Dr. Steve G. Jones, Ed.D.
Clinical Hypnotherapist www.SteveGJones.com
All rights reserved. No material in this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any
Chapter One: Preparing Yourself for Wealth... 7
Program Yourself for Wealth... 8
Unlimited Confidence... 10
Change Your Habits...12
Create Positivity... 16
Chapter 2: Overcoming and Moving Forward... 17
Facing Your Fears... 18
Induction Script (Beach House)... 21
The Keys to Ongoing Success...24
Getting Past Blocks... 27
Chapter 3: Implementing Change...29
How Do I Know If I’m An Expert?... 30
Find Your Passion... 32
Making a Plan... 35
Chapter 4: Production Ideas...38
Where Are The Ideas?... 39
Working With Outlines... 47
Chapter 5: The Power of Positivity... 49
Maintaining a Positive Mindset to Succeed... 50
Limiting Your Exposure to Negativity...52
Accepting The New You...54
Unlimited Wealth Script... 56
Amnesia... 58
Trance Termination... 59
Chapter 6: Creating a Working Platform and Philosophy... 60
Being Rigorous... 63
Providing Services to Clients You Never Met... 64
Turning an Idea into a Product...67
Chapter 7: Creating Content... 71
Content is King... 72
How to Record and Produce Quality Audio...75
How to Create and Self-Publish eBooks... 79
How to Film and Produce Quality Video Programs... 84
Create a Mobile Recording Studio... 87
Chapter 8: Exploring Opportunities...89
Creating Customized Content for a Client... 90
The Importance of Doing Interviews...93
Deep Discount Sales... 96
Finding Wealth Opportunities (Accept All Offers)... 98
Taking Action!... 99
Chapter 9: Maximizing Online Potential...104
Take the Leap into the Online World... 105
Affiliate Marketing... 106
Your Physical Practice vs. Your Online Practice...111
Media Outlets... 113
Importance of Credentials... 122
SEO (Search Engine Optimization)... 125
Resources... 128
Program Yourself for Wealth
Thank you for believing in your ability to generate wealth online! This book is going to revolutionize the way you think about online marketing. You are going to learn solid techniques based on my experience that will skyrocket your online marketing success. Before you go any further, please visit SteveGJones.com now and sign up for your free hypnosis mp3 "Program your Inner Millionaire.”
I believe it is essential to program yourself for anything that you want to achieve: if you’re interested in weight loss, you must prepare yourself mentally to lose weight; if you’re interested in stopping smoking, you must prepare yourself mentally to stop smoking; etc. It is no different when it comes to having financial success.
Have you ever considered the possibility that perhaps the reason you have not achieved success yet in your practice is because you do not feel worthy of it? Have you considered the possibility that you have all of the
knowledge, training and tools to be a raving success, and you have not put them into practice yet because there is a part of you that feels small,
insecure, unworthy, etc.?
Before moving forward with learning the mechanics of how to make money as a holistic practitioner online, I think it’s important that you look deep
form of soul-searching that you choose. As a hypnotherapist, I like to use hypnosis with people to resolve potential conflicts so that they can move forward.
Unlimited Confidence
Now, see a blackboard, a chalkboard in front of you, with the uncomfortable labels you have been given in the past, the labels that slowed you down and failed to reflect the wonderful, strong, and good qualities that you have. And now see those labels on the board and take the eraser and erase those labels from the board. Just erase each one, wipe it away. They have no meaning for you, none at all. Now, the blackboard is blank and you write anything you want to write. Now you take the chalk and you write the words that describe yourself. You write confident, valuable, important, capable, and skilled. And now you write other words, other good positive words that describe you, do this now.
Now look at those words. Look at the words you wrote: confident, valuable, important, capable, skilled and the other words you wrote, the other good, positive words you wrote to describe yourself. Look at those words. And now just begin to imagine yourself standing tall, proud of who you are. You are fine. The way you look and act and think are fine. They contribute to making you the wonderful person you are. Imagine yourself experience a new and healthy energy, an energy that helps you to accomplish all that you need to do. For a moment, just reflect on all the positive aspects of yourself, your creativity, your intelligence, your talents. People see you as a good friend, a good worker. They see you as a good person. See yourself as a positive and worthwhile person. Just imagine yourself speaking to people.
conversation with others is easy. Words flow easily. People are interested in what you have to say. People notice you and regard you as a wonderful person. Just imagine projecting yourself in the most positive way, assertive and self-assured. You will approach problems with these thoughts: I can do it, I have the energy, I am just right for the job, I can take charge, I can solve this. You are confident, capable, talented, and you have appeal. You are kind to yourself. You are kind to yourself. You are kind to yourself. You no longer have time for negative thoughts or feelings. You fill your mind with positive ideas, productive goals, and you look at life as an adventure.
Change Your Habits
Opportunities come in all shapes and sizes. They also show up in your life regularly. Perhaps you have had many opportunities in the past to become extremely wealthy as a holistic practitioner but you haven’t recognized those opportunities because you haven’t been prepared for them. It is also likely that you have passed on a few offers because you didn’t think they would pan out.
