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Michael: Hi, this is Michael Senoff with www.hardtofindseminars.com . Here’s the recording from July 24 th with Rick Raddatz of www.instantaudio.com . It was a conference call for many of the users of www.instantaudio.com where Rick wanted to share new ideas of how to use the service. There are a lot of great ideas from some of the callers. So, here’s the recording in its entirety. I hope you enjoy.

Rick: In the call today, we’re going to go over the basics of what is the Instant Audio very quickly in case there’s anyone new on the call that is not a member yet. Then we’ll go into some of the new features that we have already and a little bit about what’s coming down the pipe. We’ll go over some case studies, some amazing case studies. Then we’ll ask some of our longer time customers if they’ve had any success stories they would like to share. We’ll go into a little bit of what not to do. And then we’ll open up to the questions and we’ll just kind of go from there.

So starting off, what is Instant Audio. Some people say is it a file conversion service. And they compare me to file converters. Is it a hosting service, a recording service, is it a marketing service, a Flash service, a website service? And the answer, of course, is all of those things and if I had to pick one it is a marketing service. You can get hosting anywhere. You can convert files for free. You can do all those things separately. But what is the goal of all of those efforts? The goal is to induce sales, marketing. And so, my goal in creating this hosted audio platform from the very first day was to create something for marketers to boost sales in every way possible on the web that audio could help them. And so the way it’s coming about is mainly through website audio, email audio, and then variations of that such as the Audio Postcard that kind of bridge the gap. So, that’s what Instant Audio is. Instant Audio then is a marketing service.

So, what’s new with Instant Audio? Now, everyone on the call here are all from different experiences with Instant Audio so I’ll give a quick summary of all those that I’ve had in the last month and a half or so. The big one is Audio Postcards. And I’ll talk about that in the case study. If you’re not using the Audio Postcard feature, I strongly encourage you to try it out. You can get incredible response rates and you can use it for people who are already on your list and you can use it for sending mail out to opt-in lists that you rent, whatever you feel comfortable with as long as it’s not unsolicited email, spam, you’re okay. We also just launched the eBay wizard and we’re going to go more in that direction in the future; wizards for different services that you guys maybe using. Not so much to corner your business, but as long as you’re paying for this service, you might as well use it for the rest of your life, too. So, if you’re going to sell car in Auto Trader, maybe we’ll have an Auto Trader wizard. We’ll be adding a lot of value with those little guys over time. Something behind the scenes that’s coming up soon is we are moving to a new hosting facility. The new hosting facility is going to be able to let us handle 50,000 gigabytes of audio a day, which if you do the math is about 475 years or basically a half millennium of audio every day. We’re not there yet. But the whole point is to be so far ahead in our capacity that it’s never an issue. So, I’m very excited about that. Some of you who have been on for a while, initially you only got one little affiliate link. And I have done a lot of enhancements in the affiliate area with banner ads and whatnot there, so check out the affiliate section. Also, Audio Postcards are affiliate links if you check the box when you are creating one. So, you can get increased revenue or at the very least you’ll refer three customers and you get your service for free. So, for those of you who have smaller businesses where $30 a month is a big deal, then just get three of your friends to sign on too and it’s free. You can’t beat that.

Something very important that’s fairly new is the Snazzy Player. Hopefully you guys have all see that. The Snazzy Player is one of our eight or so different audio players. It has advanced technologies that allow it to play over slower modems with much more grace. It also has a visual indicator so when the person clicks the button to hear the audio; they instantly get some visual feedback that something is happening. And that helps people avoid the little traps by getting more than one audio playing at the same time. So, the technology in the Snazzy Player is now fully tested. We are in the process of adding that technology to all of our players. And so you will just magically get that benefit over time when we release the new players.

We’re also moving to a new phone host. We’ve experienced a couple of periods where there have been busy signals and that should never happen especially for the testimonial line service. I’m not happy with that at all. So, we are moving to a new host. This is a carrier grade phone host environment. Actually AT&T and MCI buy capacity when they get overloaded during the holidays from this guy. So, this is a carrier grade facility and I’m very excited to move to this level because we can handle any load you guys send to us. So that’s kind of a summary of what’s new. If you are familiar with Audio Postcards, check out the new stamps that are up there that we added just in the last few days.

