49 – Recycle your knowledge for fun and profit: Tom talks Repurposing

Episode 049 Repurposing. In this episode I’m going to show a whole boatload of ways to sell your knowledge.
Episode 048 Joel Comm. He’s a New York Times Best Selling Author who has literally created a happiness-based lifestyle business. His days are his own and just for fun and to learn about a topic he started a podcast about it and it’s opened doors all over the world. Go back later and check out episode 48 Joel Comm
Sponsor
Today’s sponsor is AmazingPublicSpeaking.com this is a membership site with over 475 pro and public speaking training videos, plus audios and articles. We also have a corresponding complimentary webinar 30 speaking tips in 37.625 minutes We’ll have a link to that in the show notes at screwthecommute.com/49
Main Event
Repurposing: How to Sell Your Knowledge in 19 Different Ways
So why this topic? I want you to maximize your sales from every piece of knowledge you own or that you can create or have somebody else create for you. I'm going to show you how to take your knowledge and format and sell it many, many, many different ways.
Let’s get this very clear. You have a piece of content. It could be an eBook, a video, an audio a webinar or whatever. The point of this episode is to show you all the different formats you could convert that piece of content to so that you maximize the revenue from it.
Ya see people have different preferences. If you like to listen to stuff and all I have is an eBook or webinar, I’ve most likely lost you and a great percentage of people like you. If all you have is audio and I like to read, …..well there ya go. It’s the same thing. You lost me.
So, let’s jump right in to showing you all the things you could be doing. Oh, and one more thing. You don’t have to do all of these things. You only do the ones that make sense for your audience. For instance, if I were doing something for senior citizens, I probably wouldn’t worry about doing some fancy ecourse. Which leads me to our first format.
E-MAIL E-COURSES
First thing is and this is one of the easiest products on earth to create is an eCourse and this is an ecourse via Email. Remember, we’re talking about taking knowledge of yours and repurposing it in many different formats. The first one is an eCourse via Email.
We always use plain text for these because Email delivery is tough nowadays and html emails those are the fancy ones with graphics get a big negative in the spam filters out there, so you just use plain text. Very easy.
Anybody listening to this could sit down for a couple of hours, take their topic, break it down into five or seven parts. Make five or seven Emails and put it into what we call a “sequential auto-responder”. This is something that will deliver it automatically each day or every couple of days or once a week, whatever you set up. We use http://www.KickStartCart.com the shopping cart system I use and promote. BTW I did a complete training session on shopping cart systems in episode 10. So, go back and check that one out.
To create an ecourse you just break your topic into its logical parts….similar to chapters in a book. For instance, if I was going to do an ecourse on Tennis I would do one email on serves, one on forehand, one on backhand, volley, overhead, etc. So that’s how you develop the course. Break it down into logical parts. Here’s something I just thought of. At the end of each part of the course give them a teaser of what’s coming up in the next part so they are watching for it.
Now these plain text eCourses or eCourses via Email can be either paid or free. I know one guy he’s got like a $1500 eCourse. He originally did it because he wanted to pay cash for a new BMW and he did. I haven’t checked lately if it’s still running but for years, he ran his very expensive eCourse. You can do the same thing.
My first eCourse brought in about $7,000 the first week and it was a free eCourse. Now you say, “How has that happened?” Here’s a point for you. I want you make sure that each piece of the eCourse has something that they can buy - 90% or more good information that you promised them and 10% or less something to buy. IN EACH EMAIL. Don’t wait till the last part of the course.
At the bottom of each Email I just said, “If you're really serious about this, here you can buy this CD for $200 and it’s going to tell you everything you need to know.” $7000 in the first week from that free eCourse and that eCourse is still running today although I've updated it quite a bit over the years. So, eCourse via Email is your first format and these are in no particular order. Do whatever makes sense for you.
E-COURSE IMPROVEMENT
On this first one I’m going to immediately take a side bar and tell you the modern way to deliver an Email eCourse. The problem is that Email delivery is down. It’s harder and harder to get Emails through spam filters and commercial email filters like gmail has. The longer the Email is, the harder it is to get through because innocent word combinations to you can set off the spam filters and it makes them think it’s spam and then the person doesn’t get a part of your eCourse.
In the beginning when I used to do this, I never got any complaints. They would get all seven pieces of my eCourse. As the years went by and the spam filters got tougher, people would complain that they didn’t get every piece of the course. It was a big hassle, because I have pretty large numbers of people in my database, for me to stop everything and go and find the piece they’re missing and copy and paste it was a big hassle. So, I devised a way to get rid of that problem. You want to really pay attention to this.
This is what I want you to do. I do want you to have your ecourse as five or seven separate pieces, separate pieces delivered per day or per week, . . . whatever.
Here’s a sidebar on the sidebar. If it’s a free ecourse, deliver it once per day. Get ‘em while they’re hot. If it’s more extensive paid ecourse maybe they need time to work on things and you deliver only once per week.
Back to the way to get out of the hassle of people missing parts of the ecourse. What I want you to do is put the entire course in one file and convert it to a PDF file. Then in each piece of your course, or I mean each email. I want you to say, “For those of you that missed a piece of the course,” or “if you're just too impatient and you want the whole thing, click here and you can download the entire course.”
