Audio/Video Issues, Private Labeling, Blogging, Webmasters, and Understanding Your Strengths and Weaknesses

by Fred Gleeck | March 17, 2005

Contents Include:

– Why I’m a Complete Idiot Sometimes: (Understanding
Your Strengths and Weaknesses)
– 4 Upcoming Events
– More Stuff I Learned In Phoenix
– Powerpoint
– Giving Out All Your Info
– Blogging
– Speaking of Webmasters
– Video Issues
– Audio Issues
– Private Labeling
– My Gift to You

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Prelude

I’m finishing this email up on an American Airlines flight from Newark to LA.

Also seated in First Class (which I get to do onoccasion) since I’ve got tons of miles with American.

Seated up in First Class is some super model who I don’t know and Matt Dillon, the actor. He was nice enough to give up his seat to an elderly couple who wanted to sit together.

Understanding Your Strengths/Weaknesses

I’m fairly good at a number of things. I’m really awful at at a bunch of other things.

I’m really good at making sure that when people come to my events they walk away feeling that they have gotten much more than their money’s worth.

I’m not a very good manager. I tend to be a bit of a drill sargent. That’s why I can only effectively coach those people who aren’t thin-skinned and can take direction well. For many people I’m not a good matcch as a coach.

I’m also not a very patient person and I sometimes make snap decision and snap judgements that are based on incomplete information.

I had this happen at this last event and my split second reaction almost got me into deep trouble.

Luckily, my good friend, Paul Hartunian and a number of other good friends at the event where there to “rescue” me. Paul agreed to let me use his name with this story.

After making my snap judgements I asked Paul to give me a “perspective” check. Paul told me that I may have been misinterpreting the data. Given that I almost always think I’m right (who doesn’t?), it’s always good to have someone you respect to make sure that you don’t make bad decisions. Paul is one of those people.

He suggested that things may not be the way they appeared to me. I was pretty steamed, but he asked me to hold off making any truly rash decisions without first doing some more investigating.

His counsel to me was that perhaps what I thought was an intentional move was in fact an honest oversight.

I’ll elaborate. One of the things that is understood among speakers is that whoever promotes an event is entitled to have exclusivity over the promotion of a product or service that they license or own.

In this case, one of the speakers got up and made mention of a piece of software that many of us have a license to. In my case, I call that sofware: WebMarketingMagic. Since it’s a licensed piece of software, many speakers have their own “private label” version of the same software.

In the course of his presentation, one of the speakers used the name of their private label rather than mine. In a case like this one, it is understood by all speakers that whoever is promoting the event gets to have THEIR version of the private label promoted whenever that softwared is mentioned.

At one point in this speakers presentation, he mentioned his own private label of the sofware.

This was clearly a breach of protocol.

I assumed it was done both intentionally and with malice. That’s where I asked for Paul’s help in making sure that I wasn’t seeing things the wrong way.

I got pretty annoyed when this happened and it really aggravated me. I was so steamed that when I asked Paul what to do he said that I should ask the speaker directly if he knew what he just did.

I told Paul I was too annoyed to do it at that moment. He volunteered to approach him for me. I quickly agreed.

After he asked the speaker if he realized what he had done, this person immediately apologized, not having realized that he had done it.

Paul came back to me, let me know that this person was sorry that they made the mistake, and that he wanted to talk to me to clear the air.

I talked with the speaker and listened to his explanation.

I immediately could feel that it was, in fact, an honest mistake. My bad. I had gotten upset for nothing. The speaker agreed to have anyone who signed up for his program to be moved over to my private label version of the software.

Lesson? For me I learned that assuming the worst is not the right way to go. Even if he had bad intentions it wasn’t correct on my part to assume it. All it did was cause me a lot of agita and it turned out not to be true.

Even if he had bad intentions what could I really do?

Very little. I would have never invited him to speak at one of my events again and “demanded” that he hand over the people that had signed up.

To assume that he was being dishonest wasn’t very smart on my part.

When I first saw this happen on stage, in addition to Paul I also approached a number of other good friends who were speaking at the event. All of them were super supportive of my point of view and backed my position. If the speaker had done this maliciously, they all agreed that he should not be invited to speak at another one of my events.

Luckily, I had the counsel of a good friend that made me consider what was happening before making any assumptions that may not have been correct. In this case I was wrong. Dead wrong.

A final thought. I asked Paul what I should do if (in the unlikely event) this ever happened again. Once would be an honest mistake. Twice would NOT be. if it were to happen again, it would prove that the first time WAS intentional. But, I will assume the best intentions and move on.

