Renowned Internet marketing expert, Michael Senoff was kind and gracious enough to allow me to reprint this amazing audio interview he conducted with Jim Peak. Thank you, Michael.
Because of its extensive length , I'm unable to publish the entire interview. So I've broken it up into two parts, which I will publish over the next two weeks.
Enjoy!
Dale King
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Hi! I'm Michael Senoff! My goal is to help you seek a better life-to help
you do more, be more, dream more, and take more action than ever before.
Jim Peak asked to interview me in November, 2006. Jim interviews experts on
marketing, advertising, and personal development. Although I originally said
no, Jim won me over to his way of thinking-that of giving back to the world
in an unselfish way, through his work.
In this interview by Jim Peak I will share with yousome of the strategies and secrets that make my Web-based audio marketing business, product development, interviewing secrets, and much more really work-secrets you can apply to build your own business.
Jim: Michael's been in the business creating audios online for the last
several years and his site provides a wealth of information that really I
don't think you can find anywhere else on the Internet today. And most of
the work that's in there is primarily sales marketing information for folks
that are entrepreneurs and building their businesses. So, Michael, I've got
you online.
Michael: I'm here, Jim. Thanks for having me. I really appreciate the
opportunity.
Jim: Hey, you're one of my mentors and you don't know it yet, but when I
found your site, it was probably one of the most exciting days of my days on
the Internet because there's just so much great information in there that I
was amazed that you were just giving it all away.
Michael: I do hear that a lot. That's one of the most common remarks I get
from people is I must be an idiot or crazy for giving all this stuff away
for free. They want to know what my angle is and maybe we can talk a little
bit about that today.
Jim: That definitely we want to get into that. So, the purpose of your site
is for anybody that wants to increase the sales of their business. Can you
share with us a little bit about what the purpose is?
Michael: Sure. I want to keep in mind that a lot of your listeners maybe
very new to Internet marketing. You may have some listeners who are very
experienced. So, the purpose of today's call is I'm going to share as much
information I can in the time we have available. But I also want you to keep
in mind my selfish, ultimately goal. This is all consistent with what I've
been doing at www.hardtofindseminars.com, but I want to give you so much
value that you absolutely will not be able to resist going over to my site
www.hardtofindseminars.com.
Now, why would I want to get you over there? I want to get you over to
www.hardtofindseminars.com because I want to get you addicted to my audio
recordings and if you become addicted, I have a chance on selling you on me
and selling you my trustworthiness and selling you my ideas and selling you
my products. And if I've done my job right, you will come out as a customer
of mine.
Now, we're going to talk a lot about audio and I know there are a lot of
other great audio recordings out there on the Internet, but I'm going to
just share some of the tips that I've learned over the years doing audio
recordings and audio interviews. And I also want to say that the most
valuable resource we all have is our time. I also want you to know that I'm
very aware of the people coming to your site, Jim, www.mysuccessgateway.com.
The people are there looking for solutions and one thing we all don't have
enough of is time. And the ideas I'm going to share to your listeners today
are to show them how to leverage their time. So, hopefully, I'll be able to
accomplish this in the time we have.
Jim: Excellent. So, Michael, you talk about saving time and your site is all
about saving time. Can you share with us a little bit about what you mean by
that?
Michael: I did a little research on time management. I came up with some
pretty interesting statistics and stats and I just want to read a couple. I
don't want to bore anyone, but they were really eye opening to me and I'll
read a couple of them just because this all does have to do with saving
time. A study last fall by Basics, a New York research firm, found that
office distractions ate up almost 2.1 hours a day for the average workers.
On a typical day officer workers are interrupted about seven times an hour,
which adds up to 56 interruptions a days, 80% of which are considered
trivial. And as I read these statistics, this just reminds me of my own
life. I mean don't you know in your own life there's always something that
comes up. Could you relate to that?
Jim: Oh, totally. I mean there's always another phone call, there's another
email, there's always something coming up.
Michael: There's always something that's going to try and get you off track.
I mean you've got 365 days a year, but if you really break it down and look
at all the days you have to be productive, to work, to make money, and you
take into consideration all the time you need to spend with your family and
doing other things, really your time is very limited to what you have to do.
Jim: So, what does all this have to do with audio?
Michael: Well, because of these interruptions in my life, audio allows you
to massively leverage your time. Audio allows you to can it and clone it. It
allows you to deliver a sales message without you having to be there, taking
you out of the picture. Using recorded audio and audio interviews and
delivery over the Internet allows you to duplicate yourself. Right now, I
could go and look at my stats on my control panel and I may have 50 people
listening to some recording on my site from all over the world. But right
now, you have me live on the phone. So, I'm 50 Michael Senoff's right now
pitching, selling, teaching, educating. So, I've duplicated my time 50 times
at this very moment. Does that make sense?
