Beyond the Radio Interview

Last week I was in Nashville with some of our Morgan James authors for another great event. It was similar to the event I detailed in March (follow the link if you didn’t read it). It was another distinct event to help and train our authors (a scarce activity across publishing from my experience).

I met a number of authors that I’ve brought to Morgan James for the first time which was fun after speaking with them on the phone and email for months.

One of these authors had done over 40 radio interviews—which is fantastic and to be commended. There are thousands of radio stations which are eager to interview authors and it is another terrific way to promote your book and give it exposure. If you don't know or use radio, follow the insights in this article about radio.

This author was saying the interviews barely made any impact with his book sales. I asked if he had saved the audio recording of his interview for on-going promotion. He looked at me with a blank stare and said no. It showed me that I’m taking an additional step with my radio interviews that some authors are missing. In this article, I want to show you how to preserve the interview for on-going promotion. You've invested your time and energy into the radio interview. How can you maximize and repurpose the interview for even more use than the single station?

The first step is to book an interview and give a solid interview. When you speak to the radio host, you need to pour a lot of effort into the interview. Stand up and walk around your office if this helps you have more energy. Answer every question with enthusiasm as though you are hearing it for the first time.

Radio hosts are busy and often work from  a list of questions that the author or the publicist provide them. I’ve answered the same questions over and over yet each time I act as though it is the first time I’m hearing the question. It is a basic that you need to provide a great interview.

To move beyond the interview, ask for a recording of the interview. Sometimes the radio station will put it on their site after the interview. Other times if you ask, they will email the audio file to you. You have to ask for it or search for it and preserve this audio file.

With this audio file in your possession  the next step is to  listen to it. Is it a solid recording? Do you need to cut out local commercials or anything to make it universal and just your interview? 

I use an audio program called SoundForge for this editing process.  Just like Microsoft Word edits words, you can use SoundForge to edit audio files.

I create or check to make sure I have a solid recording of my interview. Next I upload the audio file to my own hosting site. If I just link to the interview from someone else's site, they are in control and I've had these links disappear. When I put it on my own site, I know the interview is always going to be available online and never disappear. You have to make sure you preserve the interview on a site that you control.

The final step is to  incorporate this interview into your on-going social media efforts (Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn). Here’s an example from one of my radio interviews about my Billy Graham book (click on the photo to see the real links in this tweet and try out the interview):

The interview was recorded months ago, yet because it was a morning radio show, it sounds like it happened yesterday. The listener doesn’t need to know the real date.

Because I reuse these interviews, people will regularly email me saying they heard my interview and compliment me. I respond with gratitude and never say when it actually happened (not relevant information for that listener). These recordings continue to promote and drive book sales and exposure for my book—long after the interview.

It does not happen  without the author taking control and action. Are you preserving your radio interviews for on-going promotion?

Tell me about it in the comments section below.

Tweetable:

Doing Radio Interviews? How can you use them more than once? Get details here.  (ClickToTweet)
 

Use Your Content In a New Way

If you write on a regular basis (magazine articles, blog, or books), then you are constantly generating a steady stream of content. If you speak on a regular basis or teach on any subject, then you have a wealth of material.

This article is the first of several to give you some ideas how you can turn this material into a new source of consistent income. I’ve written in the past about repurposing your content but with your own membership site, you take remaking your content to a new level of potential. I’m suggesting you start your own membership site. In fact, I’ve developed a complete product to show you much more indepth than this short article. Here’s where you can learn about the Simple Membership System.

The first step is to select your niche and your topic.

Now think about this for a moment…

Your goal is to get members to happily pay you month after month for content. Obviously, that means you need to:

Over-deliver with quality content. You want your members to feel like they’re getting a steal for the price.

Give your members what they want. If you’re just starting your site, then look to the top-selling products in your niche to see what your target market is already paying for.

But here’s something else…

In order to get your members paying month after month, you need to be able to make them look forward to each upcoming lesson. And the best way to do that is by creating a membership site around a step-by-step process. That is, your lessons teach your members how to achieve a specific result.

You see, if you just provide tips and tricks for your members, there’s no sense of continuity. Your members don’t develop as strong of a psychological commitment to staying a member, because they won’t have a need to see the course through until the end.

Now imagine having numbered steps and lessons instead. When someone is receiving lesson 10 of a step-by-step process, they’ve made an investment of time and money into learning the process – so they are less likely to “bail” before they’ve received all the steps.