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4 Upcoming Events

Please try and make it to any and all of the events that I have coming up. You won’t regret it. I have rarely heard anyone say that it wasn’t one of the best events that they’ve ever attended.

Sorry to sound like I’m bragging, but it’s true.

I just did a Learning Annex event in New York last Saturday and got this feedback from many of the participants.

In fact, the guy who runs things, Harry Javer, said the evaluations were so good he thought I had “paid people” to do them.

Here’s the list:

http://www.InfoProductsSeminar.com
http://www.SeminarOnSeminars.com
http://www.InfoProductsSeminarUK.com
http://www.PublishingSeminar.com

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More Stuff I Learned in Phoenix

Last week when I did the event with my friend and client Chip Cummings. I learned a number of additional things that I thought would be worth sharing with you.

Make sure and arrive early to set up for an important event. We got into Phoenix a full day early. Since we were doing a full blown video shoot for the first time with new equipment, this was absolutely crucial.

Make sure that you have tested your equipment before you get to an event and that you have back-up items just in case something goes wrong.

We were doing a 3 camera shoot. We used one camera as our main camera and that one was positioned head on at the back of the room. The other two cameras were unmanned and sat on either side.

I have a video switching device that allows me to go back and forth between any of the cameras and one feed going to the computer where someone might do a PowerPoint presentation.

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Speaking of PowerPoint.

I’m a Mac guy so I use Keynote myself, but one of the things that happened at this event is that at one point one of our speakers had a video mishap. The presentation they were using went awry and they were caught without their slides.

I felt bad for them.

Make sure to not become dependent on a computer based presentation. Instead have a backup plan if any or all of the technology you want to use craps out.

Some people still carry copies of their presentation in overhead slides just in case. Be careful, you never know when technology will die on you.

I always travel with at least one backup camera as well just for this purpose.

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Giving Out All Your Info

People will sometimes ask me why I give away a lot of good information in free emails like this one that you’re reading.

Good question. I like the idea of building a relationship with people who are on your list. Convince them that you are one knowledgeable dude (or dudette) and they will buy from you when you present them with an offer that meets their needs.

The other thing I get asked a lot is if I’m ever scared that I will run out of material. As you can see, this email is the single longest one I’ve ever done. Shouldn’t I hold back and give it out piecemeal.

My feeling is this. If I’m actually doing what it is I claim to teach I’ll find new material every single hour I’m awake.

My problem is always remembering it so I can include it in these emails.

As I have said before, I now carry an mp3 voice recorder to capture Ideas as they come to me. I don’t know about you but I tend to forget stuff pretty quickly. I don’t think it’s my age, I think it’s because of all the ideas that go through my head in the course of a day.

Make sure you either write it down OR you record it onto some kind of device like I do. This will really help in the long run.

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Blogging

This is not my specialty, but here’s what I’m doing.

Along with all the information I come up with I’m also going to start archiving my ideas from past emails into a blog. Additionally, this will help with getting better placement in the search engines, or so I hear.

I leave that one to my webmaster, Stanley.

Start your own blog for free by going to:
http://www.Blogger.com.

That’s what I did.

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Speaking of Webmasters

Stanley is based in the Philippines. As many of you know I grew up there and I have a half brother and half sister who are 1/2 Filipino.

Wage rates are substantially lower in the Philippines and you can get someone to help you out for a lot less than someone over here.

My good friend, Phil Huff is more than a webmaster, he’s a THE marketing webmaster. Someone like him is worth every penny you pay him.

Even Phil agrees that for common and mundane tasks it makes send to either learn how to do it yourself or if you have a lot of web work to get someone like Stanley to help you.

You may not know that the Philippines is the 2nd largest English Speaking country in the world. The nice thing is that when you’re asleep (if you’re in the US) they can be working on the tasks you assign them.

We also communicate with Skype.

If you don’t have it or know what it is, you need to go to there site now to download the software.

http://www.Skype.com

It’s free and allows you to communicate with both text and voice for free over the web. It’s a great tool for talking business or pleasure with people in different countries of here in he States. Assuming you live here.

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Video issue

A couple of weeks ago I was digitizing a fair amount of video. I went into Circuit City (I think this was my first mistake) and asked them question about the issue.

I got the wrong answer.

I had shot some video with a really good 3 chip camera and wanted to know whether it made any difference what kind of camera I used when I wanted to import the material via Firewire into my G5.

The guy at Circuit City told me that it did. I have since found out he was wrong. If you do a lot of work with video don’t waste a good camera to do your importing.