Now, let’s go into some case studies. The most important case study I want to talk about is the Audio Postcard. I had a guy send out 375,000 Audio Postcards to the same list divided into three thirds and tested with some variations. One test was a control; just sending out the regular offer he would normally send out. That pulled not very well because email doesn’t pull the best. The Audio Postcard, another email was the text email saying hey you have an Audio Postcard, click here. That email got a 10% open rate and a 30% click through rate. For most opt-in emails a click through rate of like 2% is okay and 5% is maybe a target, a hope. The third Audio Postcard was actually a graphical Audio Postcard. It had a picture of an envelope on it. That Audio Postcard had the same 10% open rate and a 45% click through rate. So, if any of you are doing email marketing, even if you’re email just your own list sending out a newsletter once a week or once a month, whatever, send the next issue out as an Audio Postcard. The variability will spark interest. Your voice will connect with your customers in a different way. So, I just want to encourage all of you to use Audio Postcards. It’s not much different than an actual email, but it’s enough of a difference that it makes a huge different. People want to receive an Audio Postcard. They say they don’t want to receive another sales letter. The next case study had a guy who had been using audio for a while and has kind of forgotten what his sales were like without it because it’s slowly grown over time. He took off the audio. He went from 15 sales a week--he sells a higher priced item--he went from 15 sales a week to one. So, he quickly added audio back in. Now, I had another guy--this is a negative case study--another guy added audio to his site. His sales dropped 5%. What does that tell you? He’s doing something wrong. Well, yes but what it tells me is you have to test. Audio is not a guarantee of anything. It is maybe a likelihood or a probability. It certainly seems to help the vast majority of people I’ve talked to. But this has a really good marketer, so it’s not his innate abilities or intelligence or experience. This guy knows what he is doing. And his first stab at audio on his website dropped sales 5%. Now, this was an earlier case study in the launch of the product and I was a little worried at first until the next guy came along and he tried it. And he was getting 300% increases. So, if the rate is minus five to plus 300, odds are you’re going to do okay just by trying your best first shot. But, something I want to encourage all of you to do is do A-B split test because if you can do the testing, then you know for sure this worked and this didn’t work. It may not be audio or no audio, that’s not the right question. The question is probably do you want to have one audio clip, five audio clips, audio testimonials versus your own voice, a professional versus your own voice. Do you want to talk a lot about your experience and kind of have an introduction or do you want to talk about its benefits to the consumer? All those different things are things you need to test over time. And if you always have two tests running, it’s not really even a lot of work. You just change one that’s resilient and see what happens over the next couple of day. I just want to encourage everyone to test because it’s not a guarantee. Another case study on eBay, someone added audio to their eBay auction and sold their item that normally does not sell with a buy now thing. He sold that within six visits. So, that’s only one data point, but we’re really excited about the new eBay wizard and we’re going to be enhancing that in some interesting ways over time. So, does anybody have any test stories they’d like to share with the group?

Jake: Rick this is Jake. Can you hear me?

Rick: Yes, we can hear you. Talk up as loud as you can.

Jake: Best thing that I can say since I probably know only about 5% of the capability of what you’re giving us is that I’m a very non-technical person. And I was a little worried even though I have Sound Forge and a variety of other programs. I don’t know how to use them. I don’t know how to record into my computer and then upload or transfer WAV file over to you. So, I just used your call in feature. I had some audio that were on audiotapes, little snip-its, little two and three minute snip-its that I wanted to some how cleanly add to my website. So, the way that I did it was I just played the audios that I had on a tape recorder. I put my phone receiver, not the one I’m holding now, but another one just like next to the tape recorder as they played. And when they were finished, I did whatever I was supposed to do as though I were almost calling in a testimonial. And it recorded them very cleanly. And so, for anyone that’s a little afraid to or just unsure of how to do the technical stuff via the call in feature just playing something over a tape recorder and putting your phone receiver close enough to hear it at the right volume--I had to test the volume a couple of times to get the right level of volume to go through and then I would save it and listen to it on the web to see how it came through. It’s coming through really good. And so, I think that’ll be a helper for those that are under using it due to their potential fear of not knowing what to do. Also, I heard a couple of people using the feature in a little different way. Some people are actually putting a little instant audio button on their order page. And so, when the order page comes up, instead of someone just reading what they’re supposed to do, the voice can just automatically be activate without the customer even pushing a button and they can kind of hear a little oral instruction walking them through it and improving the conversion rate of the amount of people that actually order. Another thing that I’m going to do that I think will be helpful is I have a couple of opt-in boxes on my website and as I said even though no body is opting in yet because I’m not sending any traffic there. You can read the opt-in box. It tells you that if you put your first name and your email address in there, that you’ll get a free newsletter and you’ll be able to receive a free e-book, as well. I’m going to put a little audio button there that I just call in through the telephone to encourage them to opt-in to help build my list. So, they’re not only just reading it, but they’re also hearing it encouraging them go ahead put your first name in. That’s right. Now, put your email address in. And as soon as you click submit—so, I think that’s a good way. And I also have it on my exit pop-up that basically says wait, did you see all this blah, blah, blah. They can read it. I’m going to put a audio button there that automatically plays hey wait, looks like you haven’t done anything yet and encourage them to do something.

Rick: Those are all great ideas. In fact, you’ve just gone through pretty much all that I was going to do. I was going to give some tips including the phone next to the TV to record the audio. So, you did the same thing with the tape recorder, the order page, the opt-in box, and the end pop-up. So, it’s good that you exactly nailed a lot of the very easy techniques to dramatically increase conversion.

Jake: And the thing about the TV that you just mentioned jogged my mind. My field is weight loss and I happened to record an ABC news story on how some New England Journal of Medicine study just determined that people that are over weight are at much greater risk for variety of cancers and it’s not in my voice, but it’s in Peter Jennings’ voice. So, I just put the phone right up to the TV and played the little one minute video that I had recorded and it was made into an audio file and there’s a button there that says listen to the ABC news brief on over weight, obesity and cancer risk. All I have to do is press the button and boom they’re hearing it in his voice.

Rick: Thank you for sharing all that. I really appreciate that and I hope it has been helpful to everyone else on the call. I can’t thank you enough, if fact, it’s just perfect. Does anybody else have any best practices that they can share with the group of how they’re using Instant Audio?

