In this episode, you'll hear Dan Kennedy talk about:

And so much more. Enjoy!

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Russell Brunson: Hey, welcome back to the Magnetic Marketing Podcast. In today's episode, Dan Kennedy is going to be talking about how to build your business on a solid foundation. This episode's called Better, Faster, Quicker Info Marketing. He's talking about how the worst number of your business is won. He's talking about how today's one trick marketing ponies are gone. How one marketing strategy, one product, one service, one location, just isn't going to cut anymore. How diversity equals stability and a whole bunch of other stuff that you are going to love. I hope you enjoy this episode with Dan Kennedy.

Dan Kennedy: All right. So do you want me to tell you guys the truth about what we're supposed to be doing in here, or you want me to just do what I'm supposed to be doing and let you figure it out?

Okay. All right. So the... Well, oh, you wanted to joke? How many were on the Diamond Call? The last Diamond Call? Eh, not that many. All right. It's really not a joke. It's a true story. I'll do it real quick, because I can make up the time if I tell you the truth.

So on a Diamond Call, I don't remember now the pretext of how we got to this, but it made me think of a story that then Bill didn't think we had time to tell. And so two people have come up and insisted that I tell to them one-on-one. So it's more efficient to do it this way.

But the background of this, there's another do, by the way, it's what we're doing in here. Actually it doesn't have much to do with anything at all, but something led to it on the call. And so it's a story that has to do both with Walt Disney, car washes and a stripper, is what I said on the call, and therefore people wanted to hear the story, not because of Disney or car washes, obviously, but because of the stripper.

If you're new, how many like or Glazer-Kennedy members within the past three or four months, or this is your first super conference? Oh, bunch of you. Well, you should know the ones around you who didn't raise their hands, this is a very twisted group.

So they all wanted to hear about at this. So, here it is as quick as I can do it. So the Disney background is that, there's a famous Walt Disney story, which I had heard when I was quite young about the first Animatron, the Abraham Lincoln Animatron. And Walt wanted this very famous neuroscientist who's name now is long since gone from my memory to do the work on the Animatron. And so he sent a couple of his executives over to recruit the guy, and basically whatever it's going to cost, it's going to cost. Right? And so they comeback and tell Walt, "We can't get him." It's not about the money, but he's busy doing something for NASA, and he's doing something for Stanford, and he is doing this and he's doing that. And even though it kind of interests him, he doesn't have time to do it.

And Walt said, "Well, did you ask him what he wants?" And they said, "Well, the money's not the issue." He said, "Well, so he doesn't want money, but he wants something. Everybody wants something. Did you ask him what he wants?" And so Walt sent them back and asked him what he wanted. And he said, "Well, the only thing that I really want, I need this $50 million raised for this research facility I want to raise. So they come back and Walt says, "Well, we can do that." So they make five or six phone calls. They round up some key fundraisers. They put on some kind of an event. They get donors, they raise the guy's 50 mil, and that's how the Lincoln Animatron got done. So that's the background now.

So this is my one and only job, which lasted 11 months in a week. And my sales manager... So this is in 1973 into '74. And the national sales manager of this company, I bumped into him at ABA at book expo about five years ago, he's still mad. But that's not the story. So this is the only time I've ever had a job. So sales rep, territory rep. And I'm working for a company called Price Stern Sloan, which doesn't even exist anymore, but you may know it because of a product called Mad Libs. It's a little game people play, work on pads where they fill in. It's now automated. Of course, you can get it as I doohickey app for 99 cents.

But anyway, Mad Libs at one time was really, really big. And then they built a whole line of novelty and humor books and stuff around it. And they were in bookstores, but mostly we sold this rack of this stuff. And so all of the books that Mad Libs were on rack and they were mostly in bookstores, gift stores, drug stores, et cetera. I was the first guy who had the idea to put them in car washes. So there's this chain of, it was either nine or 11, don't remember which, really, really busy, successful car washes in my area, all owned by one guy. And they had this big waiting lobby area where you could stand or sit and watch the cars go buy and free soda pop and stuff, but they weren't selling anything there. And I said, "Put a rack in here, we're going to clean up." And so, it's a pun, clean up car wash. You guys got to be sharper than that. I noticed a bunch of you didn't get the Venus De Mylo joke yesterday, because obviously you don't know who Venus De Mylo is. See, that was a good little line stuck in there, and a bunch of people didn't even get it.