I want to tell you that one of the key components to my success has been accepting ALL offers. Anytime anyone asks me to do an interview or write an article or anything, I always do it, no exceptions. If someone wants me to share some of my knowledge in some way I always do it. The only time I will make an exception is if, for example, I am on the East Coast and a book publisher has set up a TV interview in Las Vegas and there’s only one
interview and nothing else going on in that town. I find it difficult to justify flying 4,000 miles round trip for just one interview. I will always make an attempt to stack numerous interviews and events when I am traveling. In the day of internet and phones it is usually not necessary to travel to do
something, most interviews can be done over the phone, through Skype, etc. So when it comes to travel, this is the only place where I draw the line and I make sure that I have a lot of things going on before I venture out to a city. Otherwise, if it’s someone wanting an article, I can always find an article
If it’s a Skype interview I can easily find myself on a computer and have this interview. So most of the opportunities that arise are easy to schedule and easy to handle.
Never do anything yourself that you can have someone else do. For example, I mentioned that you can have someone else write an article on your behalf. Of course make sure that they are going to write things that you would say yourself, but there’s no need for you to write a five-page article if you can have someone else do it for you. In fact, there’s no need to do anything at all ever if you can have someone else do it for you.
Wealth opportunities are easy to take advantage of when you have a systematic approach to taking advantage of them. For example, you can have someone who writes your articles, you can have a day that you
schedule all of your phone interviews, you can have someone who manages all of your appearances in a particular city so that you can take advantage of doing a TV interview, a book signing, etc. when you’re visiting that city. I realize that starting out you will not have the higher-level opportunities such as TV interviews and book signings that you will eventually have, but whatever you have going on, you need to have a way to organize it. And when new opportunities come up, you need to have a systematic approach to handling them. It’s better to put these systems into place now rather than later.
But the easiest way to do it is as the opportunities come up, realize that it’s not going to be the only time that they come up. If someone calls you or
emails you and says they want to interview you by phone and the interview is going to take an hour, realize that if you schedule that interview you’ve only handled that one interview. If you decide in that moment that you’re going to create a system for handling those interviews, then you know that, for example, Tuesdays and Thursdays between 1pm and 7pm Eastern time are the days and times that you handle phone interviews. And you can tell your assistant (or virtual assistant) that these are the times when interviews are to be scheduled. For me personally, my assistant knows that I will do an interview any day as long as there’s nothing else scheduled, and that it has to be after 1pm. There’s nothing magical about the hour of 1pm, it’s just that I stay up late and I sleep in late, and by 1pm I’ve usually had coffee and I’m conscious enough to speak semi-intelligently during an interview. This works for me, you need to find what works for you.
Realize that wealth opportunities occur constantly everywhere, and they won’t always be clearly labeled as a wealth opportunity. And some things that look like wealth opportunities are actually a complete waste of your time. The challenge is that you really will never be able to tell the difference.
For example, in 2011 I was approached by three different production
companies that wanted to produce individual television programs featuring my hypnotist skills. I thought that they were all exciting and I had a
everything simply crumbled. I thought this was going to be a new $10 million a year stream of income, me being on a TV show, marketing a lot of items due to the show – t-shirts, coffee cups, etc. – doing a tour where I command large audiences and make a lot of money thanks to my popularity of the show. None of this actually happened.
On the other hand, somebody emailed one day and wanted to do a one-hour interview with me and I thought nothing of it. My assistant handled it and put it in my schedule – I do probably three or four of these every week of the year, so this one was nothing special. But that particular interview turned out to bring in several thousand dollars, whereas most interviews bring in little to nothing.
The point of all of this is that you never know what’s going to pan out and what’s going to be a dud. You need to accept all opportunities that come your way. Along those lines, you never know who you’re talking to when you talk to someone on the phone, or who you’re emailing when you email someone back. By this I mean you don’t know their connections. They may be connected to people that may help your career tremendously, or they may just be Joe Blow. You never know, so you need to treat everyone with
respect and make sure that all emails are answered quickly, and that all meetings are attended promptly.
Create Positivity
You would think that everyone would be in perfect shape in this country, because we’ve got vegetables available to everyone, fruit available to everyone, and no one’s making anyone eat fast food or processed foods or foods high in saturated fats. So why isn’t everyone in perfect shape? It’s because some people either don’t want to be healthy and fit because of some vested interest they have in being miserable, or they feel that they’re not worthy of it.
The positive message needs to be taken in a little deeper; you have to prepare yourself to accept good things first. You have to do this by giving yourself permission to have good things in your life. Once you start to do that and you become comfortable with the notion of having good things come your way, realizing that it’s not taking away from other people, then you get comfortable with more good things.
And so you’re able to open yourself up to more positive situations, and in the above example, good food (good meaning that it empowers you rather than brings you down and makes your body what you don’t want it to be). You’re able to change your life by first changing the way you think about yourself. That all starts with taking some quiet time and figuring out why you either feel unworthy, or you enjoy being miserable.
Facing Your Fears
Many people when starting an online business are concerned that the business will not succeed. I remember when I had my first version of my website in the year 2000, it was shortly after that in 2002 when I was selling mp3’s online. I was strongly advised not to do so because of the piracy that was beginning to become rampant at that time. Now it is completely out of hand by the way. I went ahead and starting selling products online and, rather than realizing net losses, I realized net gains almost immediately. Mp3’s offer you the possibility of selling products that you record one time and can sell forever with very little cost in each sales transaction.
This was during the time when I was preparing to leave my office in Beverly Hills in Los Angeles and move to Georgia. I was somewhat concerned about losing my hypnotherapy client base, but the mp3 sales kicked in and quickly replaced all of the income I had been making as a hypnotherapist and then added more money on top of that.
