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Internet Marketing How to get your share of the hidden profits that exist in your online businesses

Jay: This Jay Gould and Michael Senoff of www.hardtofindseminars.com . Michael owns and operates that website and several other websites. Michael are you there?

Michael: I’m here Jay. How are you doing?

Jay: Good, how are you doing?

Michael: I’m doing very good. Thank you for having me.

Jay: Michael, can you tell us a little bit about yourself and your background—how you got started with your online business and how you got started worker from home as a business owner?

Michael: That’s a great question, that’s a big question, but unfortunately, I’m going to put you off on that question and I’ll tell you why. Jay it would take a long time to answer this question properly. Because I want to provide your listeners the best material and the best information I have, I’m just going to direct your listeners to a section on my stet that covers this. I have an entire section on my website at www.hardtofindseminars.com and if you look for the section that says “Bio,” I have four or five pages outlining from my baby pictures all the way until present how I got started and the events that let me to today’s interview. So, you can get my entire story these. I took time and wrote it all out for people who want to know about me, and it’s all there for your listeners review. And it’s presented better than what I would be able to adlib and tell you right now.

Jay: That www.hardtofindseminars.com is all one word and no dashes, correct.

Michael: All one word, no dashes, hardtofindseminars, with an “s,” dot com.

Jay: Yes, and I checked that out myself and I asked you because I did see your background. But you’re right, that is very elaborate. You tell everything there is to know about yourself. Every trial and tribulation that you’ve been through it seems to be covered in your biography. Why did you do that?

Michael: Jay, I did it for a very specific reason and I’ll tell you why right now. Jay, the Internet is such an impersonal medium by its nature. With just images, text and color, you’ve got to have a better way to build trust with your customer. And people want to know who the hell they’re doing business with. So, I figured why not tell them who I am. But not some one paragraph about what I do. I wanted to go into detail about who I was, where I came from and specifically the circumstances that got me to where I am today.

Jay: That’s one of the things I talk about in my course; you’re breaking down credibility right off the bat. You’re showing credibility about yourself.

Michael: Exactly. Most people on the Internet hide behind an email address and web pages revealing nothing about who they really are. This one piece of advice will be worth thousands to your listeners. Tell people who you are in detail. Tell them the good, the bad and the ugly. Build an EMOTIONAL BOND with your site visitors. This is how you make a connection. This is how you get others to like you from half way around the world. And this is in my opinion a mandatory requirement before people will buy from you. Yes, it takes time to do and yes it takes effort. But this one thing will bring you more sales then anything else you can do online.

Jay: What if do not have a story to tell like yours?

Michael: Jay, I don’t care who you are and what you do, we all have a story. Now you may not think you story is interesting or not amazing enough to your site visitors. But that is not what is important. What is important is telling the truth. Barring your soul. Proving you have to guts to open up to your visitors and share a piece of yourself. They will identify with that and you will win the hearts of your site visitors. You may not win them all but you will win way more then not having anything on your site about you. That is the point I am trying to make. Just do it. Don’t even think about it. Just do it.

Jay: Exactly how do you tell your story. I mean, how did you do yours?

Michael: Jay you just start from the beginning. You start writing or typing about when you were born, how may brothers and sisters you have, tell about your mom and dad. You talk about what it was like growing up as a kid. You just do a chronological story of your life events. Once you get going on this, it’s a very reflective experience. It’s good for you. It’s therapeutic in a way. Get your story on your site. I promise people will love it. They will relate to it. I get more e-mails about my story and bio then on any other thing about my site. I know this works.

Jay: Great advice Michael.

Michael: So, I have my story right out front and I also provide actual proof of everything I said in my bio. I think this is another important part of not only your story but your entire web site. Back everything you up with pictures. Pictures are worth a thousand words. Prove everything you say is true. Go through you old photos or your childhood scrapbooks. When you say you lived in a corner home on 5 th St. take the photo of the house you grew up in to Kinko’s and have them scan it for you. Then pop it up on your bio page like I did on my site. If you go to my bio section, you’ll see exactly what I have done and how I back everything up with photos. As children, we grew up with stories and pictures. I think that is why we still love a good story better then anything else today. When I rock my 4 year old on a rocking chair before he goes to sleep every night, what do you think he says? He says “Daddy, tell me a story” And he would rather me tell him a story with lots of detailed visual images i.e. pictures. This is so important. If you want to build trust. It’s all about establishing credibility and establishing trust with the person on the other end of that computer. That other end of the computer is a skeptical, non-trusting human being just like you and me.

Jay: I agree 100% with that. Michael I noticed you put your phone number all of your website and on the bottom of every web page.

Michael: Yes Jay, that is right. I have a way for anyone to contact me on every page. What I am really saying it, I am 30 seconds away from you. You can call me anytime if you want. I am not going to take your money and run. I am proving again my legitimacy. People are so skeptical today. You have to have a way for people to call you if you want to build the highest form of trust with your site visitors and customers.

Jay: Michael, you also have a very professional phone recording when people call in. Everything you do is professional and you show credibility and break down the trust barrier right away.

Michael: That’s what I try to do. I say it again because it so important. We want people to trust you because if they don’t trust you, they’re not going to buy from you.

Jay: Michael, you do work from home, even though when people call it doesn’t seem like it. It seems like your calling a huge organization, but your really a small operation and you operate from home; is that right?

Michael: I work right out of my house in what used to be a two-car garage that we converted. I put carpet in here, several windows, a nice couch, beautiful desk, fan and a computer. So, it is now an extension of a single family home that I live in here in San Deigo. It’s an area in San Diego about five miles from the beautiful Pacific Ocean. And I am a one-man show right in my house. I’m sitting in my garage right now talking to you.

Jay: Can you describe to me a typical day in the life of Michael Senoff—maybe when you wake up or once you start working at home?

Michael: All right. I’ll give you a typical day and it will depend because my wife works three days a week. I have two young children. I have an 18 month boy and I have another four and a half year old boy. My wife works three days a week. Usually on Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Fridays. Let’s take today, for example, it is Thursday. I woke up around six o’clock. My younger one is getting a cold, so he had a rough night and we woke up to him crying. We get the baby up and spent a little time with him. Then I usually try and sneak off into my office and to check my emails and any orders because usually I have a ton of emails. You and I both know how much time it takes shifting through all the junk mail.

Jay: Do you get a lot of spam?

Michael: Yes, I get a lot of spam. I go through my email. My other son wakes up at about 7:30 AM and we hang out. We have breakfast. Then I’ll take a shower and then Ill get my older one ready for school. I have a nanny that comes in five days a week. My wife takes off for work around seven, and I have a nanny who comes in at seven to help me with both the kids.

Jay: Is that so you can get some business done?

Michael: Yes, she’ll come in at seven. My older one has to be at school by nine and I have to take him. So, I take him to school and then I come back home around 9:30. So I’ve got from about 9:30 until about three without any interrupted time. I don’t want to say any interrupted time because I do have interruptions and crises that always happen through the day, but at least while we’re talking for the next two hours, I’ve made sure not to have any incoming calls, no interruptions from outside sources. So, I’m good until about three o’clock. My son has a play date at a friend’s house this afternoon. So, I’ll pick him up after that. And usually I wrap my day up around five as far as in the office here because that is when we have family time. We’ll have dinner. Spend some time with the kids and bet time for the kids.

Jay: That leads me into something that I wanted to ask you. Michael alot of people, myself included, when I first started, especially with the website. People will read your bio when they go to www.hardtofindseminars.com and they’ll see that you were not always involved in the Internet because the Internet wasn’t around when you first started. You were just an entrepreneur at heart.

Michael: That’s right.

Jay: Even as a regular home business owner, you can find yourself being consumed by your home business is what I found and you can put in a ton of hours, but you have to basically limit yourself. You can’t make that your obsessed lifestyle. Is that basically what you try to do? You try to set a schedule for yourself similar to going to a job except once you go into that room, that’s your job for the day and then you can come back to the family later.

Michael: Well, I know how you are. You’re probably a lot like me. You’re a total entrepreneur and we love to work on our businesses. So, we don’t look at it as work. It’s probably one of the top three things we’d rather be doing all the time. So, absolutely, I’d have to say family first. Family and friends is always first. Then my next favorite thing is working on my business. —family, friends, my business. It depends on at what point in my life I’m in. Right now I have a lot of projects going on. Things are going very well. I don’t have any crises in my life. So, whenever you have something smooth, no one’s sick, no one’s in the hospital, you’re not caring for someone; you have a smooth section in your life, I take advantage of it because life is full of crises. So, I’m going to take as much advantage of this time while things are pretty smooth sailing as I can. So, after the kids go down to bed, my wife usually goes to bed pretty early, I’ll just come back in the office and sometimes I’m up until 12:00 and one o’clock at night doing some work.

Jay: Yes, I find that a lot. Believe it or not, the people listening to this are going to say that’s not possible, but I wake up at nine o’clock in the morning. I wake up a little bit later than most people, but that’s one of the flexibilities of having your own business. And I’ll stay up working about 18 to 20 hours in a day. But it doesn’t feel like work. I’m not doing it straight like you would at a job sitting in a cubicle. I may go out to the post office, or I may stop down at Staples, or go to over a friend’s house for an hour and take a break. My day is broken up, but when I come back and I’m in the office, I’m on my laptop and it just feels like leisure time. I’m just kind of messing around.

Michael: Yes, very relaxed. You’re in your own environment. You’re not around people you don’t like. It’s great. But, obviously, sometimes it is work.

Jay: There are times that I can find myself…you get frustrated because you do come across, like you said before, a couple crises. And on a website, a crisis could possibly be like a marketing strategy that you were using is no long becoming as effective. It’s run it’s course so to speak, and you start to say to yourself, wow I’ve really got to start searching for something, or trying different routes here. This isn’t as acceptable as the ones in the past. I find that with some of my websites. Sometimes things have run their course, or maybe a market that I’m involved in, a target market, has gotten really over saturated. I realized it was coming, but now it’s time to get down to the nitty-gritty and the dirty work and start to really think again. I really run things out for a long time.

