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Mike: We’re talking with Luis Alverez again. Is this our 3 rd installment, Luis?

Luis: That’s right.

Mike: We’re doing a section of your favorite bookmarks on things related to…

Luis: Creating e-books.

Mike: Creating e-books. And what is an e-book?

Luis: An e-book is just a regular book but it is completely digital. You’re able to create it on your computer and set it up so that way people can read it and be able to read it on their computer. You can also deliver it to a computer right through the Internet.

Mike: How would being able to create e-books, and being able to deliver them on the internet, how does that benefit anyone who is interested in creating and selling informational products?

Luis: When you’re creating a regular book you have to pay for the printing, the typesetting, the actual delivery, the shipment of the book, and the cost of creating the cover art. All these things are all extra costs that go into creating an actual physical book. But the information is still the same, so why not, instead, deliver your product digitally to everyone who needs it out through the internet? Instead of having only national distribution or local distribution, you have international distribution at the click of the mouse.

Mike: Are people making money selling e-books?

Luis: Of definitely. A lot of people are making money selling e-books.

Mike: Tell us some stories that you’ve read about people who had success with e-books and how many people actually download these things?

Luis: People download these things by the millions. It all depends on your marketing, of course, and different things like that. If you go to www.amazon.com or Barnes & Nobles they have their own e-book section. Stephen King even came out with a serial of e-books. It’s like you got the first one for free, the first chapter and if you liked the e-book, then you pay subsequently for the rest of them to keep going on and find out the rest of the story. That was definitely a big success and I forget how many people exactly downloaded it but it was a huge number.

Mike: So you can actually put your e-book up on Amazon?

Luis: You can put your e-book up on Amazon. That’s one way you can do it or you can even create your website for it. There are also directories that feature a whole bunch of e-books that people can either download for free or buy. That’s another great use of e-books - you can give it away as a free offer and it’ll promote other services you do or promote other products or just your website.

Mike: Let’s go over some of these bookmarks and show us some of these websites that have some of these tools that will make this process simple for anyone who wants to do this.

Luis: Okay. First let me just go over a couple of things before we do that so that people can get a little more background of what it is that we’re talking about, as far as e-books go. There are just so many things that people think, “Oh, I’m not great enough. I don’t know anything. I’m not able to create my own book. Who am I? Why is anyone going to listen to me?” All these things, throw them right out the window. If you’re listening to this right now, you have it inside you to create your own e-book, print it online, distribute it, sell it and make money - even if you’re totally new to this. Even if you haven’t had years of experience in any field before, you can still write about any topic, as long as you’re willing to research it.

Mike: Okay.

Luis: So the number one place to research is Google. We’re going to go right now to Google Answers. The website is www.answers.googles.com

Mike: Okay.

Luis: We covered this in one of the other interviews that we did; however I wanted to go over it a little more in depth. Google Answers basically is a service where people ask questions of experts. Google has hired and these experts and they search the Internet to find the information that you need.

Mike: Anything that you want to know?

Luis: Anything that you want to know. If you go right there, the topics that they cover are: Arts & Entertainment, Business & Money, Computers, Family & Home, Health, Education, Relationships & Society, Science, Sports & Recreation and Miscellaneous Stuff.

Mike: All right.

Luis: Now just listen to some of those topics. I’m already coming up with a whole bunch of different ideas that you can create from those different things. Family and Home… let’s say I found 101 products that ideas that you can use to clean your home, or inexpensive ways to teach your child new lessons. There are so many different things that you can do.

Mike: Right.

Luis: Here, many people have already asked questions and they’ve already been answered. You can browse through them, get the answers, and maybe get an idea to expand that into an entire book.

Mike: Exactly, you’re finding out what questions people have and it’s a good chance that someone has asked this question on Google Answers. There’s a marketplace of thousands of other people who may want to know the answer to the same exact question.

Luis: That’s right and in a little while I’m going to show you another resource that you can go right into that exact idea a lot more in depth.

Mike: So, in a way, this Google has questions and answers and may have written this book for you.

Luis: Basically you can use this page to get started

Mike: Great.

Luis: Do you want to go through some of these?

Mike: Why don’t we go through one example? Let’s say that I’m a business, and that I’m looking for an e-book to put together that I can market to my mailing list of people who have requested my free cd-rom. Let’s say I don’t even want to sell it, but I would like to put a nice e-book together just as a bonus and a thank you for people doing business with me. I’m going to go to Business & Money.

Luis: Okay.

Mike: All right.

Luis: So now we’re in Business & Money. We can cover ideas for marketing; for advertising, accounting consulting. There are more things like that if you want to be able find different subjects that you can use.