As soon as I did this, and this is probably seven or eight years ago when I first needed to do this, not once, . . . . I can’t remember one in the last seven or eight years where I've had to respond to somebody not getting a piece of my eCourse. You put the whole thing in a PDF file and put it in each part of the course. That way you don’t have to fool around with people that missed it.
E-COURSE ON THE WEB
Another way to combat poor Email delivery and get people to your website is an eCourse on the web. There are two ways to do this. One of them involves sending an Email again. But you would send a short Email.
Short Emails get through the spam filters easier - that’s a good thing – You put a link to where they take the course or one part of your course on your website. It gets them to go to your website to take a piece of the course. Each piece of your course could be on a hidden page on your site. In other words, there’s no links to it anywhere. The only way people know about it is if they are taking your ecourse. Each page would have some weird URL or address to it so nobody could guess it and then what happens is, you give them the first part of the eCourse and they click over to take it on your website.
While they're at your website, you can show them all your other stuff. It’s much easier when they're at your website to promote your other products and services. Then, they get the second part of the eCourse through Email and they click over to Part 2 on a hidden page on your website, and so forth.
The other way to do it is to simply let them go from page to page to page and take it all at once but they're on your website the entire time. You don’t have to do any Email here if you have significant number of visitors to your website. You just promote it on your home page and people start going through the course. Also, when you have your course on your webpage, you don’t have to worry about its length or any potential spam words. It’s not email, so spam is irrelevant. That’s an eCourse on the web.
AUDIO E-COURSE
The next kind - let’s ramp it up a little bit - is an audio eCourse. This is where they would get a short Email with a link to a hidden page that has an audio file on it that they can either listen on your website or download smartphone or tablet. We’re going to talk about audio formats more in-depth later. So, that’s an audio eCourse.
VIDEO E-COURSE
Let’s ramp it up again to a video eCourse. You can use either regular video of you teaching something or you can use screen capture video which we’ll address just in a moment. Same thing, your videos are on hidden pages in your website.
These hidden pages that I'm talking about, you could secure them and make them password protected if you wanted to. However, sometimes just because you can do stuff doesn’t mean it’s worth the trouble. In many of these cases, especially if these are free eCourses, if somebody does trip over at it accidentally, you're still further ahead because they found you. Maybe you didn’t get their Email address, but at least they found the video and they may watch it and become a customer.
If they’re paid videos and they're really very expensive ones, maybe you want to secure the pages. But in most cases, I don’t bother because they're not easily found. So, that’s a video eCourse.
VIDEO COURSE
This is just the same type of course as the video ecourse, but it’s delivered all at one time and possibly protected behind membership software. I have some video courses that are simply on hidden pages of one of my websites. These are frequently combined with a pdf synopsis of what the videos teach. An example one that is locked up is https://www.CopyWriting901.com where I go in depth on the most important business skill I’ve ever acquired in my 40 plus years of business. I covered copywriting in episode 13 so you really don’t want to miss that one and I have an even more in-depth webinar on copywriting with lots of visuals at https://www.TomAntionWebinars.com We’ll have all this stuff in the show notes. This is episode 49 so it would be screwthecommute.com/49 unless we have our screwthecommute app done when you hear this. Then you can just pop to the show notes from the app.
SCREEN CAPTURE VIDEO
Now, let’s talk about Camtasia video. Camtasia is a brand name of a screen capture video program. I can’t tell you how much money I've made - I mean millions of dollars using this. I've been using this program in its various formats since the year 2000. Almost 19 years straight I've been using this. You can see a sample of it on the web at http://www.HowToUseAShoppingCart.com . These screen capture videos are where anything you can display on your computer screen, you can capture it and narrate over top of it and then replay it in some format. The program is now a very sophisticated video program, but not all that hard to use. You can find Camtasia at https://www.Techsmith.com
There are other cheaper screen capture video programs out there, but Camtasia is the gold standard. If you want to find others, just Google “screen capture video”.
I use screen capture for training employees, giving great customer service, but one of the ways I make money is to show people how to do things with cool software or online services, but they can’t do them unless they buy the thing I’m showing them and I get an affiliate commission when they do.
I have an entire eBook on this teaching you how to create an online income generator in one hour with no website.
I’ll have the link in the show notes.
http://www.kickstartcart.com/SecureCart/SecureCart.aspx?mid=80F7E224-BE3A-4CC7-8EA3-54567230DDEA&pid=e1241c2605aa4c57b6ab3e1455460c40
E-BOOKS
Let’s jump in to eBooks. Some of you have heard me talk about eBooks before, but not the way I'm going to talk about it here. There are a lot of new breakthroughs that you need to know about. I'm still not in favor of fancy eBooks on a PC computer or MAC that turn the pages and do all that crap. The reason I'm not in favor of them is twofold, because on a pc many of these are .exe files. These are the files that people are afraid of because they carry viruses. And the other reason is that many times they just don’t work right which is very frustrating for your reader.
We still, to this day, for most of our eBooks, use simple Microsoft Word to Adobe Acrobat PDF conversion. That’s the way we do it.
In eBooks, all the work is done in your Word file or whatever word processor you’re using and then you convert it to Adobe. Virtually, 98% of everything is done in a Word file. The only thing you do in Adobe is you can put security functions on if you want.
You can make it so people can’t print it or copy and paste it and things like that. I very seldom even use those because people will get mad and want their money back. The main thing I do is I put a password on so that they can't change the document or just take my name off and claim the whole thing is their own.
