Full show notes for this episode can be found at https://jakehower.com/creating-and-marketing-your-own-products-with-greg-rollett/

You're listening to the Multimedia Marketing Show,

and this is episode number 11.

Okay, we're going to kick straight into this week's guest.

We've got on the show today, Greg Rollett from The Product Pros.

Greg is an expert in creating products for his clients, utilizing

pretty much all forms of multimedia.

So I thought it'd be worthwhile getting him on to discuss a little

bit about how he goes about creating and leveraging product creation.

But also we'll speak a little bit about how he goes about

marketing and the right mindset.

It's a really awesome episode.

Greg is an amazing networker, but he's been featured on so many different places

CNN, ABC, NBC, Mashable, The Huffington Post, Mixergy, the list goes on and on.

So he's and truly an expert in his field and it's a really awesome interview.

Greg, how are you?

Hey, what's happening, Jake?

Real happy to be here.

Oh yeah, it's great.

I really appreciate you taking the time to come on today.

Yeah, definitely.

I'm really excited to to share some of this stuff, talk about products and

marketing and help everybody listening.

Yeah,

absolutely.

And you'd certainly be aware as our listeners out there the multimedia

marketing show is the premise of the show is to we're bringing on

experts in a particular forms of multimedia and what you're doing

over at the product price encompasses just about all forms of multimedia.

I think you're going to be able to offer a lot to our audience

today.

Love it.

Love it.

Let's get into it.

Absolutely.

All right.

So what I'd like to do is to give our listeners a little bit of a rundown

of what we're going to cover today.

We're going to go briefly into Greg's history and then we're going to expand

on what he's doing with with the product pros and we'll break it down a little

bit to see a little bit behind the scenes and how he goes about creating products.

So Greg, to kick us off, why don't you give us a little bit of a

brief history of your background?

Sure.

Yeah.

In a former life, even though I'm not very old I was a rapper in a

rock Lincoln Park 311 type group.

And here in the States toward the country, I played everywhere from

Madison square garden in New York city out to the knitting factory in Los

Angeles and everywhere in between.

And we were, my band and I were, we were getting about to start on

a big tour, about a 20 city East coast tour with a band called rehab

who had a song on the radio, and we thought this was like our big break.

We're going to play in front of a bunch of sold out venues and.

The day before we're getting set to leave for this tour, my guitar player,

my bass player, give me a call and they're like, Hey, Greg, we're not going.

And I'm like you're not going to the bar, this afternoon, kick the tour off.

And they said no, man we're not going on tour.

And at this point, I had just dropped out of college.

I had quit my job.

I had just gotten married and.

spent every dollar that I had gotten from my wedding, that I'm supposed to start

my new life and go buy like new China and crap like that with my new wife.

On band stuff, I bought a trailer and CDs and DVDs and hats and

t shirts and all this stuff we were going to sell on this tour.

And really I had felt like I had just gotten divorced from my heart

was just broken in a hundred pieces.

And I wasn't doing anything with my life.

Absolutely nothing.

I just dropped out of college.

I didn't have a job.

I had just gotten married.

And so my wife's parents were like, Greg, you just got married to our daughter.

What are you going to do to support her?

You can't just sit on the couch all day and sulk and, have this

fantasy of being a musician.

So they actually dragged me to one of those all day internet marketing seminars.

And while this might sound really exciting to you guys listening now,

and it's actually exciting to me now.

As a 22, 23 year old kid who is a musician, the last thing you want to

do is spend like 12 hours locked in a room with your wife's parents, right?

That sounds awful.

And what ended up happening at the end of the day is just literally everything.

The speaker said it clicked.

I was like, man, that makes sense.

That makes sense.

That makes sense.

It was all the same stuff that I was doing on like Napster and mp3.

com.

And when my space was starting and we were one of the first bands on my space with a

million friends and all that good stuff.

And so we were doing all these things.

I just wasn't using it to actually make money online.

So I ended up buying everything that they sold at this conference.

And I ended up starting my first website.

I was selling hammocks.

It was backyard hammocks.

com.

I still owned it today with all this stuff I know, but sold hammocks online.

I sold bird feeders online.

I sold softball bats.

I sold all kinds of random crap drop shipping and always got pulled

back into the music industry.

So I got back into the music industry, but musicians, they didn't want to pay like.

2, 000 a month for marketing, right?

They don't have that kind of money.

They wanted to go buy, new guitar effects pedals and just

buy some more drinks at the bar.

They wanted to do with hiring this guy to do marketing for them.

So I decided instead of getting one musician to pay me two grand, what if I

got a ton of musicians to pay me like.