Caller: Hi Rick. We’re using the Instant Audio not only on the website, which has increased our sales because we find we have very long ad copy and we’re finding most people aren’t staying on the site very long. But now they’re staying on longer because they’re basically listening to our topics and our headlines. But more importantly, the biggest challenge we were having was follow up and customer service and those types of things. So now we’re doing a weekly audio update that’s five minutes long. We do all the weekly conferences for all of our customers to answer questions. But not everybody can get on the call when it’s convenient. Everybody wants it on a different day, so we give a little five-minute review of what they missed on the conference call and we give them something special, a free gift or some kind of perk by listening to it at the end of the call. So, now I have lots of people going back to my update site listening to the call to get that week’s little freebie or whatever. So, it’s increased our retention rate. Our orders have gone up about 10 or 15%, but my retention rate on repeat orders is starting to go up really high and I’m getting rave reviews on email saying thanks for the update, thanks for the help. And then we set up a question box now where people can ask us a question and we answer those on the conference calls and we make sure we answer that in the update. So, just in case we miss someone’s question, we always cover it at least once a week and I’m kind of training my customers now to realize every Tuesday there’s going to be the update posted and if they ask me a question the last week, I’m going to answer it on the update. So, that’s been a real good tool for us.

Rick: Great.

Brent: A couple of things. Number one I just wanted to say your service has just been outstanding, your customer service. I’m not the smartest guy in the world and I’ve asked you a million questions and you’re always answering them very quickly and I appreciate that. But the other thing I’ve done is with a number of my products is I’m partnering up with someone who has produced the product. So, I’m really an affiliate. What I will do is a 10 or 15-minute interview with that person and it’s unbelievable what that has done for sales. So, I just go ahead and do the interview and I’ll post the interview on the site and put their product next to it. It’s just incredible how the sales have increased.

Rick: So, you working it as an affiliate and boost your affiliate revenues by actually doing a better job marketing than the host company with an interview with you and someone else about the product.

Brent: Yes. What I’ll do is an interview with whoever created the product and I send that out to my list and just say, hey I’ve just sent a 10 or 15 minute interview with so and so who has got this product and here’s the topic about what the interview is about. And they’ll come back and they’ll go ahead and listen to the interview. And simply what we’ll do is we’ll say, hey look we’re also going to give you a great price on the product say in 48 hours along with a couple of complimentary gifts. The sales have just gone through the roof with this stuff.

Rick: I wanted to enhance that a little bit or talk more about that because a lot of people here on the call are info marketers or they’re in the info market scene and that’s how they heard about Instant Audio. But there are a lot of people that aren’t. And no matter what industry you’re in or what product you’re selling, I just wanted to relate to that a great marketing tool is to just interview someone that is a name or even that’s not a name that they have the knowledge in the area that your customer’s care about. Doesn’t even have to be on your product in particular, but if your customers care about this particular topic, interview the person that is that person in that topic and they’ll opt to do it because they get their name spread out even more. And then you have that recorded and you can use that recording in so many ways. One of the ways, of course, is putting it up on your website as an audio. That becomes a draw to your website. You can email it out to people and say here’s the first five minutes. If you want the CD, click here—all that kind of stuff. So, just doing an interview, setting up an hour of work to do the interview and then an hour to do the interview and maybe an hour to put all the packaging together. So, you spend three hours and now you have a product that you can either sell or give away to increase opt-in or just increase the relationship quality with your customers. So, I just wanted to encourage everyone, no matter what industry they’re in, to consider doing an interview with someone this week or next week and just see what happens. I think you’ll be surprised.

Brent: That’s a great idea.

Rick: Thank you.

Brent: No, it is. It’s a brilliant idea and I’m glad he thought of it and shared it.

Rick: I’m doing them. I’m talking to my dad. It just makes sense. It’s not that hard and it truly stands out because not enough people are doing them. The info marketer space, they’ve been doing them for years and it’s been proven and there’s a reason why they’ve been doing it.

Brent: If you take a list—I’ve got 17,000 opt-in subscribers on my list and I’m never going to physically meet 99.9% of them. But once you have the audio, once you’re got someone’s voice in the form of an interview, all of a sudden it’s so much different than someone reading some text or anything that’s been transcribed from an interview. It just completely relaxes a potential buyer and I just think it does so much.

Rick: Anybody else want to share a quick success story or success practice?

Michael: Rick this is Mike Senoff with www.hardtofindseminars.com .

Rick: Okay Mike, you’re next and then the other guy is next.

Michael: How are you? Well, a testimonial to audio recording to use to sell your products and service, I’ve been doing this on my site for a number of years now. I’ve been doing it the old way, the MP3 recordings, and doing the recordings and then loading them up on the site and doing the editing. But let me tell you, an audio interview, which I have about 65 hours of them on my website will outsell in my opinion a well crafted sales letter because an audio interview with the dimension of your voice in that real conversation with another person can affect someone emotionally much better and much more powerful than the written word of a sales letter. When you’re talking to someone and doing and interview in a relaxed way, the real words and the real selling points and the emotion comes across to the listener like you wouldn’t believe. And it’s almost like being a professional copywriter. But if you can have a normal conversation and ask intelligent questions of the person you’re interviewing, real questions that most people want to know and you can do your research and have the person you’re interviewing send you a list of those 10 or 15 most commonly asked question and just sit there and record the conversation and ask those questions in a very relaxed way. The interview doesn’t have to be a professional recording; it’s just got to be good enough—two people talking to each other. Also, if you do in that style, people can listen in on the interview like a voyeur. It’s almost like voyeurism or looking through a keyhole. And that’s a lot different than someone reading a sales letter where they know they’re being pitched or sold. But if someone listens in on a conversation between two people and they know it’s not like the conversation is meant to be a sales pitch it’s just like someone listening in on two people on the phone, it’s a very powerful way to sell your products and services. This is how I’ve been selling my products and services on www.hardtofindseminars.com for a number of years. It’s really incredible. And when I found about Instant Audio, Rick, it’s just going to make my life much, much easier. There are some technical things that I want to get into about that a little later in the call, though.