Kindle
There are many wild and crazy eBook formats, but they’re a total waste of time compared to Amazon’s Kindle This is the big Kahuna. Kindle is an electronic book reader. If you don’t think it’s catching on, I was down at Applebees having dinner. I see a guy at the bar drinking beer like a fish and he’s got a Kindle Reader in front of him. folks I’ve been selling on the web now since there was a commercial web starting in 1994….that’s over 24 years. Amazon’s Kindle is probably the best opportunity I’ve seen in all those years because you have access to their hundreds of millions of buyers.
CELL PHONE NOVELS
This next one, in the 20 plus years I've been teaching Internet stuff, I would have never in those 20 years recommended if somebody came to me and they were fiction writers. I would have discouraged them. I would talk them out of joining my mentor program. I would have said, “Good luck to you.” Stephen King couldn’t do it, how do you think you’re going to do it?
Well folks, times have changed as of a few years ago. In Japan, the Top 10 printed novels started out as what we call ‘Cellphone Novels’. Each one of them sold 400,000 copies just for people to read them on their cellphones. This is just unbelievable to me. If you're any closet case novelist out there, I want you to go to Google and type in cellphone novels and you'll find enormous amounts of information about it.
Like I said, I would have never recommended people trying to sell fiction but here we go. It’s working. Just type in cellphone novels and that’s another way to sell your stuff. You can also do very well with fiction on Kindle.
CDs
In certain markets CDs still sell. The gift and music market is still big and for older people everyone in that age group knows how to shove a CD in the dashboard of their car.
The recording software to make audio files which are then burned on to CDs runs from free to about $65. This is like a nothing investment. I currently use Adobe Audition to record and edit this podcast which I pay $20.00 per month to use. I used to use Sony “Sound Forge Audio Studio” now owned by a company called Magix.. I upgraded to Adobe Audition so I could do some fancier stuff.
Audacity is free and if you’re on a Mac, you’ve already got “Garage Band” on your computer.
You do need a decent microphone. You can get a studio quality microphone for under $100. We get stuff from the “Internet Audio Guy” Mike Stewart
The microphone I’m using right now cost about $100 bucks. Hopefully, it sounds pretty darn good.
If you’re recording directly into your computer, you can get a USB studio microphone, and plug it right in. With that and your software for less than $175.00, you’ve got a really high-quality recording studio. For years, I just did it using the telephone microphone. So, don’t feel discouraged, “Oh, I can't spend $175 right now.” Just get any kind of crap microphone but get the software and get started doing this because audio sells
TRANSCRIPTS
Once you record something. You can take your script if you have one and sell it as a “transcript”. You can also give it away if they buy the audio or vice versa. If they buy the transcript, you give them the audio. Either way works as bonuses.
If you don’t have a pre-written script to use as your transcript, to get stuff transcribed used to cost me from $30.00 to $60.00 per recorded hour and would take me minimum of one day and usually longer to get it back. I almost jumped out of my chair when I found a place that did it electronically for only $5.00 per recorded hour and it would be back to me within 10 minutes. This is freaking awesome.
I’ll have the link in the show notes where you can get 30 minutes free to try it out and then another 100 minutes free if you sign up. Show notes screwthecommute.com/49

Here’s a Camtasia video I did to show it to you.
https://youtu.be/VmPtVuke0OE
https://sonix.ai/invite/qgzogvk Here’s the service.
Transcripts by themselves, if they’re exact transcripts don’t really read very well but people still like them and buy them.
AUDIO ON THE WEB
The next usage is audio on the web. When you're on the web, you can give away audio files and get people to give you their Email address. You’d say, “Get a free hour-long audio file on XYZ. Just fill in your name and Email address right here and you’ll get it immediately through Email.” The files won't actually be coming through their Email. They’re too big. There will be a “link” to it in their Email.
I’ve always got to throw in side bars folks. What I just said is that you always want to tell people that something’s coming through Email. Why do you think that is? If they know that they’re going to get instant access, a lot of people will put crappy or fake Email addresses in because they know the screen is going to go directly to the download. You want them to think that they have to put their good Email address in or they won't get what they want. I don’t do that all the time, but it’s a good thing to keep in mind if you’re getting lots of fake email addresses.
PRE-LOADED AUDIO PLAYERS OR THUMB DRIVES
The next thing is really cool. This is audio on pre-loaded players or iPods or USB thumb drives People really love this. I made $53,000 in three days just with this idea. The idea is just you pre-load your stuff, your audio files onto a player or thumb drive that they can use for something else after they’ve listened. You can have your name and logo printed on the device or just use stickers. I love that idea.
REPURPOSING OLD AUDIO
This is another way to sell your stuff. I just told you I made $53,000 in three days with this idea of selling audios on these pre-loaded players. Where do I get the audios? I went back about three or four years through my stuff and pulled out all these roughly 30-minute training sessions I had done in my mentor program and other places. I brought out all these files. I had about 70 of them. I sat down with my laptop and a headset microphone, (I didn’t even use the studio microphone) and I watched the tennis channel (which has nothing to do with this hahaha) I started listening to these files. This is about two weeks before Christmas.