Michael: That’s great. That sounds pretty accurate.

Jay: I have a question. You have www.hardtofindseminars.com , what are some of the other websites that you are currently running and what do they do?

Michael: Let’s take them one by one. First of all, www.hardtofindseminars.com , this is my website where I do a combination of things. One, and the main focus of this site and how it originated was, I buy and resell very hard to find marketing seminars. Usually these are marketing seminars that sell in the retail market anywhere from $5,000 to $30,000 and are mainly from one guy. He’s name is Jay Abraham. So, Jay Abraham sells seminars. People attend his seminars, sometimes 150 to 200 at a time at $5,000, $10,000, $15,000 a pop. And the people who go to the seminars come home with all the audiotapes; sometimes a transcript, sometimes the CD’s of this material. Originally how I got started, which is all in my bio, I wanted some of that material, but I wasn’t going to pay the high retail price. So, I found somebody who had a set of these tapes that I wanted to listen to. I got them for $50, and I ended up selling them up on Ebay for $1,700. So, there’s some good profit in that. I think I found a good market. It’s something to hustle as long as I could find them and make some good money. And that’s how the whole www.hardtofindseminars.com evolved; buying and selling hard to find marketing seminars so people could buy that at 10-cents on the dollar compared to what the retail price was. Then I have another site called www.hardtofindads.com , which came later--and that’s hardtofindads.com--because I’m fascinated with copywriting and letters and proven sales letters or ads that work. A proven sales letter or ad that works is like a combination to a safe.

Jay: These are like the headlines and sub-headlines of sales copy, right?

Michael: Sales copy, that’s correct.

Jay: Successful ones that have been used time and time again.

Michael: Exactly. On this site, and this is a free site, you can go to the site and access over 700 classic hard to find ads; many of them from the early 1900’s all the way up to the 1950’s and 60’s.

Jay: These are basically types of sales copy in these headlines that have always been successful and they always will be. They’re time tested, correct?

Michael: That’s correct. The majority of ads were pulled from one of the largest publications during the time. And they’re also all in editorial style format. And editorial style ads will out pull an image type ad five to one just because it’s editorial because people are used to reading editorial connect like in the newspapers and in the magazines. So, I’ve focused on editorial type advertising because it’s so powerful.

Jay: You should buy that name, editorial ad .com.

Michael: Yes, that’s a good one. So, it’s a great idea. Say you want to create a piece of copy, you can go look through some of this stuff, get great headline ideas, get great openings for your first paragraph. It’s just a great swipe. It’s a digital swipe file. You can zoom in on the ad super close and read word. They’re all scanned in there. It’s just a great resource of good ideas for doing your own advertising.

Jay: It’s www.hardtofindads.com .

Michael: That’s correct. And then I have www.idpen.com . And this you will read about in my bio. ID Pen is a business opportunity website. For ten years— and we’ll get into it in a little bit—I had started a little pen manufacturing business where I manufactured pens right out of my home. I took one of the pens, which is an invisible ink marking pen, and created a business opportunity from it—just from my own experience—because for ten years, I’ve been manufacturing and selling invisible ink pens and a number of other pens right out of my house. I teach someone who wants a product to hustle. This was a product that I hustled when I didn’t have any money. So, you need something to hustle, you can make them for 17-cents. You can wholesale them by the hundred for $1.50 apiece or even more. And that details the details on that business and offers an opportunity for a license to learn how to do that.

Jay: It’s an opportunity, too, because a lot of the people out there are not necessarily looking to be their own boss so to speak a lot of times because they’re out there looking for stuffing envelopes or assembly work or something of that nature. This allows them to be their own boss because I checked this out, your ID Pen. And it’s a business opportunity for running your own business, but yet they’re doing the work. I think some people actually are still looking to work. They’re used to being like an employee. So, I think this gives them an opportunity that they can work and have a structured job so to speak. It’s a side business. It’s a business opportunity. It’s a true business opportunity.

Michael: It really is. I can’t believe that it’s been ten years and I’m still selling invisible ink pens and red eye pens. The beauty of it is I figured out how to manufacture these pens right out of your home with nothing but boxes, rubber bands, and the parts that you buy from your suppliers. Your cost on manufacturing is 17-cents, and you can resell it. You can wholesale them at ten times. You need something with margins. Margins are so important and what’s so beautiful about the pens is, I can store 100,000 pens in a corner of a room. And you have total control.

Jay: Absolutely. They’re so small. Are those the only websites you’re running right now?

Michael: No, I’ve got some more. Do you want me to keep going?

Jay: Yes, keep going. Tell us everything.

Michael: A new website that we just set up is a co-authored a book with a gentleman named Bill Bowdry out of New York. He’s a copywriter. We created a course or a book—it’s a collection of Claude Hopkins ads. The website is called www.claudehopkinsadvertising.com . Do you know who Claude Hopkins is?

Jay: Yes, I’ve heard of him.

Michael: Claude Hopkins is known as the greatest copywriter of all time. He had a career from the early 1900’s all the way to—I think he died in 1950. But there are several books out on the market that you can pick up on Amazon called My Life in Advertising, and Scientific Advertising. And these are two amazing books. I’d recommend any of your listeners to read if they want to get a great fundamental education on marketing and copywriting. The books talk about all his experiences that he went through in his life and his most successful advertising campaigns, but no one had the original ads. So, I went out and researched and with the help of a research librarian and a historian, we located and found 60 of his original print ads that he talks about in his two books.

Jay: And once again, these are basically hard to find, right?

Michael: Extremely hard to find. It’s probably the world’s largest collection of Claude Hopkins actual ads in any one place. So, we created a book. It’s a digital product that we created and that’s a website that goes over that. We created lessons with each one of the advertising campaigns, and then there are a lot of bonuses that go with that. They can check that out.

Jay: That’s www.claudehopkinsadvertising.com .

Michael: Claudehopkinsadvertising.com. Then I have www.monicoproducts.com , which was the original name of my pen business. And on that site, I have all my pen products that can be bought off the site and also a line of UV lights. With the invisible ink pens that we sell, it’s a pen that marks on valuables. You can put your driver’s license number and your identity in case your property is stolen. It replaces those engravers. So, with that, you need a UV light, a little hand-held black light to see the markings. So, we get a lot of orders for UV lights. I wholesale and retail UV lights, and then on that site you’ll find all my pen products. That’s www.monicoproducts.com . Then I have another site, which is called www.senoff.com . Now, this is really important.

Jay: That’s www.senoff.com .

Michael: Yes.

Jay: I always go to when I check out your website to see if there’s any updates, I go to www.michaelsenoff.com .

Michael: Well, I have that, too. I’ll tell you about that.

Jay: Now I can cut out the Michael; just go to Senoff.

Michael: Well, actually you could. Let me tell you what www.senoff.com is. I had all my sites with one website hosting company, and many times my sites would go down or there were problems. My websites are my business, my livelihood. So, I had my web guy reset up another domain with new hosting company and that’s where that domain www.senoff.com is hosted. So, I have duplicates of all my website at www.senoff.com .

Jay: Oh yes. I’m looking at it right now as we speak.

Michael: So, in case of an emergency, let’s say www.hardtofindseminars.com goes down, I’m in the middle of a promotion, I can instantly email out to my list saying www.hardtofindseminars.com is experiencing difficulty, go to www.senoff.com , or I’ll provide them a link.

Jay: Yes, and it says the name of the first URL .dot this domain dot com.

Michael: Yes, I have a lot of space on there. So, I’ve got everything on that site there, too, as a back up.

Jay: That’s great. So, those are all the URL’s you have is one, two, three, four—six of them?

Michael: I have two more.

Jay: All right, go ahead.

Michael: The next one is www.executiveaudioinstitute.com . Now, on my www.hardtofindseminars.com site, as you know, I have a series of over 117 hours of audio recordings, interviews, and recordings from some of the greatest marketing people around, as well as some average guys just like you and me. So, I’ve taken all those audio recordings and I’ve taken out all the testimonials about myself. I’ve taken out all the ads and anything that really promotes myself with the exception of a few things, and I’ve put all those audio recordings on that site, www.executiveaudioinstitute.com . I provide a resale rights package to anyone who wants it for absolutely nothing. So, I could say, Jay, I can give you your own custom tapes to executive audio institute. You could say, this is Jay Gould’s audio training for all my customers, and you can given them private label access to all 117 hours of my audio recordings for nothing.

Jay: Wow.

Michael: And then I have www.michaelsenoff.com , which was one of my original sites, which is really just a branding page that if anything is clicked on will take them back to www.hardtofindseminars.com . I just didn’t want to loose that name.

Jay: Now, I’m looking at all of your websites. You have a ton of information up front and ideas. You’re teaching people things in a lot of these because you’ll throw clips of interviews or conversations between yourself and other marketers or other people in the industry, and you people listen to this up front. You don’t necessarily give them the whole two-hour interview. You do give a lot, and you give, I’ve noticed like maybe 20 or 30 of these things on a website where it’s maybe 10-15 minute clips you can listen to. Now, what do you have to say about? Is that a marketing strategy that you do?

Michael: Well, it is a marketing strategy. As a matter of fact, I don’t hold anything back in my audio recordings. Those are the full recordings. There’s nothing cut off where I try to sell you on more of the recordings. It’s everything. So, like in this interview, if I put this interview up, you’re going to get the whole thing. Yes, there’s a strategy in that and that’s giving value. You want, on your website, something of value, and that’s what I wanted to do with these audio interviews; by me interviewing someone and picking their brain and getting as much information out of them as possible. I’m digging for gold. I’m looking for ideas that I can use myself. So, I’m learning at the same time, and I’m going to share that with anyone who comes to my site because if I give them value, they’ll be back to my site. And if I give hem value, it’s called the right of reciprocation. They’re going to feel like they need to reciprocate me in some way, whether if it’s I ask them for a testimonial, or whether I came out with an offer for a product I have, or what have you. But, I don’t hold anything back. Whenever I talk to someone of the phone, I give them my 100% best because that’s what I believe in doing and that’s how I believe you build the list of loyal, following customers.