Mike: Right.

Luis: Okay.

Mike: Let’s go to Advertising & Marketing.

Luis: Okay.

Mike: What’s the first one you see?

Luis: Advertising to Polish IT professionals.

Mike: Okay.

Luis: Actually that one hasn’t been answered just yet.

Mike: But you can see the status; it’ll show you whether it’s been answered.

Luis: Here you go, “Harm that credit cards do to college students. It’s a perfect one.”

Mike: Okay, where is that?

Luis: The fourth one down.

Mike: “Harm That Credit Cards Do To College Students.” I’m going to click on that ivory link?

Luis: Yes

Mike: It has the price. What does that price mean?

Luis: The price is what that person who asked the question was willing to pay in order to get the answer.

Mike: Okay.

Luis: Okay, so once someone answers their questions, they would pay that person the $5

Mike: Yes.

Luis: You’ll notice that it doesn’t really matter how much you pay - it’s just the quality of the question that you ask.

Mike: Right

Luis: The better the question that you ask, the more chances it’ll get answered.

Mike: So here’s the question: What are the effects to college students of credit card usage? Anything on how this harms college students? How do credit card companies market college students while attending the schools in order to get them to sign up? Is this legal? Any idea for public service announcements?

Luis: Okay. Now if you go through this, this one has already been answered. You can see here it all ready tells what it does to the students and it has links to find out more information.

Mike: Right.

Luis: It keeps going. How credit companies market the student’s and things to look out for. How things are not illegal, but the rules are changing. And it’s just so much information on here and you can create a book out of it. You can make a free report, or as a manual, that you want to give out to parents to be able to have their kids more informed. I know when I went to college, there was, every couple of steps, a table there with somebody handing out free gifts if you sign up for a credit card.

Mike: I remember too.

Luis: I don’t know about you, but I don’t like being in debt.

Mike: Me neither.

Luis: Not bad debt, anyway.

Mike: No. That’s great. Do you think this stuff is copywrited?

Luis: I don’t believe this stuff is copywrited. Besides, I wouldn’t submit just the way it is. I would want to change it myself. I would want to change it to something that is easily readable by people.

Mike: But look at all the work that’s been done. The researcher has taken time to go out there to search the Internet to compile, to organize, to type, to have the correct spelling, to put it in paragraphs, and create a report for that $5. All the hard work has been done.

Luis: Yes. Personally, I would change it around a little bit but, yes you are right. It is pretty good, pretty well done just the way it is.

Mike: All right. It is incredible. All right, let’s move on.

Luis: Okay.

Mike: Basically, we can find the answers to anything that we want to know?

Luis: Anything you want to know.

Mike: And if it’s not already listed we could sign up and ask the question through Google Answers?

Luis: Yes. The minimum charge is $2.

Mike: Great.

Luis: Okay.

Mike: I’ll give you an example really quickly before we get off the subject. Since you told me about it in our first interview, I went ahead and signed up. My father manufactures a windscreen, for a Cadillac Allant’e. A Cadillac Allant’e is a convertible Cadillac. The top goes down, but when driving with the top down, it’s really windy. He owns one and created this windscreen that blocks the wind from blowing in the cockpit while you are driving. He sells them to Cadillac Allant’e owners all over the country. Now he wants to create a tunnel cover, which is basically a car cover like the old MG’s used to have. We’re looking for a double-sided sticky tape that can be sewed onto a leather fabric and then stuck to the car so that e it will adhere to the paint of the car but, you can pull it off without damaging the paint. It would have to be reusable. I posted that question on Google Answers, and I put a price of $30. If we can find this stuff, we’ve solved the problem of making these tunnel covers and selling them. We got the most incredible answer back from our researcher. She gave us 10 different links to different tape manufacturers. It’s almost a little too extensive. It didn’t quite answer the question, but with Google Answers you can go back and make a clarification before you pay.

Luis: Yes.

Mike: So we went back and made a clarification and said well, “We’re specifically looking for this.” Then she did some more research. You’re able to have an open dialog with the researcher - so you don’t pay until you get the exact answer you want.

Luis: Yes. That’s the great service about them.

Mike: I don’t have to spend time searching all over the Internet for this tape. For $30, it’s been done.

Luis: Yes. You’re already a success story practically.

Mike: Yes. I’ll tell you another: I posted a message on there and I said, “I’m looking for a source of yellow page phone books - an internet source, where I can view, online, all the printed yellow page Ads in the country.” Do you see what I’m saying? It’s like being at a library having every phone book in the country in front of you. You can look at the yellow page ads and see samples of successful ads. I have someone working on that for $20. They haven’t found it yet, but they are in the process of looking.