As soon as I would hear something that was obsolete because these files went back two or three years and who wants to get a four-year old file on Internet stuff? You know it’s going to be old. What I did is I listened to all these files. Some of them were totally obsolete, I threw them out altogether and I came out with 60 files and as soon as I would hear something on a file that was old or had changed, I’d stop the recording - remember, these are all digital on my laptop - and then, I would open up another file and here’s exactly what I did. I'm going to simulate it for you right now.
“Hi folks, it’s Tom here in the studio. You just heard me say ‘X’ on this recording. Well, ‘X’ is no longer the modern way we do things. It’s now ‘Y’. So, if you ever hear me say ‘X’ again, you know I really mean ‘Y’. Okay, let’s get back to the live recording.”
I recorded that little piece and just pasted it right there where I said the obsolete thing. The beauty of this is I was able to promote the product as “fully updated to today’s standards”.
If you have anything that changes or you have really old stuff that you love but there are some things that need fixed, just pop-in and people didn’t even say a word about it because it sounds different, “Here’s Tom in the studio with an update.” Nobody cares. But now, you can fix the stuff just by importing your old CDs and tapes into these software programs and then just fixing the parts that are bad and keeping the rest. That’s repurposing old audio, but make sure the audio quality of the old stuff isn’t totally crappy before you do this or you could just have it transcribed and re-record it.
TELECLASSES
Next way to sell your stuff is Teleclasses. This is one of the biggest slam dunk income makers that I've had over many, many years. I’m you’re technically on one right now. I mean you’re on it for free, but you can easily sell teleclasses on specific topics. They're easy to create and not one person has ever asked me how to dial a telephone.
This is just enormous amounts of money I've made using these things. To do a teleseminars or class what you need is what’s called a telephone bridge line. It’s much lower and cheaper technology than a full-blown conference call but way, way cheaper to do. I’m recommending now http://www.FreeConferenceCallHD.com Almost everybody I started out, starts out at a free place like this.
They will record the call with people listening live and FreeConferenceCallHD will send you the audio recording. It’s not going to be quite the quality as recording it yourself because it’s over the phone line but you can do conferences up to 1000 people for free. It’s a beautiful thing. Just go and get yourself an account and learn how to use it. I’ll have the link in the show notes episode 49 screwthecommute.com/49 or on the new screw the commute app if it’s ready by then.
Don’t jump into a big teleconference and promote one not knowing what buttons to push to mute everybody and all that.
Audio is great because it’s the only medium where people can listen, learn and be entertained while doing something else. Even though this podcast is free people who have been listening to this podcast have been joining my mentor program and buying my products. I hope you do to. My mentor program is unique and the other big gurus hate me because of the unique nature of my program that let’s you in cheap and I don’t get my big money unless you make money. All of them want tall their money upfront. Check it out at https://www.GreatInternetMarketingTraining.com
So, Teleclasses are very, very powerful ways to get yourself exposed to people so that they trust you, and believe in you. The ones that don’t go all the way to buy your big stuff, still gave you smaller amounts of money paying for the teleclass. It all adds up.
Also, some may say that teleseminars are dead. Absolutely NOT TRUE. For the younger generation especially….the reason is they won’t sit down to watch a webinar, but they will download a recording of your teleclass and listen to it on their smartphones.
WEBINARS
Next thing is Webinars. I used to hate Webinars but now I’m a webinar freak . . . and they sell. http://www.TomAntionWebinars.com I record a live one once at http://GoToWebinar.com and then I replay the heck out of it using the best service of all http://www.HybridWebinars.com (leading to stealth) and of course, that’s my affiliate link.
I pretty much invented the “Hybrid Webinar”. This is where I play the webinar replay but make myself available to answer questions during the replay. This converts the listeners to buyers like crazy because they get the feel of the live event and they get their questions answered immediately.
Now, I never “pretend” it’s live which is unethical. I send out an email announcement saying, “Webinar replay and I’ll be there answering questions live. In reality, I could be at the mall answering questions on my smartphone. One time I was in the woods leaning up against a tree hunting answering questions from a recorded webinar. It’s no wonder I’m such a lousy hunter hahaha
The one thing about webinar people is they’re much higher quality because they have taken the time to sit down and put time aside to watch the webinar. They’re really a better-quality customer that will spend more money because they are more committed to the topic.
SHOUTOUTS
Rob Hoerntlein http://www.ConnectTrends.com Rob says we connect the latest and most lucrative trends in business for you. This way you can skip the stuff that doesn't work and concentrate on the things that will make you the most money.
Lisa Ryan LisaRyanSpeaks.com She’s a keynote speaker, engagement and retention expert and culture consultant. She wants to know, “Do you have actively engaged employees?” I don’t know. Some of them are married hahaha
Clare Dreyer She’s got a blog/vlog. It’s called Wow Your Now - A Baby Boomer’s Guide for Travel, Adventure & Fun! www.wowyournow.com Her goal is encouraging Baby Boomer’s to get out and enjoy life. Even if it’s local you can have fun!
Sponsor
Have you ever thought about getting paid to speak and you're not sure if you're ready to invest in lots of training? Well I've got the solution. AmazingPublicSpeaking.com has over 475 public and professional speaking techniques. Openings, closings, attention gaining devices, humor and the business of speaking and it's only $97 bucks for an entire year. Also check out the complimentary webinar 30 speaking tips in 30.675 minutes. All this will be in the show notes at screwthecommute.com/49

DVDs
DVDs - I love DVDs! They have a very high perceived value. Everybody knows how to use them. It ‘was’ one of the fastest growing formats on earth. Now you’ve got the Blu-ray and different kinds of formats but DVDs will be around for a long time. They are harder to create.