Rick: If anybody has some questions about how to do the interview right, contact Mike Senoff at www.hardtofindseminars.com .

Michael: Yes, it’s www.hardtofindseminars.com .

Rick: It’s just a wealth of examples of interviews and presentation. It’s a great site. Now, there will be one other person and then we’ll go on with the meeting. Who was the other guy that was talking?

Caller: Mike?

Michael: Yes.

Caller: I’m a CPA in Texas and I use this a lot different than everybody else seems to. My problem here is that I am Internet bound and I have put this up on my website with my ugly picture and my Texas drawl telling people what I can do for them. Now, I’m not a normal CPA. I’m an abnormal CPA and the service I provide is I negotiate with the Internal Revenue Service for people who have serious tax problems. Most of my clients I never see. They’re out of state. I talk to them on the telephone. They visit my website. They see what I can do and they call me. They’re in a world of hurt. IRS has garnished their wages and they’ve got to have somebody help them immediately. They come to my website. They do a lot of reading and now I want to put up a lot of sound files of my clients giving testimonials. I can pay the people to call in and give a testimonial. So, I now I think I’m going to have to start calling them and saying, okay, do it now with me while I’m on the telephone.

Michael: What I would recommend is that right after you give them some great services or before you’re getting ready to do something for them that’s really important, that’s when you want to ask them for the testimonial. You just send your 800 number testimonial line that you have with Instant Audio and have them do the testimonial. You’ve got to get them when they’re hot. After you’ve finished giving them all the products and services, it’s sometimes difficult to get that.

Caller: I really like the service and I know that I’m going to be ahead of my competition on this. And having these sound files where people can listen to them is really going to be an addition.

Jake: I’ve got a tip for you. This is Jake. This is for the CPA. If for some reason you still find that even when they’re hot you can’t get them to give you a testimonial, get someone like me or someone you know with a good voice to do an interview with you about some of the ways you’ve been able to help people. Tape record it for about 10 or 12 minutes and then just put it up as a sound file and you’ll just be able to recount the stories of the people you’ve been able to help, not in their voice, but it’ll be in your voice and people will feel good about that because you’ll have covered all the bases and they’ll know you know what you’re doing.

Caller: That’s a good idea. Thank you.

Jake: You’re welcome.

Michael: I’ve got one other idea that’s been successful. I’ve generated 500 testimonials from my website and this is how I do it. I see some new applications to do it with Instant Audio. When someone comes to your site, you obviously what to capture their name and their email address. You want to put them into an autoresponder sequence. And once they go in that autoresponder sequence, you can set up your autoresponder to ask for a testimonial. Someone would go to my site and order a free CD-Rom that I give away free at www.hardtofindseminars.com and once they got in there, I asked did they get the CD; I wanted to make sure it arrived. Then a week later I would ask them did they have a chance to listen to it. Then a week later I would ask can you do me a favor, can I get your opinion, your thoughts about the CD-Rom. Then another five days later, I’d ask them the same thing, can I get your opinion on the CD-Rom. Now, before I would ask for a written testimonial and I would get a lot of them on the first time and then the second time. But now what you can do with Instant Audio is you can ask for an audio testimonial instead of them taking the time to write it, all you have to do is put your 800 number of your testimonial line in the autoresponder email. All they have to do is call up. And also what works well is if you bribe them for a testimonial and tell them if they leave a testimonial, I would give away one of my $20,000 marketing courses free for the best testimonial once I reached 275 of them. I got some incredible testimonials that way. And then I would ask for testimonials three additional times. It was a very effective way in building a pile of incredible testimonials. Once you have enough, you can take those out of your autoresponder sequence. You can get the voice activated one through Rick’s Instant Audio.

Rick: I want to thank everyone who contributed the success stories and ideas. If you have any stories that you wanted to share with the group right now but didn’t get a chance to, send them to me in an email. I’ll send them out to everyone by email—a little case study ezine or ezine on the website, something along those lines. So, I’d love to get the success stories. It helps new people to understand how this can benefit their business and it helps people who are already doing it learn the best practices so that they cam improve on what they are already doing.