So I go pitch the guy, "I'm putting the racks in." And he says, "I don't want racks of these things in the middle of my beautiful car wash lobbies. So I said, "Well, what do you want?" And he said, "Well, what do you mean?" I said, "Well, okay, so you don't want the racks in here. I want the racks in here. So what do you want that will get you to let me put the racks in here for a 90-day trial?" Guy says, "The only thing that could possibly interest me and change my opinion on this is I go down to... " And I now forget the name of it. "This strip club all the time. A date with Bubbles, that's what I want."

So I swept down to the strip club. I find Bubbles. I sit bubbles down and I say, "There's this guy who comes in here all the time from the car washes, who wants a date with you. And I want to put my book racks in his car washes. And the only way he'll let me do that is if you go out on a date with him. What will it take to get you to go on a date with this guy?" She says, "I'm not going on a date with this guy. He's grimy and sleazy. And he's... " I say, "You do understand now he owns the car washes." And Bubbles being mercenary, as all strippers are just as a piece of information, Bubble's attitude changes dramatically because she thought he worked at the car wash.

So I said, "Now what will it take?" She said, "Well then, if have to go on a date with him is if we go to Vegas." I said, "All right." Well, it so happens I was a gambler at the time, so I knew a casino host. And so I make a call. And so now I got the car wash owner and Bubbles on their way to Vegas, and I got my racks in the bookstores based upon the Walt Disney principle. The punchline of the story, by the way, is car wash owner and Bubbles get married and live happily ever after. Boy, are you gullible? That's not... And based upon the truth of why we're in the room, it's good you're that gullible. So the real punchline of the story is the car wash owner and Bubbles do get married while they're in Vegas; however, not so happily ever after. Roughly two and a half years later, there's a big divorce, and that's how there came to be a chain of car washes named Bubbles. Now, that's the real story.

All right. Now, you can choose to believe that one or not, as you wish. All right. So why we're here is because, and all the new hands help, because we actually have so much stuff in every category. So many resources and people. So really why we're here so I can sell you something. That's why we're here. That's the truth. So, we can make this quick, short and even do Q&A as long as everybody basically agrees that there are enough interesting information marketing that one of these resources you're going to walk out the back of the room and buy, then I can like speed this up.

Show of hands, how many are like, on a 1-10, a seven with me here that you're in the room to hunt for a resource that will help you do information marketing better, faster, richer, et cetera. Raise your hands nice and high so I can make my decision. Okay, good. I'll go real fast. All right. That's easy. So the folks are giving you forms, which will be important for you to follow along. It's actually a little earlier than I wanted you to have a form, but since I told you the truth, it doesn't make any difference. Right?

So the first thing I can tell you about the information marketing business is this, pretty much the days of a simple one are over. There was a time if you're familiar with a thing called the JPDK model. Well, even before that, there was a time, kind of when I got introduced to information marketing before anybody was even really calling it information marketing, there was a lot of run a full page ad in magazines or newspapers sell a $10 book and make money. Then there was run full page ad sell $10 book, and just from the book, one simple upsell like a course or a seminar once in a while. And the renting of the mailing list make a lot of money. And the names of that era, Joe Karbo, Ted Nicholas, Mark Haroldsen, if they mean anything to you.

And gradually media costs, the cost of acquiring a customer, made that model impossible. You see that model now moved online where media cost is at least theoretically zero. And you do see it working a little. But even there by and large, the cost and complexity of customer acquisition has sort of neutered if not destroyed the simple business in publishing, in information marketing. It's very, very hard to get much past just a nice six figure, mom and pop, make money part-time off a card table thing. If you want to go past that, you will find yourself needing to be complicated, not simple,. Lots of multiple income streams hooked together, ascension models, all of that.