50 bucks, a hundred bucks, whatever it was.

And so I went out and got one of the little, it was actually the

precursor to the flip camera.

It was before the flip camera even came out.

And I went to the local home, Home Depot kind of store and got some whiteboards

and I nailed the whiteboards to my wall.

And I put this little camera on a bar stool and I put some books

on top of the bar stool to make a kind of a ghetto rig tripod.

And I shot four videos.

They were about 30 minutes each.

And I was just like, Hey, what's up?

This is Greg.

I'm going to teach you some cool stuff.

And I taught musicians internet marketing 101.

And it's a product that's called the new music economy and it's still on

and selling online today to this day.

It's been five years now.

We've sold over, I think 3, 500 copies of this product now.

And it changed everything for me because no longer did I have to have one

client and actually do stuff for them.

I can actually just create this product, throw it online, do some marketing

and these clients would come in.

There's, I have more clients from where you're at, Australia and New

Zealand than I do in the United States because they find me online.

And from there, it's just.

Escalated.

We've created membership sites.

We've created partnerships with Reverb Nation, who has 500,

000 plus musicians at the time.

We've worked with Derek Sivers at CD Baby to help him with his keynotes

and his marketing strategies.

We've created 500, 500 home study courses.

We've created WordPress themes for bands.

This entire empire and Now I know we're going to get into it, but now I

help others do the exact same thing.

And I've been able to now create products for Michael Gerber,

who's the author of the e myth.

If you've read that book, Brian Tracy Tom Hopkins, Alan Cosgrove, who's

Nike's number one personal trainer.

It's just unbelievable what you can do.

And it all started from being this little kid who was trying

to be a rapper in a rock band.

It's incredible.

And I think what stands out for me there is the ghetto set up because

what you don't see behind the video is how the video is put together.

And I think that's that's fantastic.

It just shows you that you don't need much more than a flip camera and a

couple of books and a stool to actually go out there and start creating stuff.

Yeah.

That's really one of my biggest points is don't let technology be a barrier

to stop you from getting your message out because we all have a story.

And technology, don't let it be that barrier to stop

you from telling your story.

We're doing this podcast, audio on Skype, it's not like it's, we

have a huge studio and I flew down to Australia to hang out with you.

So use the things and the resources that you have, and if you have a great

message, that message is going to get across and people are going to buy it.

They're going to gravitate to it.

They're going to spread it, but you've got to have that message.

That's the most important part.

Yeah,

absolutely.

Absolutely.

Now, there are so many different ways we can go with this interview, and you're

certainly going to have a lot more than.

30 to 45 minutes worth of content for us.

So we've got a little bit of a rundown as we said at the top of the episode.

So let's go through that and let's see where we go.

And maybe we'll have to get you back on another episode.

All right.

So let's look a little bit more about how one of your products is put together.

Okay.

Before we even do that frame for our listeners, who you're

creating these products for.

We have two different audiences that we create products for.

One is the guy who wants to actually sell products.

So like I did in my music business, I want to actually create some kind of a product.

I want to put it online and I want to sell it and I want to make money from it.

It doesn't matter what the price point is.

I want to make money from this product.

The second kind of person that we create products for is the person

who wants to use the product as part of their marketing funnel.

So what do I mean by that is.

Maybe you're a financial advisor, right?

And you're helping people with investments and things like that.

And they're very skeptical.

There's not much trust.

I don't know if I trust you to invest my money.

So you want to educate that person in order to make a better decision.

So maybe you create a four CD set on how wall street's screwing everybody

and you're teaching them the right way.

So you create four CDs and workbooks and manuals, and instead of selling

it and making a hundred dollars on it, you give it away for free.

And essentially you create trust in the mind of the person who got that product

and maybe now they invest a million dollar portfolio with you, which turns into a 50,

000 commission that's heck a lot better than selling a hundred dollar product.

So the two audiences are the people who actually want to sell products

and make money from products and the Ascension business model where

you sell products, you have coaching and masterminds and all that stuff.

And two is the person who wants to give it away because they have

a high ticket backend service.

That's great.

All right.

Let's briefly break down what makes up a typical product for your customers.

Yeah.

So it starts really at square one with, you have to a identify what the market is.

Who are you actually going to sell this product to?

And what is their core problem?

So many times when I'm working with clients, the first thing they do is I

want to create this product on leadership or I want to create this product on

outsourcing or hiring just because they have a little bit of knowledge about

that subject or whatever the case is.

But the marketplace actually doesn't care.

They don't have a need, right?

There's not enough of a buying audience.

And so let's talk about audience real quick.

I was working with a client.

Last week, who is he's in sports sales.