Many times when I talk to hypnotherapists that want to start an online business, they have serious doubts as to how they are going to make money online. This book is designed to teach you how to do that, but before you take any action, it is important to realize that unless you let go of your fears you could potentially sabotage yourself somewhere along the way because of self-doubt. So first of all I want to give you a logical reason to believe in
Realize that the logic is extremely sound. You put a group of audio, video, and eBook products that you create one time and sell forever. The amount of time required to create them is minimal in comparison to the lifetime of money you will receive from them. Of course this requires some research on your part before you create any product. Before that you will need to know what products you will create.
Relax, I am going to walk you through all of those steps. Once you have created it all you do is you market it, and then sit back and make money. I think the major source of concern is their fear that they don’t know how to market online, or that nobody is going to want to buy from them, or that marketing is too complicated for the average person to learn. I want to tell
you that when I started out marketing online I knew very little about marketing. Only after a few months I had already replaced my previous Beverly Hills’ office income minus the office expenses and having to dress up and go to the office and work 8 hours a day.
Induction Script (Beach House)
Go ahead and get in a comfortable position…close your eyes. That’s good. Now you are going to take three deep breaths. On each one you are going to concentrate on filling your lungs with air very slowly each time. Alright now…inhale…breathing deeply…and slowly… and… exhale… releasing all air through your mouth…very good… again… inhale…through your nose… pause… and… exhale… out through your mouth. Last deep breath right here…inhale…slowly…deeply…feel your chest rise… and… exhale… slowly… through your mouth. Very good. This should have helped you relax a little more. Now for a moment, focus on your steady and consistent normal breaths. [pause]. Picture yourself on a beach. You are packing your towel up and your other things. You brush the sand off your body. You look up at the brilliant yellow sun and you are wondering what time it is. You look out into the sea. The sun is glistening off the water. You see pelicans gliding just inches away from the surface of the ocean. You see and hear sea gulls darting overhead. There is no one on the beach right now. You have the beach all to yourself. Behind you is your beach house. You peer up at it. It’s a yellow house with white shutters. You have a screened in porch in the back. That is where you enjoy spending most of your time. You gather your things and climb the steps onto the boardwalk. The boardwalk is several feet above the dunes and leads to your house. The wood feels warm against your feet as you walk along. On the edge of the dunes are sea oats; they are
swaying in the breeze. You continue to walk along the boardwalk when you notice little sand crabs scurrying into holes in the dunes. You enjoy watching them move sideways in the sand. You walk down some steps and into your
backyard. There are 20 stepping-stones leading to your back porch. You step from one stone to the next. You look up at the clear blue sky and see some small puffy clouds here and there. They seem to be standing completely still as if there was no wind way up in the sky. As you approach the door to your porch, you smell the fragrant scent of roses. Lining your back porch you have dozens of rose bushes. They are in bloom with all sorts of different color buds. There are deep crimson roses, peach roses, yellow roses, and delicate white tea roses. You breathe in the aromatic scent until it fills your lungs. You step in front of your door and brush your feet off. You reach your hand out to the shiny gold doorknob and turn it. The knob feels smooth and cool to the touch. You walk in, close the door and put your things down. With a flip of a switch you put on some music. The sound of music fills the air and makes you feel at ease. You enjoy one song after the other. In the corner of your screened in porch, you have a hammock. You walk over to the hammock and easily climb in. You feel the gentle breeze come through the screens and brush across your body. The breeze is refreshing and calms you. You have a small pillow beneath your head and you close your eyes. You say back and forth…back and forth…feeling the warm breeze against your body. You feel like you are floating on the cloud you saw earlier. You feel as light as air. You now focus on relaxing your entire body. You start with your head. You relax the muscles in your face and in your jaw. That’s good. Moving down to your neck and shoulders, you relax every muscle. Feel all tension release. Your arms, hands, and fingers lay loosely by your side as you sway on the hammock. Focus on relaxing your core, your lower back,
Relax your thighs. Relax your knees. Relax your calves and shins. Your legs are now completely lifeless. Move down to your ankles, feet, and toes. There is no tension in your feet. Your entire body is now very relaxed. Enjoy this relaxation. Now focus on relaxing your mind. You do not cloud your brain with random thoughts. You focus on relaxing further and enjoying swaying in the hammock. You enjoy this feeling; the feeling of total relaxation of your body and mind.
The Keys to Ongoing Success
In about the year 2002 I hired a success coach to help me take my business to the next level. I had an office in Beverly Hills and I was working with celebrity clients, but I was getting very burnt out and I was beginning to fantasize about changing careers. I wasn’t so sure about being a
hypnotherapist anymore. The money, at the time, was okay, the clients are always okay, but I was getting a little burnt out with the routine of going to an office… even a nice office in Beverly Hills in the 90210 area was getting to be a bit monotonous for me.
So when I hired this success coach who had worked for Tony Robbins, he told me a story about somebody who sold bottles of water and continued to do so long after his competition stopped selling bottles of water, and he turned out to be the most successful seller of bottles of water around. At the time I just found the story annoying and I didn’t want to sell bottles of water or be tied to a hypnotherapy office any longer, I just wanted to change to something else. But something about this story stuck in my mind.
It occurred to me when he told me that story that if I stuck to this that I would be able to join the ranks of those who are very successful because of their persistence. So rather than quit, I modified my business to make it primarily online with very few office sessions. I also moved out of
So by changing things rather than stopping them I was able to stay in the game and continue moving forward.