Luis: Wow. That’s good.

Mike: Wouldn’t that be cool?

Luis: That would be very cool.

Mike: Boy, if I do find the source I will share it with all my listeners.

Luis: You better.

Mike: And you can do the same.

Luis: All right.

Mike: All right, let’s move on.

Luis: The next part is on how to be able to find ideas through newsletters and e-zines There are so many subscribers to these e-zines and newsletters and they are always asking the authors questions about whatever it is that e-zine or newsletter. So you can go in and ask the editor or writer, “What questions do your subscribers ask you most frequently?”

Mike: Okay.

Luis: And from that you can create your e-book.

Mike: Okay. So what’s this website?

Luis: This website is www.e-zineuniverse.com . It’s an e-mail newsletter directory. This one actually has 7,875 e-zines listed.

Mike: Wow.

Luis: Right now. Okay? So you can go through it and you can put in a keyword or you search through each one.

Mike: For anyone who doesn’t know what an e-zine is, what is it?

Luis: It is an electronic digital newsletter that’s sent to you through your e-mail.

Mike: Okay.

Luis: It’s just like a newsletter, but instead of in print, they send it right to your e-mail and you can read it on your computer.

Mike: Okay.

Luis: Okay. Let’s try “Business and Economy.”

Mike: All right.

Luis: So now we’re getting there and we can see all the different listings. There’s 538 different business e-zines.

Mike: Right.

Luis: For marketing alone, there are 687 of those.

Mike: Wow. Let’s click on “Marketing” and see what’s there.

Luis: We’ve got in here “Internet Public Relations Discussion Lists,” “Networking Gazette,” “Banner Tips.” The list goes on and on.

Mike: Okay.

Luis: On down a little bit you can see, it’s the 5 th one down and it’s called “The Marketing Experiment Journal.”

Mike: Okay. Have you heard of this one?

Luis: I haven’t seen it yet, but if you click on to it, it should take you right to the link to be able to subscribe to it.

Mike: Okay.

Luis: Actually they changed their link you got to go to their home page.

Mike: Should I get out of their home page?

Luis: Yes. Get out of their home page. Go back.

Mike: All right.

Luis: The real interesting part is that, many times, you get to see a circulation list, which is 5,000 people on this newsletter.

Mike: Where do you see the circulation?

Luis: Okay right under where it says “Marketing and strategy.”

Mike: I see it.

Luis: It says 5,000 people are subscribed to this particular e-zine.

Mike: Okay.

Luis: Now Mike how much does it usually cost if you go to a mailing list and get names? The minimum is about 5,000 Right? Right here is also where you can test out. If you created a product, you can do a joint venture or partner up with them and mail out your product to these 5,000 people. There’s your test.

Mike: So these are the owners of this e-zines? Right?

Luis: Correct.

Mike: This is really incredible. Is this the site for e-zines? www.ezineuniverse.com ?

Luis: This isn’t the site; this is one of the tops.

Mike: Wow.

Luis: Okay. There isn’t any real e-zine site.

Mike: Tell me, you were talking about with these e-zines. You can post a question to the e-zine publisher, or owner, of what their most commonly asked questions are?

Luis: Correct. Just go in there and ask them. Get their regular e-mail address.

Mike: Yeah.

Luis: I could say. “Hey, I’m a marketer and I’m looking to create an e-book. I love what you’ve done with your website and I’m sure you have a receive a lot of questions. Maybe we can partner up and I can create an e-book. We could offer it to your subscribers.” My first e-books that I did was with Jim Straw.

Mike: Okay.

Luis: The way I created it was I had access to his newsletters and I was always reading it. One of the questions, I notice, that everyone was always asking was, “How do I find ‘finder fees’ on the Internet?”

Mike: Right.

Luis: Jim wasn’t a great computer guy, but he knew about finder fees. So I said, “You know what? Let me create the e-book.” I offered it to him to sell to his newsletter subscribers. He accepted it, and it’s been very successful and I’ve been very happy with it.

Mike: That’s great. And you also have a joint venture manual that you sell on your site that has a couple form letters that you can just copy and sent to these e-zine people for joint ventures, right?

Luis: Oh definitely. That joint venture manual has everything you need to be able to create partnerships with e-zine subscribers or even website owners.

Mike: That’s incredible. I actually was just sending a guy a link to your joint venture sales letter. He was interested in buying some tapes from me, and I was telling him about your joint venture manual, so he’s going to read the letter and may to buy one. We’ll work something out.

Luis: Oh. That’s perfect.