Jay: Exactly, and in your business, a little bit more than my business, my customers will come to me to learn how to market and then after they buy my course—I have a couple of different courses—but after they buy those courses, I usually don’t have much more to really offer them. I give them everything. I kind of lay it all out that I have and what I know. But you offer various different marketers like Jay Abraham. So, they’ll keep coming back to you for more and more. So, you have a lifetime customer. You’re building a relationship with these customers.

Michael: You yourself, I’m sure are a tremendous student. How long have you been educating yourself?

Jay: Over eight years I have spent over $10,000 on various different marketing seminars and programs.

Michael: Now let me ask you this Jay, do you plan on ever stopping learning?

Jay: Never, F because even after I figure I think I know everything, I’ll continue to buy things even when I see a new opportunity. I told you about Jason Isaacson. I bought Jason’s course and I feel like I’m pretty good at what I do, but I still see a course and when I read the sales copy, if it kind of gets me a little bit, I say I’ve got to buy this. Maybe I’m obsessed, but I’ll still buy someone’s course just to see what he has to say. Maybe he’s doing something that I’m not doing.

Michael: You’re not obsessed, but you understand that if you can find one little idea that you haven’t thought of that can mean thousands and thousands of dollars.

Jay: I agree. And so, if it only costs me a couple hundred dollars or maybe even less than $100 for some of these little things like pamphlets and stuff, to me that’s not a lot of money. It’s a write off, first of all because it’s education and it’s research and development for taxes. It’s a 100% write off. So, I write it off taxes at the end of the year. That’s not really a concern of mine. But like you said, if you could just find one or two ideas that can make you thousands of dollars, it’s well worth the money. And that money usually is going to be residual year after year.

Michael: Exactly. Now, imagine you spend 10-15 years educating yourself and just compiling more and more ideas in your head, and know that you have 20 or 30 ideas, you could go anywhere and start from anywhere in the world and know without a doubt that you have the combination, you have the formula to an idea that can make you money at will. Why would you ever need to keep money in your back account? You walk through a airport when you go through customs and you’re going out of the country and they want to make you fill out a form if you have anything over $10,000 on you. But you can walk through an airport with ideas in your head that can produce millions anytime you want and they don’t ask you…

Jay: You can go anywhere in the world to do it.

Michael: And you can go anywhere in the world to do it. Now, what would you rather have, $10,000 on you or a head full of ideas that can produce millions anytime?

Jay: Yes, I agree 100%. I never thought of it in those specific terms and put it to those words. But that’s pretty much the gist of it. You’re learning secrets, not necessarily secrets. Anybody has access to this if they’re willing to spend the money to buy them and we just can’t get this stuff for free. These people are well renowned like Jay Abraham and to the likes of that. If you’re going to learn these things, these guys learned over a 30-year period and they’re going to throw it all together in a course for you to listen to, and you’re going to have to pay a decent amount of money for something like that. But it’s going to make you a ton of money over the course of years. Once you know it, like you said, you know forever.

Michael: If you implement it, absolutely. Ideas are a dime a dozen, but it’s the person who acts of them. But back to your question, as far as my type customer, my customers who are people who like to learn and who do continual learning. So, many of my customers will stay with me for years and come back as new courses are available. They can trade in their stuff. They can…

Jay: I remember hearing about that from somebody. You actually buy stuff back again from the customers that purchase from you. I guess you re-sell it again, is that right?

Michael: Well, it depends. This is hard to find stuff. I can’t go to Kinko’s and run copies of this because I don’t own the copyright to it. I’m like a used bookstore for expensive seminars. But I use barter. So, for instance, let’s say I find 20 of a seminar, for example, Jay Abraham’s 2003 Mastermind Marketing Seminar. I was able to get a lot of those, which I had 10 or 15 sets. Well, not everyone’s asking for those, but let’s say I’m looking, for instance, a set of Protégé tapes, which is a popular training that Jay Abraham put on in 1989 and 1990 and I don’t have it. Well, I have a list of everyone who has bought on Ebay for the last two and a half years any product related to Jay Abraham. Plus I have my own customer list of everything that I’ve sold to people. I can go back to my list and let’s say I don’t have an inventory of Protégé training set, I’ll go to my list and find out who bought one from me and I’ll say are you finished with the Protégé tapes would you be willing to trade? So, I’ll trade them for something they don’t have like the Mastermind Marketing Seminar that I’m sitting on 10 of and I’ll get that and I’ll be able to sell it.

Jay: What does something like that particular seminar sell for so people can get an idea?

Michael: The Protégé Training Seminar was a seminar that sold for $15,000/$20,000 retail back in 1989/1990. I sell that seminar for around $695.

Jay: That’s a huge discount. That’s thousands of percent lower. That’s incredible.

Michael: You don’t get the experience of going to the seminar, but you get the edited version of the actual seminar on tape.

Jay: That’s what they’re going to bring home after they leave the seminar, is that right?

Michael: That’s correct.

Jay: That’s awesome. A lot of times they say going to the seminars are great too because you get to mingle with some of the other top marketers. But most of the people who are there are not top marketers, though. They are people who are learning to try to become marketers or they’re trying to learn strategy. Listening to it at home or being there is not going to have that much of a difference or affect on you.

Michael: The bottom line is going to a seminar can be exciting, but it’s a pain in the butt. You’re away from your family, you’re staying in a hotel—maybe it’s not the nicest hotel, it’s expensive. You’re sitting all day long in maybe some uncomfortable chair next to someone you don’t want to sit by. It’s very difficult to absorb all that information in a four-day event. It’s usually in one ear and out the other.

Jay: And let’s be honest, most people can spend or splurge $600, but $20,000 or $50,000, that’s not something most people can actual spend.

Michael: That isn’t something that the masses can spend. That’s correct.

Jay: Absolutely. Well, I think one thing I wanted to ask you was you have all these different websites, you’re like me; you get into all different areas. It seems to be you haven’t gotten into too many areas except the ID Pen it seems and the other stuff all seems to be marketing, right?

Michael: Right.

Jay: But the ID Pen is something you’ve done for the past ten years or so?

Michael: Correct.

Jay: Now, you said you’ve manufactured these pens for ten years. Do you actually have workers that work for you for these pens when you do manufacture them?

Michael: When I’m manufacturing them, I’ve had a nanny every since my four and a half year old was born. So, the nanny’s here usually anywhere from three to five days a week. And there’s downtime for her. So, when the kids are napping, if I’ve got two hours, I’ve got all the parts right here in my house so everything is assembled. Some of it is pre-assembled that I farm out with somebody. They do the work out of their home and they’ll bring back, let’s say I give them 20,000 sets of pen parts. And with a pen you have a cap of a pen. If you look at a pen on your desk, you’ve got the cap, you’ve got the barrel, you’ve got a plug—that’s the end cap you usually chew off—and you’ve got the tip that goes in it. So, this is like a felt-tip pen. I buy all these parts from a supplier and then I have someone pre-assemble—put the tip in the pen barrel and then put the cap on. So, those are done out of someone’s home. And they’re all here at my house. Then the next step is you have to line them up in these boxes getting ready to insert a reservoir filled with ink. So, it’s all done through sequential steps and on downtime in two hours, we can easily make a couple thousand pens all by hand.

Jay: And you said you’re making about $1.00/$1.50 off each one of those wholesale.

Michael: Well, my cost is 17-cents. If I wholesale them $1.50, you can do the math.

Jay: That’s beautiful. Does your primary income come from ID Pen or is coming from Hard To Find Seminars? Where is the majority of your business coming from right now?

Michael: It’s a combination of both. My primary income is coming from my Hard To Find Seminars, though. It’s the profit I’m making in between buying and reselling the seminars plus other services that I provide like I do audio interviews and I generate income by promoting products on my website and doing joint ventures; a number of things.

Jay: Do you ever do consultations with people and you’ll actually help consult with somebody in how they can get setup with their own home business or something?

Michael: If someone calls me, I’ll give them my best advice, which you can see examples of all over my site. Now, I didn’t really have the confidence and know how to charge for that and how to do that. But I recently went to a seminar on that and he is probably one of the greatest marketing guys around. His name is Martin Howey.

Jay: Yes, I saw that on your website.

Michael: He’s putting on trainings out of Phoenix every month on how to do business consulting. And this guy has incredible experience within the insurance industry and consulting. If you go to my site and where you see consulting, you can hear multiple interviews I’ve done with this man. Plus you can hear testimonials of people who have gone to his seminar. Now, I’ve never gone to a seminar in my life and I just went to Martin Howey’s seminar in Phoenix in March. It was incredible. So, I now have the absolute confidence that I can take a client—so, let’s say I have clients calling me every day and they want to buy Jay Abraham material or other marketing material. What they’re really telling me is I need help with my business. Well, I can ask them a series of questions and get an idea of what their business is like and identify if this maybe a good business to work with. I can certainly encourage them to let me do consulting for them now that I know I have the ability to do it and I know how to charge and I know to present an offer to a business to do this. I’m very selective of who I would take just because my time is limited.

Jay: And money, yes.

Michael: Time is money.

Jay: Even when you have a set price at what your time is worth, it’s still your time that you devote to your own business, it’s time away from your business, which is going to cost you money with your own business.

Michael: I’ve done very little promotion of any of my businesses. In the last three years, I’ve really been building the content, building the audio recordings. Just getting the roots of a giant Oak set in place. I’m almost to the point where I’m now ready to start really promoting the audio interviews and the products and services that I have. But literally, it’s been three years of putting this together and getting the structure and the foundation set and the plan and the strategy in place. And it’s just about there. So, a lot of my time has been in developing that product. Now, certainly because it’s my own products, it’s been very time consuming and there’s give and take in that. I could simply go buy the rights to other products, but I wanted it to be my own…

Jay: That leads me into a question that I been wondering since I first saw your website—the first time I saw your website. I heard about you through another marketer and when I went to your site listening to—you said I own www.hardtofindseminars.com and I checked it out. I thought it was a really great site. It’s well put together. It shows credibility in breaking down trust, which we talked about before. But basically one of the things that I was wondering is do you have a lot of competition out there? It doesn’t seem like you would.