So he sells season tickets for professional sports teams and it

goes into corporations and tries to get them to buy a bunch of season

tickets or a sky boxes, what have you.

And he wanted to create a product for other people who

were selling sports tickets.

And so the first thing I did was let's talk about the market, right?

How many sports teams are there?

So we just went in the United.

States, there's four major sports.

Let's say there's 30 teams in each of the sports.

So the national football, baseball, basketball, and hockey that's

120 teams and how many sales reps do each, does each team have?

And he was like, ah, about 10, so 120 times 10.

That's only a thousand two hundred and fifty people out of those thousand

plus people, how many will actually spend money to improve their career.

And so immediately right off the bat, obviously I wanted to work with this

guy, but he didn't have a market, right?

He just did not have enough of a market to make the income he wanted

in order to make the product.

So you have to make sure that you've got an audience that's big enough.

An audience that actually wants to buy the product.

They want to improve their life.

So I, again, I work with a lot of clients who want to go and help people

who are in kind of corporate jobs to be better at their corporate jobs.

And I was just like let's see, we all bitch about our jobs, right?

And how much money we make and how we hate our boss and all that stuff.

The problem is that most people that are in that position.

Bitch about it, but they won't actually take action to get out of it.

That's why there aren't more entrepreneurs.

So there aren't more people doing the things that Jake and I are doing.

You got to look at the market, look at what their real problem is

and what they'll spend money on.

If you don't start there then you're just going to make something.

It's going to look pretty.

It's going to sit on a shelf and it's not really going to help anyone.

No, it really isn't.

And you're right there.

To me, from my own experience, I find that 10% of what I do is recording the podcast.

90% of that is promoting the podcast and building an

audience.

Yeah.

The product itself isn't very difficult.

It's everything else that goes around it.

That is the stuff that people either don't want to do, or they don't.

Really fully understand.

You just said it great.

90% of this is promoting the podcast, looking for new guests.

How do you expand your reach?

How do I find more people that are going to listen?

How do I get those people who are listening to take action, do other things?

It's not just, a lot of people can just turn on a microphone and talk into it,

but how do you actually get people who are going to listen and pay attention?

And Jake, you did a great job.

You sent me an outline.

You told me, what is what your audience wants to hear, how I can help the process.

Yeah.

That's the most important stuff is how can what you're doing

add value to the marketplace.

So what we do when we create products is we actually we create what we call

a framework and all the framework is it's a I call it like a puzzle, right?

You have to put certain pieces in the puzzle in place in order to create this.

Complete masterpiece, right?

And so you have this problem at the start, you get all these pieces,

they're all discombobulated.

And at the end, you want to finish with this completed puzzle that, looks great

and it looks like the picture on the box.

So you start with on the, I usually draw a line straight across horizontal

on a piece of paper from left to on the left side, just put a little like

a dash and put an A and on the right side, put a little dash and B, right?

So on the left side where you have the A, that's where your

prospect is right now, right?

They have some kind of problem.

They have some kind of itch.

They have some kind of need, some kind of desire for something better.

So in the weight loss industry, real simple, I want to lose 20 pounds, right?

So that is where they are now.

They're 20 pounds overweight.

I want you to go a little deeper.

Why are they 20 pounds overweight?

Are they a house mom who just had a kid and they have the baby

weight and they need to get it off?

Have they been working at a corporate job for 10, 15 years eating out at fast

food for lunch and all of a sudden they woke up and they're 20 pounds overweight.

Are they, what's the reason, right?

So that's your a on the B is what is their promise land?

What does that end result or desire look like?

Obviously again, the fitness, they lost 20 pounds, but that's not good enough.

They lost 20 pounds.

Why?

They lost 20 pounds because they have a cruise to go on to and

they're going with their husband.

They want to surprise them and look great.

Or they're getting married.

They have a wedding to go to.

They they, their doctor said they had diabetes and if they don't lose 20

pounds, they're in serious health risk of, heart disease, things like that.

So go deeper on the A and the B.

And then in the middle of that line, that's just the steps that

you want to take them through in order to go from A to B.

It's the bridge.

They have to cross.

It's the mountain, the valley, whatever you want to call it,

but that's just the step by step.

So how do I go from 20 pounds overweight because I'm a mom and

I just had a baby a year ago and I haven't lost the baby weight to I'm

going on this cruise with my family.

It's our first family vacation we've taken since we had our

baby and I want to look awesome.

How do you take them there?

So really, Jake, that, that's how we create our products.

And the majority of the work happened in finding out the a and finding

out the B, the stuff in the middle is the stuff that you just know.

And it really comes naturally.

Definitely.

That's great.

