In this episode we speak with Greg Rollett, of The Product Pros. We focus on how to create your own multimedia products. We discuss how to successfully leverage, market and profit from creating these products. So, Go grab a coffee, sit back, relax, plug in the earphones and enjoy this weeks episode.
Greg Rollet is a Best-Selling Author and media producer. He works with experts and entrepreneurs to show them the power of using media and stories to grow their businesses.
EPISODE SUMMARY:
- Music and Me – How Greg went from the cusp of a country wide music tour to become a “product pro”
- Products and Multimedia – Creating and leveraging your content for maximum impact and results.
- Monetizing & Marketing – Tips to help get your products in front of the right people.
THE FULL TRANSCRIPT
Introduction: Welcome, to the brave new world of cost effective communications, tips, trips and tricks, how-to’s, why-to’s and what-not-to-do’s, and using the power of web based content marketing to easily promote whatever you’d like. Welcome to The Multimedia Marketing Show with, Jake Hower.
Jake: Hi there, welcome back to the show. I’m your host, Jake Hower. You’re listening to The Multimedia Marketing Show, and this is episode number 11.
We’re going to kicks right into this week’s guest. We’ve got on the show today, Greg Rollet from the Product Pros. Greg is an expert in creating products for his clients, at utilizing pretty much all forms of multimedia. I thought it’d be worthwhile getting him on to discuss a little bit about how he goes about creating and leveraging product creation, but also he will speak a little bit about how he goes about marketing and the right mindset. It’s a really awesome episode. Greg is an amazing networker, but he’s been featured on so many different places; CNN, ABC, NBC, Mashable, the Huffington Post, Mixergy … the list goes on and on and on.
He’s well and truly an expert in his field, and it’s a really awesome interview. Let’s get straight into that now.
Segue: We’ll be right back with more of The Multimedia Marketing Show but first, this suggestion. Make sure that you don’t miss a single episode by subscribing to us via iTunes. Don’t forget to like Jake on Facebook, follow him on Twitter and sign up for email notifications at multimediamarketingshow.com. Then you’ll be the first to know when new episodes are available.
Now, let’s get back to The Multimedia Marketing Show with Jake Hower.
Jake: Welcome back listeners, as discussed at the top of the episode, we’ve got Greg Rollet from the Product Pros on the line. Greg, how are you?
Greg: Hey what’s happening Jake? Real happy to be here.
Jake: Yes, it’s great. I really appreciate you taking the time to come on today.
Greg: Yes definitely. I’m really excited to share some of this stuff, talk about products in marketing and help everybody listening.
Jake: Yes absolutely. You’d certainly be aware as are our listeners out there, The Multimedia Marketing Show is a … well, the premise of the show is to … we’re bringing on experts in the particular forms of multimedia. What you’re doing over with the Product Pros encompasses just about all forms of multimedia. I think you’re going to be able to offer a lot to our audience today.
Greg: Love it, well let’s get into it.
Jake: Absolutely. All right, what I’d like to do is to give our listeners a little bit of a rundown on what we’re going to cover today. We’re going to go briefly into Greg’s history, and then we’re going to expand on what he’s doing with the Product Pros. We’ll break it down a little bit to see a little bit behind the scenes and how he goes about creating products.
Greg, to kick us off, why don’t you give us a little bit of a brief history of your background.
Greg: Sure yes. In a former life, even though I’m not very old, I was a rapper in a rock band; like a Linkin Park, 311 type group. Here in the States, I toured the country. I played everywhere from Madison Square Garden in New York City out to the Knitting Factory in Los Angeles, and everywhere in between. My band and I, we were getting about to start on a big tour; about a 20 city East Coast tour with the band called ‘Rehab,’ who had a song on the radio and we thought this is like our big break. We’re going to play in front of much of sold out venues. The day before we’re getting set to leave for this tour, my guitar player, and my bass player gave me a call, and they’re like, “Hey Greg. We’re not going.” I’m like, “Well, you’re not going to the bar this afternoon? Kick the tour off?” They said,” No, no man. We’re not going on tour.”
At this point, I had just dropped out of college, I had quit my job, I had just gotten married and spent every dollar that I had gotten from my wedding, that I’m supposed to start my new life and go buy like new China and crap like that with my new wife, on band stuff. I bought a trailer and CDs and DVDs and hats and T-shirts and all the stuff we were going to sell on this tour. Really, I’d felt like I’d just gotten a divorce. My heart was just broken in a hundred pieces and I wasn’t doing anything with my life, absolutely nothing. I just decided to drop out of college, I didn’t have a job, I just got married. My wife’s parents were like, “Greg you just got married to our daughter. What are you going to do to support her? You can’t just sit on the couch all day and sulk and have this fantasy of being a musician.”