If you don’t believe me watch people at 7/11 in front of the RedBox Video rental machine.
My philosophy is that just about anybody can learn to shoot video and get decent audio on their video. But it’s a lot harder to edit it. When I say ‘a lot’, it’s tremendously harder to learn really good video editing. I don’t recommend that for other than simple edits. . . . It’s too time consuming to learn great editing and you still may suck at it even if you learn to use the software because there’s an art to it.
There are tons of highly talented people available everywhere on earth that could edit for you. I have never paid more than $15 an hour for editors. If you don’t think I've had some good ones, when you go to http://www.GreatInternetMarketingTraining.com , take a look at our promo video for the retreat center there. That video anywhere would cost you $30,000 to $50,000 to create that half hour show. I did it for about $3,000 in editing.
It took about 200 hours of editing by a graduate of film school, just building a resume and she spent 200 hours editing that thing. It wouldn’t have taken so long if I was more organized with the shooting of the video. It wasn’t her fault. So, I got a $30,000 production for $3,000. That video has probably been responsible for about 6 million dollars in sales so far.
We also have a great video class I teach about once or twice a year at the retreat center in Virginia Beach. People come in from all over. I’ll have a link in the show notes.
https://www.Antion.com/vipvideoday.htm (Actually now it’s a full weekend) Besides shooting great video, you will learn simple editing on your smart phone with cheap or free apps because lots of things we teach you is on location where you want to get it up on the web fast with a real live feel to it. So, I teach you how to create a video to promote your business and relate it to wherever you happen to be. We actually go out into the field and you look around and see what’s there and you learn how to make a video based on where you are. It’s really cool. We also give you all the studio stuff, lighting, equipment and we shoot you in our HD studio.
It’s a really great weekend.
You do get a lot of money for DVDs, so I wouldn’t ignore this market.
PRINTED BOOKS
Printed books, I'm not going to say too much about printed books. This is obviously another way to sell your stuff. I really think you need “The Self-Publishing Manual by Dan Poynter. Printed books are a great credibility builder. But, there have been a lot people out there that putting out real schlocky books. There’s still some credibility because you can call yourself an author but I wouldn’t be too proud of the crap they’re putting out.
This just doesn’t fly in my program when these books are so thin you can almost see through them, you can't even put a print on the spine and people are all proud of them. It doesn’t fly well with me. I'm somebody that believes in excellence and putting out crap is not excellent. Don’t ask me to teach you how to do that.
But if you put out a decent book, it is a big credibility builder but you have to decide if you're going to self-publish or try to get a major publisher God help you there or use print on demand. I have done all the ways and for me to go through the major publishing hassle again I’d rather shoot myself in the head. You can believe there’s going to be a lot of money on the table before I’d ever mess with it because it just was big hassle, they didn’t know what they were doing and they're a big major publishing company. Who am I to say a major publishing doesn’t know what they're doing?
They’ve been in business for 50 or 100 years. But from my point of view, making money and marketing a book, they're clueless. I prefer self-publishing and Dan Poynter may he rest in peace is the main guru and I've had every version of his book for the last 20 versions of them. Everything I do has his influence on it so I can't recommend him enough. Get the “Self-Publishing Manual”.
SPECIAL REPORTS
The next thing is special reports. One of my favorite students, her name is Joan Stewart, the Publicity Hound, refuses to write a book. Her book would sell for about $24, that’s what books sell for.
The same information in her book breaks down into about 43 special reports where she gets anywhere from $18 to $39 for them. She gets
$800 for the same information she would only get $24 if she put it all in one place. Check her out at www.PublicityHound.com.
I know this is real because I've paid as much as $180 for a 30-page report. I really needed to know something about the State of the Email Union - publishing and open rates and stuff like that. A company out of DC called ‘Marketing Sherpa’ sells these very expensive reports. To a big company, it’s a drop in the bucket. They don’t even think twice of dropping $180 on some executive summary report. If you have stuff that lends itself to that, forget the book and write special reports and sell them.
CEU CREDITS
Next thing is CEU credits. For those of you who don’t know, that stands for Continuing Education. Continuing Education is beautiful even in today’s economy because people that have to have continuing education to keep their license like lawyers, doctors, cosmetologists, CPAs, all those kinds of people - nurses.
There are loads of places that have CEUs. These people don’t give up their license just because the economy is having a little rough time.
They have to go buy this training. I know the guy that first recruited me into the DC Speakers Association. He’s been selling them forever. Back in those days in 1991, he was selling some little workbook for $90 and his market HAD to buy it. This is a beautiful thing.
The first thing you’d want to do is in your state because it’s a state by state thing, type in to Google ‘licensing board’ and then put your state and profession.
So, I typed in ‘licensing board Virginia’ and found in about 30 seconds what I need to learn. I just tried it before we started the class and typed in ‘licensing board Texas’ and about 5 seconds, the first place was what I needed to find out who needs CEUs in that state for electricians and all these other professions, contractors.