Mike: This is incredible! I can’t wait to get back and check this stuff out. This is really, really, really good.

Luis: All right.

Mike: Okay. What’s next?

Luis: Let’s go to the next one. This next one is another directory of e-zines. It’s called www.free-zineweb.com . Go there and scroll down a bit and you’ll see a directory of e-zines. There’s’ a whole bunch of other stuff in here as well, but we’re going to focus on this part.

Mike: Okay. I got it.

Luis: Lets try one. Click on “Business.”

Mike: Okay.

Luis: All right. Now this is all the different directories that are listed under “Business.” You have “Advertising,” “Affiliate programs,” “Joint Ventures,” “Marketing,” “Multi-level Marketing,” “Patent” - all these different categories.

Mike: Right.

Luis: Let’s click on “Business” again.

Mike: Okay.

Luis: Now these are all the e-zines that are listed in here. These will keep you busy.

Mike: Oh yeah.

Luis: Now. Let’s try just the first one: “Forward to online success tips and general.”

Mike: Okay.

Luis: Now what does this look like? Doesn’t it look similar to what you can get from the SRDS manual?

Mike: Yes. It sure does.

Luis: Okay. Here is where you get to find out what these e-zine are: the key words, how often it’s published, and other information. Twice a month is about right - if you get an e-zine that’s posting to their subscribers daily, it can get a little bogged down and people aren’t going to pay much attention to your message.

Mike: Right.

Luis: This one here has over 2,000 subscribers. That’s a nice size.

Mike: Yeah.

Luis: Some of the ones you see on here have 50,000+.

Mike: Right.

Luis: You see their e-mail contact? And something about free ads to new subscribers?

Mike: Oh man.

Luis: They have ad swapping available. You can also pay for ads, but they only have an average of 10 ads per issue. You may be fighting a little bit. An idea that you might want is to ask about joint venturing or get a personal endorsement from that marketer.

Mike: Right.

Luis: Granted, you probably not going to make as much money as if you would just buying an ad from them, but you’ll have a lot more exposure or quality stuff.

Mike: Yeah. These guys got to come out with an e-zine twice a month. Some do it twice a week. Look at that. They are looking for good content.

Luis: That’s another thing. Yes.

Mike: I mean, I can just sit there and e-mail these people and say, “I’m looking to buy hard to find seminars. You may want to let your subscribers know if they need to make some quick cash on some old tapes that they have sitting around, send them a link to my site.”

Luis: Actually, if you scroll down a little bit, they actually tell you that articles are accepted. Yes.

Mike: Wow.

Luis: And they tell you the article guidelines.

Mike: Wow. This is great. That’s excellent. Excellent.

Luis: All these links are all similar. Some will tell you subscriber amounts, some won’t. Some of them won’t accept articles. That does not change the rules - it doesn’t matter.

Mike: And these are different from newsgroups, aren’t they?

Luis: These are different from newsgroups. Yes. I’m going to show you newsgroups in a little bit.

Mike: Okay.

Luis: These are e-zines that are sent to your e-mail.

Mike: Right.

Luis: Newsgroups are different, because, with newsgroups, you actually go to the website and you look though it. It’s more like an outline of different questions and answers that people submit.

Mike: Right.

Luis: Let’s move on down to the next one.

Mike: All right.

Luis: Now you have your free e-zines and you have the ideas you want to create. Now you need to know a little bit of the form and structure of an e-book. You want some ideas for what your e-zine e-book will look like. This next site lists different types of e-books.

Mike: What’s the website called?

Luis: It’s called www.free-e-books.net

Mike: www.Free-e-books.net . I’m there.

Luis: Okay.

Mike: All right.

Luis: Here we have a whole list of them. We have fiction. Maybe you don’t want to do a non-fiction book. Maybe you have a great idea for a story, a Science Fiction story or whatever. You can create your own book and sell it that way.

Mike: Okay.

Luis: But here, we have “Business” again. Let’s try clicking on “Business.”

Mike: Why would someone want to offer a free e-book?

Luis: That’s easy: Because people want free information.

Mike: Okay.

Luis: People want free information. You create a free article or a free e-book and you give it away. At the end of your e-book, or even peppered through the e-book, you have links connecting back to your website. These links offer more products that you are either are an affiliated with, or you have a partnership with, or that you own 100%.

Mike: Right.

Luis: It’s just a great way to market your website.

Mike: Wow. Now, weren’t you telling me about a letter that you also used in a joint venture. One about how you can approach the owners of the rights to these e-books and trade rights to different products? How to approach the owner and say, “Would you be willing to license your e-book to me?"

