Taking Care of Your Voice
August 5, 2008
As an information marketing business owner, you’ll need to take care of your voice. If you do seminars or record your own audio programs, your voice will be an integral part of your products.
That being the case, you’ll want to make sure and follow some simple rules to “protect” your voice from harm. I advise you to take care of your voice and follow these rules.
1. Drink water when you speak.
Whether you are speaking to a group or to just one other person in an interview situation, it’s important for you to drink water. Water is to your throat what oil is to a car engine. It’s a lubricant. You’d never want to run your car without oil or your voice without water. Never use HOT or COLD water. Keep it room temperature to properly take care of your voice.
2. Don’t drink alcohol or caffeine.
Drinking alcohol and things like coffee will have a deleterious effect on your voice in both the short and long term. There are a lot of sophisticate medical explanations that I can give you, but in short, just don’t do it.
3. Don’t talk when you don’t need to.
When you are not speaking, try and give your voice plenty of time to rest. There was a time when I was on the road speaking over 100 times a year. During that time it became very important NOT to speak when not on stage. This will give your vocal cords time to rest.
4. Never yell.
It’s one of the worst things you can do for your voice. Never do it. If you like to go to college sporting events, be careful. You may be tempting yourself with your favorite team!
There you have it. Those of are some of the most important things you need to know to take care of your voice. Take care of your voice and your voice will take care of you.
Selling Info Products
August 4, 2008
Selling info products can be fun. To be done correctly, it will require some work on your part. I have always been taught that marketing is everything you do to get the phone to ring. Selling begins when you pick up the phone.
That language is now a bit dated.
In the selling of info products, particularly online we could change the definition to: marketing is everything you do to drive traffic to your site. Selling begins once they land on your site.
Selling info products now is very different than it was 10 years ago. Most intelligent marketers who are selling info products still use both methods, but the bulk of their efforts lie in the online marketing world.
In order to know how well you’re doing in the selling of your info products, you need a means of tracking your efforts. This is best done with Google Analytics. It’s a free service provided by Google to give you some key statistics you’ll want to track to analyze your efforts.
You’ll first want to know how many unique visitors are coming to your site. You’ll also want to know what percentage of those folks you are closing to take ACTION. That can be both the purchasing of a product and the opting in to receive your emails.
Your final element that you’ll want to track is your AVV. Your average visitor value. This will allow you to figure out how much each customer is worth who comes to your site.
This is incredibly valuable as we now live in a PAY PER CLICK world. Knowing how much a customer is worth will allow you to know how much you should be wiling to pay to get them to your site.
I would suggest that you never pay more to get them there than what they are worth. So if the average visitor value to your site is $1, never pay more than a dollar per click.
Big companies may be willing to LOSE money (initially) to get someone to a site, but that should NOT be done with someone like you or me.
Creating Your Own Info Products
July 23, 2008
When you get started as an information marketer, you have some choices to make. One of the first will be whether to create your own products or to license or “use” someone else’s.
I suggest you create your own.
Not that there is anything wrong with licensing or affiliating with other people’s products. It’s just that when YOU own your content, you are in greater control of the process and you are building a business that will have some equity value.
The products YOU create will be saleable at some point in the future if you ever decide to sell your business or a portion of it.
Creating your own info products can be intimidating if you have never done it before. When you get started, you are faced with some choices. Should you do a book or ebook? Should you first do an audio or video product? Or, should you do some kind of event like a seminar to get started.
My suggestion for the novice is to do an audio program.
Within the category of audio, you now have some choices. You can do one of three things to create your audio program:
1. Sit in a studio (or somewhere like a studio) and talk into a microphone.
Even if you are a VERY gifted speaker, this is tough to pull off effectively. Even someone like Tony Robbins is tough to listen to doing a “solo” act where he is talking to you via a studio recording.
2. Record a seminar or other event.
This is a good option provided you make sure that you repeat the questions when asked and to have good recording equipment set up that will allow the listener to clearly hear the audience questions.
3. Record an interview.
This is my suggestion for what MOST people should do first. Although many people aren’t expert interviewers (if you want to learn HOW to interview people like a pro go to: http://www.ExpertInterviewer.com), it’s a good place to start. You can either do it in person or over the phone and you can ask someone a list of questions that you have pre-prepared.
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