They actually dragged me to one of those all day internet marketing seminars. While this might sound really exciting to you guys listening now, it’s actually exciting to me now, as a 22 – 23 year old kid who is a musician, the last thing you want to do is spend 12 hours locked in a room with your wife’s parents, right? That sounds awful. What ended up happening at the end of the day is just literally everything the speaker said, it clicked. I was like, “Man, that makes sense. That makes sense. That makes sense.” It was all the same stuff that I was doing on Napster and Mp3.com and when MySpace was starting, and we were one of the first bands on MySpace to have a million friends and all that good stuff. We were doing all these things. I just wasn’t using it to actually make money online. I ended up buying everything that they sold at this conference. I ended up starting my first website. I was selling hammocks; it was backyardhammocks.com, I wish I still owned it today with all the stuff I know, but …
I sold hammocks online, I sold bird feeders online, I sold softball bats, I sold all kinds of random crap, drop shipping. I always got pulled back into the music industry. I got back into the music industry, but musicians, they didn’t want to pay $2,000 a month for marketing. They don’t have that kind of money. They wanted to go buy new guitar FX pedals and just buy some more drinks at the bar. They wanted nothing to do with hiring this guy to do marketing for them. I decided, “Well, instead of getting one musician to pay me two grand, what if I got a ton of musicians to pay me $50, a $100,” whatever it was. I went out and got one of the little … it was actually the precursor to flip camera. It was before the flip camera even came out. I went to the local Home Depot store and got some whiteboards and I nailed the whiteboards to my wall. I put this little camera on a bar stool, and I put some books on top of the bar stools to make a kind of ghetto-rigged tripod, and I shot four videos. They were about 30 minutes each. I was just like, “Hey what’s up? This is Greg. I’m going to teach you some cool stuff.”
I taught musicians internet marketing 101. It’s a product that’s called ‘The New Music Economy.’ It’s still on and selling online today, to this day. It’s been five years now. We sold over, I think, 3,500 copies of this product now. It changed everything for me, because no longer did I have to have one client and actually do stuff for them. I can actually just create this product, throw it online, do some marketing, and these clients would come in … I mean I have more clients from where you’re at, Australia, New Zealand than I do in the United States because they find me online. From there, I mean it’s just escalated.
We’ve created membership sites, we’ve created partnerships with ReverbNation who has 500,000 plus musicians at the time. We’ve worked with Derek Sivers at CD Baby to help him with his keynotes and his marketing strategies. We’ve created $500 home study courses, we’ve created WordPress themes for bands. This entire empire, and now, and don’t know if we’re going to get into it, but now I help others do the exact same thing, and I’ve been able to now create products for Michael Gerber who’s the author of The E-Myth, if you’ve read that book – Brian Tracey, Tom Hopkins, Alan Cosgrove who’s Nike’s number one personal trainer. It’s just unbelievable what you can do, and it all started from being this little kid who was trying to be a rapper in a rock band, sort of.
Jake: It’s incredible. I think what stands out for me there is the ghetto setup, because what you don’t see behind the video is how the video is put together. I think that’s fantastic. It just shows you that you don’t need much more than a flip camera and a couple of books and a stool to actually go out there and start creating stuff.
Greg: Yes, I mean that’s really one of my biggest point is; don’t let technology be a barrier to stop you from getting your message out, because we all have a story and technology … don’t let it be that barrier to stop you from telling your story. We’re doing this podcast, audio on Skype. It’s not like it’s … we have a huge studio and I flew down to Australia to hang out with you. Use the things and the resources that you have, and if you have a great message, that message is going to get across and people are going to buy it, they’re going to gravitate to it, they’re going to spread it, but you’ve got to have that message. That’s the most important part.
Jake: Yes, absolutely. Now, there are so many different ways we can go with this interview. You’re certainly are going to have a lot more than 30 to 45 minutes worth of content for us. We’ve got a little bit of a rundown, as we’ve said at the top of the episode. Let’s go through that, and let’s see where we go and maybe we’ll have to get you back on another episode.
All right. Let’s look a little bit more about how one of your products is put together. Before we even do that, frame for our listeners who you’re creating these products for.
Greg: We have two different audiences that we’ve create products for. One is the guy who wants to actually sell products. Like I did in my music business, I want to actually create some kind of a product. I want to put it online and I want to sell it and I want to make money from it. It doesn’t matter what the price point is, I want to make money from this product. The second kind of person that we create products for is the person who wants to use the product as part of their marketing funnel. What I mean by that is, maybe you’re a financial adviser, and you’re helping people with investments and things like that. They’re very skeptical, there’s not much trust, I don’t know if I trust you to invest my money, so you want to educate that person in order to make a better decision.
Maybe you create a four CD set on how Wall Street’s screwing everybody and you’re teaching them the right ways. You create four CDs and workbooks and manuals. Instead of selling it and making $100 on it, you give it away for free and essentially you create trust in the mind of the person who got that product, and maybe now they invest a million dollar portfolio with you which turns into a $50,000 commission. That’s a heck of a lot better than selling a $100 product.
The two audiences are the people who actually want to sell products and make money from products in the ascension business model, where you sell products, you have coaching and masterminds and all that stuff, and two is the person who wants to give it away because they have a high ticket back-end service.