I also remember before that in about 1991, I was jogging on a track – at the time I was going through a jogging kick – and this guy was jogging next to me, and he was telling me that when you feel tired, don’t stop, just slow down. So when I was jogging with him, I would slow down a little bit and he slowed down with me, and when I was ready to speed up I sped up and he sped up with me. I never saw him before or after that, and we jogged
together for about a half hour that day, but the lesson he taught me stuck with me. Which is, that there’s no need to stop, you can continue moving forward and just slow down when you need to, and then when you get your energy back you can speed up again.
So this method of sticking to things and slowing down when you need to without completely stopping or changing to doing something completely different, this method stuck with me over the years.
These two major influences, combined with thousands of other influences in my life, showed me the way to being successful. The main point here is that if you are persistent at anything, you will come out ahead, because most people are quitters. If you want to be the best at what you do, one of the main ingredients to that success is going to be simply continuing to do what you’re doing.
The person who worked for Tony Robbins who coached me in 2002 about persistence, I ran into him about eight years later and I thanked him. He came to a seminar I was doing, a hypnosis seminar in Los Angeles, and I thanked him for the words of wisdom that he shared with me when I had hired him all those years earlier. And he told me that he wished he had taken his own advice because he quit the coaching business, and having seen my success he was actually a bit envious and wishing that he had persisted as he had taught me to.
Getting Past Blocks
Sometimes you’ll find yourself sitting in front of a computer screen unable to translate your ideas into actual text. Relax, this is normal and happens to everyone. I would suggest reading The Artist’s Way by Julia Cameron in which she presents a simple writing exercise that can help unblock you. Her writing exercise has you writing three pages freehand every morning when you get up. You don’t think about it, you just write write write, and then you put it away. The process helps you to free up your creative mind. There are even Artist’s Way workshops and groups available in larger cities.
Another program called the Landmark Educational Forum offers multiple-day programs that get you out of your excuses. I paid $400 and spent four days with them, and while I’ll admit they can seem cultish or annoying and mean sometimes, they’re a lovely bunch of people and the program really pays off.
If you’re still having difficulty writing, change your approach. Instead of sitting at a computer and staring at a screen or down at a blank sheet of paper, start dictating your ideas. Keep a digital recorder with you at all times and begin recording ideas and thoughts as they come to you. Ideas won’t necessarily come to you when you’re sitting at a desk trying to force them out. Sometimes they’ll come at you randomly, like when you’re driving or just waking up from a dream.
The easiest way to record your ideas is with a digital recording device,
something that you would actually put your name on. At the same time, don’t let analysis lead to paralysis.
You should never think about whether it’s going to sell or not when you’re considering the actual content of something. But if you have a product idea, just a general product idea, think about if it’s going to sell and do your
market research before you create it. If you’re writing a book, and you get ideas, don’t analyze them at all, just put them in the book. As long as
they’re legitimate ideas about the concept you’re teaching, just go ahead and put them in the book.
How Do I Know If I’m An Expert?
You should only offer a certification program on a topic that you actually know something about. Bringing something to market just because you want to sell it can get you into trouble since you’re only marketing the product to make money off of it. Oftentimes people will read a book on a topic so that they can produce something just to market it. That’s not the way to do it. If you’re in that situation, then you need to find someone that is an actual expert on the subject to assist you instead of pretending to be an expert yourself.
Joe Vitale and I created the Law of Attraction certification program because he’s a law of attraction expert. I also created the NLP & Hypnotherapy program because I’m an NLP and hypnotherapy expert. For the numerology program available on my website, I worked with Blair Gorman, a
numerology expert.
For all of these programs, and for yours, it’s important that whoever’s name it is that’s attached to that deliverable is actually qualified to do whatever is being instructed.
Outside of providing certification programs, you really just need to be comfortable with your material. I started teaching hypnosis right after I read The Complete Guide to Hypnosis, and my bunk mates were thrilled to learn.
hypnotized, and man, he was out of it! I think about that every day, how you did that, and you just read a book.”
Even as I was learning hypnotherapy I was already able to teach people how to hypnotize me. There are a lot of schools out there that will tell you that you have to study hypnotherapy for years, that it’s something really difficult to do, but, as a kid of fourteen that was able to process and utilize the
information, I didn’t find that to be the case.
If you want to be a cardiologist then certainly it’s more complicated; you need to go to medical school, then a specialty school, followed by a residency and taking your Board exams. But people try to make
hypnotherapy into cardiology sometimes, vaulting it into some complicated system, when it’s really so basic. With hypnotherapy you’re just relaxing someone into a trance and telling them that they’re going to change.
My advice if you’re want to become an expert in your field would be to let go of making it into something that it’s not. Let go of making it something very complicated and realize that it’s very natural, very easy, very normal, and if you were to do it, if you were to just stumble upon it as a kid like I did, you probably wouldn’t think twice about it. So somewhere between being relaxed with the process and thinking that it’s cardiology is where you need to fall in terms of letting yourself become comfortable with the content and letting yourself get into teacher mode more quickly.
Find Your Passion
I happened to find hypnotherapy at a very young age, and quite by accident. In 10th grade I was attending Riverside Military Academy in Gainesville, Georgia, and generally unhappy with the experience: I was bored, upset at being there, and a bit lonely. I wasn’t into sports or really all that academic so I didn’t engage much in school – it was difficult to find a fit.
Then one afternoon I found a book by Leslie LeCron called The Complete Guide to Hypnosis. At one hundred and fifty pages it was ultimately far from “complete”, but I read it and soon started victimizing my roommates with what I had learned. It was mostly silly things, like making them scratch their noses when I gave a command, but it didn’t take me long to realize I could use my powers for good.