Michael: The only competition I have would be on Ebay where people are selling their old marketing seminars.

Jay: Well, you usually call those people up and say hey listen, I’ll give you a deal.

Michael: Sometimes I can approach those people if I’m looking for something and offer to do a trade. But I won’t pay the price that they’re asking for. You’ve got to understand; they’re selling what market value will pay. It’s not going to be worth my time to buy what they want to retail it at.

Jay: Because you basically resell it.

Michael: Yes, because I’m reselling. When I pick this stuff up, I have to pick it up at a steal. I’ve got to find the stuff where the guys got a garage full of all this stuff and Jay Abraham is notorious for when someone goes to a seminar for adding all these bonuses. So, let me give you an example. Let’s say I find a set of materials—I’ll use the example that I was talking about before his Mastermind Marketing Seminar from December 2003. When someone went to that seminar, they would come home with a set of the audiotapes, which is 36 audiotapes, which I could sell for $500. So, they’d come home with a set of the CD-ROMs, which I could sell for $500 or $600. They would come home with the transcripts whether it’s on a DVD or in printed form, I could sell for $100 or $200. They would come home with a book called, Money Making Secrets of Marketing Genius Jay Abraham and other marketing wizards, which I sell on my site for $295. They would have a book called Jay Abraham Advertising Guide, which is a collection of all his best winning ads; extremely value. I sell that for $300. He would have a product called his Consultation Transcripts, which is over $50,000 of one-on-one consultations he’s done with all types of businesses; a huge thick book about 600 pages.

Jay: Transcribed?

Michael: Transcribed word for word. I sell that for $300. I’ll buy all this stuff for less than $500. So, by the time I just sell one set of tapes, everything else is profit. Some of it sits on my inventory, but over time, you’d better believe it’s going to go. So, it’s an investment. Every time I buy a set of stuff for $500, I’ve just doubled, tripled, quadrupled my money just in a matter of time.

Jay: Yes, it’s a beautiful business. It does require work, though. It’s not something that everybody can do. The reason you probably don’t have competition is they don’t even know where to get these things if people wanted to start a business like yours. Correct me if I’m wrong, you’ve been doing this for so long now, the last few years or several years that you have contacts; people who are going to these seminars and then they’ll trade off.

Michael: Here’s a story. I got really lucky in one way. Ebay was coming along. People were learning about Ebay. That was one source that sellers could offer their stuff for sale where you could match up buyers. So, you could go on Ebay and look for Jay Abraham stuff and see a list of stuff. But that’s kind of stopping now, and I’ll go into reasons why. Then there was another website called Help Talk. It was owned by Bill Myers and it was also kind of like a gathering ground of people who were looking for pre-owned material and people selling pre-owned material. On a small basis, you had Yahoo walk-ins, but it was very limited. Well, Help Talk was bought out and so there was only just once source, which is Ebay. I started my business out on Ebay. But what happened, people were counterfeiting some of the Jay Abraham products on Ebay and some of the stuff. I can’t compete with counterfeit products.

Jay: So, basically they were making clones of the packages?

Michael: They were making clones of the packages and selling them for really cheap.

Jay: That’s dangerous.

Michael: Yes, and I could identify what was counterfeit because I was seeing all this original material. I knew what the originals looked like. So, I had to set my identity outside of Ebay and that’s why I set up Hard To Find Seminars. I had to give more value in separating myself from Ebay because Ebay was not a real reliable place to pick up this merchandise because much of it was counterfeit. And now even today, Jay Abraham is policing Ebay and he has the right to stop any auction. If he thinks it’s suspect, he can end that auction and there’s not a damn thing you can do. So, if you look on Ebay, there’s really not too much stuff available on Ebay because they’re policing it and there’s only one other source for pre-owned material, which is me.

Jay: Well, listen to this Michael; I had a question about the phone system. I brought it up earlier. Your phone system is very professional. I don’t have anything as nearly as professional as that and we both work from home. So, how did you get such—because when you call just so listeners understand—when you call Michael Senoff, you hear this is going to be a…tell me how it is. You do something like: this could be a recorded conversation for quality assurance purposes, etc., etc.

Michael: You know when you call your credit card company or your bank, you hear that professional, this call maybe monitored for whatever. Someone had called me about doing some interview work with her and she is psychotherapist. And I called her and I heard her phone system. I said that is incredible. I am looking for this. What is that? And she told me about the phone system. Now, any of your listeners can go to a section on my site. If you go to www.hardtofindseminars.com and you go to the products page and then along the left side in light blue, there’s a section called Internet tools. And these are all the tools I currently use. The same tools I use to run my Internet businesses. And you’ll see the company for that. It’s called Kall8. This gives you the ability within minutes to have your own 800 number, and this is part of the service. So, on the bottom of every…

Jay: It does that?

Michael: Yes. So, you have your 800 number. It automatically lets you set that feature that you hear that this call could be monitored. So, the person is notified that the call could be recorded, which you have to do legally here in California. And you can set settings to archive your calls. So, let’s say you’re in business and you’re taking orders over the phone, you could have your 800 number. The calls are recorded so you can store them on this Kall8 company server. And if you ever had complications or you need to provide proof, you have it all on audio. You just reference the achieves and they’ll store them all for you.

Jay: Let me just understand this. When somebody calls you, as soon as they call, it says this call could be monitored for quality assurance purposes; whatever it says typically. That is recorded as well so that the whole thing is recorded because once they call that picks up and that’s start the recording, is that right?

Michael: What happens is they get that notice and then you set within the control panel with Kall8 where you want the 800 number forwarded to. So, I have the 800 forwarded to my office number. But you could have this service go online. You could be on vacation and have your calls forwarded to anywhere you ant. You can have them forward them to your cell phone.

Jay: How much does something like that cost?

Michael: Cheap, cheap, cheap and you get an 800 number.

Jay: That gets more people to call you.

Michael: It is great for me because I wanted the ability to be able to record a call without having to ask if I could record the call every time. And this way, if they’re going to talk to me, they’ve already been warned that the call could be recorded. So, that covers me on that end. Plus, I can archive them and save them if I wanted to, and plus—here’s another incredible feature. This thing has the ability to pickup the caller ID even if people have called ID blocking.

Jay: Wow.

Michael: What happens is once a call comes in, if you call me on my 800 number, within seconds it will email me the identity of the person who called right to my email address. So, how many times have people called and you missed the call and they hang up because they don’t want to leave a message. This happens to me every day. They’ll call. They won’t leave a message. So, I get the email—let’s say I was on the other line. I call them back and I say Jay this is Mike Senoff. You had just called. I was on the other line and I didn’t want to miss your call; how can I help you. It will identify the caller no matter where they’re coming from. It’s pretty incredible. You can get back with those missed called from people who didn’t want to leave a message. I’ve generated sales off those people who I would have never found them because they would have never left me a message in the first place.

Jay: Like I said before, when you’re buying the courses, a little bit…like I asked just a minute ago how much is it going to cost, it doesn’t matter because if it just makes you one sale a month, it’s worth it.

Michael: It’s peanuts. It’s four or five cents a minute. It’s nothing.

Jay: And it’s worth it. One sale out of that in a month and you can make hundreds…

Michael: And you can link directly through it from my site from the Internet tools.

Jay: Can you tell me a little bit about your educational background and maybe some of your marketing background or the kind of educational background you have?

Michael: Well, I grew up in Atlanta, Georgia. I went to nursery school and grade school and high school. I went to college. I went to the University of Alabama, which is in Tuscaloosa, Alabama. I graduate and ironically enough, I majored in advertising and I minored in marketing. Now, isn’t that weird.

Jay: So, you did minor in marketing?

Michael: I did minor in marketing. I had no idea that I would doing what I’m doing today. No clue that it would have been marketing and advertising. The only reason I majored in advertising and minored in marketing is because I didn’t know what I wanted to do. I knew the communications school at Alabama was easy and I wanted to get through and graduate.

Jay: Like me. I took the easiest thing there was. I didn’t know exactly what I wanted to do in life. So, I just made it easy and fun.

Michael: It had some influence on me. Did I learn anything about advertising in school? No. Did I learn anything about marketing in school? No. But college is a great experience. It was fun and a good time in my life.

Jay: Who is your mentor or do you have a mentor—someone that you see or regularly speak to or role model that helps you out with your business or did you in the past?

Michael: I’ve always listened to tapes. So, growing up, I didn’t really have anyone to learn from within my immediate family or center of influence. So, I turned to tapes. Like Zig Ziegler, Brian Tracy, and all the stuff from Nightingale Conan. I was fanatical about tapes. I loved the stuff. So, these guys became my mentors. And then as I got into marketing, Jay Abraham, Gary Halbert, Ted Nicholas, Dan Kennedy; all the stuff that I sell, all these people are my mentors. And now, anyone I talk to, anyone I interview is my mentor. So, anyone you come across knows stuff you don’t know. If you just take the time and ask them questions about what they do and how they do it, those can be your mentors. So, my customers become my mentors now.

Jay: How big is your niche market? It seems like it’s a very small niche market, but I could be mistaken. Is it largely because there are so many different business owners out there that are searching for certain things on the Internet and they come across Hard To Find Seminars instead of people call you and they say can you help mentor me, for instance. And you say, well you know what, in general, this guy is looking to improve his business. So, is your target market, your niche market large or is it small?

Michael: The market that I am in as far as Jay Abraham—let’s say my unique selling proposition or the one thing that people remember me by or my site by is I’m the guy you can get the Jay Abraham stuff inexpensive from. So, as far as Jay Abraham, his name, it’s incredibly small. Even though he’s well known, as he is, the people who have a serious interest in marketing and advertising is minute compared to other markets who have interest in golf. I mean it makes the people interested in advertising and marketing look like a flea on an elephant’s butt. So, there are other markets that are a lot larger. I happen to fall into this market. I do love it and I’m involved with it. So, it’s a very, very small market; it really is.