Jake: That’s great. Let’s briefly break down what makes up a typical product for your customers.
Greg: Yes, it starts really at square one with … you have to A), Identify what the market is. Who are you actually going to sell this product to, and what is their core problem? So many times, when I’m working with clients, the first thing they do is, “I want to create this product on leadership,” or “I want to create this product on outsourcing, or hiring.” Just because they have a little bit of knowledge about that subject or whatever the case is but he marketplace actually doesn’t care. They don’t have a need. There’s not enough of a buying audience. Let’s talk about audience real quick. I was working with a client last week who is … he’s in sports sales. He sells season tickets for professional sports teams. He goes into corporations and tries to get them to buy a bunch of season tickets or sky boxes, what have you. He wanted to create a product for other people who were selling sports tickets.
The first thing I did was, “Well, let’s talk about the market. How many sports teams are there?” We just went in the United States. There’s four major sports. Let’s say there’s 30 teams in each of the sports, so the National Football League, Baseball, Basketball and Hockey. That’s 120 teams. How many sales reps does each team have? He was like, “About 10,” so 120 times 10? That’s only 1,250 people. Out of those thousand and plus people, how many will actually spend money to improve their career? Immediately, right off the bat, I mean I obviously I want to work with this guy but he didn’t have a market. He just did not have enough of a market to make the income he wanted in order to make the product. You have to make sure that you’ve got an audience that’s big enough, and an audience that actually wants to buy the product. They want to improve their life.
Again, I work with a lot of clients who want to go and help people who are in kind of corporate jobs to be better at their corporate jobs. I was just like, “Let’s see. We all bitch about our jobs and how much money we make and how we hate our boss and all that.” The problem is that most people that are in that position, bitch about it but they won’t actually take action to get out of it. That’s why there aren’t more entrepreneurs. There aren’t more people doing the things that Jake and I are doing. You’ve got to look at the market, look at what their real problem is and what they’ll spend money on. If you don’t start there, well then you’re just going to make something that’s going to look pretty, it’s going to sit on a shelf and it’s not really going to help anyone.
Jake: No, it really isn’t. You’re right there. To me, from my own experience, I find that 10% of what I do is recording the podcast, 90% of that is promoting the podcast and building an audience.
Greg: Yes, I mean the product itself isn’t very difficult. It’s everything else that goes around it that is the stuff that people either don’t want to do or they don’t really fully understand. You just said it great, I mean 90% of this is promoting the podcast, looking for a new guest, how do you expand your reach, how do I find more people that are going to listen, how do I get those people who are listening to take action, do other things?
It’s not just … I mean a lot of people can just turn on a microphone and talk into it, but how do you actually get people who are going to listen and pay attention, and Jake, you did a great job. You sent me an outline, you told me what your audience wants to hear, how I can help the process. That’s the most important stuff, is how can what you’re doing add value to the market place. What we do when we create products is we actually … we create what we call a framework. All the framework is, it’s a … I call it like a puzzle. You have to put certain pieces in the puzzle in place in order to create this incomplete masterpiece, right? You have this problem at the start; you got all these pieces, they’re all just discombobulated. At the end, you want to finish with this completed puzzle that looks great and looks like the picture on the box.
You start with … I usually draw a line, straight across horizontal on a piece of paper from left to right. On the left side, just put a little like a dash and put an A, and on the right side, put a little dash and the letter B. On the left side, where you have the A, that’s where your prospect is right now. They have some kind of problem. They have some kind of itch. They have some kind of need, some kind desire for something better. In the weight loss industry, real simple, I want to lose 20 pounds. That is where they are now. They’re 20 pounds overweight. I want you to go a little deeper. Why are they 20 pounds overweight? Are they a house mom who just had a kid and they have the baby weight, and they need to get it off. Have they been working at a corporate job for 10 – 15 years, eating out at fast food for lunch, and all of a sudden they woke up and they’re 20 Lbs overweight? Are they … what’s the reason? That’s your A.
On the B is what is their promised land? What does that end result or desire look like? Obviously, again the fitness, they lost 20 pounds, but that’s not good enough. They lost 20 pounds. Why? They lost 20 pounds because they have a cruise to go on to, and they’re going with their husband, and they want to surprise them and look great. Are they getting married and have a wedding to go to? Their doctors said they had diabetes and if they don’t lose 20 pounds, they’re in serious health risk of heart disease … things like that.
Go deeper on the A and the B. Then in the middle of that line, I mean that’s just the steps that you want to take them through in order to go from A to B. It’s the bridge they have to cross. It’s the mountain, the valley whatever you want to call it. That’s just the step by step. How do I go from 20 pounds overweight because I’m a mom and I just had a baby a year ago, and I haven’t lost the baby weight, Two, I’m going on this cruise with my family. It’s our first family vacation we’ve taken since we have our baby and I want to look awesome. How do you take them there?
Really, Jake, that’s how we create our products and the majority of the work happened in finding out the A and finding out the B. The stuff in the middle is the stuff that you just know and it really comes naturally.