Before long, the campus athletes began visiting my bunk so that I could hypnotize them to exercise more efficiently, and the smart kids came to retain more of what they were reading to improve their grades. And all of these years later, I’m still doing the same thing, except now the athletes are the Dodgers and the smart kids are working for NASA.
One thing that I have found that is extremely helpful is to identify yourself as a leader in one particular field. For example, I promote myself as the world’s leading hypnotherapist. However, I also teach many other subjects
and I do not call myself any of the other titles. This is because all of the other titles fall under the umbrella of hypnotherapy. First and foremost, I am a hypnotherapist and all of the others are sub-specialties, which enhance my hypnotherapy practice. For example, perhaps I will be working with a client and realize that what they really need is life coaching. I will work life
coaching into the hypnotherapy sessions.
You need to think along similar lines. What are you really good at? Perhaps you feel that you are good at a number of things. Perhaps your business card lists 5 things you are good at. When doing my research for this book, I asked a group of people at a seminar I was doing to hand me their business cards. Not surprisingly, most of the cards touted the cardholder as being proficient at 3 to 5 different things. For example, reiki master, massage therapist, and hypnotherapist. I don’t doubt that this person was good at all of these things, but I feel when looking at it as a potential consumer that they have probably not mastered any of those things. Consumers want to feel that you are an expert at something. If you promote yourself at being an expert at numerous things, consumers are not going to believe you. When consumers do not believe you they do not buy from you often. When they do not buy from you often, you do not make much money. Therefore, by logical reasoning, when you promote yourself as being an expert in several fields, you do not make much money.
So, figure out what it is that you are really good at. Everything else will be a sub-specialty. This will direct your business cards (which will only mention
the one category in which you excel), website (which will only mention that category), and any other advertising you do such as Yellow Page ads, online ads, brochures, etc.
Making a Plan
In order to accomplish anything you need to have a plan. In order to get out of bed in the morning you need to have a plan to move your body in such a way that your feet will be on the ground and then you will stand up. You can then carry on with your day.
So even from the very simple things that you do everyday you need to have a plan before you do them. In this book you are going to be guided through a step-by-step process for creating ongoing residual income online for
yourself. But that is going to come with some work on your part.
The first thing you are going to have to do is to get focused. The way that you get focused is by making a plan that makes sense to you. I want you to get out a piece of paper and a pen. Yes that’s right, a piece of paper and a pen, because when you write something down you are more likely to remember it. You are going through the motion of writing it and you are reading it as you are writing it.
I also want you to read it aloud after you write it. That will involve the kinesthetic, auditory and visual aspects of learning, which means that this information is going to have much better chance of turning into a group of products that you can sell.
The first thing I want you to write is a date on which you will have
about the titles of your products. I want you to get focused on when you will have them completed. I would prefer that you initially create five audio products of an hour long each and that they are instructional in nature.
For example, if you were a massage therapist you will be creating five audio recordings that will be helpful to the people who buy them. Perhaps you are going to sell to other massage therapists some, which you can make
instructional recordings about different types of massage or perhaps even how to market yourself as a massage therapist.
Perhaps you are selling to people who are interested in massage in which perhaps you are creating a recording on what to look for in a good massage therapist or where to find the best massage therapists in the United States, or anything you want to create that you feel someone would buy. Remember, I want you to set a date on which you will have these recorded.
At this point, let go of any concern about how to record anything or where to get the equipment or which equipment to use or anything along those lines. I just want you to focus on making a schedule for yourself and then I want you to back that up. That is the date that you will have finished all five of your recordings. So now I want you to write four more dates for when you will have finished the other four recordings. You see the final date is when you are done with the final product. Five out of five. So you need to write four more dates when you will be done with products one through four.
I find that with research and recording and editing and auditing, which we’ll discuss later, the process from making one recording from initial concept to final completion is as little as one week and as long as two weeks for a one hour instructional program. Keep in mind that most of my recordings are much longer than this so they would take much longer to make. But I want you to start with something minimal so that you can get up and running and start making money online as soon as possible.
Chapter 4: Production Ideas
Where Are The Ideas?
You may be wondering where the ideas are going to come from. You may have a blank in your mind when you think about the products you will create. After all, perhaps you may have never created any products. That may very well be the reason you are reading this book. I want you to realize that ideas are everywhere and that nobody has a trademark or copyright on ideas.
My best advice to you is to go online immediately and type in whatever it is you do -- hypnotherapy, acupuncture, chiropractic, etc. -- find a few websites that are selling products online related to what you do. In hypnotherapy it’s
easy. You can find hypnotherapists online selling eBooks, video programs and audio programs.
You can look at the titles and you can make those titles your titles. For example, Having More Confidence, Be More Motivated, Stopping Smoking, Weight Loss, etc. You can easily do research on these topics or you can order the products from these websites, analyze them, and create your own version of them. This is entirely legal and ethical.
But what if you are in a slightly more obscure realm online. For example, how would a chiropractor take his or her knowledge and turn it into a group of online products? This requires a little bit of creativity because when you research online for products by chiropractors that are eBooks or audiobooks you don’t find much.
In cases such as this all you have to do is think about two different groups of people. One would be your patients. The other would be fellow,
chiropractors. When I, as a hypnotherapist, think about products I can create. I think about my patients. This leads me to create audio such as confidence, motivation, stopping smoking, etc. and I think about other hypnotherapists and this leads me to create certification programs such as my Hypnotherapy Certification Program, my Neuro Linguistic Programming Certification Program, my Life Coaching Certification Program, all of which will help hypnotherapists increase their bottom line in their practice by teaching them more skills.