Jim: Yes, that makes a lot sense. It's almost like broadcasting it to a
stadium. So, Michael, can you share some information about your site and the
content that's in it?
Michael: Sure, absolutely. My main website with all my audio recordings is
called www.hardtofindseminars.com. Now, I have about 150 hours of free audio
content on my site. There's another additional 50 to 70 hours of audio that
is not free, but it's up on my site, which is used for products that people
purchase. So, this is audio that's being delivered to people who purchase
information products that I have for sale. The site was first published in
January of 2002. Now, back then I was just a guy selling pre-owned Jay
Abraham seminars on Ebay. That's how I got started in all this. This was
when Ebay stock was going through the roof and they were getting tons of
media and I'd learned about the auction atmosphere and I loved it. It was
something I wanted to do. I was also living in Pacific Beach in San Diego,
California and I was one of the very first people in the country to have
high-speed cable access with Time Warner Road Runner. So, even back in 2002,
I had high-speed access and if you remember going online with the 28.8
modems, you can imagine how painfully slow it was. But they were testing
cable in Pacific Beach where I was living and they were testing it in New
York City. So, I've been very fortunate to have that edge and high-speed
access to the Internet. But I always wanted to sell something on Ebay and
without going into too much detail, I was selling pre-owned Jay Abraham
marketing seminars up on Ebay and I had a great success of it. But
originally the site was nothing but a one-page sales letter explaining that
I bought pre-owned Jay Abraham seminars. People would pay $20,000, $15,000
to go to these seminars and I would sell them for 10 to 20-cents on the
dollar. So, I was offering a lot of value. And even though I was having
success on Ebay, you had competition there so I had to kind of get away from
Ebay and create an identity outside of Ebay so I didn't have to compete with
the other people who were into the marketplace.
But I call this site the $5 billion dollar site. Why do I do this? If you
were to add up all the combined sales from all the experts and people I have
interviewed on this site, it would come to about $5 billion dollars. Now,
that's with a "b" not an "m." And I also did another calculation. The
interviews that I've done with the experts on my site, some of them charges
thousands of dollar an hour and if we added up all the consultation fees
that these people would have charged you to listen to this advice, you would
have paid probably over $50,000 in fees. And this is very similar to what
you're doing at your site, www.mysuccessgateway.com. The value you're
bringing with your recordings is incredible and I'm enjoying listening to
them and I'm going to continue enjoy listening to your recordings because we
can never have too much free, good audio content out there.
You can get over 150 hours of free audio interviews similar to this at
www.hardtofindseminars.com.
Now, on my site I've done something really unique that I've never seen done
before. The visitors who come to my site get to learn four different ways.
When you come to www.hardtofindseminars.com and you see a description of an
audio recording that looks interesting to you, you can absorb it four
different ways. You can press a little green button, which is a Flash audio
player. Flash is a way of delivering audio content where it's streams over
the Internet so you don't have to wait for things to download. So, by the
time you click the little play button, you'll start hearing that audio
interview while being online. Now, also a lot of people don't like to sit
there and be tied to the computer so I offer PDF transcripts. Some people
can get through reading faster than they can audio, so you can download the
word-for-word transcripts of each one of the audio recordings. I also offer
the transcripts in an HTML page where you can click onto a web page and you
see all the word-for-word transcripts right there.
Now, this is something a
visitor to the site can actually increase their comprehension of the content
because they can listen to the recording and at the same time read the
transcripts of the recording and they can increase their comprehension by
using two senses, their eyes and their ears. By far the most favorite way
the visitors like to access my information is by downloading an MP3 file.
They can download this audio recording onto their computer and play it later
and they don't have to be connected to the Internet, or they can download it
to their portable iPod or MP3 player. Now, as far as the transcripts, I have
6,750 pages of typed transcripts. Virtually all of the audio content on the
site has been transcribed for people who like to read.
I get an average of 550 visitors a day to www.hardtofindseminars.com and
these are unique visitors, different visitors. They come from all over the
world, including Singapore, Germany, Australia, the Netherlands, Canada,
United Kingdom, Japan, France, Mexico, Thailand, Hungry, India, the Czech
Republic, Columbia, Brazil, China, Viet Nam, Taiwan, Kuwait, South Africa,
Italy, Israel, Indonesia, Switzerland, South Korea, Norway, Sweden,
Malaysia, Russia Federation, the Dominican Republic, Spain, and Slovenia.
So, it really amazes me that I have people coming to the site from all over
the world and all these great countries.