Luis: You could do that. Should you do that, you just ask them, “Hey, I have just created an e-book. I would like to trade it with yours, so I’ll give you the right to my e-book and you give me the rights to yours.” It’s not ordinary competition, but it’s more of an expansion for your resources. You have a new product that you can sell and you can now offer new things to your subscribers.

Mike: Right…or not only that, I’m looking at this website not only as a way to see good ideas on how an e-book is created, because these are all free and its going to be something that we can emulated when we’re creating our own e-books, but I’m talking about creating and developing information products. These people have created a product and you can buy the license. You can license 100 copies of them to take to your e-book, to print it out, and then you can have a printed product right there that you own the rights to.

Luis: Yes. You will have their information so it’s great advertising for them.

Mike: Oh. This is wonderful.

Luis: When you create an e-book, there are different options, which you’ll notice as you look through here. There are different types. There are executables which are actually like little programs in themselves.

Mike: Yes.

Luis: You can have it in Adobe PDF format.

Mike: Okay.

Luis: “pdf” stands for portable document format. I don’t suggest that you create an executable e-book.

Mike: Okay.

Luis: The reason is because people send viruses through the Internet, and many times it is in executable programs.

Mike: Okay.

Luis: So people are getting a little wary about opening those types of programs. They don’t know what to expect.

Mike: For anyone who doesn’t know what an “exe” file is, an executable program, please explain that.

Luis: An executable file is just how a program is stored. Whenever you click on your computer and you click on anyone of the links inside your start menu file bar, those are all executables. Those are all the programs that start up automatically, that way you can actually use your computer to do different things, like word processing or whatever.

Mike: Right.

Luis: Now you can also send those as attachments through the internet, through your e-mail, or download it off a website. However many people do send viruses through them. So people tend to get a little bit scared and say, “Hey, I’m not going to open this, I don’t know about this.” And that’s the last thing you want your readers to be thinking.

Mike: Okay.

Luis: So the PDF format totally eliminates that fear, because it does not allow viruses to be sent through it.

Mike: Great.

Luis: We will talk about that later.

Mike: So I’ve clicked on “Business” and I’m looking at “Business e-books.” It says, “We have added 11 new e-books to our career categories.”

Luis: There are a lot more than 11 here.

Mike: Okay.

Luis: Right now, there’s over than 69.

Mike: Should we look at one right now?

Luis: If you want to look at one, that would be great!

Mike: Who wrote this one: “Ask me about the crazy wife. Are you trying to develop your one of a kind business opportunity? Are you an entrepreneur or pioneer in your field or a creative advertiser, copy writer or writer? Are you an inventor or artist who success is largely dependent upon innovation and creative skills? If you answered yes at least once and you need the independent work. This contains yet unknown info regarding creativity. This title takes you through 20 lessons, it teaches you unconventional ways to increase your creativity and stand tall above your competition. This work is updated every week, so when clicking the download link, you will be automatically be taken to our latest version.” Okay, I’m going to click on that.

Luis: Okay. When you click on that, it will take you to the guy’s website.

Mike: Okay.

Luis: Then you have to click a couple of other links, and it will take you to the actual download page that has the exe program.

Mike: I see that. All right we won’t do that. But basically these links will take you to the owner to the e-book’s site or the place where you can download it.

Luis: Now if you want to see what a pdf looks like, scroll down to number 9 or number 11.

Mike: I see it does say pdf format. Is that what customers want, pdf formats?

Luis: You have 2 options. The best way would be for you, if you want to look at the pdf, is to right-click on it with your mouse.

Mike: Right click.

Luis: Then click the “save target as” or “save link as.”

Mike: Okay.

Luis: That way it will save it to your hard drive.

Mike: Okay.

Luis: If you click on it directly, it’ll either tell you it doesn’t work, or it’ll take a while to load using Adobe Acrobat.

Mike: Unless you have a cable modem.

Luis: Yes. Exactly.

Mike: Okay.

Luis: Your best bet is to save it, otherwise its really going to slow it on your system.

Mike: Someone can do that and take a look at what a pdf looks like. Tell them where to go and get the Adobe software. It’s a free download, which will give you the ability to view a pdf file on your computer. Where can they get that?

Luis: You can go to www.adobe.com

Mike: Okay.

Luis: Go to www.adobe.com , and you’re going to find a little icon there, a giant eyeball. Go down below it, to where you see a button that says “Get Acrobat reader.” Follow the links from there and you should be able to download it.

Mike: This is incredible for creating products and looking at samples of other e-books.

Luis: That’s right.

Mike: Let’s move on.