So back to our friend the chiropractor, who is perhaps at a slight loss for product ideas. Think about, realizing I am not a chiropractor, the clients you would see in a day. If you are not seeing clients in an office then think about the clients you would like to see in a day, or the clients you formerly saw in a day or the clients you were trained to see and the types of challenges they would come in with. Perhaps slipped discs, muscle aches, stiff neck, etc. realize that in an audio program you’re not going to adjust them, you’re not going to resolve their challenge; but perhaps there’s some extremely helpful information about these topics that would lead to the resolution of their challenge.
For example, when it comes to a slipped disc: perhaps a client has been going to a chiropractor for a while with a slipped disc challenge and they are not getting any resolution. The slipped disc is still hurting them and it’s still existent.
Again, keep in mind I am not a chiropractor so I really don’t know how many times a client would go to a chiropractor for a slipped disc. I’m simply using this as a potential example that you can extrapolate from. So our
person with the slipped disc is not getting any relief from the chiropractor and they are franticly searching online for the solution.
Here you come with an audio program that thoroughly educates the client about slipped discs, gives some helpful resources that they can go to, perhaps a website that you have created with a listing of chiropractors in their area that you can later sell advertising on once it becomes popular. Hint
hint. And you take them from knowing nothing about slipped discs to everything that they need to know about the challenge that they’re facing. This can probably be done in an hour if you add some extra helpful
information, and you’re speaking slowly and clearly and you are describing every aspect of the slipped disc and how to resolve it. And bingo, you have your first product, which you can now sell for the rest of your life, because I imagine that as long as there are humans, there will be humans with slipped discs, and a percentage of those humans with slipped discs will not find resolution with their local chiropractor and will be searching online.
You now have one product, which will make you money forever. Research required was almost zero.
The website you can refer them to that you will create is optional. In other words, you don’t have to create that now, you can create that in the future version of your audio when you’re ready. Your recording time is probably slightly over an hour. Auditing time is usually about double the recording time, so that equals three hours total for production and you have your product. This is the procedure that you must go through when you are thinking about products.
This is where the ideas come from. I want to encourage you to follow through with every idea that you have. You want to follow all potential concepts that you have all the way through to completion. It is possible while reading this book that you will come up with 30 different ideas. I want
I have produced many products, which never went anywhere. For example, I produced an audio on releasing wedding stress, which I thought would be a big hit. One person in Saudi Arabia ordered it about five years ago and I don’t think anyone has ordered it before or since. I imagine it was a sheikh who was marrying a number of different women and he was stressed out. I’ve also produced other recordings that I never thought would be successful and they were.
So what you end up with is a bell-shaped curve in which the majority of your products will sell fairly well. Some will underperform and some will over perform. It really doesn’t matter once you create a lot of products because you are going to have residual income from this, and they really don’t take a lot of time to produce. So I suggest you follow every idea you have all the way through.
One way to get ideas is to take concepts from other people who are already selling products online in your field. And you now know that in the event that you do not find anyone selling products online in your field all you need to do is think about the two groups of people: the patients, since we are all holistic practitioners we all have patients or could potentially have patients, and your fellow holistic practitioners in your field.
This leads me to another important point, which is that you need to let go of being the butcher, the baker, and the candlestick maker. One thing I don’t like seeing is a business card that says that someone does everything. I
remember when I lived in Los Angeles people would hand me a business card that said they were an actor, a screen writer, and a producer… and really what they were was a waiter or a waitress, but I imagine that wouldn’t look very good on a business card. The more focused you are the greatest results you are going to have.
Think about it, if you went to doctor, a general practitioner, because you have a cold and the doctor said, “Yes, I am a doctor, but I am also a painter and a car mechanic. Not only that but I have an art store down the street where I sell my paintings which I work at on Tuesdays and Thursdays and on the weekend I work at my car repair shop.” How confident would you feel that that doctor is going to provide you with outstanding service? I
imagine that you would think like I do which is that he or she is too scattered and needs to focus.
Humans have a difficult time as being experts in more than one thing. I remember a while back when Michael Jordan decided that instead of being a basketball player he was going to be a baseball player? His career was very brief and unfortunate as a baseball player and he very soon went back to being a basketball player. This doesn’t mean that he couldn’t have been a baseball player. What it means is that to perform at a high level of efficiency, which is required at the professional level where he wanted to be, you have to practice for years to get good at it. It also helps if you have the public behind you; he had neither. He had ridicule from the public and he had not
purposes of delivering the best end result to your customers and for purposes as being accepted as a professional in your field you must focus.
I myself am primarily a hypnotherapist but I also use Neuro Linguistic Programming (NLP) and lifecoaching and business coaching. So you may wonder, how am I focused? But if you go to my website SteveGJones.com you will see that I present myself to the world as a clinical hypnotherapist. I happen to have sub-specialties which I feel work nicely under the umbrella of hypnotherapy, which would be NLP life coaching, business coaching, etc., however, I brand myself as a hypnotherapist. I present myself as a hypnotherapist who has sub-specialties.
So if you have various interests like I do or if you’ve seen markets that you can contribute to and financially benefit from like I have, that’s ok, as long as you choose a main identity and you treat the rest as sub-specialties. In our example of the doctor, he or she could have had a medical practice that they practice at five days a week and could have turned car repair and art into hobbies. This is perfectly fine because it presents a picture of a well-rounded person.
The challenge is that when he or she attempts to present to the public that they are equally proficient in all three and they are unrelated areas this makes no sense and it turns people off. When people are turned off from a professional that means that the professional loses opportunities and loses money.