So the first thing you need to know, I think about information marketing is that the one trick ponies pretty much dead. They used to exist. They used to do fine. They don't now. It's more complicated. And so you need diversity built into the business. You're probably familiar with a general business principle I teach, which is the worst number in business is one. And so one key anything; one product, one employee. If you're in retail, one location. One anything that accounts for a substantial portion of your income, leaves you endangered and vulnerable all the time to cyclical effect, to changes in consumer preference, to legal changes. You can go to bed one night, wake up the next morning and somebody's figured out a way to really mess with your business. It's happening a lot now.

So if you think about, last year, the whole mortgage industry imploded. And generally speaking as the few mortgage were brokers who are around here will tell you basically almost all the mortgages are now Fannie Mae, Fred Mac, FHA. And there's commission caps, and there's feed caps, there's all kinds of new... The college lending business, two weeks ago, basically they put that out of business. They just destroyed the whole industry. So a bunch of guys went to bed one night with a nice little business and they woke up the next morning and opened a Wall Street journal and said, "Uh oh, we've been federalized."

We had it years ago, the infomercials were outlawed. A lot of people don't remember, don't even know, but the infomercial business as you see it now was made possible by Ronald Reagan deregulating the regulations that had been put in that ended infomercials to start with. So there were infomercials in the early years of television and then the FCC passed a law that said, "No advertiser can run more than a two-minute thing at a time." So that was the end of infomercials, because the longest spot you could run was two minutes. And it lasted all the way to Ronald Reagan. When Reagan said, "Let them buy however many minutes they want. If somebody wants to sell them four hours and they want to buy four hours, what do we care?" And boom, there's the infomercial industry again.

So for all these reasons, dependency on one thing generally speaking is a bad idea, because there's too much of a risk of going to bed one night with everything pretty cool and waking up the next morning with everything very uncool. Some Mormons even extend this philosophy into personal life.

Come on, come on, come on, come on. Some of my best friends. So there's a whole diversity equals stability. By the way, I used to tell Avon Lady Jehovah's Witness joke. And I did it for 12 years, waiting for the Jehovah's Witness complaint, which never came. The complaint that finally came was from an Avon sales manager who was setting herself on fire over the whole thing. So if there was a Mormon in the room, I know you, please.

And Arlene's probably here. Arlene, are you in a room? No, she went somewhere else. So I know there's at least one here, and I know she only has had one husband at a time and was only a wife to a husband that had one wife at a time. So I know, I understand.

So diversity, stability, insurance against trans hazards, all that. The other reason to be very complex in your information marketing business is the ability to maximize the customer value. Because the most difficult thing to do is get a good customer, the most expensive thing to do is get a good customer. Therefore, if we're going to go through all that agony, effort and expense, we ought to optimize the customer that we get.

In one of my private meetings, I was just in with a client of mine. They've dramatically improved their business in the last six months and in the past year, revenues, profits, all of that. And their front end, the number of new customers coming into door is not improved at all. If anything, it's down a little bit, but they're offering more and more and more things, and more and more splintered, specialized interest things to the customers that they have, and the value of each customer is now multiplied. This generally does not make people unhappy, it makes them happy.

A, they're going off buying stuff from somebody else if you're not meeting their needs. And different people have different interests and different needs within every information business. And so if you cater to them, you have a better business. If you successfully, the close loop here is, the better job you do with customer value, the easier you can make new customer acquisition because you could spend more money on it. So it's the most difficult thing to do, it's the most expensive thing to do. You want to be able to spend the most you can on it, not the least you have to spend on it. And a way to do that is to do a better job with customer value on the backend altogether.

So in total there are 17 main profit centers in an information marketing business. They splinter, there's subsets of all of them, but there are 17. And so if you're just beginning in information marketing, the smartest thing I think to do is to be fully aware of and have good understanding of all 17. Even if you choose not to pull the trigger on all 17, the first month, the first six months, the first year you're in your business, you still want to know about them so that you strategize where they fit and when they should begin in your business, because ultimately you should be using all 17 of them. If you're a pro and you've got an established information marketing business, then the question to ask is how many of the 17 am I using? And how good of a job am I doing with the 17? And why aren't I using all 17 of them?