Jay: And your market will change as time goes on when Jay’s seminar is no long around, say years from now; you’ll still be reselling informational or not informational, but more marketing courses, not necessarily Jay Abraham. I mean you’ll continue to sell his even though he’s gone, but once he stops making his seminars and he stops doing them, there’s going to be other guys that come after him. There’s other guys that are out there even now. So, your market will always be a niche you, right?

Michael: Well, I think there will always be a market whether I want to still be reselling Jay Abraham materials three, four, five years from now; I don’t know. I’m always looking to make improvements and I’m always looking to make more money with less time. And recently I am finding new ways to do that. Now, having the pre-owned Jay Abraham materials on my site as my core business is important because it gives me the ability and puts me in front of people who are interested in this material. So, I don’t think right now I can get rid of that right now. But certainly it maybe something I’d like to stop doing because I’m not…even though there’s very good money, I’m learning some stuff that there’s a lot better money in doing some other things with things that I even enjoy more. It’s like the pens. When I got into the pen business, I had nothing. I was dead broke. I needed something to hustle. Now, it’s still been around ten years. It’s not my love, but…

Jay: At that time, I would say, necessity is the Mother of all invention. At that time, you were dead broke and you got creative and said how am I going to make some money—and you’re like me—I’ve got to do it the easiest possible way, the best possible way. So, how can I do something that doesn’t require a whole lot of work, but is going to reap me a ton of margin or a ton of profit?

Michael: That’s right. It put bread on my table. It paid my rent. It gave me breathing room to start doing the stuff I really love and that’s to start learning marketing. Leaning marketing was just me saying I want to learn how to make more money easily and more effectively with the least amount of work.

Jay: What’s actually separating you from somebody who jumps in the game and tries to become the Hard To Find Seminar clone because you know you’re going to find that at some point? You probably have seen it before. Is there anything that separates your business or is it just the fact you’ve built up your name now; Michael Senoff is the guy to go to because he’s got so much Jay Abraham, he’s got so many of the marketing courses.

Michael: What separates me is my intimate knowledge with the products that I sell. Because I was a seminar junkie, like a lot of people, I studied a lot of this stuff so I understand what’s in this material. I understand how the material is compiled and I understand what and how someone is going to benefit from the particular seminars. So, when someone calls me, what they’re saying is I’m interested in learning more about Jay Abraham. I’m interested in learning marketing, but how do I know which one I should get? So, they’re looking to me to be somewhat of a doctor; to prescribe them the right set of materials in the right format that they can learn from best for the least amount of money in the most efficient way possible. I look at myself as a doctor. When someone calls, I don’t just say yes, I think you should get this. I will ask you well how do you like to learn? I’ll ask you questions. I want to know what are you trying to do? What do you want to accomplish from this material? Why are you calling me? Where do you want to go? How much business experience do you have? What kind of business is it? I’ll pick their brain. I’ll ask them all about their business. And based on all of these answers, I may make a recommendation for something that’s beginner material. I may feel like they’re more advanced and recommend an advanced course. I may tell them that I don’t think they should get any of it because there’s a lot of people who do nothing but study and study, have all the knowledge or have enough knowledge…

Jay: What makes you different from all the other sellers of marketing tapes?

Michael: The difference that separates me is I really do care about the people who call. I’m looking after their best interest. If they want multiple products, but I know multiple products are 70% the same thing, I won’t sell them all three products. I’ll say you don’t need all three because it’s all duplicates of the same stuff. All you need is this. If I don’t feel like they need anything, I’ll tell them I don’t think you need anything. If I feel like they don’t need Jay Abraham, I may recommend something else not by Jay Abraham. So, depending on their situation, I’ll analyze their needs, what they’re trying to do and I’ll make my best recommendation that I feel will benefit them the most.

Jay: The question a lot of people who listen to my courses and they’re all into making money at home. They want to own websites a lot of times. They want to make money on the Internet. Basically, they’re like us, they want to make easy money doing the least amount of work. So, the question I have for you—and basically listening to what you said, how you’re making money—you make a few hundred dollars off of a course, which basically costs you next to nothing at lot of times and you’re making a hundred dollars, what’s a good day for you? How many sales do you do, or how many sales per day is a good day, or what’s a typical good day? That’s what I’m looking for or maybe your best day. What was your best day?

Michael: I think a good day is $1,000 a day. I’ve made $1,000 a day multiple times and I feel pretty good when I can make $1,000 a day. And that’s usually $1,000 net, not just gross sales. If I put $1,000 net in my pocket, I’m pretty happy.

Jay: Yes, if you could do that every day that would be great.

Michael: If you could do it every day it would be great. And it’s doable.

Jay: Another question that I have is you do resell these courses. Now, getting in more to the nitty-gritty of the marketing and how you run your business, do you have an affiliate program set up for your products so that maybe some customers that previously have bought from you maybe want to become an affiliate or maybe someone just looking for a business opportunity can resell to you?

Michael: Not with Jay Abraham material. I have a section on my site of products that I have control over and under the product section under resale rights there are a number of products that I have the resell rights to and products that I own that I’ve created for myself that if someone is looking for something to sell and make money off of, there’s a listing of things there. But the Jay Abraham stuff because it’s so rare, it wouldn’t be practical. However, my new website www.claudehopkinsadvertising.com , we have an affiliate program that is set up through Clickbank for people who understand that and anyone who has a Clickbank account can resell that depending on where we have it at 30 to 50% profit.

Jay: Affiliate programs are really great for people who are starting out and they want to have a website. They want to do something on the Internet. They want to make some money on the side. They want to get that feeling to be an entrepreneur—maybe the beginners out there. The people who listen to my course, a lot of times they’re beginners. On an affiliate program, they thought it was great. So, maybe they can get involved with your course and sell that Claude Hopkins Advertising—they can sell through Clickbank. I offer something, too, with Clickbank reseller affiliate.

Michael: Absolutely. It is so time consuming and I know because I’m putting my own products together. All my audio recordings, which will become products, have taken me years to do—years. Now, someone who is just starting out, they can go to Clickbank and find wonderful products, great products that they can hustle. Remember I told you; you need something to hustle when you’re starting out. And you can go start selling products and hustling products that you can have the rights to sell within minutes.

Jay: Exactly, an affiliate link. Link them to this site and when they buy, you get credit.

Michael: That’s what’s great about selling other products. They’re already put together. There’s wonderful sales letters. They’ve invested much time and some of the better ones, thousands and thousands of dollars putting the sales letters together for you and everything. The only thing is you don’t get the glory of calling it your own product. It’s an ego thing.

Jay: Exactly. But you can develop your own products as you learn more. You should buy these courses, learn these things, use these marketing strategies in promoting a product like www.claudehopkinsadvertising.com . Once you see that your advertising or marketing skills are working and you’re becoming a great affiliate for your site, then they can say oh I can develop my own product—whatever it may be—and they can start to use the same marketing skills they developed to market their own product.

Michael: Another idea that popped into my head for any of your listeners is they can go look in the back of any magazine. Find something you’re interested in. Let’s say you’re interested in writing and you go subscribe to the writing journals or wiring magazines. Look in the back. Look and see what they’re selling through classified ads. Look in the classified ads of your newspaper. See what offline products are selling and then talk to the owner. You can ask him to negotiate for Internet rights and take that offline system and put it online and be very successful.

Jay: That brings me to the Don Lapre course I bought years ago, Making Money. I do reviews on all these things on my site and a lot of people say he is a scam artist. He is kind of maybe that way, but the one think that I always took from Don Lapre is what you said; look in the classified ads and read those ads, see those ads, they’re there. Week and month after month, week after week, month after month, something is successful about that copy. The headline…everything is just positioned perfectly and that is successful copy. You’re saying look for a product offline and bring it online, but also you can, like you said with your www.hardtofindads.com , it’s essentially the same thing like Don was saying. He had never developed a course, even though he was called a scam artist, if he did what he did. He had a little more creativity. But basically, look at these ads in the back, these classified ad areas and you can see what’s successful. If it’s running week and week, and month after month after month, that’s a successful ad.

Michael: You’re absolutely right. I never looked at Don Lapre as a scam artist. I looked at his commercials and I said this guy’s got it going on. He is absolutely right and I remember word for word. He said if you can make a tiny profit in one small paper, then…and that’s exactly right, the same thing with an advertisement, the power of the ad. If you can make an ad successful in one county or one shopper, all you’ve got to do is make it successful in one area and make it turn a profit and then you roll out slowly nationally.

Jay: Yes, you just do testing, testing, testing. Once you find that it has worked here…let’s say—I live in New Jersey—so let’s try…we have the New York Times in this area and we also have the Star Ledger. If it’s successful in one of them, why not throw it to the other one or the LA Times. Now you’re putting it all over the place. I think people gave him a bad name because they weren’t successful with the first two or three ads they had and they may have spent $100 or $200. You and I both know that sometimes it costs you a lot of money to test and find a successful ad. Going back to your site, though, your site will basically alleviate their issues in trying to find an ad or trying to create it with the Hard To Find Ads because you’ll find successful ads on there.

Michael: You’ll find incredibly successful ads that you can generate ideas for. They might not be classified ads, but they’re editorial style ads that you could use for website copy, you could use as a fax as long as you’re faxing to a legitimate list with people on there that accept and receive faxes. You could use it as a script on the phone. Words that sell don’t have to be on paper. Words that sell are nothing but ideas that are communicated to a potential prospect. And what’s great about these ads, Claude Hopkins talks about the enormous amount of work that goes into one little ad. The average person thinks it’s so simple to put together, but it has taken volumes and volumes of research to come out with that ad because that ad is pointed to a particular market. It’s incredible research and time and then you get the finished product right there for nothing. Let’s say it’s an ad on storm windows for your house. If it’s a successful ad, you know what the big grips are about storm windows are. You know the hot buttons. They’re all right there for you in the ad. And so let’s say you wanted to sell storm windows by the phone. All you have to do is look at the ad and look at what they’re talking about in the ad and those are the points and the hot buttons you want to bring up to the potential prospect.