Speaking of that, let’s cover a few quick tips. We’ve already covered these a little bit in the meeting by accident. But, we’ll nail them now. On the order page, here’s the challenge with order pages. Order pages are in SSL encryption. And so don’t want that message popping up that says both secured and unsecured elements are both on this page. You don’t want that distracting the customer. So, here’s what we’re going to do for people that are on this call. We’re not announcing this to anybody else. This is just for you guys today. If you have an order page and you want to put an audio clip on your order page, send me an email, I’ll copy that audio clip onto my SSL server and that way you’ll be able to have SSL audio playing on your page. Now, it’s up to you to test it to see what message works best. And you can use the record over feature to constantly change that message. I want to give you that special benefit to boost your business in this, hopefully, large way. But who knows. The next thing is we talked a little bit about the opt-in box and also the exit box. An audio enabled exit pop that plays automatically is a tremendously powerful tool. As people are leaving, you’re actually interrupting them. That’s one of the powers of voice is that it interrupts the person in whatever they were doing and they have to make a quick decision am I going to abandon this right now or am I going to listen a little bit. And if they listen a little bit, which most of them do, they’re kind of stuck because they don’t quite know when it’s going to end. They don’t know where it’s going to go. They have to keep on listening to unravel the mystery of where this audio stream is headed. And so, that power to interrupt a person’s life and their path first of all is what a pop-up is supposed to do, right. It’s supposed to interrupt the user on the way out. Well, an exit pop doesn’t interrupt anymore. People click the exit pop so fast you won’t believe it. But with an audio exit pop, then that actually achieves the goal of an exit pop, which is interrupting the users giving you one last chance to offer them something. And one idea that I like on the exit pop and this comes from marketing guru Alex Mendozian. I’m sure other people have done it too, but he is the guy that taught it to me. Don’t just say hey buy my product. Give them a choice. Do you want to do this or do you want to do that? It could be buy yes or no. It could be do you want to buy product A or product B? Give them a choice. Waitresses and waiters do that with wine; would you like red or white wine tonight. It increases wine sales by 35%. So, give them a choice. And if they say no, that’s okay, lead them to a page of affiliates with other products they might like. So, that’s a little marketing effort on the exit pop. We talked a little bit about testimonials, which I forgot to mention in my basic summary of the service. One of the foundations of a service is a testimonial line. We covered some great ways of getting testimonials and number one is asking for it, asking for it right after a great period of customer service. That’s actually what I do. I wait until someone says hey I love your products, your company. Thanks for responding so quickly, which usually happens. I’ve been real busy the last few days and I apologize to people that I’ve been busy with. Right after a great moment of customer service, I say hey could you give me a testimonial and it happens. So, wait for the right time. Just sending out an opt-in email saying can you give me a testimonial please isn’t going to cut it. Other ideas for you guys, an audio frequently asked questions section, audio facts. You can have the text. You can even have the audio there too. If they’re in there reading the facts, very often they’re the kind of person that is just kind of on cuff of understanding what it is you have to offer and sell and so forth. And so anything that you can do to push the person over the edge is understanding. That’s the key. So, have your text facts, frequently asked questions section, but also right next to it have a little audio button right there and that will be pretty neat. We’ve talked about autoresponders. Well, I don’t call them autoresponders any more. I call them audio responders because why limit yourself to text. So, include the text. You always want to have text, never audio only. Well, sometimes but mainly you have the text there and then augment it with audio in your autoresponder. That’s about all I had for you guys today.

Now, it’s time to open up for questions. Before we do this, though, because there are so many people on the call, there’s going to be a lot of people going at once. So, I’m not sure what to do about that, but just if you hear someone else talking, maybe back off and we’ll get to you next. So, we’ll open up for questions. Shoot.

Jake: This is Jake. Rick, I’m not super familiar with the Audio Postcards. I have seen a couple. So, I have a few questions. Number one do you have to send them out one at a time or can they be sent out in a form of a list? Is it a link that’s just enclosed in your email and then when they click on it the Audio Postcard will come up or is there some great way to be able to send them to multiple people at the same time?

Rick: Do you have any follow up questions on that?

Jake: On Audio Postcards?

Rick: Yes.

Jake: Yes.

Rick: I’ll answer that. I just want to make sure everyone knows the order here. So, I’ll answer that question and then I’ll come back to you for a follow up or two. Audio postcards are so important. So, if you have questions about it, other people do too. For those of you who missed the very beginning of the call, we went through a case study where auto postcards can produce like a 30 to 45% click through rate on an email campaign, which I haven’t seen since 1997. And the secret isn’t in the technology, really. It’s really about presentation. All an Audio Postcard is; is an email with a link that says hey you have an Audio Postcard. The person clicks on that link and then they get a web page. Well, you guys know how to make web pages, right. So, that’s all it is. But it’s the presentation of it that compels people to click through and then listen. The question was could you send an Audio Postcard to more than one person or in bulk. Absolutely. When you go through the Audio Postcard wizard and actually it’s a little bit hidden on the site and that’s on purpose because I want people to be surprised by it after they sign up. But to get to the Audio Postcard wizard you have to first record an audio clip. First you record an audio clip, you click on the click to publish link and you get the audio clip wizard. You fill out the form, pick you stamp and you hit next. And then you get the link for the Audio Postcard. All you do is you copy that link into your email. It can be a graphical email or it could be a text email; it doesn’t matter. You send out the Audio Postcard link. Now, if you have Outlook Express, you could send to 100 people at a time or something around there. If you have an autoresponder or newsletter service, you could send to 10,000 people, 100,000 people at a time. If you buy into any of the high quality opt-in mailing houses such as a double opt-in mailing house, it’s okay to send out opt-in Audio Postcards as long as it is not spam. If you span with this, you get me in trouble and that’s not good. But the key is the link can go anywhere you want to send it. What’s the follow up?

Jake: That kind of takes care of it. I could send my newsletter out as an Audio Postcard, couldn’t I?

Rick: Absolutely. One note about that, the other key element about the Audio Postcard, the reason it works so well is because it’s not just audio. Not everybody—and it’s hard for me to admit this because I want to say rah, rah, rah audio—but not everybody has their speakers plugged in or turned on. They have the mute button on or whatever. So, 80% are going to be able to hear your audio or something—I don’t know what the number is. I tried to find that out, but no one knows. But there will be people that don’t have audio playing and so you want to have text and audio together. The postcard is a great excuse—all it is really—a great excuse to have text and audio together and that’s why it works so well. You can have your benefits on the left with the text. We’ll call the action on the right and then the audio playing for the people that have audio.