Jake: Definitely. That’s great. That stuff in the middle, I’m thinking now, we’re not going to spend too much time on that stuff in the middle because as you say it’s a process that you follow. What I’d like to hear from you though, just on that topic, is how you go about getting the content. I know a lot of our listeners are obviously content marketers. Are you able to re-purpose existing content or leverage existing content or are you building the products out from scratch?
Greg: Everything is on a case by case basis, and I know people hate hearing that. Let me get us some specifics, because I really love giving specific actions that everybody can take. When I first launched my music product, my big one, my $500 course, I knew the need that the market had. I knew where they wanted to go, and I wanted to create this big product, a high end product, but I didn’t want to spend three months shooting all these videos and doing all the stuff. What I actually did is, I held a webinar and I invited everyone that was on my music list to the webinar. I sold the product before I ever created it.
It was like a Tuesday night. I had the webinar. I sold it. It was 500 bucks. I put 15 people into the program. I said, “Hey. We’re going to start next Monday.” Right, it’s Tuesday night, I haven’t made the product yet. I said, “We’re going to start next Monday.” Literally, what it forced me to do is create the content by next Monday. It was actually … I was going to do a 12 week program and they get one module a week, every week for 12 weeks. It gave me a week to create each week’s content. That has been the most effective way that I’ve ever created a product, and nearly every product that I’ve personally created for myself, I’ve done in the exact same way. I’ve sold it, and then I made sure I had an audience and I collected some cash up front, and then it forced me to put a deadline and say, “Hey. Let’s go and create this product.” That’s what I do with the Product Pros’ system, what I do with info Product Pro, what I do with new music economy, so on and so forth.
Now, other ways to create products – a great way to do it, is to do it live – to hold four live webinars over the next four weeks. That kind of forces you to create your product, and then you take the recordings from those webinars, and now you have four videos. You talked about re-purposing content. I use a program called ‘Switch,’ S-W-I-T-C-H. It’s free. It’s on a Mac . It strips the audio from the video on the webinar, so now I have the video from the webinar and I have the audio. I go ahead and get that transcribed, I use fiverr.com, F-I-V-E-R-R.com. People on there, they’ll transcribe about 15 minutes or so for five bucks. If you have an hour long webinar, it’s about 20 bucks to get the whole thing transcribed.
Now, I have the video from the webinar. I have the audio. I got it transcribed. Then what I do, is I create … I call them ‘Action Guides.’ You might know it is like a workbook, but I never like calling something work especially if you’re going to sell it, because who wants to buy more work to do? It sounds ridiculous. I created an action guide, and it’s really the action steps that people need to take in order to get the most benefits. It’s fill in the blank stuff, it’s do you remember the four points to this, how do you use this stuff? Now, I’ve taken one piece of content, a webinar I did, and broken it down into four pieces of content. What that does is it hits on all the different modalities in which people learn from, because some people are visual learners, so they have to watch something to learn it. Some are auditory so they need to listen to it in order for their brain to process it. Some people are kinesthetic, which means they need to actually do something, which is the action guides. They won’t actually get the information and process it unless they do something. Then some people read. That’s just how we learn.
By doing that process, breaking it down, we hit on all four learning styles which allows people to actually process the information, because there’s two steps to the product. One, you’ve got to sell it and they have to buy it. Two, is they’ve got to use it, because we’re not in the shyster-huckster business. I actually want people to go through my products, use it, get some kind of tangible benefit from it and say, “Hey Greg, that was awesome.” I used it and I changed my life and changed my business. That’s how you actually accomplish that process in re-purposed content in the same way.
Jake: Yes, that’s a relatively typical of the way media seems to be going these days. Now just with that action guide, is this essentially just the transcript and then do you heavily edit the transcript to make it more, I guess, presentable or is it more just putting in some topics or breaking the content down a little bit from there?
Greg: From the transcript standpoint, what we do is we have a list of instructions that we send to our transcriber. We say want it in all headers, in Times New Roman, 18, bold. We want the rest of the text in Times New Roman, 16. We only want no more than two sentences in a paragraph. If you don’t know a word, make sure you highlight it in yellow. We give them a full set of instructions so we can go back and edit the entire thing.
What we’ve done, kind of taking to the next step, as I said, use fiverr.com. It’s about five bucks for 15 minutes. What we do, this is kind of the hack to it, is we hire three people to do the same 15 minute job. We give them the same set of instructions. Two of them are going to totally screw it up, and one of them is going to do okay. I hired that person who did okay off of fiverr. I pay him a little bit more and I give him some more instructions, so a little more editing. I make sure they read through things, all that good stuff, so we do make it nice. We put headers and footers on everything. We add some graphics. We add a lot of breaks and things like that. If there’s a quote, we have them italicize it and center it and put it on its own line. We do give them a set of instructions so it reads well. It doesn’t read like a transcript. It reads like something that you would actually want to read.