Let me give you a few examples of sites that teach a specific achievement or result using a step-by-step process:

• How to start an online business.
• How to write a sales letter.
• How to choose, train and raise a puppy.
• How to adopt a child.
• How to homeschool your child.

Now let me give you an example of what a 12-week online marketing course might look like:

Step 1: Choose a niche.
Step 2: Market research.
Step 3: Plan your sales funnel.
Step 4: Get a domain and hosting.
Step 5: Get an autoresponder.
Step 6: Write your autoresponder messages.
Step 7: Create a squeeze page.
Step 8: Product creation part 1 – research and outline.
Step 9: Product creation part 2 – create and polish.
Step 10: Create a sales letter.
Step 11: Drive traffic – free methods
Step 12: Drive traffic – paid methods.

Notice how each step builds on the previous step.

It starts with a member not even having an idea for a niche… and ends with the member driving traffic to a sales letter and making money.

In other words, if the member completes the steps as the course progresses, he or she should be able to enjoy a specific achievement or result by the end of the course.

Note: The above example is a 12-week course. Naturally, you could easily stretch this out to a year or more by creating more steps and more in-depth steps. You could go on indefinitely as long as you kept providing more advanced info as the course progressed.

One final tip…

To keep your customers happy, make sure that they are progressing and enjoying results right from the beginning.

Example: If you create a yearlong course, don’t stretch out the process for a year. Instead, give the step-by-step instructions your customers need to experience some type of results immediately (within a few weeks or month after joining) and then provide more in-depth instructions as the course progresses.

In short: Satisfy your customers’ needs for instant gratification while still providing the continuity that will keep them as a member. You’ll learn more about that in Part 2 of this series.

Keep Your Eye On The Product

Sometimes I have been unaware of the product potential in my day to day work. I'm determined to increase my effectiveness in this area of my writing life. Otherwise you let time and money slip right through your hands--mostly through not being aware of it.

For example, over the last 15 years, I have taught at numerous writer's conferences around the nation. Typically the conference organizer will have the speaker sign a release form to be able to sell my recording also I'm able to receive a free copy of the recording. I've picked up these recordings, carried them home and tossed them in a desk drawer or a box--and promptly forgotten about them. In this process, I have left a potential product. I gathered several of my sessions about book proposal creation into over three hours of audio recordings and created Editor Reveals Book Proposal Secrets:

This past week, I chatted with about 80 participants on Book Proposal creation at the Muse Online Writer's Conference. I enjoyed answering the various questions and I typed furiously for the entire hour. I attempted to cram as much information into that hour as possible. In addition, before the session, I sent each participant a two-page handout with links to various resources.

I participated in this same conference last year. Here's the difference: last year I never asked (nor received) a copy of the transcript from that chat session. I've gotten wiser about such matters this year so I requested a copy of the transcript.

Now if you have never seen a chat transcript, it's not pretty. I turned on bold for all of my answers so they would show up well for the various participants. Here's a small portion of this seven-page transcript:

Are there different agents for different genres?

W._Terry_Whalin: absolutely. I would be a terrible agent for cookbooks or science fiction for example--since I know almost nothing about that type of book

W._Terry_Whalin: You need to find the agent who works in your material and pitch that person

Basically you write in short bursts because I quickly learned if I wrote too long, then part of my answers would be truncated and how show up for everyone.

I took about an hour today and cleaned up the transcript. I poured my answers into a single paragraph. I added working links throughout the transcript to highlight additional resources (beyond what I recalled off the top of my head during the session). I still need to sweep through it one or two additional times, but the finished transcript is attractive and the double-spaced version is 12 pages of information. Finally I changed my Word document into an Adobe PDF. It's a short report or product that I can use as a bonus item or any number of other possibilities.

Under my old way of operating, I would have pressed on to something else and left that transcript behind. I'm learning to use and repurpose everything that I've created. As you squeeze more products from a single product, you will be able to increase your own effectiveness in the marketplace. I like what Dan Poynter's The Self-Publishing Manual where he encourages you to create as many different forms for the same product as possible. Why? So you can reach the broadest possible audience. For example, some people will prefer listening to your book while others will want to read it in large print.

These types of actions will help you keep an eye on the product. It's something that I'm thinking about and acting on all the time.

