audience, having a list of your own is that you can just reach out to them and find out what the problems are. Ask them, like what are the biggest hang-ups? What’s preventing you from accomplishing whatever it is?

If you are in the cake decorating world, if you’re doing that, what’s preventing them from doing the kind of things that they want to do? You ask them and they’re going to let you know, “This is what I am having problems with.” Then you don’t leave it there because the first question you ask, the answer you get is going to probably be a surface problem so you need to ask a little deeper, a follow up question.

You can do that in a survey. You can create an awesome survey out of Google Docs now. It’s pretty simple to do. You can just go in there and make a survey.

You can use Survey Monkey which I tend to use so you can create a survey. Or you can just send out an email and say hit reply to this. I get a bigger response from for my members and for my audience just hit reply to this message and they just tell me. That’s the fastest way to find problems in your market.

If you’re just getting started, then what you need to do is go out and hit some research. Old school techniques go to forums in your marketplace and see what things people are asking. If you’re in a market that is big enough, you’re going to find books at Barnes and Noble or on Amazon.

Amazon’s a great search engine for ideas. You just go in there, type in your marketplace and you can see what people are writing about that they’re selling information already on stuff that you’re doing. So you can go out and find through other people’s research. It’s a shortcut.

So it’s like, “Oh here are the highest selling items in my marketplace on Amazon are these topics. I’ll just hit their table of contents and now I’ve got a whole bunch of subjects I can cover that I know people are willing to pay money for.

James: Wow. That’s awesome. Tim, that is sensational. I think we’re going to stop it there because we’ve given an entire income stream product idea and implementation checklist. I’m going to pop this up on Internet Marketing Speed with a full transcription.

Be sure to head over to Tim Conley’s website which is called FoolishAdventure.com, hop on the email list and find out when there’s a new podcast because they’re fantastic. I’ve been listening to the whole back catalogue. Which has been a lot of fun and I want to thank you again for coming on this show Tim.

Tim: Oh it’s my pleasure. I’m glad to be on here and be able to talk about this stuff. You and I tend to have the ability to talk about business stuff at length.

James: Yeah, well I’m going to keep an eye on the questions. So if people have questions they can pop them down there and I’ll be along to answer them and I’d love to have you back and we’ll cover another one of your favorite topics which is the TIM formula I think you call it.

Tim: Yeah. The TIM which is not me.Time Income and Mobility.

James: I’m looking forward to that. We’ll catch you soon Tim.

Tim: Alright thanks a lot James.

 

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