That’s really important because someone reading a transcript, that sucks. No one really wants to read a transcript word for word, because we say weird things. We do run-on sentences, which don’t make sense, which is pretty much what I’m doing right now because I haven’t stopped and paused. We repeat words a lot, words a lot, words a lot, when we … it just doesn’t read right. We have to go, and you have to edit it. You have to make it look like something someone actually wants to read and have value. Otherwise, you’re just putting out more content that people don’t want.
Jake: Yes, that’s brilliant. I think the key there is that it’s not taking up too much extra time for you personally. It’s being done by somebody else, which is brilliant.
Greg: Exactly, systemizing that process.
Jake: Definitely. That’s great. From there I guess it’s just a matter of deciding, depending on budget, whether or not that’s a digital version of everything or whether you produce an actual hard copy workbook with CDs and DVDs, etcetera, I’d imagine.
Greg: Yes, I mean when we create products for our clients, we give it to them in both modalities, both physical and digital. I am a huge, huge fan and advocate of physical stuff. I just find that there’s so much more value in it. I can’t tell you how many courses I bought, and Jake, you might be the same that you bought it, you went in, you logged in, you’re excited when you got it. Then it just sits in your bookmarks and if you’re not thinking about it, you never go and log back in. It just doesn’t happen. With physical stuff, it looks you in the face every single day and says, “Hey, I’m this DVD you just spent $500 on. You should watch me.” It just has a different kind of value, but it also does something to your mindset, where you really feel like you need to take action on it.
We definitely stress that. Also, when you’re selling the product, the physical stuff has more value. You can sell almost the exact same product with nothing else, but being in the physical version, for usually double what you’re going to sell to digital version which obviously is great for business, which instead of charging 197, you can charge 400 bucks. I’d much rather make 400 bucks for the same thing, and all you really need to do, is make it physical.
Jake: All right, let’s switch gears a little bit here, and let’s focus a little bit more on the marketing and that side of things. If you’re anything like me, you want to be exceeding expectations for your clients. In most cases, they’re going to be wanting to do the same thing for their clients. When you’re helping somebody create a product for their clients, I guess you need to work at how you’re going to deliver something which they’re going to be really happy with.
Where I’m going with this is, you talk about a little bit how you onboard a client and you go through the process of working out their audience etcetera, etcetera. On the back ends, what we spoke about 10% – 90% in terms of marketing – do you provide your clients assistance with the marketing of the product as well?
Greg: In our product creation stuff, we do not do any of the marketing for them, but we do go through a marketing consultation when the product is just about to be completed, to say, “Hey, here’s what your finished product looks like. It’s four CDs, four DVDs, a workbook, a manual. Obviously this is the market we created it for. If this was my product, here’s how I would sell it. I would go and do Facebook ads targeted directly at this, this, this and this. This is my ups, this is what I would offer this thing for free, and this would be the price point. This is my up sell that I would do.”
We walk them through that entire funnel. We talk a lot about both online marketing and offline marketing. Again, I’m a huge advocate of offline marketing just because we’re getting less and less of it and it is becoming more and more effective if you hyper target it. What I mean by that is, in the fitness example we talked about earlier for moms who have … need to lose that extra 20 pounds. You can buy mailing lists of moms who just had a baby in the last six months. A baby who just had … a mom who had a baby in the last six months who lives in this affluent neighborhood, and a mom who drives this type of vehicle, and a mom who has purchased something from weight watchers in the last six months. Then you can send a postcard or a sales letter or something directly to that house. That becomes really, really effective. We go over a lot of that stuff because you don’t want to just broadcast messages. You want to go as targeted and select as possible as you can spend more money to a smaller list, if you know that list is going to convert in a much higher ratio.
Those are the kind of things that we get into when we start to talk about marketing, is what are the pieces of media out there that are available to us, that would allow me to laser focus on the exact person who wants to buy this products because I don’t want to waste any money on anyone who isn’t very, very likely to be interested in what I’ve got to sell them.
Jake: Yes, okay. Are you usually extracting this information or targeting from an existing list that the client owns or do you have other sources that you direct at or that you’re targeting?
Greg: The best source is going to be an internal client list. If they already have an internal client list, A) we can obviously market to that list. That’s the easiest. The unfortunate thing is most people don’t have a very good list, and if they have a list, it’s segmented. What I mean by segmented, is how many prospects do you have, versus how many are actual paying customers? What did they opt in for? It will be like … I got 5,000 people on my mailing list, and I’ll be like, “All right. Why are they on your mailing list? Did they opt in for a certain special report on a certain subject? Did they come in off a certain blog post?” Because those tell you different things, because if you just came in on a blog post on Summer Fitness Tips, that might not even be a woman. That might just be someone who wanted summer fitness tips.
Knowing all that stuff is very, very important and most people do not have their internal listing, segmented like that. If you don’t … that’s tip number one, is make sure you’re segmenting your list. Know where people came from. I used both AWeber and Infusionsoft for my list management. There’s six and one half dozen of the other. Infusionsoft is the 800 pound gorilla. Aweber, it could be constant contacts for you, it could be mail champ. It doesn’t matter, but have different lists set up for the different ways that people get on your mailing list. Don’t just have one general list. Start there.