Working With Outlines
Creating outlines can be an individual or a collaborative step, but it’s
essential to the process. For my projects, I’ll usually have my assistant first create the outline then turn it over to me for refinement, then we work
together to finalize it so that I can use that outline as a tool for recording my audio programs.
When I’m working with someone else on a project, like Joe Vitale for example, he and I will each create our own outlines and then trade those back and forth for review and approval.
Because I don’t use scripts for my recordings, the outlines become my tool for staying on track while recording a program. Because I’m no good with word-for-word scripts, I’m able to improvise around the bullet points of an outline to ensure that all of the key messages are being delivered, and in order.
Developing a brief outline can also help keep the deliverable in a
conversational tone. When reading a word-for-word script the content can become dry when being read aloud, and lose some of the personality of the author. An outline allows you to explain everything conversationally without reading it.
For example, if I’m going to talk about Neuro Linguistic Programming and the “soft eyes” technique -- that’s a technique that you use in NLP, it’s an exercise -- all I would need on the outline from my assistant is:
I. NLP
A. “soft eyes”
I don’t need a full two-page script on “soft eyes”. I know what that is because I am expert in NLP, I don’t need to be told what it is. If someone needs to be told what it is, that’s a clear indication of them not being an expert on the topic. If they really knew what they were talking about they wouldn’t need a word-for-word script.
A lot of times we’ll get our written books from transcripts of audio sessions. When I want to write a book I’ll often just dictate it and then have a
transcriptionist transcribe the text. Those recordings allow me to keep the content in a very conversational tone that flows.
Maintaining a Positive Mindset to Succeed
Your mindset has everything to do with your ability to succeed. As Henry Ford, founder of Ford Motor Company, once said, “Whether you think you can, or you think you can't -- you're right.”
Essentially what he’s saying is that whatever you think is going to happen IS going to happen. If you think that you’re going to be successful, you’re going to be successful. If you think that you’re not, then your thoughts are already getting in your way.
This negative mindset impacts everything to the degree that sometimes things never even get started; sometimes the plant never even starts to grow into a tree, it never gets planted in the first place because you talk yourself out of it. And we convince ourselves that we’re right, we’ve got logical reasons, and we know what we’re talking about when we say this isn’t going to work… but that’s all a negative mindset. And it has the impact of
destroying our dreams.
A positive mindset, on the other hand, can launch us to do anything. I remember when I was starting off in the online world, at the time I knew a lot of hypnotherapists who were also doing other things. They weren’t full-time hypnotherapists, they were pursuing other methods of making money to support themselves and practicing hypnotherapy outside of that. In fact the mindset at that time was, as I discovered in talking to these people, that you were not able to support yourself as a hypnotherapist, and that I couldn’t do
it full-time. And that these hypnotherapists, positive people saying that you can’t be a full-time hypnotherapist and must have another job to supplement your income, was troubling. They also assured me that the online world wasn’t going anywhere and if I produced recordings on mp3 people would just rip them off.
That was all the negative thinking I was hearing at that time, and if I had listened to it I never would have ventured into the online world. I would have kept things as a bricks and mortar business and missed a huge opportunity.
The online world has of course made all the difference in my financial success, and my ability to help the world. So the impact a positive mindset has on somebody’s ability to succeed is everything, and you just have to ignore what you’re hearing and focus on what you believe in your heart to be true. Even if you’re not able to see the path ahead, you just have to believe that it’s going to unfold as you continue walking forward.
That’s why I always give the same advice to people, like those that get on my FaceBook fan page and tell me they did something great and just wanted to share it with me. I tell them, “Keep moving forward!” Because that is the positive mindset in action, and that starts us on the path and continues
Limiting Your Exposure to Negativity
Recently one of my publishers, in preparation for my most recent book to be released soon, said that they would like me to review and comment on
current news items as part of getting the buzz going for my book. He suggested that I download an application to my phone and look at the news articles every day to find something that I could “Like” on FaceBook and comment on.
When I downloaded the app, I looked through it and it was all crap news that I had no interested in whatsoever: death and everything short of plague, people losing their jobs and just all kinds of negative things. They were all very real things, I’m not going to deny that they were true or unimportant stories, but the things that they were presenting were negative things, things that I would not want to focus on. So I had to find a different app that would show news items that I’m interested in, which are science and technology. When I was a kid my dad used to cut out things about the Apollo missions and leave them for me to read; those are the kinds of things I read as a kid, those are things I was exposed to, and that’s still the kind of news I like. Because it’s so positive, it’s forward moving, it’s forward thinking. It’s all a matter of focus.
I want to recommend not going under a rock and being oblivious to what’s going on, but getting a little bit of news to see if anything major’s going on, and then I look for things that are positive. Everybody has to find their own
positive in the world, but for me it’s science and technology, it’s businesses that are doing well, and it’s space exploration.
You can always find something positive to focus on. What that’s going to do is get you in that positive mindset, realizing that the sky is not falling, things are actually looking up, and that there’s still a lot of optimism in the world. And you can bring that down to your life, and say, “It’s worth getting up today, it’s worth moving forward. There are a lot of people doing good, positive, powerful things in the world, I want to be one of them – how can I contribute?”
Accepting The New You
You may find it difficult sometimes to conceive of yourself as being a person who makes residual income online without really having to work much. This concept can seem foreign to people who have gone to an office all of their adult lives or who have always been told that you need to do an “honest day’s work for an honest day’s pay.”