The list and the resource, because remember why I'm here. So the resource that gives foundation for all 17, is the A-Z blueprints course, which has been revised and updated like five times in five years. It's very, very current. The 17 are the book business. And by the way, everybody, in some way, shape or form should be somehow involved with books. And the new electronic world makes that even more interesting. Probably in the next month or so, for those of you that the info marketing letter, I'm going to do a whole report on the whole new world, because the iPad and the Kindle and the Nook are changing everything newsletter business. The something of the month club business, book, CD, DVD whatever, the whole products business, it always amazes me how many established mature information marketers have front end, they have back end, they even have ascension, they have a bunch of stuff, but they don't actually have a catalog business.

And there's no reason not to have a catalog business, and there's every reason to have it. Two of the biggest reasons are, customers you have like to buy by cafeteria and people who will never go into your system, who absolutely refuse to be members or subscribers or in continuity or ascend will still come 2, 3, 4 times a year to a catalog online and make a purchase if you give them the opportunity to do so.

I'll give you a little piece of inside baseball. I don't know if I should, but I'll give it to you. You guys are all members so you know what it means to be a Glazer-Kennedy member. You should know, we have a lot more non-members than we have members. We still have them because they're on email list and they get communication, they just don't get the membership stuff.

Here's the piece of inside baseball. The non-member group is financially valuable as is the member group. And the member group is financially valuable in many ways, the non-member group is only financially valuable in two ways. Our stuff they buy piece meal, and other people's stuff they buy piece meal through our portal of promotion. So there's about 25 ways that a member is potentially valuable to us, there's only two ways that a non-member is potentially valuable to us. And yet the non-member group is as valuable as is the member group, predominantly because of the catalog business. There's licensing, there's teleseminars and tele-coaching, there's consulting, there's coaching, there's seminars and events.

There's membership sites free or paid or both, there's done-for-them services, there's list building itself and monetizing the list through ways other than what you sell to the people on those lists. There's pure online deliverables. There's actually making your thing an association or having an association as part of your thing. There's area exclusive programs, which can coexist with non area exclusive in the same environments. I have one client right now, for example, has five, all in one niche, five different area exclusive programs, four non-area exclusive programs. They are all coexisting.

Hidden money. What I call hidden money in an information business; commissions, royalties, JV partner, money, all that stuff. And of course, 17 is integrating it all together. Feeding this, a big issue is affiliate marketing.

So let's talk next about the coaching and consulting business. So here's the new reality of coaching and consulting. It's more difficult than it's been in the past five years, probably in part because of economic issues, but it is not a lay down anymore to sell people up into coaching programs. It used to be about as simple as numbers. There's a hundred of you out there, there's 10 chairs up here. There's only going to be 10 chairs. Who's the first 10 people who want them? It almost was that easy. It is not that easy now, predominantly because of the way people are spending money. However, it is also more important now than it has ever been in the information marketing business, because more of your net will, it is pushed to the top of the pyramid. And so if you're not effective at the top of the income pyramid, again, you'll find it hard to sustain an information marketing business and the ability to do everything that you need to do to feed the big, broad bottom of the pyramid.

Also, if you choose to run a business that skips the big, broad bottom of the pyramid, then being able to effectively put people in coaching programs is essential. The new reason why it's so important is, in my opinion, it's the only deliverable left in the entire industry that you can actually protect from commoditization. If you haven't noticed, here's what's happened. It's become easier and easier and easier online for a variety of reasons, including people misunderstanding what they're doing to themselves. Its become easier and easier and easier for consumers to sit their appetite for information or entertainment in any category for free than it has ever been before.

So think about if you don't have a relationship preference. So Dwight owns a martial arts studio. He doesn't know much about marketing. He wakes up this morning and decides he's going to get online and start to find something that can help him with marketing his martial arts studio. So he has no, we now have no relationship. He doesn't know me from Adam. He's going to start shopping, this, the first piece of bad news, the word shopping. So he's going to start shopping. So I don't know what he's good at Google. He's going to Google marketing. He's going to Google marketing experts. He's going to type in martial arts marketing, whatever.