Jay: What I do a lot of times is I watch the infomercials. They spend hundreds of thousands of dollars developing these infomercials before they put them on television so that they know this is successful. The buzz words that they’re using, how they structure the outline of their scripts, and I’ll record them sometimes and listen to how they’re doing it and the try to develop that into a sales copy on a website, too. Here’s a question I want to move into more of how you market your customers, your current customers. Do you have a newsletter that you send out to your subscriber list?

Michael: I don’t have a newsletter because I didn’t want to be tied down to a commitment of having to write a newsletter every two weeks or every month. I have places on my website where I ask for email addresses and names for people who want to be in the loop. If I want to send out a promotion, I’ll just go to my autoresponder and type up an offer or type out…my newsletter is this auto-sequential-responder that’s automatically done.

Jay: Yes, that’s what I pretty much expect that most people are using autoresponders in that way now. The autoresponders, when people try to email, just to let them know we’re really, I got your email, I will give you a call back. Do you ever use bulk email or have you ever used bulk email in the past?

Michael: I do not use bulk email now. I remember, maybe eight years ago, when I was first learning about the Internet, I had bought some software that would allow me to send bulk email. And I did play around with it.

Jay: What do you find to be most profitable products to sell? I know you resell the marketing courses, but I sell informational products and I find that to be the most profitable for myself. What do you find to be the most profitable type of product?

Michael: I’m kind of moving into a section that’s pretty exciting and that’s promoting high-end expensive seminars. You think about Jay Abraham, he’s selling seminar seats for $15,000/$20,000. There’s certainly a market for everything. You know, $15,000 or $20,000 for a businessman or a CEO who wants to learn how to improve his business is write off just like a small information product would be a write off for you and me. I’m kind of moving into that direction in creating an online strategy to promote expensive marketing seminars—anywhere between $5,000 and $15,000. There’s a lot of money to be made in it and there’s a market out there for it. I think it’s a good way to leverage my time.

Jay: So, that’s where we’ll see Michael Senoff in the next couple of years?

Michael: I’ve been really seriously thinking about it, yes.

Jay: What are your views on backend selling? When you sell a course, is that a front end to you or is that just it? You sell them a course and the sales over. Do you backend sell customers, as well?

Michael: Probably not as much as I should, as anybody, but when someone buys a course, I take their name and they go into an autoresponder sequence called new customer. So, let’s say Jay Gould buys a course from me today. Well, I’ll take Jay Gould’s email address, your name, what you bought and put that into an autoresponder. And then you’ll hear from me over the next six or seven months. No major offers, but just Jay how’s it going. If you need anything, let me know. Just keep in touch, so I’m at the top of your mind.

Jay: This way you’re just reminding them, I’m out here.

Michael: Yes, I’m out here if you need anything. So, by the time you finish that course, many will call me back for something else. And also another reason is because the material is so hard to find—now if I had shelves full of everything and I can go print them off, I would definitely be hustling more with my backend customers. But if I hustled for two or three weeks calling all my customers, my inventory would probably be gone.

Jay: Do you up-sell on your products?

Michael: The three fastest ways to increase profit in any business is cross sell, up-sell, and packaging and I do them all. So, I may have someone that calls me and says hey I’m interested in that joint venture product put together by Luis Arauz. I’ll give you a perfect example. A guy from England wanted that. He sent me a money order. It was about $300 for this course and then he said he was also interested in the contract guide, which was a letter of agreement guide, which was a series of one-page letter of agreements; legally binding but not as threatening as a four or five page contract when you want to do a deal with somebody. He was interested in that. Now, I had the resell rights to that. It sells for $300. I go I’ll tell you what. If you get—I think I made him an offer; he gets the joint venture guide, I’ll give him the contract guide at half off. So, with some of the products, because some of the Jay Abraham stuff and some of the other stuff is limited, I’ve had to create and get and acquire the rights to some of my own products that I had control over. So, I had the rights to that, so it cost me nothing. I’ve already made the investment in the resell rights on both those products; the letter of agreements guide, which sells for $300 and the joint venture guide, which sells for $300. They’re digital products and it’s all profit. So, I made an agreement with him and we did the joint venture for $300 and I did 50% off on the letter of agreements guide.

Jay: You sell Jay Abraham and I know and some of my listeners know what you do is you’re just reselling like a used bookstore. Have you ever contacted the Jay Abraham Company or maybe they contacted you, but had you ever asked them could I become an exclusive reseller?

Michael: I’ve thought about it. Now, when I first started, I heard from their attorney, a guy names Troy Tate. And he contacted me. He saw me all over Ebay and they wanted to make sure I wasn’t counterfeiting this stuff.

Jay: Only their main concern was that, right?

Michael: They wanted to make sure that I was legitimate. I think they emailed me or sent me a letter. They wanted proof that what I was doing was legitimate. So, that same day, I went to my checkbook. I photocopied about 25 checks that I had written for material that I’ve bought that they could cross reference with their mailing list, and I over nighted it to them right away. Just said here you go, you want proof, here it is. So, from then on I’ve never had problems with them and I’ve emailed Troy Tate. I’ve got his email address and we email back and forth. I even assisted him with some of the counterfeit stuff on Ebay.

Jay: Yes, because you want to get rid of that. That’s your competition.

Michael: Absolutely.

Jay: You’re basically like their right hand man in a sense to try to eliminate all the counterfeits. They probably love you.

Michael: I helped Troy Tate, general council for Abraham Publishing get set up with the Ebay’s copywrite protection program. it’s called VIREO. I showed them how to stop any unauthorized auctions from running and how to identify counterfeit items as well.

Jay: That’s new to me. I’ve never heard of that. I knew that Safe Harbor used to be something that they did years ago with like volunteers, who would try to…

Michael: Well, it’s a program with copyright holders. So, Jay Abraham—it’s his name. He can stop any auction that has Jay Abraham in it if he wants to with no questions. They click the button…

Jay: You don’t even list your stuff on there anymore do you?

Michael: Yes, sometimes I do. I’ve got a couple of…

Jay: You do because they know who you are. As soon as they see Hard To Find Seminars in that Ebay listing, they know right away that’s Michael Senoff.

Michael: That’s correct.

Jay: Do you use any offline marketing?

Michael: Jay, I use no offline marketing.

Jay: Not at all?

Michael: The only offline marketing I use would be if I picked up the phone and make a call.

Jay: Really. I thought you might maybe do some display ads or some magazines cuts…

Michael: Not at all.

Jay: That’s interesting.

Michael: One hundred percent online. All my sales all originate from leads online.

Jay: Let’s get into that. That’s what most of the people who buy my courses are very interested in online marketing, which is direct marketing, as we know, because you’re looking for action, immediate response, so to speak. Do you use search engines, pay per click, ezines—how do you do your online…?

Michael: I have so much content on my site now that as you develop content on your websites, the search engines will pick you up. But the only thing I use for Hard To Find Seminars is I’ve used Overture, which was keywords and I’ve used the key words Jay Abraham and Gary Halbert, Bill Myers, Ted Nicholas; the authors of the products of the people I sell. And I have one ad that says buy pre-owned Jay Abraham seminars for 20-cents on the dollar. It directs them to Hard To Find Seminars. So, I use Overture and I use keywords on Google; ad words, and that’s it.

Jay: That’s great. Have you ever thought about buying leads? Have you ever done that in the past?

Michael: I’ve never bought leads. Those are pay per click. I consider that buying leads. For my website, www.hardtofindseminars,com , I just wait for people who are looking for Jay Abraham stuff and let them come to me. Like I said, I don’t do much promotion of the site. It’s all through referral. People who find me online…

Jay: That’s the question I want to get to. You probably get a lot of referrals because people are happy with the product. They know what they’re getting and they got it. It’s a straightforward product that you have. You’re saying you’re going to catch this seminar and then they can get that seminar.

Michael: Yes, it’s not hard to beat. If you’re looking for Jay Abraham seminar and you want to save money, why would you pay retail? As long as I can prove to you that the materials are authentic and they’re exactly as described. It’s a no brainer.

Jay: Like you said, the majority of your business, probably it would be safe to say that 90% of your business comes originally from online.

Michael: Basically 100%.

Jay: So, basically 100%. Then you’re like me. You have an off time in a year, more or less, or a slow time of the year. And we’re approaching that time now. It’s spring through summer. Is that your slow time of the year or do you find your time slow down for sales in that time of the year?

Michael: Yes, the summer time is naturally a slower time for everybody. Yes, I would agree with that.

Jay: Do you track your online advertising? With some of my websites, I track it. Some of it I don’t track because it’s a little more difficult to track. But I track my dating ones. I have specific links that are generated and I put them on to the pay per click words or I put an ad on a different website. Then I know if they clicked it and if they signed up. Do you do anything like that?

So, you have all the statistics on that. Another way I track my promotions—let’s say I send out an email to my entire list and direct them to a special web page. Inside the control panel of your website, many of your listeners maybe who are new to websites don’t know this, but there’s a control panel. It’s almost like the brains of your website with all kinds of tracking devices. It will tell you how many people every day clicked on that page, or tell you how many people clicked on all the different pages. I can determine who is listening to what recording at what time, how many people listen to this recording, how many people listen to that recording. It’s all built into my control panel of the website. Now, everyone’s control panel is similar in nature. It gives you controls of where you can forward your email address and all kinds of things. There’s statistics. I have an audio recording up at www.hardtofindseminars.com on the Audio Clip section on page 5. It’s an audio recording I did with an Internet expert. We went through my entire control panel and went over all the features and all the things that you can do with a control panel. It would be a great education for anyone who wants to get a hold and learn what they can do with that.

Jay: And that’s on Hard To Find Seminars again?