Realize that the majority of your income from this point forward is actually going to come from no work after the initial work is done. I think that many people have difficulty embracing this idea because it sounds like a fairy tale. It sounds too good to be true.
I remember in the 80’s I was involved in AmWay. AmWay is a company that has a multi-level marketing structure, which allows people to get people into the company beneath them and they make money from those people, so that the more people you get beneath you the more money you make. This is a perfectly legitimate company and it has been around for a long time, and it has made a lot of people rich and pays a lot of people every day without having to do anything after a certain point.
I didn’t do well at AmWay. In fact, I never got anyone in. I think I was involved in it for approximately two months in the 80’s. I think part of the challenge for me was that I didn’t really believe it could work for me. I heard a lot of stories about how people became wealthy with it and made residual income and became millionaires but I didn’t believe it would work
for me. I’m not sure why I didn’t believe it but I did have difficulty picturing myself as a person making a tremendous amount of money without doing anything.
Now of course I’m able to picture it because I’ve found my own way of creating this thanks to selling products on the Internet. But I think that my AmWay story is a good parallel for what people think when they attempt to picture themselves making money for the rest of their lives for a small amount of work that they did at one point at their lives.
I think it sounds like a fairy tale. I think they fully believe that other people like myself have achieved it, but they have difficulty believing that they can do it and for this reason they become scattered and unfocused and they eventually stop moving forward towards this goal because they don’t feel its going to work for them.
I want to tell you that you need to get focused right now and you need to realize that in addition to this being possible this is in fact your future. You need to embrace it and focus on it right now. In fact, I’ve included a
Unlimited Wealth Script
You are unaffected by negativity and retain the ability to enjoy all of the warmth and joy that life has to offer. You are totally detached from
negativity. You are open and receptive to love. You do not complain. You accept other people as they are and you do not expect them to change. You are patient, calm, and harmoniously centered at all times. You let go of all fear-based emotions such as blame, jealously, guilt, and possessiveness. These negative emotions are now a part of your past and you open yourself, open yourself to receive all the good things life has to offer. You accept all good things into your life. You know that you are worthy of receiving all good things in your life. You allow yourself to receive good things. You do not block good things from entering your life. You are worthy of receiving them. You allow money to come to you. You allow money to come to you. You allow money to come to you. You now have a flow in your life and money is actually attracted to you and you allow it to come to you. You do not stand in the way of money flowing toward you. You allow it to come to you. You know it is for you. And you know that you will use it for the greatest good. You allow it to come to you. You now realize that you have the ability to create in your life unlimited wealth, unlimited wealth. Your wealth will be without limits. You allow money to flow to you and it does. It flows to you easily and effortlessly because you are now open and receptive to all good things. You keep your mind calm like water. You remain centered at all times. Physically relaxed, emotionally calm, mentally focused, and spiritually aware and money flows to you. You now realize that you will
have unlimited wealth. You will have all the wealth you desire and you let this happen easily and effortlessly. You are comfortable with wealth.
Amnesia
As you continue to relax, every breath you take is soothing you, and I want you now to become aware of your breathing. And I wonder how much attention you have paid to all the different thoughts going through your mind. And then you can become aware of how difficult it is to remember what I was saying exactly 10 minutes ago. And you can try to remember what I was saying five minutes ago, or what you were thinking 14 minutes ago. But doesn’t it seem like too much work to try to remember all of that? In fact, it seems that it takes more effort than it is worth, so I want you now to relax, relax, relax, and understand that it is not necessary to remember what I say when it is too much work to do. You can choose to forget to remember what I said or remember to forget what I said. The choice is yours.
Trance Termination
Now, in just a few moments, you are going to come back up at the count of three. When I bring you back up, you are going to feel comfortable. You are going to feel relaxed. You are going to feel as though you have had a
peaceful nap and even after you are out of hypnosis, understand that your subconscious mind will act on every word that you have just heard, these suggestions will become stronger and stronger in your mind. Each and every time you listen to this recording, these suggestions will become more and more a part of you, and you will become more and more the person of your choosing — a relaxed, calm, confident, peaceful person who is able to achieve anything. All right now.
One: beginning to come up, feeling very good, filled with energy, rested, feeling as though you have had a peaceful nap.
Two: coming up even more, beginning to move now, beginning to stir and you are totally at ease.
And, at the count of the next number, you will be completely awake. Three: eyes wide open, relaxed, refreshed and feeling wonderful.
Chapter 6: Creating a Working Platform
and Philosophy
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.
Content is King
The content is the content. It doesn’t have an eye on the audience, it’s just telling the story, or how to do something. It’s marketing’s job to tell the story about the content and then create sales copy to support that. The two initiatives must always be kept separate to maintain the integrity of the content.
You’ve got to start with SOMETHING though. I recently had dinner with Joe Vitale in Austin and, after a full delightful meal of sushi, we began brainstorming, asking each other what we could create together. Having previously worked together on projects such as The Wealth Trigger and The Soulmate Attractor, our process always seems to begin in the same way: collective brainstorming.
That night Joe and I sat over the table and came up with about 20 different ideas. I sent that list to my New York office, which is now responsible for reviewing those ideas and assessing their marketability, but we never considered marketing while brainstorming. Brainstorming can be a great tool for kick-starting ideas – you can develop all kinds of great ideas in an environment that acknowledges no limits. During the brainstorming process your mind should never consider whether someone will like it, if the market is ready for it, or whether it will sell or not. You just think about what you know, and how you can use that to help people.