Guess what he's going to find? The democratization of content to the point of free. So he can find a lot of martial arts specific stuff for free. He can find my kind of people for free. He can find Seth Golden for free. He can find Jay Con. Levinson for free. If he wants motivation, he can find Zig, Brian and Tommy, and he can find any kind of media he wants. You want webinars, there's all kind of webinars. Go to YouTube, there's all kind of videos of everybody. You want audio? There's all kinds of audio downloads. You want print, there's all kind of eBooks, free books, free courses. It's just mountainous.

So he can sit his appetite every day. He can literally build his own coaching program. He can build his own course. He can build his own everything for free if he wants to. So the only thing we can really protect is his preference for me, that's the only thing we can protect. The only thing you can protect is his preference for you. And the best way to sustain that preference of profit from it is to get him out of that whole environment and get him into a direct personal preferably one-on-one relationship. So the coaching business is the last vestige that we can truly protect premium price, reten profit therefore, retention, everything in.

Now, linked to it done-for-them is sort of another place, but it's vulnerable to commoditization from the other side. Again, take something like the done-for-them newsletter business, which a lot of niche players have as part of their information marketing businesses. Well, there's all sorts of folks nipping at those heels from the other side at much lower, lower prices. So again, unless he has a preference for me, unless he's tied into a program with me, I run the risk of losing him to price.

So that's a new reason that it's critically important. Another reason that it's important is that coaching and/or one-on-one consulting, and I want to talk about that for just a second. Coaching and/or one-on-one consulting is the best way to actually get implementation and therefore get legitimate success case histories. And increasingly in the current regulatory environment, you actually have to be able to document your case histories.

In case you didn't know it, there's sort of new FTC regulations. You will see a lot of people ignoring them for a while, but they're there. They mostly affect use of testimonials. The loophole in them, if you're not familiar, and the caveat here is I'm not practicing law, I'm making a general observation. The loophole in them is that if I want to show someone who got exceptional results, which the only people I want to show are people who got exceptional results. And by definition, there's exceptional results, and then there's no results, because the vast majority of the people have no results. They ruin the bell curve because they don't do anything. And hardly anybody ever does anything with anything. So regardless of what it is that you sell, it is a very safe bet that in a lot of homes it will be in the garage. And in a lot of offices, it will be in the closet, and that ruins your bell curve. So you can't actually show average and typical results because the bell curve's so bad, the average and typical results are zero.

The FTC consent decree years ago that the multilevel industry, the big players, Amway, Herbalife, et cetera, all at Shackley, all agreed to, they have to disclose the average Mary Kay, the average annual purchase volume of a distributor, which is like 12 bucks. So if you've been to an opportunity meeting anywhere, anytime in your life, and you've seen them draw the circles and show you how you're going to make a $100,000 a month, because everybody does 500. See, $12,000 a year ruins that story. It's not helpful at all.

So you got to be able to tell the exceptional story. So the window they left is, I can tell my exceptional story as long as I fully disclose and document everything that exceptional person did. So to be straight with this now, I can't show you Barbara who lost 134 pounds in the last 20 months, and just show you the before and after and tell you Barbara lost 134 pounds unless everybody I sold my weight loss program lost 134 pounds, or a proportionate ratio to what their original weight was. But if I tell you, or have Barbara tell you, "Not only did I use this glop, but I actually stopped eating pizza and chocolate every day for breakfast. And I took a walk with the dog two times a week and I lifted weights for an hour." And so Barbara tells that, I can use Barbara all I want. Well, the best way to have all that information is to have Barbara in a coaching program, because I can document every step of the way. Whereas, otherwise, you may not even have the information to tell the case history the way the case is. So that's another reason to do this.

Now, the other thing about new realities is, increasingly I have information marketing with private clients who are backing their way, not just into coaching, but into the true consulting business. So for example, I won't name them, but a client of mine in dentistry, in dental profession, in a three year period of time has gone from 50% of his revenue coming from product stuff, 30% of the revenue coming from events, and the rest of it coming from coaching. Now to almost 50% of the revenue coming from coaching and 30% of the revenue coming from actual consulting, and several levels. One, a junior version of him who goes to the docs office and camps out there for two days and does some staff training, does some installation of systems, does some private time with the doc, is billed at X dollars, but only costs my client Y dollars. And he has gone from one such person to three such persons, to 38 such persons, busy all the time. That's the business.