I do no paid advertising, so the traffic coming to the site is almost all
generated by word of mouth and referrals. Sometimes people will find it on
some of the search engines, but the traffic stats, which will bore a lot of
people, to just give you an idea, the average hits on my site, that's when
someone is clicking around to a recording or to a different page on the
site, the average hits per hour is 648. The average hits on my site per day
is around 15,500, files per access is 8,212, page views can be up to 3,000 a
day, and again, the unique visitors a day is around 550. I have about 18
products that I offer for sale on my site. Twelve of them I either created
totally on my own or have co-ventured with experts to enhance them and my
products sells for anywhere from $97 up to $20,000. Almost all of my
products have a 30-day trial where the visitor who comes to my site and
wants to trial one of my products does not have to pay anything for a
digital product and if it's a physical product, all they're paying is the
shipping and they have 30 days to try. If they don't like it, they can call
me and I won't charge their card. So, this has been a real valuable way in
increasing sales, as well.
You've got a money back guarantee, which the people still have to pony up
the money. They've got to hope that the seller is really going to honor
their guarantee. I take it a step further. I want to create as little
resistance as possible for someone to try my product and if I can do that,
I'm going to come out ahead. There's always going to be some people who are
going to take advantage of you or they're going to put fake credit cards in
there or they're cards are going to decline, but it's worth it to me because
even if a guy has intentionally tried to steal a product by using credit
card fraud and if they actually listen to my product even though they
haven't paid, I still have a chance to sell them on myself and maybe down
the road his finances will be better and he'll come back as a customer. So,
I'm fighting anyway I can to get my audio in the head of a potential
customer. Does that make sense?
Jim: That makes a lot of sense.
Michael: And you should, too, which I see you're doing.
Jim: I'm going to follow your lead, Michael.
Michael: I know you are.
Jim: So, share with me a little about some of the folks you've interviewed
on the site.
Michael: Well, there's so many, but I really like interviewing the older
guys and I'm going to tell you about a few of them who are all over the age
of 70. I mean, obviously, if you're interviewing someone who has more life
experience, you're going to be able to gain another 30 years. I mean if I
interviewed someone who is 30 compared to someone who's 70, the guy who's 70
is got twice the life experience and it's a good leverage of my time to
interview the guys who have lived more than other people because we can
stand on the shoulders of them.
But some of the most exciting interviews I've had, there's a gentleman named
Glenn W. Turner. He's 73 now and you can hear a recording of a speech that
Glenn Turner that generated over $500 million in sales. Now, this was back
in the early 60's. He was called the greatest pitchman that ever lived. He
was born from an unwed Mother. He grew up very poor. His mother's prenatal
illness of scarlet fever caused Glen to be born with a cleft pallet and a
harelip. He overcame huge adversity and this guy started a multi-level
marketing company called Koscot and later to be called Dare To Be Great.
Over his career in the MLM industry, he had sold over seven million books
and audio taped programs. He's created over 800 millionaires in business
with his Dare To Be Great personal development products. There was a book
about him called Con Man or Saint. Have you ever heard of that book?
Jim: I've heard of it, but I'm not familiar with it.
Michael: Have you heard the name Glenn Turner?
Jim: Yes, I have.
Michael: Okay. Now, this is really weird, Jim. I remember ten years ago
reading this book Con Man or Saint and I didn't read that many books ten
years ago, but I did read this one. And it's just really wild to think that
I've actually interviewed that guy ten years later. He is incredible. He's
taught me a lot and it's fascinating interview and to hear this audio pitch
is pure proof of the power of audio and the sound of someone's voice. And
you can find that at my site www.hardtofindseminars.com.
Now, another expert is a gentleman named Barry Bedell. Barry Bedell is the
son of the late Clyde Bedell, and I'll talk about Clyde in a minute. But
Barry has been responsible himself for over a half a billion dollar of sales
through some of the enterprises that he's been involved with, so he is a
great ad man and I've a two and a half hour audio interview with Barry. He's
the living son of the great Glyde Bedell. Now, who is Clyde Bedell? Clyde
Bedell was one of the greatest educators on advertising of all time. He was
the author of what many copywriters consider the bible of copywriting. It's
How to Convert White Space into Advertising. He also has a book called How
to Write Advertising That Sells.
Now, this guy was doing seminars back in
the 50's traveling all over the world, mainly the U.K. He was doing seminars
there with experts in the advertising field. And I made arrangements with
Barry and we had digitally re-mastered one of Clyde's most famous lectures
back from the 50's, it's called The Advertising Job. And you see a lot of
experts out there on copywriting, but I don't care who you are today, no one
could touch this guy Clyde Bedell. And if you go back and find out who
everyone studied, Clyde Bedell's name will always come up. I find many
people who already have his book of his teachings, but it's a phenomenal
seminar to listen an advertising expert do a seminar back in the 50's. It
was really interesting and a great experience.
End of part one.
Be sure not to miss part two of this amazing interview on Friday, June 8, 2007
This interview is the exclusive property of Michael Senoff. It may not be republished in any format period.