Updated Straight Talk

Last October, I wrote about the Amazon Short program as a way for authors to gain additional exposure with a short original article. Some people will recall that I created Straight Talk From The Editor, 18 Keys To A Rejection-Proof Submission as a part of this program. A number of people have purchased this Short and especially when it released it was the number one ranked Short at Amazon. Part of the arrangement with this Amazon program is that they receive an exclusive arrangement on the material for the first six months then they switch into a non-exclusive arrangement. I suspect many of the authors have pressed on to other things and don’t think about this arrangement.

Over the last few weeks, I've been working toward using Straight Talk From The Editor for some other purposes. It's part of the suggestions I've made to repurpose content. I took the edited version of this manuscript and updated it for my own purposes. I added links into the PDF file which will be a greater benefit for the reader. Plus I've switched from working for a publisher to being a literary agent since Straight Talk From the Editor released. I wanted the updated version to appear as professional as the Amazon version. With a brief Google search, I learned about Ebooks Graphics.com which sells templates for Ebooks along with simple instructions for using it. I created this version of Straight Talk From the Editor as you can see from this different graphic.

How do I get the maximum use for this updated version? I'm still working out the details but I have a partial answer with this entry about The Writing Life. I used Marketing Makeover Generator to create a squeeze page. If you don't know the term "squeeze page" it's a place where you send people to give their first name and email address. When they give this information, you give them the item or in this case they get Straight Talk From The Editor as a free download. Marketing Makeover Generator is simple to use and I've arranged for you to have a trial subscription if you click this link.

I created the form and made it easy to locate and download with this new link: http://www.straighttalkeditor.com/.

Why go to such effort? It is another means to collect first name and email addresses so I can continue to increase the number of subscribers to my free Right-Writing News.

OK, here's my question for you: can you follow my steps and do the same thing? Absolutely. Literary agents, acquisitions editors and publishing executives are looking for people with visibility in the marketplace or some people call it platform. I see it all the time with some good writers who have good ideas--yet they are stuck marketing and remarketing their single book manuscript. It doesn't matter if they have written nonfiction or fiction because I see it in both cases. Maybe they have written for a few magazines (which I recommend) but they have never started a newsletter or have not done the work to continually increase the size of their newsletter list (get this free resource, download it and read it). They do not understand why their good material is consistently rejected. The reason is simple: it takes a tremendous effort for a publisher to push and promote a new author into the marketplace. It's not impossible and it is done but infrequently.

As a book author, you need to do everything you can do to increase your attractiveness and value to the publisher. Last week I was listening to Mark Victor Hansen from the Mega Book Marketing University last March and he said that to get into the bestselling area of the book market, you needed to have at least 100,000 people on your newsletter list. Doesn't that sound like an impossible dream? It's not everyone has to begin some place. Make a plan and get started today.

And if you can, spread the news about my free resource, Straight Talk From the Editor.

Add Value With Repurposed Content

Recently I wrote about the value of repurposed content. As writers and editors, we have a lot of this material which is "hanging around." Are you using it?

In the next few weeks, I will be releasing a new product into the marketplace. It is premature to write about the specifics but I can tell you about the process and hopefully help some of you readers to think creatively about some of your material and how it can be repurposed.

I'm still in the preparation stage to release this new product. I have purchased a website address and I'm in the process of building a landing page. If you don't know this term, landing page, it is a one-page website with persuasive words where someone can purchase the new product. If you want to learn more in depth about this process, I'd encourage you to pick up a copy of Bob Bly's four audio CD set called The Internet Marketing Retirement Plan. While many people try to make the Internet marketing process into something complex (and charge an expensive price to teach it to you), Bob and Fred Gleeck reduce it into three simple steps. This set of CDs is packed with information. I've listened to all of it twice and learn something new each time. I'm sure I would benefit from a third session with it.

While there are several key factors to building a good landing page, one portion of the process is adding some bonus items to the purchase which have value for the customer. Some times I will purchase a product not because of that particular product but because of the attractive bonus which comes with that product. I suspect my buying habits are fairly typical in this area.

As I was considering the possibilities for the bonus items, I turned to something which has been sitting around in my desk drawer for several years. I’ve been traveling around the United States and Canada teaching at various writers' conferences. Usually, my workshops are recorded and I receive a copy of the CD presentation. Normally I pick it up at the conference (if available), tuck it into my carry-on luggage and bring it home. When I unpack, I put the workshop into my desk drawer where it is not replayed and does absolute zero good for anyone (including me).