Okay.

So that stuff in the middle, I'm thinking now we're not going to spend too much

time on that stuff in the middle.

Because as you say, it's a process that you follow.

What I'd like to hear from you though, just on that topic is how

you go about getting the content.

I know a lot of our listeners are obviously content marketers.

So are you able to repurpose existing content or leverage

existing content or are you building the products out from scratch?

Yeah.

So everything's on a case to case basis, and I know people

hate hearing that, so let me give some specifics because I really love giving

specific actions that everybody can take.

So when I first launched my music product, my big one, my 500 course, I knew that

I knew the need that the market had.

I knew where they wanted to go, and I wanted to create this

big product, high end product.

But I didn't want to spend three months shooting all these

videos and doing all this stuff.

So what I actually did is I held a webinar and I invited everyone that was on my

music list to the webinar and I sold the product before I ever created it.

It was like a Tuesday night.

I had the webinar.

I sold it.

It was 500 bucks.

I put 15 people into the program.

And I said, Hey, we're going to start next Monday, right?

So it's Tuesday night.

I hadn't made the product yet.

And I said, we're going to start next Monday.

So literally what it forced me to do is create the content by next Monday, right?

So it was actually, I was going to do a 12 week program and they get one

module a week every week for 12 weeks.

So it gave me a week to create each week's content.

That has been the most effective way that I've ever created a product.

And nearly every product that I personally created for myself, I've

done in the exact same way I've sold it.

And then I made sure I had an audience and I collected some cash up front, and then

it forced me to put a deadline to say, Hey, let's go and create this product.

That's what I did with the product pro system.

What I do with info product pro, what I do with new music

economy, so on and so forth.

Now, other ways to create products a great way to do it.

Is to do it live, right?

So hold four live webinars over the next four weeks.

And that kind of forces you to create your product and then you take the

recordings from those webinars.

And now you have four videos.

You talked about repurposing content.

We'll use I use a pro program called switch S W I T C H it's free.

It's on a Mac and it's, it strips the audio from the video on the webinar.

So now I have the video from the webinar and I have the audio.

I go ahead and get that transcribed.

I use fiverr.

com F I V E R R.

com people on there.

They'll transcribe about 15 minutes or so for five bucks.

So if you have an hour long an hour, it's about 20 bucks to get

the whole thing transcribed, right?

So now I have the video from the webinar.

I have the audio, I got it transcribed.

And then what I do is I create, I call them action guides.

You might know it as like a workbook, but I never like calling something work,

especially if you're going to sell it, because who wants to buy more work to do?

It sounds ridiculous.

I create an action guide and it's really the action steps that people need to

take in order to get the most benefit.

So it's filling the blank stuff.

It's, do you remember the four points to this?

How do you use this stuff?

So now I've taken one piece of content, a webinar I did.

And broken it down into four pieces of content.

And what that does is it hits on all the different modalities in

which people learn from, because some people are visual learners.

So they got to watch something to learn it.

Some are auditory, so they need to listen to it in order

for their brain to process it.

Some people are kinesthetic, which means they need to actually do

something which is the action guide.

So they won't actually get the information and process it unless.

Do something.

And then some people read, that's just how we learn.

So by doing that process, breaking it down, we hit on all four learning

styles which allows people to actually process the information because

there's two steps to the product.

One, you got to sell it and they have to buy it.

And two is they got to use it.

Because we're not in the shyster huckster business.

I actually want people to go through my products, use it, get some kind

of tangible benefit from it and say, Hey, Greg, that was awesome.

And I use it and I changed my life, changed my business.

So that's how you actually accomplish that process and

repurpose content in the same way.

Yeah, and that's relatively typical of the way

media seems to be going these days.

Now, just with that action guide is this essentially just a transcript and then

do you heavily edit the transcript to make it more, presentable or is it more

just putting in some topics or breaking the content down a little bit from

there?

So from the transcript standpoint, what we do is we we have a list of instructions

that we send to our transcriber.

So we say we want it in all headers in Times New Roman 18 bold.

We want the rest of the text in Times New Roman 16.

We only want no more than two sentences and a paragraph.

If you don't know a word, make sure you highlight it in yellow.

So we give them a full set of instructions so we can go back

and edit the entire thing.

What we've done taken to the next step, as I said, use fiber.

com and it's about five bucks for 15 minutes.

What we do, this is the hack to it is we hire three people

to do the same 15 minute job.

We give them the same set of instructions.

Two of them are going to totally screw it up.

And one of them is going to do okay.

I hire that person who did okay off of fiber.

I pay him a little bit more and I give them some more instructions.

So a little more editing, I make sure they read through things.