Two, is now we’ve got to look extra. Right, the first place I usually look is who else has a list already of these people? That would be your affiliate partners or joint venture partners who you could go to and say, “This person already has a product that’s selling to women who want to lose weight. Maybe my product would be a good compliment to his. Let me create a relationship with that person and see if we can do some trades or swaps or I can pay him for advertising on his site, whatever it is.” That’s step one, is has someone already built it? It’s like a Field of Dreams, “If you’ve built it, they will come.”
If someone else has already built that marketplace, go after them first. Maybe there’s bloggers that you can go after and you can guest post on their site. Jake, I know you talk a lot about some of this stuff on the podcast and with some of the guests in going and finding that audience. That’s step two.
Step three, is what other media is out there. Right now I’m loving Facebook ads because of how targeted you can get. You can say, “I just want 30 year old women who are fans of Jillian Michaels who watch The Biggest Loser. That’s the only people I want to put this ad to. What other kinds of media? Are there newsletters? Are there magazines? Are there trade associations?
One of the best research sites that I use is alltop.com. A-L-L-T-O-P.com, which is run by Guy Kawasaki. It’s all the top websites broken down by categories. Again, you can go into fitness and then women’s fitness and yada, yada and break it down from there. Start internally on your own mailing list. Then look for other content producers, product creators, people that already have a list that you want to go after. Then three, look for media sources that you can go and actually buy traffic from. That’s going to be your third source.
Jake: That’s really awesome. There’s a whole lot of information there. That’s a great action list for our listeners.
All right, well let’s look forward into the future a little bit. This type of product creation or this type of product has been around for a few years now. Do you see things change your …? Is this style of creation of product and packaging a product, is that going to hang around for a little bit longer?
Greg: I mean, obviously I am going to say yes, right? (laughs) No, so the thing is we all have access to more information than we’re ever going to need in our entire life. It’s called Google, Wikipedia, Facebook whatever you want to call it. The thing is, what products do is they take the experience that someone had and the mistakes that they already made, and then they package it up and say, “Hey, instead of Googling for months and trial and error and all that, I have this step by step system or solution that’s going to get you where you want to go faster.” That’s what people will pay for.
The second thing that people will pay for is ‘the guy.’ I need to find ‘the guy’ who is the absolute best expert in this marketplace, and that’s who I want to hang around. That’s who I want to be around. That’s who I want to learn from, I want to emulate. I want a business just like theirs. I want a lifestyle just like theirs. People are always going to want you find ‘the guy.’ I did air quotes as if you could see me when I said that but people want to find ‘the guy.’ We want to follow ‘the guy’, and that’s where products come in is because … it really comes back to the ascension model.
The first thing people do is they get on Google and they do a couple of searches and they stumble on some blogs or some websites and they get some cool, free information. Next step, maybe they see if that person has a book and e-books. They spend 10 – 20 bucks. Once I get the idea … because a book is usually just kind of a forum for an idea or a concept conceptually, then I need to know the application of that idea. That’s where the product comes in. Then they need a little bit of accountability. That’s where coaching groups come in. Then they just want the high level access to you and live your lifestyle and that’s where the mastermind groups come in.
That’s the ascension model in the information business, is get something for free, buy a low-end product to get the ideas. Then go into info products. Then go onto coaching, then go into some kind of masterminds. If you’re ‘the guy,’ like you have this opinion, you have a track record, you have the characteristics that make people like you, you’re fascinating in some resort, people will spend the money to see ‘the guy’ who has figured it out. Your quest in this whole process is to be ‘the guy.’
Jake, you’re trying to be ‘the guy’ in multimedia marketing, right? Dan and Ian of TropicalMBA are ‘the guys’ as far as building lifestyle businesses and traveling the world. People want to be attracted to ‘the guy.’ Seth Godin is ‘the guy’ when it comes to tribal marketing. Chris Brogan is ‘the guy’ when it comes to social media. The list goes on and on, but we pay to get access to ‘the guy.’ That’s why products are so important because it’s another level of access to ‘the guy.’
Does that kind of make sense?
Jake: Yes, it does. It really does. I think the other thing you’ve got to do is the market is so crowded that you’ve got to stand out. Rather than following trends, I think you’re trying to go in the opposite direction. As you were saying before, the trend is towards online marketing and this lower cost marketing. You’re going offline more and more because you’re breaking through. The trend is that everything is going into an iPad and everything’s been consumed in Kindle etcetera, etcetera, so you’re going in the opposite direction and produce physical products and really stand out from your competitors.
Greg: Yes, I mean it’s really … if everybody’s running into one direction, don’t follow that crowd. Run straight in the opposite direction. Obviously there’s pluses and minuses to both sides. Everything that we do, we do Kindle versions, then we do iPad versions, and we do the new cool technology thing, but what about all those people that don’t have access to that stuff, that needs your information? What about the people that still want that physical thing and even the people who have it? I mean I’m a digital guy. I got everything on an iPad, I use Evernote. I got the little Doxie scanner, whatever it is. If I turn the computer on right now, you know what you would see? Stacks upon stacks upon stacks of newsletters, special reports, binders, brochures, folders, catalogs. I mean it’s just ridiculous because that’s what I really go through to study materials. It’s what I go through for information, and once I process it, then it goes into the digital process.