Over the last few months, I've been listening to the CDs from Mega Book Marketing University 2006 and Mega Book Marketing University 2007. Each of these presentations begins and ends with the same jazzy little tune. From the instant you turn on the program, the music begins and it mentally prepares you for the next speaker. In simplistic terms, it's called branding and each of these CDs are branded or connected through the music. I've learned this music is called "needle music" and if you search for it online, you can find many different vendors for royalty-free music.

Let's turn back to my need for some bonus items for my forthcoming product. I turned to these workshops which have been taught before live audiences and is my material in a readily available format. In a relatively short amount of time, I extracted the workshop from the CD, selected a short piece of needle music, then branded the workshops so they contain identical music at the beginning and the end of the workshop. I know almost nothing about how to edit audio tapes. I used a program called Sound Forge which is menu-driven and simple to use. Just like you can use Microsoft Word to edit a text file, you can use Sound Forge to edit an audio program. If you are wondering about the illustration for this entry, it is the Sound Forge editing program from my computer. The little blue lines are audio music which I was editing.

The editing process wasn't a chore but actually fun. I snipped out some silence at the beginning of my workshop and added a few seconds of the music introduction. Then I moved to the end of the workshop and again cut out some silence so it ended with some applause from the audience. Then I added a few more seconds of the same music. Now my workshops are a package and I've repurposed my content. These audio workshops will become a valuable addition to my product.

Here's my question with this entry about The Writing Life: what are you doing with your material to repurpose it and add value to your products? Explore the possibilities and the results may surprise you.

The Value of Repurposed Content

Yesterday during The Talking Book Show with Stacy Hawkins Adams, I spent almost an hour and a half talking about different aspects of book proposals. If you missed the live program, you can still download the entire interview and listen to it on your own schedule. Just follow the link.

I know the replay is available because after the program, I went to the site, checked on it, then downloaded the program. Why? In situations like this in the past, I would have pressed on to the next writing project or my next radio interview. I'm grateful for the opportunity to help would-be writers to understand more about the book publishing world and to promote my Book Proposals That Sell. Over the last 20 years, I've spent the majority of that time writing original content. I've learned a great deal about how to write for various magazines and how to write different types of books for different ages and styles. I've moved from project to project. Yet in recent years, I've tried to be wiser about the value of repurposed content. If you don't know what I'm talking about, stay with me because I'm going to explain it.

Probably about 15 years ago, I attended a workshop at a writer’s conference with the topic of reselling reprints. While I can't recall the specific author, she was a master at reselling her magazine work and normally had about 1,000 of her reprints in circulation at any given time. When one of her submissions came back rejected, she had a system to send it to another magazine and get it into the consideration process. That effort on her part was adding considerable income and exposure to her work in the marketplace. At the time, I was writing for a number of magazines. I tried to remarket the reprints and did place a number of them and earn some more income from it. But in general, I found it to be a bothersome experience which didn't bear as much fruit as writing original material. I chalked it up to experience and returned to my bent of crafting original content for another magazine or another book project. To me at that time, it seemed more productive. I didn't understand the value of repurposed content.

I downloaded The Talking Book Show interview because I can use that material for something else related to marketing my book proposal material. I can do some minor edits and even rebrand the program with music at the beginning and the end or a new introduction using Sound Forge. The process isn't complicated or time-consuming. I can use this interview in a promotional effort or as a bonus when someone purchases another product or any number of other ways. I can only use it if I'm taking advantage of this content and intentionally repurposing it. If I press on to another project where I am creating original material, I leave behind a potentially valuable asset.

One of the best examples of how I've repurposed content is with my Book Proposals That Sell. When I signed my contract on the trade paperback, I kept the exclusive electronic rights to the material. In other words, I can sell the ebook version for whatever price and do whatever I want with it. I turned the book into an ebook which is a part of my affiliate program and continues to sell. It takes a bit of planning for the writer to take this step. First you have to protect your rights and make sure you control whatever you need to control in order to repurpose the content. Next you need to proactively move that repurposed material into the marketplace.

I continue to write original material and I'm not pretending to have all the answers about how to repurpose my content into other forms such as an audio or an ebook or a home study course. The possibilities are endless if you are open to the concept.