All of that good stuff.

So we do make it nice.

We put headers and footers on everything.

We add some graphics, we had a lot of breaks and things like that.

If there's a quote, we have them italicize it.

Center it and put it on its own line.

So we do give them a set of instructions.

So it reads well, it doesn't read like a transcript.

It reads like something that you would actually want to read.

And that's really important because someone reading a transcript that, that

sucks, no one really wants to read a transcript word for word because we say

weird things, we do run on sentences, which don't make sense, which is

pretty much what I'm doing right now.

Cause I haven't stopped and paused.

And we repeat words, a lot, words, a lot, words, a lot, when we.

It just doesn't read right.

So we have to go in, you have to edit it and you have to make it

look like something someone actually wants to read and have value when

otherwise, you're just putting out more content that people don't want.

Yeah, that's brilliant.

And I think the key there is that it's not taking up too much

extra time for you personally.

It's being done by somebody else, which is

brilliant.

Exactly.

Systemizing that process.

Definitely.

That's great.

From there, I guess it's just a matter of deciding depending on budget, whether

or not that's a digital version of everything or whether you produce an

actual hard copy workbook with CDs and DVDs, et cetera, et cetera, no matter.

Yeah, so when we create products for our clients, we

give it to them in both modalities, both physical and digital.

I am a huge fan and advocate of physical stuff.

I just find that there's so much more value in it.

I can't tell you how many courses I bought and Jake, you might be the same that

you bought it, you went in, you logged in, you were excited when you got it

and then, it just sits in your bookmarks and if you're not thinking about it.

You never go and log back in.

It just doesn't happen.

But with physical stuff, it looks you in the face every single

day and says, Hey, I'm this DVD.

You just spent 500 on.

You should watch me, so it just has a different kind of value, but it

also does something to your mindset.

Where you really feel like you need to take action on it.

We definitely stress that also when you're selling the product,

the physical stuff has more value.

You can sell almost the exact same product with nothing else, but being in

the physical version for usually double what you're going to sell the digital

version which obviously is great for business, which instead of charging

like one 97, you can charge 400 bucks.

I'd much rather make 400 bucks for the same thing.

And all you really need to do is make it physical.

All right let's switch gears a little bit here and let's

focus a little bit more on the marketing and that side of things.

So if you're anything like me, you want to be exceeding

expectations for your clients.

And in most cases, they're going to be wanting to do the

same thing for their clients.

So when you're helping somebody create a product for their clients I guess

it's, you need to work at how you're going to deliver something, which

they're going to be really happy with.

So where I'm going with this is you talk about a little bit.

How you onboard a client and you go through the process of working

out their audience, et cetera, et cetera, on the back end we spoke

about 10%, 90% in terms of marketing.

Do you provide your clients assistance with the marketing of the product as well?

So in our product creation stuff, we do not do any of the marketing

for them, but we do go through a marketing consultation when the product is just

about to be completed to say, Hey, here's what your finished product looks like.

It's 4 CDs, 4 DVDs, a workbook, a manual.

Obviously, this is the market.

We created it for.

He, if I, this was my product, here's how I would sell it.

I would go and do Facebook ads targeted directly at this, and this is my ups.

This is what I would offer this thing for free.

And this would be the price point.

This is my upsell that I would do.

So we walk them through that entire funnel.

We talk a lot about both.

Online marketing and offline marketing.

Again, I'm a huge advocate of offline marketing just because we're getting less

and less of it and it is becoming more and more effective if you hyper target it.

So what I mean by that is in the fitness example we talked about

earlier for moms who have, need to lose that extra 20 pounds.

You can buy mailing lists of moms who just had a baby in the last six months

and a baby who just had a mom who had a baby in the last six months who lives

in this affluent neighborhood and a mom who drives this type of vehicle.

And a mom who has purchased something from Weight Watchers in the last

six months, and you can send a postcard or a sales letter or

something directly to that house.

That becomes really effective.

And so we go over a lot of that stuff because you don't want

to just broadcast messages.

You want to go as targeted and select as possible because you can spend more money.

To a smaller list.

If you know that list is going to convert at a much higher ratio.

So those are the kinds of things that we get into when we start to talk about

marketing is how, what are the pieces of media out there that are available to us?

That would allow me to laser focus on the exact person who wants to buy

this product because I don't want to waste any money on anyone who isn't.

Very likely to be interested in what I got to sell them.

Okay.

And are you usually extracting this information or targeting from an

existing list that the client owns or are you, do you have other sources that

you direct that or that you're targeting?

The best source is going to be an internal client list.

So if they already have an internal client list, a, we can

obviously market to that list.