Really think about your audience and what does your audience want. Jake, we were talking before the call started, one of my biggest markets is financial advisers. Financial advisers are going after baby boomers. Baby boomers don’t want stuff on the iPad. They want stuff coming in their mail, they still want to go live seminars, they still want the physical book. They want CDs because they’re driving 30 minutes to work every day. If I just put something on an Mp3 and threw it on iTunes, they would never even get that stuff. It goes back to the first thing we originally talked about, which is know your market. Know your market better than anyone and know how they want to consume that content.
Jake: Yes, that’s great. I think just to finish up on that topic, making an impression is important. For someone like Tim Ferris with his 4 Hour Body,” now, I haven’t seen the actual physical book, but by all reports the book itself is amazing. To consume the content, you really need the book because it’s all total experience.
Another one who’s done this is, I believe Seth Godin in one of his … maybe it was his ‘Kickstarter’ book project, where I think he was sending out an actual physical, vinyl record to some of his customers. Regardless to whether or not someone’s consuming that particular version, that’s what memorable about it.
Greg: Think about this. Say you got injured. You went to a Starbucks, and there was some coffee on the floor and you slipped and fell, and you called a bunch of personal injury attorneys, because you wanted to sue Starbucks, because “Hey, might as well,” right? You called like five personal injury attorneys. Four of them are going to say, “Hey, go to our website and fill out these claims thing and we’ll get back to you in a week.” You’re like, “Well that sucks. They just sent me online to fill out this thing,” right? Then one attorney, they actually take the call, they take the stuff. The next day, what shows up on your doorstep is a huge FedEx package from this attorney that’s got a copy of his book, that’s got a CD of information you need to know when you get into a slip and fall. It’s got a printed version of their special report that’s got all this crap. I mean honestly, who are you going to do business with? Who are you going to remember? Who are you going to tell your friends about? You’re going to go … at the party on Friday night you’re going to go, “This lawyer sent me a big box of crap just because I slipped and fell at Starbucks. Everybody else just sent me this link online.”
You said it right. It shows up like nobody else is showing up, because that’s what’s memorable and that’s what again is going to make you stand out from the crowd. I’m not saying you have to go to those links, but think about that analogy in your own business because it’s really going to help you be the differentiator, be that celebrity expert in your market.
Jake: Yes, absolutley, and what you’ve just done there is you’ve created your own unfair advantage and you’re not playing on the same field as everybody else, and by doing that, you win. It’s as simple as that.
Greg: You can charge higher fees, there’s no more competition. You can be selective on who you want to work with. I mean, it completely changes the game. Then, if you charge more for your money, well guess what? You can spend more in marketing, because you have more income coming in. It’s really a game changer when you get … when you grasp that concept.
Jake: Yes, brilliant. We’re just about finished with the interview. What I wouldn’t mind doing for our listeners because it’s not just products that you guys work with … tell us a little bit about the PR side of things and how you work with experts and celebrities.
Greg: Yes, sure. I am part of a … the Product Pros is part of a larger agency called the ‘Celebrity Branding Agency’. We’ve worked with over 1,600 people in 26 countries over the last few years. We have three … four kind of core divisions of the company.
One is a publishing company, where we help people become bestselling authors. Second is a television production company, where we help people get on ABC, NBC, CBS and Fox affiliates around the country. Third is what we call our big print division, where we get people into Ink magazine, into Forbes magazine, Newsweek, USA Today, Wall Street Journal and stuff like that. Fourth is the films division, where we help people create a movie, a documentary about their business and we get it aired on the Bio channel. Then we have the product development company, which is the company I run. We also have a celebrity expert marketing which is the done for you marketing company that I run as well, which kind of does that thing like I just gave you the example for the lawyers, creating those shock and all packages and the stuff like that … the physical stuff; the catalogs and the referral programs, things like that.
What we really try to do is we try to take the person who might be considered a commodity – again, personal injury attorney – when you don’t know the difference between any of them. Most people, when you go in to get brain surgery and you meet two brain surgeons, you don’t know the difference in the quality of their work. It’s the person that stands out is the person that has the best personality that you relate to that makes you remember them. That’s what we do, we fabricate that through publishing, through TV, through print, through film, through marketing.
It’s been really fun. We’ve got some amazing joint venture partners. In our book publishing process, we actually do co-authored books, so everybody writes one chapter kind of like Chicken Soup for the Soul style. We guarantee that it becomes a best seller, it’s at least one best seller. It usually hits multiple. We generally allow you to contribute to a book with another kind of celebrity expert. Right now we’re working on a new book with Jack Canfield from Chicken Soup for the Soul so you can co-author a bestselling book with Jack Canfield. We’ve done this with other experts like Dan Kennedy in the marketing field, with Brian Tracey, with Tom Hopkins. If you’re a real estate guy, we’ve done books with Ron Legrand before.