According to my good friends at B&H Photo, the quality of the image has nothing to do with the quality of the camera you use to import. It only has relevance as it relates to capturing the video.

Don’t waste a good camera’s gears and other moveable parts doing a job a cheap video camera can do.

If you do a lot of video have a cheap camera near your computer to import your material and save the good camera for capturing your material.

When you do an event, make sure that you get all the cameras (if you use more than one) white balanced so you get the best quality image.

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Audio Side

Before I say a thing here, remember that I’m not the expert in this area. Kendall Scott is. He is the person you need to talk to if you have any questions in the area of audio.

He’s my contact at B&H in New York City and he can be reached at: 800-606-6969 x-2561.

Please be respectful of his time when you call. He knows the needs of information marketers like us and will help you buy what you need. He will not try and bilk you out of cash you don’t need to spend.

Good guy and comes with my highest recommendation.

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Private Labeling

To create a great piece of software it costs a lot of money. To help recoup the investment and get your software out into the hands of the greatest number of users, one of your tactics is to recruit private label customers.

A private label is someone who takes your software and gets to “slap” their brand name on the product.

Exactly what I have done with WebMarketingMagic.

With MemberScript, we are selling the software three ways. Direct to customers that we already have. In this case we make 100% of the dollars. We still have some pretty hefty ongoing expenses, but we get all the money that comes into us.

We will also sell this software using affiliates. This is set up as an open affiliate program. One where anyone can sign up to sell the software. In this case, affilaites make 25% of the gross sales price of the software.

Private labeling is where someone “buys in” to the program at a higher commission rate AND gets to put their own name on the software. To make it simple, at MemberScript we have decided to make people pay $10,000 up front and in doing so they get 50%, rather than 25% commission. They also, as I said above, get to use their own name for the software.

In all cases, we provide the customer service and support.

One will only want to become a private label IF they think they can sell enough units to justify the $10k up front fee. If they can, it makes sense to do so and get the higher commission levels.

Given that the sofware costs around $1000, you would have to be fairly certain that you could sell around 20 units in the next 6-9 months to justify the private label fee. After the 20th unit is sold you have now “broken even” on the fee and are earning a much higher commission rate than had you just been set up as an affiliate.

People who have large lists and have a target market who can really benefit from the software are the best prospects for private labes.

Why do you care about this when you don’t have any software of your own to sell? Because in the future you might. It is something that can make you a lot of money in your niche if you have a solution that matches their needs.

I promised my friend, Phil Huff a private label of MemberScript and even have a domain name that I’ll be transferring to him as part of our deal.

This isn’t normally the case, but I had a good name that he wanted to use and I made it part of our bargain that we struck.

Should you cut your fees in the early stages to attract private labels for your software. Probably so. Don’t do too much of it and also make sure that one of your conditions of offering the private labels at below market rates is that the person you set up only maintains their private label (50% commission) status if they hit certain volume levels.

What should those levels be? This depends on the the price of your software and the market you are selling to. There is no RIGHT answer to the question.

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My Gift to You

I’d like to give you a gift that has real value, But it also has value to me in giving it to you. Fair enough?

Feel free to use the link: http://www.FredGleeck.com/ebooks as a bonus for any product or service that you sell.

You may even be on this list as a result of having received this link to download 5 of my best books. These books have a combined retail value of close to $80.

Why would I do this? Don’t I want to sell books and make money? Sure, but the the real money is in building a list of rabid fans.

I’d like to give you this link to share with others to help you sell your own products and services and in exchange you’ll be helping me to build my list.

The only thing you can’t do is to use these books as bonuses that you send to people directly without having them get on my list.

If you have books or other downloadable material I encourage you to do the same. The money is in the list.

A Related Idea

I would also like to have you take a look at: http;//www.FredGleeckSale.com. This is a site I set up for any and all products that I have that are sitting around that I haven’t sold.

Even if you don’t buy anything, look at the site and see how I’ve set it up to give you some ideas for your own products.

I use this site to do my own “remaindering. When you go into Borders or Barnes and Noble they always have a discount bin. This is used to sell products that are a little old or scuffed or aren’t moving at the price they were originally set at.

In my case the materials are good, they are just a bit dated and all of the ones on the site right now happen to be on audio cassette.

There are many peoples materials I would love to get on cassette if I could get them at the right price. I’m sure you feel the same.

Take a look at this site and then set up your own.

Try and get www.YourNameSale.com or something like that.

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Lots of information for one email, but I had a lot inside me. Thanks for taking the time to read it all! I always appreciate feedback, so let me know what you thought.