Luis: Okay. Let’s say that you got your idea, and even before you go looking through the newsletters, maybe you want to go the more traditional route. You want traditional newsletters or mailing lists that are out there and find out are a lot of people interested in the similar things you’re thinking about. One of the best ways to do that is the www.SDDS.com

Mike: Okay.

Luis: This is our old trusted friend. Mike, why don’t you telling them a little bit the SRDS. I know this is one of your favorites.

Mike: All right. The SRDS is what I use for direct mail. This gives you the ability to search every single mailing list that is out there on the market. The SRDS is the clearinghouse, the grand daddy of them all. If you we’re a business who wanted to rent a list, this is the one source that you can view over 10,000 different direct mail lists. So let’s say you think of a product like these new mops coming out on the market. Any product - consumer product, or business product or mailing list you can think of - you can go to this SRDS. It’s going to cost you about $575 for a year’s membership and it allows you to search for different mailing lists. So for instance, Bill Meyers is one of my favorite marketing teachers. He tells you, “Don’t be stupid and try to come up with a product then go find a market, because you’re taking chances that way. You’re going to be much better off find a market and creating a product for that market.”

We use SRDS and we want to work in a market that we enjoy. Let’s say, if you have a wife and she just had a baby, you’ll understand what a huge market that is. Women are still getting pregnant - they are always having babies. When you have a baby, you spend money on all kinds of things. You spend money on formula, on diapers, on cribs, things that you absolutely have to spend money on. So let’s say that I’ve created an information product or an e-book that I own the right to print out and I got a hard copy e-book that shows women who just had babies how to save 30% on diapers and other products.

You’ll be amazed when you have a kid, how many diapers a baby goes through each day, and how expensive it gets. Any women with a baby would raise their hand and would want to know that information. “How to save 30% on diapers - until your kids are out of diapers.” That would be a great little product. I could rent a mailing list of other companies that are selling non-competing products to mothers who are having babies.

For instance, there may be clothing companies that have a mailing list of 50,000 names every month. These are women buy maternity clothes or who buy formula. There are so many lists! I can approach that list manager who is handling that list and say, “I’m interested in renting that list." I have a contact name. I have a price of how much I’m going to pay per name. I have how much what the minimum order is. I have information on how much that person on the list has spent on that item. So, if they spent $100 on a case of formula, I know that this is a buyer of formula and I have all the information on them. So I can rent that list, send out a sales letter to the list for my new report on how to save money on diapers, and have a lot better chance of succeeding than creating a product on my own and then finding a market. Does that make sense?

Luis: That definitely makes sense.

Mike: It’s incredible research. Not only that… you can contact the list broker and say, “Okay, list broker, I would like to see how many other people have rented this list in the last year.” Let’s say the lists are of the buyers of infant formulas - they’ll send me an itemized list of what other companies are mailing to the list. So you’ll see if it’s a hot list or not, based on who else is mailing to it.

Luis: That’s right.

Mike: And it’s just amazing. You can figure out a company’s gross revenue. You can figure out how many sales they’re getting each month. You can also, with some research, find out where they’re advertising. You can have all the information on a company through a little research on directories like this.

Luis: Yes.

Mike: You can go through the SRDS, and read more about it there, but that’s my two cents worth.

Luis: I know, for many people, the SRDS can be a little expensive. One of the best resources is your public library. Go to the central branch, that’s your best chance of finding it, and talk to the librarians there and ask them for the SRDS Manual.

Mike: Exactly. I’ll tell you what I did. This is how I get a free subscription every year: I sign up for SRDS and I pay about $575. I have access to the online version of the SRDS, the digital version, which is perfect for me because I’m in front of the computer. They will also send you 6 issues every 2 months. They’ll send you the big book of the entire updated list. You get it, you place an ad up on Ebay, and you sell them each for about $150 to $175. You just a free subscription for the year and you’ve made some money on the deal.

Luis: That’s a great idea.

Mike: That’s all you have to do.

Luis: Always using your assets wisely.

Mike: That’s right. Now let’s move on.

Luis: Okay. Before we go on, you have to create your own product or, if you can’t create your own product, you have to buy the rights to it. I don’t know if you noticed, but there are many websites out there that will sell you rights to a 1000 different “How To” reports.

Mike: I’ve seen that.

Luis: I personally think a lot of them are outdated, or their garbage. They’re really not worth it, just because so many people have bought them. You’re really competing against all these other people who bought the list.

Mike: Okay.

Luis: I don’t like competition. I like being able to totally turn the playing field over to my direction.

Mike: Right

Luis: Now let’s say, you just want to at least take a look at these reports. I’ve gone and I found you all of those reports that they have on there - but now I got them for you for free.

Mike: How’s that?