Jake: So, an Audio Postcard you said is actually a website. Is it just a sub-page on my website that that links and goes to that?

Rick: It could be. The Audio Postcard wizard that you use as part of the service does all the hard work for you if you like our template. If you don’t like our template, that’s okay. We are going to be coming out with more templates. We’re going to have a whole Audio Postcard management section where you can store all of your favorite Audio Postcards. You can track the results of them; who opened, who didn’t open. So, we’re going to have a lot of Audio Postcard management features built into the site. But until that time, if you don’t like the format I have right now, that’s okay. Create one maybe and then do a view source to cut and paste that actual HTML source code or just have your web master do it. And you can create a copy of my template. I don’t mind; that’s okay. And then you can customize it from there. I see one person that had kind of like a little flashing thing. Some people like to have a big click here sticker using different fonts. One thing you don’t want to do—I saw one person do this—don’t copy the Audio Postcard image and send the image in the email. That doesn’t work. First of all there’s no audio. Second of all, you’ve lost the transition from the introduction to click through to learning to action. That progression is important in the relationship. So, don’t just copy the image and email the image. The thing you’re sending out in the email is actually the link to the web page. It could be my generated web page or it could be your custom page. But you call it an Audio Postcard and it will boost your response.

Jake: Will your template allow us to add text to the Audio Postcard?

Rick: Yes, that’s almost the whole point of the wizard is once you record your audio clip and you click on the publish link and then you click on the Audio Postcard wizard, you get a little form, a little visual form that looks just like a postcard. And so you get a big text box on the left. You can type all your stuff in there. And you get a small text box on the right and that’s your call to action. And you can type in the link where that goes. And so you have total control over the text. You also pick which stamp—we have over 40 different stamps you can pick from.

Jake: Can the text be an HTML format?

Rick: I was just going to say that. We do allow, I think it’s 2,000 characters of text on the big side and I think 1,000 on the small side. Now, that’s way more characters than you need for a simple text message. You would create an 11 x 17 Audio Postcard then. The reason I do that is that you can have HTML commands, not a lot of them because they add up, but if you want to pick your font, your font size, do some bold and italics and different colors and so on, you can absolutely do that. In fact, you can actually turn—here’s a special trick for you guys—you can turn the Audio Postcard into an HTML form, an actual opt-in form that goes to your autoresponder. Then the audio responders have a form processing page that you can create any form you want on any website and then as long as the user clicks okay and goes to that processing page, they will opt-in to your autoresponder. So, you can actually put the HTML code for a form, email address, phone, first name or whatever you want with the action parameter being your autoresponder processing code. And if you don’t know how do to all that, just have your web master do it. And poof, you have a very powerful, high click through rate opt-in form that will blow any other opt-in form out of the water.

Jake: The last part of the question is can we include more than one audio file or audio link on a single Audio Postcard?

Rick: If you want to include more than one audio link on the Audio Postcard, you’re going to want to copy the Audio Postcard HTML onto your own web server and then modify the page there. The Audio Postcard actually began with the lead generator feature that you may have seen. Now, personally, I’m not too happy with the lead generator. It’s a little bit clumsy in the way it was developed. It’s not having the results I was hoping for. But that was the beginning of the Audio Postcard. So, that led me to this very good place. But the lead generator had multiple audio clips on one place and it turns out, I think that simple is better. And that’s an axiom of marketing for decades, right. Don’t offer three offers; offer one offer. So, maybe offer a choice on the exit pop-up, but don’t sell them three different products in one solo email. So, we’ve covered Audio Postcards. Does anybody else have any other questions? We are over time. I’m happy to stay on for as long as you guys want me to. But if you need to drop off now, that’s not a problem. I encourage everyone to go to www.instantaudio.com and sign up if you haven’t already or get your friends to. If you get three friends to sign up, your service is free. So, take advantage of that. Now, let’s go on. Anyone else have a question?

Caller: I have a question on the Audio Postcard. Just like on my regular recording, once I publish it, it’s always there. Every time I go back to my Audio Postcard, I have to type in my text again. When are you going to have that so that I don’t have to do that?

Rick: That’s a great question. If you couldn’t hear him, the question was when you create an Audio Postcard; the text is kind of lost after you create the Audio Postcard. If you want to change it just a little bit, you have to type it in all over again. And that’s a symptom of a version one feature. Behind the scenes we are working on version two that has all the bells and whistles we can image. To be honest, we have a feeling that the Audio Postcard is going to be big. We had no idea it would have the power it did. So, it was really kind of a quick little inspiration kind of a feature. And it’s turned into one of the better pieces of the service. And I’m really proud of it. It’s also a good example of what we can do as a hosted marketing services that if you can’t get the buy by converting files and so on; there’s more to the service than just the file format. Okay, next question.

Brent: Rick this is Brent again. I have a quick question. I was talking about the interviews before. One of the problems I’m having with my interviews right now is my voice comes through nice and loud and clear, but my interviewee’s voice is sometimes quiet and muted. Can I do a conference call to record voices through your service?

Rick: Not at this time. Certainly that’s something that has been identified over time we’d like to add. Mainly not as a thing that you’d use every single time perhaps, but as a convenience feature if you’re in a hotel room without all of the equipment, what a great way to always have that available to you. The solution to your problem right now, though, is—are you using a headset right now?