CO-AUTHORSHIPS
Next topic: Sell co-authorships. This is a very cool thing. You do the work putting a book together and charge people to be a co-author of the book. All they have to do is write sections of the book. They pay you for the privilege of being a co-author with you and they get out of all the hassle of developing the book. The bigger your name is, the more you can charge. Just be careful the person isn’t a scammer or some other kind of person who you would be embarrassed to co-author with.

ANTHOLOGIES
This is another form of co-authorship, but instead of one person co-authoring you have many people co-authoring. They pay you to be in the book. They write one chapter and get a certain number of books included in their fee. You have the book printed and distributed to the authors and you keep the profits from all their fees over an above the printing and other costs.
LIVE SEMINARS
Next thing is live seminars. This can be extremely lucrative but they can also be extremely risky and they are always a lot of work. I never did any of my own until I got a large database because it took out all the marketing cost which made it less risky. So, if I want to throw a live seminar now, I just hit a few buttons, 100,000 people will hear of it, and I can pretty much fill up a seminar in any state in the United States. That knocks out the risk.
The one thing I learned along the way is to get a meeting planner. Good ones will save you far more than they’ll ever cost you. Here’s the reason,
. . . they have clout with hotels. I usually call hotel people ‘scumbags’ and a lot of stuff because it’s a pretty rotten profession. They’ll screw you every which way they can screw you. You probably won't know what’s happening or what hit you until it’s too late. Wait till you get the bill for the coffee which will be ten times what you expected it to be.
A good meeting planner won't let that happen to you. I recommend Audrey Hagen at Platinum Events. She does all the major players because she is just excellent. She takes care of every detail and makes the best deals. There are lots of books on how to run seminars. If you
want to sell, give live seminars, a little bit risky but can be very lucrative.
COACHING AND MENTOR PROGRAMS
Coaching and mentor programs. I really don’t like the word ‘coach’. I think it’s been bastardized by all these supposed life coaches. I crack up so bad. I don’t want to embarrass people when they say, “I'm a certified life coach.” Then I check in and see they haven’t done a darn thing in their entire life. “But they're certified to help me learn how to run my life.”
There’s too much of that going on nowadays. There’s not much regulation on it. You have to be very careful. It’s funny because they begged me to speak at this coaching seminar and I told them exactly what I just told you. They still wanted me there. There are a lot of serious, good coaches. What I'm saying to you is that that term, even though you're a good coach, doesn’t mean that you are not going to suffer a little bit by using that term to call yourself a coach because of all these other low-life’s that are out there driving broken down Hyundai’s and can't pay their rent but they're going to be your life coach.
I prefer the term ‘mentor’. Mentor is a much higher-level type of person, a trusted adviser. I believe that’s a better term and you'll be held in much higher esteem. Whatever you call yourself, people will pay for personal attention. This is where you can be one-on-one on the phone or Skype or Zoom .
. . you can be one on many on the phone, . . . you can have personal visits, etc.
The beauty of it is you can set it up any way you want it. People pay you by the hour. They can pay you monthly, they can pay you yearly. Mine is an upfront fee and then a percentage of their net profits that’s capped so they’re not stuck with me forever. It’s totally fair and it’s why it’s one of the longest running most successful mentor programs ever.
I've gotten myself to the point where it’s just not worth it for me to help somebody for a year if I don’t have a chance of making a lot of money.
Here’s how I set mine up and I’d be thrilled if you joined. Sure I would. You pay an entry fee plus a percentage of your net profits. I say NET because you have to make money before I get any percentage. And that is up a cap because I don’t want to get married to you and I don’t want you to feel like you're stuck with me forever.
My program is a yearlong. It’s going to take me a year to train you. You’re either crazy or naive if you think you can learn what I know in a few week program.
Anyway, that’s how I've structured my program. I started out as $250 a month, I think. Over the past 18 years, I got it up to about $8,000 to get in and we finance that for you and then $50,000 on the back end. You’ve got everything at your fingertips by somebody that really has done it.
The bottom line in my program you get personal one-on-one attention from me and my staff and you could do the same thing for your program. Unless of course your program isn’t financially related where there is no measurement of income. At any rate you can give personal or group attention to people and get a lot of money for it. Check my program out at
http://www.GreatInternetMarketingTraining.com
Of course, that will be in the show notes. This is episode 49
TV SHOWS
Next thing, you might not have thought of is TV shows. The same people you recruit for doing your DVDs can help you create a TV show. Or you can just pitch a TV show to a production company and if they like it, they’ll provide the production crew for you and try to sell it to the networks or cable. I have a show in development in Hollywood now. We did all the stuff. We shot the sizzle reel and all that but they told me, “Tom we love the show….but don’t quit your day job” hahaha
They told me it has about a 40% chance of selling to cable and 5% to network.
See the sizzle reel at https://www.ScamBrigade.com
If you're not that ambitious, you can do a lot of Web TV stuff now.
You Tube is pretty obvious but there are two specifically for TV shows. One is called www.ustream.tv. In this place, you can charge for your videos, you can put ads on your videos and you can dedicate space on your show to sponsors.
You can sell your knowledge in TV shows. Look at all these cable places. How did Bob Vila get started? He had an expertise, turned it into a show by getting sponsors, Home Depot, Lowe’s, Corning, and all these places that make building materials. Who would want to sponsor a show like you have? If you find the sponsors and you put together a decent show, it’s going to get on the air pretty much, because if you come with the money which is from these big sponsors, as long as it’s a legitimate looking show, they’ll love you because you're bringing the money to the table.
