Expanding Your Platform
If you find yourself in a narrow subject field you’ll often need to get creative when developing deliverables. On my website, SteveGJones.com, the
catalogue has been expanded over the years to address horizontal expansion opportunities. Looking at my current catalogue, you would see that we have an abundance of categories: gold, platinum, titanium, diamond, daytime, binary daytime, backward daytime, high-speed daytime, subliminal, backward subliminal, high-speed subliminal, paraliminal, omniliminal, hypno-hybrid, hypno-fusion – that’s just to name a few. And in each of those categories we have roughly 215 recordings.
Each month we deliver a new series, and each new series is an opportunity for multiple levels and kinds of product. For example, a new series may just have new background material added to a voice recording I created a few years ago, but that background music will give it a particular flavor or offer a new slant, making it a distinct product.
When I first started recording audio sessions I recorded over 200 titles and thought, “well, okay, we’ve got them all done, let’s call it a day.” But then I realized, “wait a minute, we’ve got all these recordings, we can do a lot of things! We can have a gold line and a platinum line and the gold line’s going to have all of the same intros, all the same background music, and they’ll be shorter, they’ll be 30 minutes, we’ll reduce the script size, and the
they can have a few NLP techniques I can add at the end, we’re really flavoring them up to make them a much richer experience.” That thought expanded over time to create a multitude of program levels and types.
We even had a contest here in the office, $500 for anyone who can create a new series. My assistant got so excited about this, and she said, “We can do the daytime thing and offset it by ten seconds and play one version on the left ear, one in the right ear.” This sparked a whole new series, and also kept the team excited about our deliverables.
Ultimately this growth in my product catalogue came from me wondering,
“hmmmm, what else can I do with these recordings?”
Being Rigorous
Our online examination tool creates a very thorough online process. It’s a program that was custom created for my needs, cost thousands of dollars to build and is constantly being refined to more smoothly and efficiently
process all of our students. Because we have so many given students at any given time all around the world, we’re not able to handle all of the
examinations in-office, so we created this automated process.
That automated process needs to be rigorous, which is a term I like to keep in mind while creating certification programs. Keep it rigorous, make it challenging, and don’t create something that a monkey could pass without even trying.
Having studied at Harvard and finishing my Doctorate in Education, I’m intimately acquainted with the notion of rigor. But you don’t have to bring a Harvard-level rigor to bear in a certification program. You just need to make it challenging enough so that you’re confident the student has processed the material. People don’t get a free ride just because they paid money for a certification program. It has to be tough, thorough and rigorous.
Providing Services to Clients You Never Met
One of the more difficult adaptations of the internet age is the departure from face-to-face relationships in businesses and the growth of digital media and communications. Questions like “how do I trust this provider?” and “is this information reliable?” are regular concerns, but for the online
entrepreneur it largely becomes a matter of crafting a deliverable for a client that you may never even meet. How would you translate and market an existing practice into something that works for an anonymous internet audience?
Here’s what you need to remember: don’t focus on marketing. In my
business we separate marketing from content creation, which not only allows you to concentrate on what’s important (the content), but also helps preserve the integrity of your deliverable. We call content creation “production”, and production and marketing never mix, at all.
Some practitioners – hypnotherapists even – will balk at that, insisting that one must be good at marketing in order to be successful. Not true. That’s what copywriters, website designers, marketing gurus and PR
representatives are for. My first concern as a hypnotherapist is being a good hypnotherapist, and I know that is what makes me successful at marketing myself as a hypnotherapist.
You’ve got to maintain what you were doing in the office when you bring your services to the online world. For me, there was no shift at all in how I
approached my clients. I just took the best of all of my techniques – for quitting smoking, overcoming fear, etc. – and recording them to audio format where people could download them.
I never worried about “how am I going to market this” and instead focused on creating the recordings, making sure they were of the best quality
possible.
I went to a ClickBank meeting a few years ago and found that they were promoting one of my products, the NLP Program, at their desk. And why had they chosen to promote my product? Because, as stated before, I created something that was pure information – no website plugs, anecdotal unrelated stories, or fluff to fill a marketing need. ClickBank saw the value in that and chose to promote my product, thus marketing my product for me.
Turning an Idea into a Product
I’d like to share with you my regular practice for creating a product to help illustrate the steps to success.
With over 9,000 audio programs available on my website, and more
programs being developed regularly, we deploy new content over time on a schedule. Hypnosis records, for example, will often begin with a request.
Because the Steve G. Jones brand has such a powerful online presence, both our New York and Savannah offices are staffed with customer support agents that handle phone and email inquiries from clients. Throughout the day that team will field requests, like “Do you have anything for deep vein
thrombosis?” or “Do you have something for the fear of clowns? My nephew is afraid of clowns and won’t go to the circus.” The customer support staff will log those requests and, about once a year, my team and I will take that long list and begin creating new recordings based on those suggested topics.
But before something goes to production, my assistant will first research the topic to make sure the information provided is accurate and executed
correctly. She will then create the script (it’s worth noting that when I first began this was a step I would complete myself) based on that research to help guide the content. Together we will review the script, finalize the list of requests we’ve received that year, and then submit everything to our
Once marketing receives our list of topics and supporting scripts, they will either approve or discard the topic based on market insight and their
estimation of its ability to sell. It’s important to note that the marketing team has NOT had input up until this point. They have no control over the
content itself, but the do have control over what does or doesn’t get created at this point. They’ll base their decision based on keywords, popularity and marketing metrics instead of just catering to that single person that sent in a request.
As an example, my Fear of Frogs program was recorded after a woman in Australia requested it. The recording has been a remarkably poor performer.
When I first began recording audio programs I would take on any request that I could, including the request from a woman who asked for something to help overcome her fear of frogs. I hadn’t done any market research on the topic, but if I had I probably would have discovered that it was a very
narrow market. And while it’s nice to be able to create something for just one person, it’s not an efficient use of my time when I could instead be helping thousands of people who need help with a different topic.
Once marketing has reviewed the list and we have a final approved list of topics, I will further refine the script and record the session on my recording studio. Years ago when I first started recording hypnotherapy sessions I would go to an apartment in Santa Monica where some guy had set up his computer and he and his friend would create the recordings for me. That wasn’t even ten years ago, but the quality of my recordings has improved tremendously since then. Now I have a custom built recording studio in my home, with top-end equipment like a hand made RØDE microphone from Australia, and two college graduate recording engineers to program the audio.
After I’ve completed recording the audio files they will then be sent to another audio engineer who will add music tracks. My assistant follows this by auditing this version, sending it back for any corrections, until a final version is approved by me and sent to our New York office.
The New York office will complete the process by loading the deliverables onto the servers, create sales copy, contact the affiliates and finally launch the product.
Turning a book into a eBook is a very simple process. All you need to do is find someone that can create PDF files. If your source document is well formatted, someone can create a PDF for you in ten minutes. If, however,
process may take 48 hours for a good PDF designer to turn all of your content into an eBook.