Luis: Let’s go to the next website that we have here. Now the website you are on is a little long, but if you go to the…

Mike: Link below?

Luis: The link below that, you’ll going to be right there.

Mike: “Articles e-zines e-books.” Click on this whole thing?

Luis: Yes.

Mike: Okay.

Luis: Now these little “How To” reports - they’re free to steal. They have zero copyrights on them.

Mike: www.makingprofits.com is the website.

Luis: www.makingprofits.com you have click on the free stuff button.

Mike: Free to steal?

Luis: No. If you’re going to www.makingprofits.com , on the left hand side, click on the “Free Stuff” button, and it will take you to where we are.

Mike: I got it

Luis: Click on “How To Reports.” These are free to steal. You can do whatever you want with them.

Mike: Right.

Luis: Okay. There are thousands and thousands of reports.

Mike: How did you find this?

Luis: I’m just that good.

Mike: Do you know more about this website? Who put this thing up?

Luis: I don’t know exactly who put this up, but he also sells his other products and things like that. But these are all the reports that are in those deals. You can buy 1000’s of reports and sell them.

Mike: Wow.

Luis: Why buy that crap when you can get it here for free?

Mike: Wow. That’s incredible.

Luis: This is great because, also, you have all these different resources to create your own products with.

Mike: Right.

Luis: You can just take it. These articles have already been written for you to use.

Mike: Okay.

Luis: Let’s look at one.

Mike: All Right.

Luis: You want “Marketing Papers”? “Hot Reports”?

Mike: How about “Marketing Papers.”

Luis: “Marketing Papers” or…

Mike: “Scientific Advertising”!

Luis: Good. The entire e-book is right there.

Mike: Wow. This is great!

Luis: It’s all right there for you.

Mike: It’s by Claude Hopkins. Here’s the whole book.

Luis: Exactly and you can offer this for free on your website.

Mike: Wow.

Luis: Because the copyright has expired on “Scientific Advertising”.

Mike: Wow. That’s great.

Luis: Okay, now lets go back to see one of the other ones. Let’s check out the 743 listed under “How To."

Mike: Okay.

Luis: In here are 14 other directories of report.

Mike: Right.

Luis: Click on the first one.

Mike: Okay.

Luis: These are all the different reports. Granted, you sift through them to actually see what they are.

Mike: Right.

Luis: But there are so many options that you have. The first one is about being able to make money by watching television.

Mike: Wow.

Luis: That’s a whole report right there.

Mike: Okay.

Luis: So these are all the different reports you have in there for any type of “How To.” Be it cleaning. Be it creating your own business. Be it how to get free stuff.

Mike: These are copyright free?

Luis: These are copyright free.

Mike: That’s incredible. That is a good one.

Luis: All right. Go to the next one. Definitely go through these - it’s going to take you a while to go through all of these.

Mike: I just opened up “How to make $4000 a day watching TV shows.” It is a report. There you go.

Luis: We were talking about newsgroups. That’s one of the great ways to get information. You go through the newsgroups and you find out about what people complaining about. What are they asking questions about? What don’t they know? You go through there and either you can do your own research, or many times just like Google Answers, people have already answered those questions. Now you can create a free report, because other people may have the same questions but they don’t know about these newsgroups.

Mike: All right

Luis: So I’m giving you right now the top 3 that are out here.

Mike: These are newsgroups?

Luis: These are newsgroups.

Mike: Okay.

Luis: The first one is Google Groups. The website is www.groups.google.com

Mike: Okay.

Luis: Now Goggle bought out Deja News, which used to be another website that listed all the use-nets and all the newsgroups that were online. They just bought them all for one price. Here you have different topics. You have “Alt,” which is for any conceivable product;”Bus,” which is for business; “Comp,” for computer stuff; “Humanities,” for fine arts and literature; “Art,” for different things like this and a many different topics. You can click on any one of them. Lets’ look at “Business.”

Mike: Okay.

Luis: In here you get a little bit more in depth. You got “Marketplace,” “Entrepreneurs”… They have a lot of activity in that one.

Mike: Right.

Luis: Let’s try “Entrepreneurs.”

Mike: Okay.

Luis: For a lot of it, it might really be more advertising than anything else. That’s what a lot of them have become. But, many times people do ask questions in there as you go through them.

Mike: Okay.

Luis: It’s the same way that you would use Google Answers or any of the others. Just go through them or search terms about what it is that you want to create.

Mike: Okay.

Luis: If you have an idea, like what you had with baby products or diapers, type it in to a search engine and see what you get.

Mike: I will.