The next tier up is they come in groups of six for a day with him and they get put together based on some commonalities; type of practice, size of practice, problem they're dealing with, goal they have. And then the next level up, which is really expensive is time with him. The consulting then, part of that business, is an ever increasing important part of that business. He's choosing to do some of it with manual labor of his own, but he's doing a lot of it with manual labor of others.

Five years ago, given the opportunity, I probably would've tried to talk him out of this, purely on the basis of anything involving humans is to be avoided at all costs. And now not only when I talked him out of it, I'm facilitating it and advising other clients to do it as well. The client, the chiropractic profession, who I met with yesterday, who has gone from only one coaching level to three coaching levels and then two consulting levels, all the way up to a $50,000 fee for a prescribed program of personal one-on-one. In information marketing language, this is what we call stretching the top of the pyramid so that the profit now is like this way at the top, because there's less and less profit way down here.

Again, I think even... First of all, I think you have to understand it all and pick every piece of it and every possibility of it up and look at it; pros, cons, case histories, how does it work? What does the agreement look like? What does the math look like? Who's doing it in order to sort out for yourself really what of it belongs in your business? What of it doesn't belong in your business and then how to do it effectively?

But you should know that the top two desires not even on the top 10 list is actually information/education. The top two desires of buyers that we would deal with in this industry are personal customized assistance. Now this is important because you have a strategic choice to make when you're an information marketer. You can essentially do what I did 50 minutes ago. And say, "How about if I just tell you guys the truth?" You can't get away with that very often. It's damaging. There's a very small market in America for the truth. And generally speaking, it's suicidal, unless relationship is well established. Or you can pander to the conversation already going on in their mind to what they want. Find a way to meet their desires and needs and at the same time deliver then, what they really need.

For example, in coaching, in any technical aspect of coaching, this is not new, but what I'm going to tell you here in a second kind of is. In any technical side of coaching, so if you're teaching somebody how to run auto repair shops more successfully, or you're teaching dentists how to run dental practices more successfully, whatever it is, whatever professional occupational business, even truthfully, recreational niche that you might be in, personal development is more important than mechanics. Because the overwhelming majority of the reasons why they aren't doing better than they are, it has nothing to do with absence of information about how to do it, nor does it have to do with bad mechanics. It has to do with how they think about themselves, the world around them, money, et cetera.

But if you tell that truth as your sales presentation, you will almost always starve. It's very hard to make that work. What they want is 10 steps of this, four steps of that, a better ad. A doohickey they can stick up on their website that will improve conversions. That's what they want desperately. So if you're going to give them what they need, you got to give it to them like extra, and not make it the focal point of the selling.

So the two things they want most are personal and customized assistance. Why do they want that? Because they devoutly, that's a key word, devoutly believe their business is different. Now, strategic choice in part because I'm a generalist, I don't deal with a niche, I have chosen to sell against that. My entire life, consequently, you hear a regular and frequent and off repeated to the point of horrific monotony beating up on everybody that your business is not different. It's not because you're in the marketing business. So we're all in the same damn business. So that's the position you see me take. It is not the position I recommend anybody else take.

It is infinitely easier to say, "Yeah, your business is different. It's different than everybody else's business on the damn planet, including everybody else in your profession, everybody else in your community, everybody. You are the most unique, of unique, of unique sets of problems, circumstances and opportunities ever invented in the history of mankind by God himself. And that's why you need, and we got for you, the most unique customized approach," because that's what they... So you can either play to what they already believe and want to believe, or you cannot play. So personalize the appearance, personalized customized assistance.

That's why small coaching groups always have a much higher retention rate than big coaching groups. Always. Why? Because they feel like they're getting personalized customized attention that they really don't need to go be effective, but they feel like they need it to go be effective. So rich guys when they decide they want to get in shape, typically after a divorce, but not so bad that they're not still rich, not as rich as they were, but they're rich, rich guys go hire a personal trainer. Now, for the most part, probably 90% of it, the personal trainer's telling all 10 of them the same stuff. They could just as easily be in the same class, spend 10% less money. "Here's the DVD, go home and watch it. Here's the eight exercises; stretch before you exercise, breathe after you exercise, stop eating crap, take these two things, lift them 10 times." It's the same crap.