Brent: I am using a portable, wireless phone and I guess something from Radio Shack that plugs into the wall and then it goes back into the computer. So, it records the WAV file directly into my computer. But unless I get my interviewee to speak up loudly, the difference in our voice sound is tremendous.

Rick: The solution is to get a headset with a volume control because what you want to do is lower your voice. Now, even though that decreases the signal to noise ratio, you’re getting more noise in the recording relevant to the level of your voice, that’s okay because you’re matching what the other caller has anyway. The human ear tunes out the noise anyway. At lot of people who are novices at recording, they worry about the noise. And don’t worry about the background noise. Worry about getting the main speakers voice equal volume and without distortion.

Caller: I have a solution that might help that’s even lower tech than that.

Rick: Okay.

Caller: That is you get a Radio Shack tape recording telephone device so that you can tape record telephone calls. And then even though your voice will sound louder on your phone than your other speaker, if you open up a conference call account somewhere and instead of you calling this person and then calling into your testimonial line or your Instant Audio line to record it as a computer file, what you can do is you both call the conference call line, like this line we just called here. Both of your voices will probably be pretty equal on that line and you’ll be tape recording it both as a tape recorded file on a cassette. You probably can rig it at the same time so that it goes into your computer and you can just determine which of those files has the most even volume and then upload one or the other either by computer means or just through the phone means. You’ll actually three-way in with Rick’s dial in service and it should come out clean and you don’t need to do anything.

Rick: I agree. So, we have a couple of options for you. The headset with the volume control and then you just normalize it or compress it with Sound Forge or whatever. There’s the three-way conference call. If you just want to do it the three-way conference call, you want to go to www.freeconferencecall.com because guess what, you get a free conference call. If you want to talk more about audio equipment, there’s a guy I recommend, a buddy of mine—I make no money on this. Go to www.internetaudioguy.com . His name is Mike Stewart, www.internetaudioguy.com . That’s guy, not guide. It’s guy. And Mike Stewart knows all the equipment. He goes to all the conventions to learn about the equipment. If you have a MAC, if you have a PC, he can help you either way. So, Mike Stewart from www.internetaudioguy.com is a great resource. And he does a lot of custom Flash and audio. He’s a former audio engineer. Well, I guess he still is. But he actually used to do a lot of what I’m doing now in the automated fashion. He used to do this by hand and used to charge hundreds of dollars for testimonial. And you get as many as you can record for $60 a month plus phone charges. He and I are still buddies because we’re servicing different parts of the market and there’s tons of room for everybody. So, I encourage you guys visit Mike. Next question.

Mike J: Hi Rick this is Mike Jackman. How are you?

Rick: Hi there.

Mike J: I really love your testimonial feature, but I have six different businesses that I’m running right now. I was wondering is there any way where we can get some folders with maybe some testimonial extensions?

Rick: Yes, that is a feature that I have identified as one that I am definitely going to do. I’ll tell you what, everyone who is still on the call, if you want a second testimonial line, I can do that for you for $10 a month. Just email me and I’ll get you set up for that.

Mike J: Thank you.

Rick: It’s not automated yet. I don’t want a thousand people calling me on that. I don’t want to announce it to the whole list, but if you guys who are the active, interested people, I want to do what I can for you.

Mike J: Thanks Rick, love your service.

Rick: You’re welcome. Let’s take five or six more questions and we’ll end at quarter after the hour. Who is next?

Caller: Is there any possibility of getting some audio up on the Screen Blaze program?

Rick: Screen Blaze, I talked to Mike Chen about that and what the conclusion we came to, I think it’s going to be allowed, but then I got busy, he got busy and I think he just sold the company after that conversation. So, I’m not sure what’s up with that. But, I’ll write this down because I know a lot of people really like Screen Blaze.

Caller: I’m getting lots and lots of hits and I really would like to have that audio up because that’s really important.

Rick: I will contact them. I actually had a conversation with them just after they launched. It was quite a while ago. Thank you for that suggestion or request. Next question.

Lauren: Hi Rick this is Lauren.

Rick: Hi Lauren.

Lauren: I don’t know if I have a question because I’m so new, but I appreciate all the tips that you guys are giving and everything because that’s helping me know what I can really do the next time out. I certainly need to learn the techniques of the ways of doing things.

Rick: Well, I think you’re going to love the record by phone service because it takes much of the technical stuff out of it. In fact, it takes all of it out of it because all you need to do is call the number and leave a message and have your web developer whether that’s your son or your neighbor or the guy that you’re paying, have the web developer do the rest.

Lauren: So, will they know how to do it?

Rick: Yes, you just have to tell them what message you want and where you want it to be and then they’ll take it from there.

Lauren: And they’ll know it’s HTML because I sure don’t.

Rick: Absolutely. We accidentally sent out an email that was blank. It just said insert subject here, right. And one of my customers actually thought those were instructions for how to do audio over email and he wrote back and thank me for the instructions. So, not everybody is a computer geek. And that’s okay. Everyone has their specialty. So, it’s all good. Anybody else?

Rob: Hey Rick this is Rob; I have a question for you. I have a hard copy newsletter that I’m going to be sending out to my 2,000 customer base. And I was going to have a testimonial contest. I’m actually giving them $500; that’s how serious I am. Now, what I want to do is put in there a call to number to give the testimonial and that’s what your 1-800 number is for. Does anybody else have any ideas how I can play that out in my newsletter before I send it out?