That, that just, that's the easiest, right?

The unfortunate thing is most people don't have a very good list.

And if they have a list segmented.

So what I mean by segmented is who, how many prospects do you have versus

how many are actual paying customers?

What did they opt in for?

So he'll be like, I got 5, 000 people on my mailing list.

And I'll be like, all right, why are they on your mailing list?

Did they opt in for a certain special report on a certain subject?

Did they come in off a certain blog post?

Because those tell you different things.

Because if you just came in on a blog post on, summer fitness tips that

might not even be a woman, right?

That just might be someone who wanted summer fitness tips.

So knowing all that stuff is very important.

And most people do not have their.

There are internal lists segmented like that.

So if you don't, that's tip number one is make sure you're segmenting your list.

Know where people came from.

I use both a Weber and infusion softs for my list management.

There are six and one half dozen of the other infusion

soft is the 800 pound gorilla.

A Weber could be, it could be constant contact for you.

It could be MailChimp doesn't matter.

But have different lists set up for the different ways that

people get on your mailing list.

Don't just have one general list.

So start there two is, yeah, now we've got to look externally, right?

So the first place I usually look is who else has a list already of these people.

So that would be your affiliate partners or joint venture partners.

You could go to and say, this person already has a.

Product that's selling to women who want to lose weight.

Maybe my product would be a good compliment to his.

Let me create a relationship with that person and see if we can, do some

trades or swaps or I can pay him for advertising on his site, whatever.

So that's step one is someone already built it?

It's like field of dreams, right?

If you build it, they will come.

So if someone else has already built that marketplace, go after them first.

Maybe there's bloggers that you can go after and you can

guest post on their site.

And Jake, I know you talk a lot about some of this stuff on the

podcast with some other guests.

I'm going and finding that audience.

That's step two.

Step three is what other media is out there, right?

Right now.

I'm loving Facebook ads because of how targeted you can get.

You can say, I just want 30 year old women who are fans of Jillian

Michaels, who watched the biggest loser.

And that's the only people I want to put this ad to.

So what other kinds of media are there?

Newsletters or their magazines or their trade associations.

One of the best research sites that I use is alltop.

com, A L T O P.

com, which is run by Guy Kawasaki.

And it's all the top websites broken down by category.

So again, you can go into fitness and then women's fitness and yada, yada.

I'd break it down from there.

So start internally on your own mailing list, then look for other.

Content producers, product creators, people that already have

a list that you want to go after.

And then three, look for media sources that you can go and

actually buy traffic from and that's going to be your third source.

That's really awesome.

That's a, there's a whole heap of awesome information there, and that's

a great action list for our listeners.

All right let's look forward into the future a little bit.

This type of product creation or this type of product has been around for a

few years now, do you see things changing or is this style of creation of product

and packaging a product is that going to hang around for a little bit longer?

Obviously, I'm going to say yes, right?

But no.

So the thing is, we all have access to more information than we're ever

going to need in our entire life.

It's called Google, Wikipedia, Facebook, whatever you want to call it.

But the thing is, what products do is they take the experience that someone had and

the mistakes that they already made and they package it up and say, Hey, instead

of Googling for months and trial and error and all of that, I have this step

by step system or solution that's going to get you where you want to go faster, and

that's what people will pay for, right?

The second thing that people will pay for is the guy.

So I need to find the guy who is the absolute best expert in this marketplace.

And that's who I want to hang around.

That's who I want to be around.

That's who I want to learn from.

I want to emulate.

I want a business just like theirs.

I want a lifestyle just like theirs.

People are always going to want to find the guy.

And I like did air quotes as if you could see me when I said that, but.

Oh, but people want to find the guy we want to follow the guy.

And that's where products come in is because it really comes back

to the Ascension model, right?

So the first thing people do is they get on Google and they do a

couple searches and they stumble on some blogs or some websites and

they get some cool free information.

Next step, maybe they see if that person has a book and ebook.

So they spend 10, 20 bucks, right?

Once I get the idea, because a book is usually just a a forum for an

idea or a concept conceptually.

Then I have to know the application of that idea.

So that's where the product comes in.

And then they need a little bit of accountability, and that's

where coaching groups come in.

And then they just want the high level access to you and live

your lifestyle, and that's where the mastermind groups come in.

So that's the Ascension model in the information business,

is get something for free.

Buy a low end product to get the ideas, then go into info products,

then go into coaching, then go into some kind of masterminds.

And so if you're the guy, like you have this opinion, you have a track

record you have the characteristics that make people like you you're

fascinating in some resort.

People will spend the money to see the guy who has figured it out.

So your quest in this whole process is to be the guy, right?