Luis: It’s hit or miss many times, but this is a great resource for getting ideas. For finding what people are thinking out there and what’s available.

Mike: So it’s a great source for finding what the market wants? We’re looking for questions that people are asking. If you’re going to create a product, you have to create a product that people want. The only way to know what people want is to find out what they want. And by finding out what questions are asking, you will know what they want. That means you have to do research.

Luis: That’s right.

Mike: Okay.

Luis: So, now, the next site. This one is a little bit more fine-tuned to asking questions and finding out what people want to know. The site is www.messages.yahoo.com

Mike: All right.

Luis: Now here this one has a whole bunch of message boards. Yahoo, for anyone who doesn’t know, it one of the major “communities” that are out there Next to Google, it’s one the biggest website and portals available on the internet.

Mike: Google is bigger though?

Luis: It’s bigger than Google?

Mike: Yes

Luis: As far as a search engine, no. As far as an overall community, yes.

Mike: Okay.

Luis: Because community is not what Google is really about. Yahoo is a huge community of people who have similar, or different interests, but they all come to yahoo to share and be able to connect with other people.

Mike: Okay.

Luis: Let’s try the fist one, “Business and Finance.” That is the first category that’s listed.

Mike: Okay, I’m there.

Luis: Let’s go down a little bit to where it says “Small Business.” There so much of information for you to go through.

Mike: Right. I can see that

Luis: Look at all these different messages boards that are available.

Mike: At a glance, you’re looking at a topics. It’s going to show you what people want to know. Am I going to create a report on business opportunities, or am I going to create a report on running my your porn site? “Running your own porn site” has 1 post - “Business opportunity” has 2,413. Which one is my better market?

Luis: That’s right.

Mike: Excellent. Show me how to click on that business opportunity board.

Luis: When you’re going start creating your e-book, one of the things is exactly how to write and e-book and some forms and structures to put into it. But one of the things you have to know is that information overload is not the wave of the future. I’ve seen so many of the different marketers, and some of the marketers that we know personally, they just fill up there books with tons and tons of information.

Mike: Right.

Luis: You’re reading through it in order to find that one little bit - that one little nugget you need in order to jump-start your business.

Mike: Right.

Luis: So, if you have something to say, and you’re creating an e-book, write it down the way you would speak… and get right to the point.

Mike: Right.

Luis: If you need to add a story here and there to get your point across a little better, that’s fine. But you don’t have to go and make a 300-page e-book in order to put a decent price on it.

Mike: Right.

Luis: Okay. Let’s say you have a couple options on how to write an e-book. One of the best ways is to use a word processor, be it WordPerfect or Microsoft Word. You’ve already got tools built onto the programs that will help to create your own pdf document.

Mike: Okay.

Luis: Did you know that?

Mike: No. I didn’t know that.

Luis: So this next one that we’re going to go to is located at the adobe website.

Mike: Okay.

Luis: There are tutorials about creating pdfs files with other applications.

Mike: Wow.

Luis: It has all the tools you need in there. If you were to get the actual full version of adobe acrobat, not the reader, but the full version, it’s $300-500. I don’t know about you, but if I’m just starting out, I don’t want to be paying that much.

Mike: Right.

Luis: Here’s what you do: you click on the type of program you have - Word, Excel, or whatever.

Mike: Okay.

Luis: Click on one of them.

Mike: Right. I have Microsoft Word.

Luis: It teaches you right there how to create an Adobe pdf file.

Mike: Right.

Luis: And it just walks you thru the all the steps.

Mike: Okay. That’s great.

Luis: Maybe that’s a little complicated for you. Let’s go to the next one.

Mike: Okay.

Luis: Okay the website is www.createpdf.adobe.com . Here is a service that adobe put together that they’ll create the documents for you.

Mike: Really?

Luis: Yes, you send to them in whatever format it’s in - a word document file, a word perfect file, whatever it’s in or even just a text file - and they’ll put it together for you and give it to you.

Mike: What do they charge for it?

Luis: You can get the full subscription to make pdf files for $9.99 a month or $99.99 year.

Mike: That’s it?

Luis: But… they offer your first 5 files for free.

Mike: Okay.

Luis: How many e-books do you need to create to make a profit?

Mike: Exactly my point!

Luis: So try it out for free. Do your first 5 e-books for free, and later, if you want, you can get the service or learn how to do your self for free with that other link I showed you.

Mike: Wow this one is incredible. I think this is the last one, but this is great. I can’t wait to get off the phone and go through these and explore these sites a little bit more.

Thank you again for listening. This is Michael Senoff with www.hardtofindseminars.com . If you want to get in touch with any of the people in the interviews, please e-mail me at my email address.