But the guy thinks his deal is different. So he will pay the personal trainer umpteen amounts of money, and he will be unhappy if he doesn't feel like he's... So the number one thing they want is the sense of customization. You can only give that to them through coaching and consulting. You can't give it to them any other way.

The second thing they want is done-for-them, which again is best provided in the context of a multifaceted program that you lock them into.

So nearly the last thing I want to talk to you about is speaking in seminars. So here's the new reality about that. Speaking is returning as the ultimate media. It once was the ultimate media. Back I built... My first niche business was an information marketing business in chiropractic and dentistry. And we built it from 1982 to 1987, and went from zero to about a million bucks the first year. And I think our peak year we did 12 or 14 million. And it was entirely driven by a speaker on the road doing previews. For a year and a half I did some, but for the most part, we had one person out there. And we used to preview seminar model, plus him speaking at trade association and large regional association meetings and so forth. I, of course, initially built what is now this business on the back of speaking. And many of you... Well, not the newest ones probably, but certainly anybody would say seven to 10 years of longevity with us probably came in through that portal, more likely than any other portal. Your first exposure was you saw me speak some place.

And for a while everybody went away from it for a variety of reasons. First of all, they didn't come to information marketing from that path, they came from being a successful plumber who now is going to take their stuff and sell it to other plumbers. Bill's path to information marketing, successful menswear retailer, going to take my stuff and sell it to other menswear retailers. No speaking was ever involved in that. No reason for it to be. What the recession started to teach information marketers again... And again, I can speak mostly about my private clients, is it began to teach them how valuable speaking could be as a means of customer acquisition.

First of all, you get groups, you get clumps, so you get them all at one time. And generally speaking, you can make the cost of acquisition go away, which is extremely attractive. The third reason is because you get better customers. I can assure you, I'm not going to give you the math ratio, but I can promise you if you look at the average longevity, retention, total customer value in our business or any other information marketing business of the customer acquired online versus the customer acquired from a speaking engagement or a seminar, you're talking about two different animals from two different planets. You got to have like a 1000 to them to equal 10 of them.

Info marketers started to learn it again about two years ago as efficacy of everything else they were doing started to dry up. And so I have a number of clients who are using some version of the roadshow, in many cases not doing it themselves, once perfected, but having one or more people out there. Various approaches to that. Some use champion clients and use them by area, so they don't have to go very far. They got a champion client who has a store in Pennsylvania using their system. They get him up to speed and they use him as their roadshow presenter for Pennsylvania, Ohio, Michigan, Indiana. Others hire pros, other share pros. There's all sorts of ways to deal with the staffing issue, but there's a lot of roadshow operation now going on. They sell them into a seminar, sort of a very classic thing that was abandoned. So there's all different ways to use speaking and to use seminars. But here's some of the powerful reasons to do it.

One, if you are there under someone else's auspices, you have endorsement, so it's not just you showing up, it's you blessed by somebody with whom they already have a relationship. In my chiropractic dental business, we got very effective. We got to the point that we could close 80%-90% of the room, but that's extremely unusual. Normally in a preview seminar environment where you bring them in on your own, you might be closing 20% of the room. But if it's blessed by the association they belong to, your close rate might double or triple, purely because of the blessing. So the endorsement's useful, the free promotions useful, not only as an info marketer you benefit from this tremendously, because not only if you get an association or vendors or someone else to either bring you in to speak or promote some event of yours, not only are you getting the benefit of the promotion that actually fills those seats at that moment, but you got all that free promotion for you to all of the people who didn't come and sit in those seats. And I'll get to a way to capitalize on that.

Here it is entry to other cooperation. So I'll tell you an interesting story.

So I spoke for a company called Sun Securities. They're a very large financial products company and I did their convention with all the brokers, registered investment advisors and so forth, for whom Sun is their broker dealer? So I spoke at their convention in fee. I don't remember now, but there might have been 400 there. There's breakout sessions. Of course, I set... Well, that's another step, but I had like 300 of the 400 in my room. So I acquired let's say a 100 customers. However, they got 5,000 who weren't there. Well, now we just had a success, everybody liked what they saw, 100 people bought stuff. I actually have written Sun Securities a bigger check for their share of the revenue than they wrote me for the fee, which they've never seen before.