Note: You have to be careful you’re sponsors are not competitive with potential advertisers of the show. They don’t like that. So anyway, I got myself an agent and production company and crossing my fingers that the show sells.
And if you have any connections that could move the show along, I’d love to hear about it.
SPOKESPERSON WORK
I was the Chief Spokesperson for CBS’s owned www.Switchboard.com which is one of the largest websites in the world. I think it was probably the easiest money I've ever made in my life. It was $100,000.00, part- time for three months. I only left the house six times and went to five different cities and did the exact same speech each time. Most of the time, I'm very customized. This was exactly the same every time so it was much easier.
Spokesperson stuff can be very lucrative. You can do tradeshows, and other industry events and most of the time you just say the same thing each place.
SCHOOLS
Next thing is a school. Of course, this is what I'm doing with the distance learning facility: http://www.IMTCVA.org Whenever I talk about my school I highly encourage people to watch the free webinar I produced called “Is Higher Education Really Worth it?” You find it at https://www.ScrewtheCommute.com Click on “Webinars” If you want retrained or you have kids or neighbors thinking about going to college, please watch this. It could literally save you hundreds of thousands of dollars.
Anyway, back to starting a school….The big thing here is you have to be able to navigate through all the red tape. That’s why I got a professor with a PhD and who has been on Boards of Directors of schools. As an entrepreneur, I just don’t speak their language.
There are schools on all kinds of topics. There’s a place called www.ttouch.com, it teaches you how to massage horses. It’s 6 eight-day sessions at their ranch for $5,000. Keep in mind, I heard about this in 1999. This is already 19 years old and this place is still in business.
Not to be outdone, there’s a website called Equissage, they’re the same thing about massaging horses and dogs. Last I heard it was $1,795 for a week or if you want one-on-one with the owner, it is $3,000 for a week.
You’d be amazed at all the kinds of schools you could start. There are watch Repair school, Hypnosis schools, - every kind of goof ball therapy you can imagine - back to horses, there’s a Horse Management school hahaha. I’m not sure exactly what that is. Are they managing the eating and pooping schedule hahaha?
Basically, what I'm telling you is you can start a school on whatever you do and really legitimize it. But my favorite one was the International Professional Sex Surrogates Association. I have a sex surrogate in my program so this really is a real profession. This is a quote from their advertising, “The association offers a professional sex surrogate training course that combines experiential exercises, lectures, and reading assignments” - I’m wondering what the reading assignments are hahahaha- “individual counseling, and group processing” – I do not know what that means - “along with daily journaling. The training ends with an internship where students are placed with experienced therapist for additional hours of consultation and supervision.”
Can you imagine? You're training to be a sex surrogate and your instructor is there and telling you, “Hey, don’t do it that way. Do it this way.” hahahaha I'm not sure I could make it through this course. It’s 60 hours in 12 weeks. I might be able to handle 60 hours in 12 weeks but they have a 10-day intensive…That is no way I can make it through that course hahahaha for a thousand bucks.
Anyway, there are all kinds of schools you could start.
TRAINING COURSES
The next thing is writing and licensing training courses for royalties. One way would be to write course materials that the company that licenses the training course from you duplicates and delivers the course themselves.
You can always throw in a ‘train-the-trainer’ class (which you charge for) because if you make a course, you might want to make sure it’s delivered properly. As part of your deal, you could train their trainers for money so you get paid to do that, you get paid for the course materials, and you get paid royalties.
I don’t claim to be an Intellectual Property Attorney, so I don’t know the amounts of money you can get for this kind of material, but in the corporate market it can be substantial. You might want to get an Intellectual Property Attorney who has been through licensing of these kinds of things. Some attorneys might only have experience licensing music and they would be clueless about course materials. Find somebody good that’s already done it.
Another thing to license, and this is kind of cool, is Tip of the Day Licensing.
Let’s say you wrote 365 tips on your topic, maybe it’s time management or customer service or whatever it is, you can have a program or make file that you could license to a company where they distribute it to all their computers and every day, a tip comes up on the screen from you. This happens all the time. These are inexpensive to companies to license these things but to you, it could be a heck of a lot of money. When you license it and they're going to put it on 5,000 or 10,000 computers around their company, that will be big bucks for you.
Another kind of licensing is a little bit different from the sponsorship that I got. I’m talking about sponsorship of your materials like books and training materials. This is where a company would pay to be involved or included in your books.
The way to land these kinds of deals is you have to think, ‘Who would want to be in front of my audience that I speak to?’ If you happen to speak to cancer patients, maybe a company that makes prosthetics - I am not sure the term for artificial limbs and bras and things like that. Maybe they would want to sponsor you.
You’ve got to think, who would want to be in front of it? I used to know
- I can't remember this lady’s name - but she spoke about soy beans. I know there’s controversy out there on whether they're really good for you or not, I don’t care about that so much. She had nine different people paying her money every time she spoke because she had sponsors and they were non-competitive.
The more books you distribute, the higher the sponsorship fee goes. The other way to license is get training companies to use your course or sell your courses to training companies looking for new topics, like SkillPath or National Seminars.
Those kinds of places sometimes buy course materials. Another way is curriculum for colleges. You say, “I never heard of that, people buying curriculum?” Yes, they get it somewhere. One of my options instead of doing this school on my own was to tie-up with another major university because they are all looking for additional revenue streams.