Michael: Yes, www.hardtofindseminars.com . It’s on how to understand your control panel of your website.

Jay: So, you track your visitors, but are you tracking the conversion of specific visitors, or are you just tracking…?

Michael: Well, I’ll know the conversion. Let’s say I’ve sent out an email, for example, to a thousand of my customers. Then I’ll go into the control panel. I can determine how many people clicked on that web page. So, let’s say 300 clicked on the page and then I can determine, well did I get a sale that day, within the next two days. Now, I can get an idea of what promotion produced.

Jay: What I’ve been doing recently—I did not do this when I first started, but something I’ve been doing recently is I’ll specifically track a keyword and if it converts into a specific sale because you know how we pay for a click. And those clicks, as small as some of those may be, 15/20-cents a click, you’re getting hundreds of them a month or thousands of them a month on some keywords and it really turns into some money over time over the course of a year.

Michael: So, you’re directing each keyword to a separate page?

Jay: Each keyword has a specific link. Now, not for all my website, but for the dating sites, yes. So, it’s just something we did with the programmers I have. I contract out programmers to do jobs for me. And they set up these keywords or they set up this system for me so I could just type in a new nickname, say Overture, and then I’ll put like underscore and I’ll say what the keyword is, say dating, right, which I don’t use because it’s too expensive. But Overture underscore dating, and then I know when I look at my list it’ll say how many clicks it got and how many of those clicks turned into sign ups.

Michael: With my Hard To Find Seminars, I’m not doing it as much and I’m not really paying attention to my ID Pen thing unless I do a promotion and the same with Monico Products. But with Claude Hopkins Advertising, we can get a good idea of what’s happening on that.

Jay: Really because of Clickbank, yes. Now, I would like to talk more about sales copy, online as opposed to offline and how effective you feel sales copy is or isn’t when you’re presenting your product or your offer online or offline. What type of sales copy or what do you put into your sales copy for your websites? For my websites, I put in like headlines, sub-headlines. We talked about this before, establishing credibility, breaking down the trust barriers. On all my sites, I have my phone number, which I think a lot of people don’t do. So, with those types of things in my offers, I’ve noticed on your sites, you’re big on bulk sales copy and all the top guys, Cory Rudl, all of them, they all have long sales copy pages. So, could you tell me a little bit about what you feel is successful sales copywriting and do you feel it is different if your online/offline?

Michael: I don’t think there’s much difference whether it’s online or offline. I think there’s some key, important factors in website copy or letter writing copy. Number one and most important is a headline. You’ve got to telegraph as quickly as possible the main benefit that would capture the attention of your prospect reading that letter. And you have to give them reasons why they want to read the letter. And you have to talk to them in normal, every day language. I like to write like I talk. As a matter of fact, a lot of my sales copy is nothing but transcripts of me talking and then I may clean it up a little bit. And also, I think a headline is definitely important. I think an opening paragraph is definitely important; a good strong offer, telling them reasons why. Giving your prospect reasons why, the real, honest reasons why they should buy that product or service from you, explaining everything you can, every question that they may have in their head in that letter because you only have one time to get them. And that brings the point to long copy. Why are all these people so in love with long copy—because long copy sells? When you’ve got someone’s attention with the headline and if you can keep them reading and you’re talking their language and they’re interested, what you’re saying in your writing is interesting to them and it shows them how they can benefit, that you’re writing copy of what’s in it for them. That’s how you should always be writing your copy. You should look through your copy after you finish and wherever you have the word “I.” or “the,” or “they,” you should have you—you, you, you. That’s what people are interested in—them selves and that’s what your copy has got to talk to. What is in it for them and give them reasons why. Make them a strong offer and just back up everything you say and do it in a normal, conversational tone without trying to sound important or fancy.

Jay: This leads me into your audio. Most of the top Internet marketers when they wrote their courses, I think audio wasn’t really something you could do at the time because now they have the flash audio like you mentioned before. You told us about one that’s on your site in the Internet tools section of the product section. You basically offer the ability to get audio, is that right?

Michael: What’s on the section on the Internet tools is when I’m doing audio interviews, like you’re doing an audio interview. You have to have a way to record the phone conversation. So, I’m recording it in a couple of different ways through a digital recorder. Do you have a digital recorder on your end?

Jay: Yes.

Michael: I’ve got a digital recorder on my end. We’ve got those Radio Shack plugs that plug into the back of the phones. So, that is one pretty reliable way to get a good quality recording. Also on the site, I have piece of software that you can link to and it’s what I first learned about. It’s called Modem Spy. And it costs about $24. You download it right onto your computer. You’ve got to have a voice modem. You have to have plugs, like phone jack plugs, that you can plug your phone in and an out. That gives you the ability to record your calls and intercept a recording through your computer. You’re recording it through your modem. So, those are tools that will allow you to record the calls. Now, once you…

Jay: With Modem Spy, does it have that buzz in the background kind of like Radio Shack thing? They all had a little…

Michael: Yes, with Modem Spy, I had some problems with. My digital recording device is much better quality and much more reliable. I had to find an alternative to that Modem Spy, but I didn’t know of one until recently.

Jay: With digital recording, recorders, too, like mine it’s like five and a half hours. You can get a lot of audio on there. You’ll never run out. You just kind of go through a regular conversation, which I do sometimes. I get on the phone and I ask people if it’s okay that I record our conversation; like students because down the road, I might actually want to use that as a whole course; a testimonial course. But it’s good. Those Radio Shack…or I have a Sony one, but the sound recorders itself, the handsets, they could go up to five and a half, six hours.

Michael: Absolutely, they’re great. I’ll tell you the model I use. I use a Sony IC Recorder, and the model number is ICD-FT25. This is one of the more recent ones. They’re about $150. You can get a similar model for $100 at Circuit City. They’re fine. Now, one real important thing; you need that device from Radio Shack to record the call. There’s a little microphone jack that you plug into your Sony device. I recommend that you do not get the little recording thing with the suction cup that you suction onto your phone set. It’s not going to be as near as good quality. You want the one that plugs in. It’s got a little box to it. Just ask your guy at Radio Shack what you need. Get the most expensive one because you want a good quality recording.

Jay: Now, as a tool of marketing, you use this on your websites, and what do you use because I use Audio Generator.com as a third party module.

Michael: Once you have your recording, then you need to edit it. Now, I’ve made mistakes in answering some of your questions, but we’re going to edit these out so we get a smooth. No one wants to hear all your screw-ups, right.

Jay: Yes.

Michael: So, I’m going to use some editing software. Once you have your audio recording, which is a file; you want to save it as a WAV file, then you use editing software. I use something—there’s a link to my tools to the one I use. It’s called Gold Wave. Now, Gold Wave came out with a new version, a 5 point something, but I tried that one and I’ve been used to a 4.7 version. I would recommend if you do go to Gold Wave and get this software, you can download a free version for about $50. Get the older version, the 4.7 because in my opinion it’s a lot easier to do your editing with that version. That software will allow you to cut out pieces of your recording that you don’t want included. And you can cut and you can paste. You can move things around. There’s a lot of flexibility. It’s just like a Microsoft Word document. You can cut, paste, move sentences, move around paragraphs. You can enhance volume. There are all kinds of things you can do. But it’s a great tool for cleaning up your audio recordings. Now, once you have your audio recording all cleaned up, you want to get up onto your website. There’s one tool that I recommend for someone just starting out, which is very effective and it’s called www.instantaudio.com

 . Again, there’s a description of how you can benefit from Instant Audio.com and a link that directly links you to them. It’s a…

Jay: Instant Audio.com?

Michael: Instant Audio.com. It’s so easy. You’re going to have to learn a little bit about how to put up a website. If you don’t, you have a Webmaster who could do it for you.

Jay: Yes.

Michael: Instant Audio.com allows you to take your file, once it’s all edited and cleaned up, and you’ll convert it into what’s called an MP3 file. Once you have this MP3 file, you can go into Instant Audio.com and upload and encode. You just link the file up, you click the button, and it sucks it into the website and turns it into a flash file.

Jay: Yes, that’s what I wanted to get. Years ago, if you just put the MP3 on the site—I tried doing this like five years ago, four years ago—it would have to download it to the desktop, not the desktop, but it would essentially have to download it to the person who wants to listen to it, which takes time. And then a lot of times if you tired to make it in Real Time like you just wanted to play it immediately when you come onto the site, it wouldn’t play the whole thing. It would play all the way up to the point where it’s been loaded and then it would stop. And then more of it would load and then it would play and then it would stop. With flash, they hit that play button and you hear it right away.

Michael: As technology is getting better and better and faster and faster, that’s the whole goal is to be able…

Jay: That’s right. Positive feedback from…

Michael: Yes, that’s why on my site; you can listen to audios three ways. You can listen to it in flash. So, even if someone has the slowest modem, it’s streaming audio. So, someone can listen to these recordings even with a slow modem without waiting.

Jay: It’s like playing off their servers, not their own connection feed.

Michael: Right. And then I have transcripts. A lot of people don’t like sitting and they like reading. So, I have the word for word transcripts of the entire audio recording, which we will have for this, as well. So, it’ll all be linked up. The websites I talk about, we can have the URL’s in there in the transcripts. It’s dynamic. They can read it. They can link to the places we’re talking about, and some people like to learn that way. And then I also have the MP3 files. So, people who are a little more skilled, they can download the MP3 file, listen to it. They can load it on their Palm Pilot or their MP3 player…

Jay: Listen to it when they’re in a gym or in a car.

Michael: Yes, they can take it with them.

Jay: I’ve noticed you have a lot, I mean when I say a lot, you have a lot of testimonials on your site and you do them, like I said, some of them are transcribed. Are they all transcribed? I know you have…

Michael: You mean the recordings or the testimonials?

Jay: The testimonials are recordings, aren’t they?

Michael: Yes, that’s correct. Yes, sometimes I’ll get audio testimonials. Some are solicited. I’ll ask for them to build credibility, to provide proof to the people who come to my sites, detailing some of the services I provide and what have you. I screwed up. What’s the question?