Jake, you're trying to be the guy in, multimedia marketing, right?

Dan and Ian of of tropical MBA are the guys.

As far as building lifestyle businesses and traveling the world, people

want to be attracted to the guy.

Seth Godin is the guy when it comes to like tribal marketing, right?

Chris Brogan is the guy when it comes to social media, the list goes on and on,

but we pay to, to get access to the guy.

And that's why products are so important because it's another

level of access to the guy.

Does that kind of make sense?

Yeah, it does.

It really does.

And I think the other thing you've got to do is the market is so

crowded that you've got to stand out.

So rather than following trends, I think you're trying to go

in the opposite direction.

So as you were saying before, the trend is towards online marketing

and this lower cost marketing, you're going to Offline more and

more because you're breaking through.

So the trend is that everything's going into an iPad and everything's being

consumed in Kindle, et cetera, et cetera.

So you go in the opposite direction and produce physical products and

really stand out from your competitors.

Yeah.

It's really, if everybody's running into one direction.

Don't follow that crowd run straight in the opposite direction.

Obviously there's pluses and minuses to both sides.

And everything that we do Kindle versions and we do iPad versions and

we do the new cool technology thing.

What about all those people that don't have access to that stuff

that needs your information?

What about.

The people that still want that physical thing, and even the people

who have the, I'm a digital guy.

I got everything on an iPad, I use Evernote, I got the little

Doxy scanner, whatever it is.

But if I turn the computer on right now, you know what you would see?

Stacks upon stacks of newsletters, special reports.

Binders brochures, folders, catalogs.

It's just ridiculous because that's what I really go through to study materials.

It's what I go through for information.

And then once I process it, then it goes into the digital process.

Really think about your audience and what does your audience want?

Jake, we were talking before the call started.

One of my biggest markets is financial advisors and financial advisors

are going after baby boomers.

Baby boomers don't want stuff on the iPad.

They want stuff coming in their mail.

They still want to go to live seminars.

They still want the physical book.

They want CDs because they're driving 30 minutes to work every day.

So if I just put something on an MP3 and threw it on iTunes, they would never

even get that stuff, so it goes back to the first thing we originally talked

about, which Know your market, know your market better than anyone and know

how they want to consume that content.

Yeah, that's great.

And I think just I guess to finish up on that topic making an impression

is important and Someone like tim ferris with his for our body now.

I haven't seen the actual physical book, but By all reports, the book

itself is amazing and to consume the content, you really need the book

because it's all total experience.

And another one who's done this is I believe Seth Godin in one of

his maybe it was his Kickstarter book project where I think he was

sending out an actual physical vinyl record to some of his customers.

And regardless of whether or not someone's consuming that particular version, it

just, that's what's memorable about it.

We'll think about this.

Say you, you got injured, right?

You went to a Starbucks and there was some coffee on the floor

and you slipped and fell, right?

And you called a bunch of personal injury attorneys because you

wanted to sue Starbucks because, hey, might as well, right?

You call five personal injury attorneys, right?

Four of them are going to say, hey, go to our website and fill out this claims

thing and we'll get back to you in a week.

And you're like that sucks.

They just sent me online to fill out this thing, right?

And then one attorney, they actually take the call, they take

the stuff, and the next day, What shows up on your doorstep is a huge

FedEx package from this attorney.

That's got a copy of his book.

That's got a CD of information.

You need to know when you get into a slip and fall.

It's got a printed version of their special report.

It's got all this crap.

Honestly, who are you going to do business with?

And who are you going to remember?

Who are you going to tell your friends about?

You're going to be like, yo, at the party on Friday night, you're like, yo

this lawyer sent me a big box of crap.

Just because I slipped and fell at Starbucks, everybody else

just sent me to some link online.

So you said it right.

It's show up nobody else is showing up because that's what's memorable.

And that's what, again, is going to make you stand out from the crowd,

not saying to go to those links, but think about that analogy in your own

business, because it's really going to help you, be the differentiator, be

that celebrity expert in your market.

Yeah, absolutely.

And all you've just done there is you've created your own unfair

advantage and you're not playing on the same field as everybody else.

And by doing that, you win.

It's as simple as that.

And you can charge higher fees.

There's no more competition.

You can be selective on who you want to work with.

It's, it completely changes the game.

And then if you charge more for your money guess what?

You can spend more in marketing because you have more income coming in.

It's just, it's really a game changer when you get, when you grasp that concept.

Yeah.

Brilliant.

We're just about finished with the interview.

What I wouldn't mind doing for our listeners, cause it's not just

products that you guys work with.

Tell us a little bit about the PR side of things and how you work with experts and

celebrities.