If you can come bring them a course, they’ll put it in their catalogue as long as everybody’s happy and you suit the powers that be, they’ll name your course in their catalogue. That’s another way is to make curriculums and maybe even you’d be the teacher and get paid for that.
I can't remember the school, but I know somebody for a long time was using - my book ‘Wake ‘Em Up’ Business Presentation book in their Public Speaking Course. Every semester, they would order a bunch of them. I can't even remember where it is. Those are all ways to license and use curriculum and sell training.
MEMBERSHIP SITES
Another thing is membership sites. I happen to have several. I have https://www.GreatInternetMarketingTraining.com that’s the site for my mentor program. I have https://www.AmazingPublicSpeaking.com that’s the largest public speaking site in the world. It’s got more than 475 videos on it and just hundreds of hours of stuff. I’ve got http://www.CopyWriting901.com which is an excellent education in writing words that sell. And by the way, copywriting is the number one skill I’ve acquired in my 40 plus years of business. https://www.BrutalSelfDefense.com is a membership site that has 14 hours of some of the most brutal ways to defend yourself.
I even have a paid private Facebook group called …..what else? Screw the commute. The link is https://screwthecommute.com/facebook/ Haven’t you joined yet? I’m not getting any younger over here hahaha. I’ll have all these in the show notes. Those are membership sites.
I use Wish List for inexpensive membership software. Of course, my affiliate link will be in the show notes http://bit.ly/1v2McBq and for really important stuff like my mentor program I use http://www.MemberGate.com
Let me tell you about membership sites. I wrote an article one time called ‘When does 20 equal 24,000?’ The answer is if you had as little as 100 members at $20 a piece - . . . and 100 by Internet standards on anything is pitiful as it is. 100 members at $20 a piece per month, that’s $2,000 a month times 12 is $24,000 a year cash flow you just created at the worst possible performance level you can imagine.
What if you had 200 members. You just exceeded the average income of a person in the USA.
300, 400, 500 1000.
If you do a really good job at it, some people are making $200,000 a month on this. I know personally, I was spending $80 a month on four different tennis sites. If I don’t get a chance to visit it during the month, they still get my $20. And I don’t complain. It’s not their fault I was too busy.
Membership sites are a great thing to get in to.
Also, it builds a community. Once you get to what we call a ‘critical mass’, the people never want to quit because they’ve made friends there. You have a discussion board where they’re kicking around issues all the time. Once you get to that critical mass worth of people, you're really sitting pretty.
COMBO PRODUCTS
Next thing is combo products. This is taking all the stuff I just told you and putting it together in different combinations. You really have no additional work other than to rewrite your sales letter a little bit by taking little things and putting them in different things.
We do this on eBay all the time. We have the “Great Internet Marketing” package and we’ve got the “Great Public Speaking” package which is just a hodge-podge of stuff all about that topic and it brings in leads off of eBay and it brings in decent money also.
But the money isn’t as important as the leads that we bring off eBay. Just repackage things and put it in different order and you'll have no additional work but you have a bunch of new different products.
TRANSLATIONS
Once you get done with all the stuff I'm telling you, the last thing I have for you on this podcast is to translate it to other languages. This is how you tap the lucrative foreign markets.
You don’t use one of these free translators because it’s probably going to say something really stupid and you're going to look like an idiot. You can find quality translation services by Googling them or you sometimes can find good people on Craig’s List.
What do you do with the sales page or complete website you’ve had translated? There’s a search engine called www.searchenginecolossus.com. I can never remember how to spell colossus so we’ll have it in the show notes. This is a search engine of foreign search engines. All the search engines, major ones in every country around the world are listed here. You don’t have to submit an entire website to most search engines. If you wanted to get a page of yours accepted in a Mexican search engine, you write it in Spanish and just submit that Spanish page to that search engine. These other search engines aren’t nearly as crowded as the ones in the United States. Most countries also use Google, but it certainly doesn’t hurt to submit to the others.
PODCASTING
Of course, we can’t leave out Podcasting. Podcasts are free but there are many people bringing in $100,000.00 a month by selling their own products and services, getting sponsorships and using affiliate links. Some even charge many of their guests to be on. Screw the Commute made about $10,000.00 in it’s first week simply by stimulating sales mostly from people that already knew me, but now I’m reaching them in a different way besides email.
Podcasting is really taking off and the listenership has exceeded satellite radio and even new cars are coming podcast ready. And don’t forget Amazon’s Echo and Alexa in the homes. They’re podcast ready too.
So, I don’t know how many ways I gave you to sell your knowledge, but I know I gave you plenty enough to make a fortune so you can screw the commute.
Hey why don’t you think about joining my mentor program so I can work one-on-one so I can really help you screw the commute. Check it out at http://www.GreatInternetMarketingTraining.com Go out and repurpose your stuff for fun and profit. I can't wait to hear those ‘ka-chings’ coming from your computers. Catch you later!
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Episode 050 Roberto Candelaria with sponsorship expert Roberto Candelaria. He’s going to tell you how to get big companies to finance your dreams and you don’t have to be some big celebrity to get them to do it. You just need to know what to say and how to present yourself. He’s going to show you in this episode. That’s episode 50
I’ll catch ya’ll then.
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