Jay: I’ll go back to it. I’ve noticed on your site, you have a lot of testimonials, probably more than I’ve seen on most other websites. Do you proactively seek testimonials from your current customers? How do you go about that and maybe why are you using so many, or why are you even using testimonials—why does anybody use them?

Michael: I love testimonials. I don’t believe you could ever have too many testimonials. I wanted testimonials to provide proof of my service. There’s nothing better than a testimonial telling someone else how good this person is. It comes off a lot more credible than me just telling you how good I am.

Jay: Really.

Michael: So, testimonials are very powerful in your sales letters, in your web copy and in anything you do. I get them both audio and written down. Now, I was actively seeking testimonials and I did this when I was giving away from free CD-Rom. I would give away 65 hours of my audio recording on CR-Rom. Once they ordered the CD-Rom, they would be entered into an autoresponder. And when I was aggressively seeking testimonials, I would have like 15 or 16 sequential autoresponder emails that would go out. Four or five of them were asking for a testimonial through the series.

Jay: That’s interesting. I might try this.

Michael: It was very effective. It was, by the way, did you get your CD-Rom. If you got it, can you give me any opinion on what you thought about it? You don’t have to dictate a letter. Just jot down what you thought, Blah, blah, blah.

Jay: That’s great.

Michael: Then I’ll ask for it again. I go, you know, I never got your testimonial. Would you mind just taking a couple of minutes and giving me your ideas of what you thought about my audio CD. And then I would ask for it again and again. Now, it pissed a couple of people off, but I would get a lot of testimonials. I would just collect them and put them on my testimonial pages.

Jay: Going back to what we said earlier, so everybody remembers, they may think my God, Michael’s crazy. But this is all automated. This is all autoresponder. You just have to put the email address into the autoresponder after they order and that’s it.

Michael: All automatic.

Jay: And then, from my understanding because I also have audio on some of my website. I use a different service than you use, but do you have the 800 number for them to call and then they type in your extension, they can leave the testimonial? Is that how yours is set up?

Michael: Yes. With www.instantaudio.com , the service that allows you to convert your audio recordings into flash, they have testimonial lines. They provide you with an 800 number with a code. So, you can send that out to any of your people you want to get testimonials from and ask them to call and leave it on your 800 testimonial line. Then you can take that code and create a little button with audio testimonials on your site.

Jay: That’s great because that’s what I always try to teach everybody. Try to get it as automated as possible so you can free up—even if it’s ten minutes of your day you’re freeing up every day, it just starts to add up. If you just say oh forget about it, maybe I’ll do that later. Later on, those ten minutes really start to work into hours a day. And that’s when you start to see yourself working into those 15-20 hours a day. And some of that stuff is not the stuff that you love to do. We love business. We love our own businesses, but that’s the kind of stuff I don’t think I’d actually want to be doing myself, like calling people up. Do you think you want to do a testimonial? Because now, it’s more of like a hound. If you just send out that automated email and then it has a phone number for them to call—800 number—it doesn’t cost them anything. You’ve got five minutes. What do you have to say about my seminar, anything good? And if they have something good to say, maybe put it on a frame.

Michael: That’s right. Now, here’s something really important. In doing this, I’ve tested the number of requests for a testimonial. Rarely will you get someone to leave you a testimonial with the first or second asking. You have to have three or four. I think I had five times I would ask for that testimonial and that was extremely successful. That goes to show you, in anything, when you’re asking someone to buy something, most…

Jay: Yes, they say Cory Rudl always said it takes sometimes up to seven times for the average person to be contact before they actually purchase from them.

Michael: That’s correct.

Jay: It’s like that with everything. So, if people think that the website—the advertising, the direct marketing and the keyword is it—that’s it, it’s over.

Michael: Yes, go ahead.

Jay: So, the question I have now is do you have a method for pricing your products and if you do, how do you typically determine how to price a product when you sell it?

Michael: I have no real strategic method on how I price my products. What I like to do with my products on my site is I don’t like to sell inexpensive products. I think about the most inexpensive product on my site at www.hardtofindseminars.com is around $300. And if it’s any less than that, I’m at this point in my business; I really don’t even want to mess with it. I’m looking for a specific market. I’m looking for a market that has money. I’m looking for a market where if someone wants to learn marketing that in some aspects money really isn’t an issue, even though in some cases it is. I’m trying to weed out price…

Jay: You go more for the corporate customer or the more elite customer.

Michael: I’m going for the customer who has a high desire to educate them self. If they have a high desire to educate themselves and they want the product, the $300 isn’t going to be a problem.

Jay: Right, like we said before, it’s going to make them money.

Michael: Yes, my market is maybe a different market than what you have. It is not…

Jay: Yes, it is not startup.

Michael: It is not a startup business opportunity market. Most of the people that I deal with know about marketing. They know about Jay Abraham, or they’re intensely interest in it and they’ve got a passion for it. That really is…

Jay: I gave a review of Jay Abraham on my site and I say, obviously, Jay is the guy. He’s the man. But if you’re somebody who is starting out, it might not be the first route you want to take because it is a ton of money for somebody starting out. If you’re just starting out and you don’t know where you’re going—you’re looking left, you’re looking right, you’re like where am I at here. I want to do something, but I don’t know what I want to do, that might not be the guy you want to start with. But if you’re somebody who maybe has a business or a little bit more serious about really starting a business, you do want to learn the strategy.

Michael: Absolutely. I think, no matter what, you should get the money—borrow the money—beg, borrow, steal to learn from the best because learning from the best is only an investment.

Jay: It’s all going to save you time and money in the long run.

Michael: Right.

Jay: Here’s a question that I have for you. Are you big into linking partners and have you created alliances with other websites to link to create a better, natural listing for you on the search engines, or do you do that with your own websites linking back and forth?

Michael: I’m not. It’s something I need to learn more about. I’m not real super educated in linking and all those strategies. I’ve been talking to several supposedly experts in it. It’s just not something I’ve concentrated on, but it is something I’m interested in doing in some of my newer marketing products. So, I’m starting to learn about it.

Jay: I can tell you first hand it is great to get natural listings because you’re driving traffic to your sites already. You’re already driving traffic from the online advertising that you do. So, if you can get a few different sites that are getting that online advertising traffic because you’re basically paying for that traffic that’s coming there and you get like you have a bunch of them, you have three or four different sites and then you start to link those sites together, that’s when you start to see yourself in the natural listings climbing. I know that from experience.

Michael: I have done that. Like, for instance, I have entire biography on my ID Pen site and then my Michael Senoff site links to www.hardtofindseminars.com …I have purposely—it’s almost like a landing page where it directly links to www.hardtofindseminars.com . So, I actually have done that where all my sites are linking to each other. I need to actually talk to my web guy and make sure that that’s done because that will help me.

Jay: Yes, absolutely. It helps your natural listing.

Michael: Yes, but as far as—I am currently…with the Executive Audio Institute recording—this is a strategy to get a large amount of linking partners. So, I’ll provide all that content for free where someone can put links…or I think there’s going to be a way to link it all to my sites, but…

Jay: Here’s the key because I know what you’re leading into is Clickbank with the affiliate links. And I can tell you that that is 100% true. You’re going to start getting a bunch of…your natural listing will climb through the search rankings for the…I’m sorry…

Michael: Claude Hopkins Advertising.

Jay: Not Claude Hopkins…oh I see what you’re saying. With the Executive site, that’s like a linked page for all your sites. Is that what you’re saying?

Michael: No, that’s just all 117 hours of my audio recordings.

Jay: Okay, we’ll just cut that one out of this. That was confusing.

Michael: Let me just answer real quick. I think I pretty much answered. I’ll edit it.

Jay: You did. You can edit it all up. I’ve got the next question here. Do you use press releases as a form of marketing or have you in the past—as a press release for your Hard To Find Seminars? Have you ever done anything like that?

Michael: I’ve never done any press releases for Hard To Find Seminars.

Jay: Have you done it for any of your businesses at all?

Michael: I have done it actually. It is one offline strategy I used when I was marketing my invisible ink marking pens. I designed a press release that I sent out to police stations for the use of my invisible ink marking pen. And it was very successful. I faxed it out when faxing was legitimate and everything. My press release landed on the fourth page of a huge publication called Police Magazine. I also got a request for an image showing a picture of my product and use. That one press release generated so much interest for my invisible ink pens. It was incredible. I think almost 100 police stations around the country responded from that magazine printed article. One negative thing about press releases, there’s a lot of people teaching how to sell your book through a press release. But let’s say you send out press releases to the media. Well, the thing is it’s not an automatic thing because you have to be by the phone, you have to do radio interviews, and you’re selling your book through the interview you do with the radio station or the media. And that almost creates you into a hostage position.

Jay: Well, speaking of books, what are your views on e-books opposed to creating a book and sending them a tangible product? Do you have anything opposed to that or do you find that there’s a higher return rate on those? What are your views?

Michael: I don’t know because I don’t sell many e-books. I know with some of the products I have on my site, I have in digital format. But, if someone’s willing, and they want me to, I’ll print it out. Now, I think when someone really wants information and it’s valuable information, they don’t care how they get it. They want the information. They want the ideas. So, whether it’s in an e-book format or printed version, I don’t think it really matters if your market is hungry enough. Now, if your market is ambivalent and they’re not really sure if they want this, an e-book is easier to return because it’s digital and sometimes delivering a tangible product that they can feel and hold…

Jay: But the impulse buyer, they may just email you back and say can I get a refund on that because they just downloaded it and read it real fast. And it was, just like you said, somebody that didn’t know exactly what they wanted. They might be just buying it because they’re buying it.

Michael: Right.

Jay: So, that’s were a digital product could be bad, I guess.

Michael: Yes. So, the difference between that—like I say, both have their advantages and I don’t know the right answer.

Jay: Do you have a unique marketing technique that you specifically use at all, or that you have used in the past…like a specific, unique something that’s come to your…something that you can think that comes to mind that is unique for yourself a