Yeah, sure.

I am part of a, the product process, part of a larger agency called

the celebrity branding agency.

And we've worked with over 1600 people in 26 countries over the last few years.

And we have three, four kind of core divisions of the company.

One is a publishing company where we help people become best selling authors.

Second is a television production company where we help people get on ABC, NBC, CBS,

and Fox affiliates around the country.

Third is.

What we call our big print division, where we get people into ink magazine and

a Forbes magazine, Newsweek, USA Today, Wall Street Journal, stuff like that.

And fourth is the films division, where we help people create a movie,

a documentary about their business.

And we get it aired on the bio channel.

And then we have the product.

Development company, which is the company I run, and then we also have a celebrity

expert marketing, which is the done for you marketing company that I run

as well, which kind of does the thing.

I just gave you the example for the lawyers creating those shock and all

packages and the the stuff like that, the physical stuff, the catalogs and

the referral programs, things like that.

So what we really try to do is we try to take the person who might.

be considered a commodity.

Again, personal injury attorney when you don't know the

difference between any of them.

Most people, when you go in to get brain surgery and you meet two

brain surgeons, you don't know the difference in the quality of their work.

So it's the person that stands out as the person that has the best

personality that you relate to that.

Makes you remember them.

That's what we do.

We fabricate that through publishing, through TV, through print,

through film, through marketing.

And it's been really fun.

We got some amazing joint venture partners.

We in our book publishing process, we actually do coauthored books.

So everybody writes one chapter, like chicken soup for the soul style.

We guarantee that it becomes a bestseller.

It's at least one bestseller.

It's you.

To contribute to a book with another kind of celebrity expert.

So right now we're working on a new book with Jack Canfield

from chicken soup for the soul.

So you can coauthor a bestselling book with Jack Canfield.

We've done this with other experts like Dan Kennedy in the marketing field

with Brian Tracy with Tom Hopkins.

If you're a real estate guy, we've done books with Ron Legrand before.

So it's super fun.

On the TV shows, we've had the Michael Gerber TV show where you could be

interviewed by Michael Gerber and it'd be seen on ABC, NBC, CBS and Fox.

And it's just a really great business to get out of the state

of being a commodity and do the things that we just talked about.

Become that expert, charge higher fees, get rid of the competition,

making it have an unfair advantage over everyone that you work with.

And it's a heck of a good time.

People really love what we do and I love what we do.

And that makes it a really fun marriage.

Yeah, definitely.

And that was exactly my thought process as you were speaking there without sounding

too salesy, promoting the product pros, you've essentially just done that you've

you've created an unfair playing field.

You've got all this data and all this experience that you can draw from

publishing with experts, et cetera, et cetera, that there'd just be no one

else you'd want to be working with.

If you're creating a product.

That's the,

that's what I hope.

And more, this isn't for, to brag at all.

Look at the model we've created.

We have tons of special reports.

We have insane follow up sequence.

We have hundreds of videos you can find.

I do interviews like this all the time because I'm trying to get the message out.

When people inquire about us, they don't just get an email from me saying,

Hey Jake, it was great to meet you.

If they're a qualified prospect, they're getting a package on their door.

They're getting one of our books signed with a sales letter in it.

They're getting a copy of a product there, and so we've created that

unfair advantage and it's a model.

For you to copy, if you want to be in that high priced expert space, which is a great

space to play in because, no longer do I need, I don't need 10, 000 clients, right?

I need 10, and I'm happy and I'm doing well.

And that makes life really fun.

Yeah, that's cool.

All right, Greg, let's close this out now.

Where can I listen to find out more about

you?

Yep.

So on the product creation stuff, if you just had to product pro systems.

com, that's product pro systems.

com.

You can learn a little bit more about our services.

You can grab that special report that we have on there.

It's actually our product creation manifesto.

And you can find out my contact information.

Give me a call, shoot me an email.

I'd love to talk to you.

If you want to learn more about the agency, just head over to d n agency.

com.

Again, that's d n agency.

com.

And you can learn all about us.

The fun stuff that we do there.

And always open to chatting with people, just Greg roulette on Facebook,

Greg roulette on Twitter, and we can have a fine conversation and

obviously leave a comment on Jake site.

And I'd be more than happy to have the conversation there as well.

If it's cool with you.

Yeah, that's great.

And as always we'll include links to everything we've

discussed in the show notes.

All right, Greg, thanks very much for coming on.

You've shared a whole heap of awesome content for our listeners.

I'm sure they'll get a lot out of it.

I certainly will as well.

So again, thank you very much for coming on and we'll catch up soon.

Thanks, man.