Caller: Yes, just simply put your offer out there. Let them know you want testimonials. Publish the 800 number with some instructions of how to do it. Record a little greeting before they leave the testimonial as to how you want them to do it. And let them know that somebody’s going to get $500 for picking up the phone.

Rick: Now, I would be really interested in hearing how that goes because a lot depends on how you phrase the offer and what’s the relationship is with your list already because what I’ve seen in the past—and this is not proven, I have a feeling from hearing other stories—that the kind of cold bribe or cold incentive doesn’t really tie that well to action when it comes to testimonials; mainly because there is nothing immediate and concrete for them except the chance of winning, perhaps.

Caller: What better offer to do you think would work?

Rick: I like to try something along those lines. That’s why I have two different companies. I haven’t gotten it to work yet. So, if you get it to work, I’d love to know what you did. It will be a great case study. My only recommendation is when first launching a product; get your friends to give you testimonials. Then as quickly as possible, as you have powerful, good interactions with your customers, then you say hey by the way, could you call this number and leave me a quick voice testimonial? I’d really appreciate it. That’s it.

Caller: Well, I do have a good relationship with the customer, but like somebody said in the beginning, it’s hard to get testimonials from them. But this way, I see how it makes it almost a no brainer for them. If you like my company, I would appreciate some good feedback. Or better yet, here’s a thought that I’m starting to get, we’re holding a survey about what you would like to receive as a give away or just give us a good testimonial about how we’ve helped you out.

Rick: I do know of one other company that is giving away something for a testimonial and I guess for them it’s working out pretty well. They are a larger company and so it’s part of their marketing budget, I guess. So, they’re actually encouraging all their customers. They’re actually putting it on all their invoices and their marketing materials. And another example is www.fundraising.com ; they actually print the testimonial number on their chocolate rose wrappers to help people get the product. Do you like this product? Give us your testimonial. And there’s the appropriate number.

Caller: And if you have a good relationship with those 3,000 people, maybe you just send a little offer out to them telling them that you publish your testimonial line. Tell them you are throwing $500 into the mix. You’re going to give $100 for the five best testimonials.

Rick: There you go.

Caller: And that anyone that gives a testimonial, even if it’s not one of the five best, will receive something free, whether it’s physically delivered to them or digitally downloadable or whatever. But that everybody will get something for making an effort.

Caller: Excellent. That’s like a free oil change or something like that.

Caller: Whatever it is.

Rick: I like that a lot.

Caller: What I like most about this is that somebody else mentioned you have like an interview and then the customers can get involved, but it’s very low compressed. You don’t have to talk to anybody. You don’t have to look at anybody. You can just talk and say what they think on the recording. Does that make sense?

Rick: Absolutely. All of these features, by the way, are in constant improvement. Either I’m dreaming up new ways of enhancing them or I’m actually doing it. And so, I’m hearing a lot of good feedback on all the things we have so far. So, there’s nothing negative here. I’m just saying I know what’s coming and I’m so excited about some of the things we’re going to be doing. And so, I’m so happy to get you all into the service in so many interesting ways that are working for you and we have lots of powerful case studies. And so, there’s more yet to come. We have not even come close to harnessing the power of audio as a marketing service. And that’s the way I think of my company. So, I’d like to take one last question and then we’ll wrap it up.

Caller: I have a question about the exit pop-up, Rick that you talked about earlier. Just like your other service where you can create an opt-in form with audio. Do you have something or would you use the lead generator. Would you use the very same thing with an exit pop-up?

Rick: We don’t have an exit pop-up on our site yet as a tool for you to use. What I would recommend is go to Armand Morin’s website. I forget which one it is. He has so many of them. I’m sure it’s called pop-up generator. But if it’s not pop-up generator, you can just go to www.gogenerator.com and Armand Morin has all the variations of pop-ups that you want. And he is actually furthering the science of pop-ups more than anybody else in the market. So, he is definitely the guy to go with.

Caller: What’s his name again?

Rick: It’s Armand Morin. And his website is—I think his main website is www.gogenerator.com .

Caller: Okay, great.

Rick: You can’t miss by going with him.

Caller: Thank you very much.

Rick: So, I’m going to wrap up the call. If there are any other questions that we didn’t have a chance to answer—we answered a lot of them—just go ahead and put them in an email and I’ll get back to you just as soon as I can. So, if you are a subscriber, I want to thank you. I really appreciate your business. And I want to do everything I can to make this a great investment for you both in money and in time. And if are not yet a subscriber, I want to invite you to go to www.instantaudio.com right now and click on the subscribe link and sign up and become a member. We’ll give you the same customer service that you’ve seen with all the other customers.

Caller: Amen.

Rick: Yes.

Caller: Thanks Rick

Rick: This is actually my first teleconference and so I want to thank all of you for making it a great success. I really enjoyed it and I’ll do more of these in the future.

Caller: I am speaking from Switzerland. Am I too late?

Rick: Did you just join in?

Caller: I’m terribly sorry.

Rick: Send me an email. I want to give you a special bonus for being the furthest person to come to the teleconference. I actually was going to give that bonus to someone from London whom I knew was going to be on the phone, but I think you beat him. I’ll be in contact with you guys through email and maybe by Audio Postcard.

Caller: Great call Rick and great service.

Rick: Thank you and have a great weekend.

Michael: I want to thank you for listening to www.hardtofindseminars.com . If you want to get in touch with any of the people we interview, please contact Michael at www.hardtofindseminars.com by email. You can emailor you can call (858) 274-7851.