It’s super fun. On the TV shows, we’ve had the Michael Gerber TV show, where you can be interviewed by Michael Gerber on ABC, NBC, CBS and Fox. It’s just a really, really great business to get out of the state of being a commodity and do the things that we just talked about – become that expert, charge higher fees, get rid of the competition, making it a habit, an unfair advantage over everyone that you work with. It’s a heck of a good time, people really love what we do and I love what we do. That makes it a really, really fun marriage.
Jake: Yes definitely. That was exactly my thought process as you were speaking there, without sounding too ‘salesy’.. Promoting the Product Pros, you’ve essentially just done that. You’ve created an unfair playing field. You’ve got all these data and all these experience that you can draw from publishing with the experts, etcetera, etcetera, that there’d just be no one else you’d want to be working with if you’re creating a product.
Greg: That’s what I hope, and more … this isn’t to brag at all. Look at the model we’ve created. I mean, we have tons of special reports. We have insane follow up sequence. We have hundreds of videos you can find. I do interviews like this all the time, because I’m trying to get the message out. When people inquire about us, they don’t just get an email from me saying, “Hey Jake. It was great to meet you.” If they’re a qualified prospect, they’re getting a package on their door. They’re getting one of our books signed with a sales letter in it. They’re getting a copy of a product. We’ve created that unfair advantage, and it’s a model for you to copy if you want to be in that high priced expert space which is a great space to play in, because no longer do I need … I don’t need 10,000 clients, right? I need 10 and I’m happy and I’m doing well. That makes life really, really fun.
Jake: Yes, that’s cool. All right Greg. Let’s close this out now. Where can our listeners find out more about you?
Greg: Yes, on the product creates and stuff, if you just head to productprosystems.com. That’s productprosystems.com, you can learn a little bit about more about our services. You can grab that special report that we have on there. It’s actually our product creation manifesto.
You can find out my contact information. Give me a call, shoot me an email. I’d love to talk to you. If you want to learn more about the agency, just head over to dnagency.com. Again, that’s dnagency.com and you can learn all about the fun stuff that we do there. Always open to chatting with people. It’s Greg Rollett on Facebook, Greg Rollet on Twitter, and we can have a fine conversation. Obviously, leave a comment on Jake’s site and I’d be more than happy to have the conversation there as well if it’s cool with you.
Jake: Yes, that’s great. As always, we’ll include links to everything we’ve discussed in the show nights. All right, Greg. Thanks very much for coming on. You’ve shared a whole heap of awesome content for our listeners. I’m sure they’ll get a lot out of it, I certainly will as well. Again, thank you very much for coming on and we’ll catch up soon.
Greg: Thanks man, I appreciate it.
Jake: Welcome back listeners. I hope you enjoyed that episode. I’m sure you’ll agree that Greg’s absolutely awesome. How much gold did he share with us? That’s simply incredible. I think what really stands out for me, now I’m listening to Greg is how important it is to be an action taker, and to try and eliminate the technicalities involved, and focus on what’s important.
In this case, really it’s the marketing and the networking area of your products. The actual product creation accounts for such a small percentage that you don’t need to really focus on that. Yes, you want to be producing an amazing product, but you can systemize that, allowing you to free up your time and focus on the promotion of the product itself.
As you can imagine, our the last couple of episodes have been focused around selling and producing products. Now this obviously is something that I’m looking to get into myself. I’d love you to join with me, in seeing how I go about this and I’d love to get your feedback. If you haven’t already registered, head across to mshow.co/webinar. That’s mshow.co/webinar. Sign up for an upcoming webinar. You’ll see exactly how to webinar as we learnt from Louis House in Episode 10. You’ll therefore also see how I go about creating a product. I’d love you to join in on my ride and see exactly how I set it up and of course I’d really love your feedback.
Okay, the tip of the week this week comes from something we discussed in this episode with Greg. It’s, I guess a marketing software or an email solution. I’ve just invested in Infusionsoft, which is a relatively pricey option in comparison to some of the other ones, but it’s certainly an investment, because the amount of automation in market intelligence you get from it or demographic intelligence, is absolutely incredible. To me, I’ve had it for about three weeks. It’s quite a steep learning curve but once you do get your head around the initial learning stages, it’s really easy to use and it’s certainly very powerful with what you can do.
In an upcoming blog post or a video, I’ll be running through a little bit more in depth to review Infusionsoft. It’s certainly something that … if you’re making money, and you want to make more and sell more products, this is something that I’d suggest you look at it. It’s an incredible product.
Okay. That’s it for this episode. No audio quote this week. Instead, I thought it would be a nice little touch to hear from my favorite rapper, in light of Greg’s previous rapping career. Let’s round out the episode with Eminem’s ‘Lose Yourself’.
Thanks for tuning in listeners. We’ll speak to you again next week.