Here's the conversation that it then facilitates, "Hey, you had 500 people here. You got 4,500 people who weren't here. Let's do something with the 4,500." Now try and get through Sun Securities to their brokers and dealers with some sort of joint venture to drive people to a tele seminar or do a direct mail campaign to sell your product without that speaking piece occurring first. Lots of luck. The speaking piece is what made the other possible. The other infinitely more valuable that I would rather not have done the speaking piece. I'd rather just go direct and say, "Hey, let's do a three-step campaign to your 5,000 guys. Let's drive model webinar. Let's sell them a ton of stuff." But that conversation can't be had unless this piece is this first.

It can support trade show exhibiting. Most effective thing you'd ever do if you insist on going somewhere and exhibiting is making sure you're on a program as a speaker. It can be a substitute filling your own seats at previews, thereby taking away the cost and moving it to an association of vendor group, some other organization.

In the very early days of Joe Polish's business in the carpet cleaning industry, we used a strategy that I had invented 10 years before that for a client. So in order to put carpet cleaners in a room for Joe to sell a system to, we got the vendor in the area that sold supplies to carpet cleaners to be the host. And so they had a list, they had a name, they had relationship, they had sales guys on the street. If they could be managed well, all the cost of acquisition of customer went away. All the cost of putting on the event went away. Endorsement was picked up, promotion to everybody in that area was gotten for free. Now, what the vendor partner didn't know, no reason for them to know it.

So let's say we're doing LA, I don't know how many carpet cleaners there are in LA, but there's a ton of them. Some of them are artificially registered anywhere because they're in LA illegally, but of the ones that are there ille... Well, the barrier to entry if carpet cleaning is relatively low, but of the ones that are there illegally, there's at least thousands of them. I don't know. Maybe 10,000 for all I know. So now you have the vendor or two or three vendors put together who are non-competing and compatible vendors. You have the vendor doing mail, email, fax to all of those carpet cleaners for about six weeks, banging away at them about this event, to which maybe 150 come, leaving thousands who got all that promotion at the vendor partners expense for all of those weeks and did not come.

They now can be contacted directly by the info marketer saying, "You may have noticed I was here and you couldn't come, but let me send you a CD of the whole thing for free so you can listen to it. And then there's a tele seminar you can come... And so the back end of that is more valuable than the front end of that, but it is executed all at somebody else's expense.

The main thing, the most valuable thing for most to know about all of this is the strategies for working outside the rule book with national regional and state associations. So even Craig Proctor, I'll tell you Craig Proctor story real quick. So Craig of late, his coaching business and his seminar business has not been nearly as good as it was 2, 3, 4, 5 years ago, since he's in the real estate industry, which 40% of that industry is now working at Kohl's. So the candidate population has reduced substantially. Their incomes are off and so forth. So some of the regular marketing methodology, which in Craig's business is largely email, email, email, email, email, email, email, email, email, drive to teleseminars, drive to teleseminars, drive to teleseminars. Well, all of those stats are bad. They're not awful, but they're not what they were. So email delivery, a problem. Email readership, a problem. Getting people to come to the teleseminar because the real estate agent says, "I don't want et cetera, et cetera."

So Craig's using a strategy, tweaked, that he hasn't used in 20 years of working with regional realtor associations in order to get people in a room very, very successfully. So there's a whole range of strategies for working with trade associations, local, regional, national, that revolve around speaking or a seminar event. I will give you a clue. If you want to write something down, that's a takeaway. It is a non-dues revenue event. That's some important language in the association world. And with that, I shall turn you loose to whatever it is that you need to do. Thank you folks. Have a good day.

Russell Brunson: Thank you for listening to the Magnetic Marketing Podcast with Dan Kennedy. If you love hearing in on these lost Dan Kennedy talks and speeches and calls, then please let someone else know about this podcast. That's how you can help it to grow. And the more it grows, the more free Dan Kennedy we can bring to you.

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