Dear Friend,

A few days ago I interviewed a good friend of mine who is one of the best online marketers I know.

I twisted his arm and got him to reveal his online marketing techniques he has used to successfully dominate a VERY large and highly competitive market.

I posted the MP3 of the teleseminar here… but I also thought you might want to have a transcription of it, too.

It’s below.

Enjoy!

All the best,

Dan

Dan Gallapoo: Okay, everybody, this is Doberman Dan and I’ve got a special guest with us tonight, who only wants to be known as Mr. X, and he is one of the top online marketers.  He’s in – I’ll let him tell you more about it, but he’s in what I consider almost a general market niche, a highly competitive market, and he has excelled in that market and is one of the top marketers in that market and just has a line of competitors just waiting to knock him off.

So that’s basically why he’d like to keep his identity secret and also would like to keep his niche secret, and I can certainly respect that.  Like I said, it’s an extremely competitive market because it is such a large market.  And I have known him for quite a few years now, and have seen him rise to the top, basically, getting started like I did.  And so I can vouch for the fact that he is one of the top online marketers in a highly competitive field.

So, did that pretty much cover it, Mr. X, why we’re keeping your identity secret?  Is there anything else you’d like to add?

Mr. X: I think that’s pretty fair.  I mean I think when we first started to reach our initial level of success, maybe ten years ago, we had a person put together an information product on Internet marketing, and he interviewed a bunch of the big names and we were one of – I think he interviewed like ten different big names in the Internet marketing field, and we were, I think, of the ten, one of maybe two who had a non how to get rich in Internet marketing business.  And that is meaning like we marketed a real product, you know, not a how to get rich product.

And the fella doing the information product who interviewed us, he did pretty well with the product, but what happened was, there was so much penetration within Internet marketing circles that pretty much the next month we saw all kinds of competitors popping up and knocking off, you know, what we were doing.  Some of em just blatantly copying, I mean just literally ripping off our copy, ripping off our product.

And we had to kind of reinvent our business model, and we’ve had to reinvent it several times, just because of the nature of the Internet changes.  You know, the Internet, as you know, kind of goes through an evolution every 18 months.  So a lot of the stuff that, you know, we were doing four or five years ago may not necessarily work or not necessarily work the same way today as it did back then.  So you’re constantly having to reinvent yourself.

But in addition to that, when you kind of reveal a lot of your secrets, you know, because the Internet is so anonymous, it’s very easy for people to just kind of copy and steal what you’re doing and then, you know, it can negatively affect your bottom line.

So, my long-winded point in bringing this up is just that if you have somebody telling you how to make money on the Internet and they’re telling you how to make money for, you know, for a small investment of $29.95, either they’re only giving you a small piece of it or they don’t really know what they’re talking about.  I mean the people who really know what they’re doing, they’re not just gonna give you – you know, they’re not just gonna give away their business model.

Fortunately, what I really like about Doberman Dan’s stuff is that Dan does a really great job of showing you how to, you know, reverse engineer how somebody who is doing something successful is making money with what they’re doing.

Dan Gallapoo: Thanks, I appreciate –.

Mr. X: Kudos to you.

Dan Gallapoo: Thank you.  You brought up several things that I’d like to address.  First of all, you know, I had a few people email me before the conference and like, what’s with this Mr. X stuff.  This is kinda shlocky, you know, a lot of these online gurus pull this.  Well, you’ve explained why, you know, you prefer to keep things anonymous.  You’re in an extremely competitive market with, you know, hundreds or probably even thousands of competitors.

Mr. X: Yeah, and just to give you an idea of the type of niche without revealing what the niche is, it’s kind of a niche like – it’d be kind of like cars, like automobiles.  It’s the type of niche where like everybody has an automobile, and granted, maybe everybody doesn’t buy windshield wipers or, you know, doesn’t buy XM radio for their car, but it’s one of those niches where pretty much almost every other person has one of these things, and there’s just a huge percentage of people who have problems with this thing.  And then, you know, look online for answers on how to deal with those problems.

So, it’s a phenomenal niche, it incredibly lends itself to Internet marketing.  But what Dan and I are gonna talk about is how you can – one of the things we’re gonna talk about is how you can identify other niches like this.  And, in fact, you don’t even need a niche as broad as mine to make a lot of money in.  I mean some of the top Internet marketers that I’ve met are making money in little tiny niches that you’ve never heard of.  They’re very narrow ditches, but they’re very deep and Dan can probably elaborate on that a little bit later.

Let me also interject and ask how long is this program tonight, so I can tailor my answers to be either long or short-winded?

Dan Gallapoo: As long as the time as you need, you know.  I’ve been wanting to pull this information out of you for a long time.  So, you know, I’m just grateful that you’re on the call, so you take however much time you need.

Mr. X: You know, you’ve been such a great friend and marketing sounding board, you know, over the years that I feel like I owe you something.  So I feel like I’m giving back.  Because you’ve really, I mean it’s been 12 years now we’ve known each other, and you know, I can’t remember how many hours we’ve spent on the phone over the years just bouncing ideas back and forth.  You know, so, you know, I really value the information that you’ve been able to give me.

Dan Gallapoo: Well, I appreciate that, and you know, you’re one of my good friends.  You’re a person I consider what Halbert used to call a go-to guy, and I know sometimes you get sick of hearing me whine but when – you know, when I have marketing problems or challenges, or I need – there’s things I need to overcome or new projects I need to start, and I need answers, you know, Mr. X is the person I always call.  And yeah, I’ll admit, sometimes I’m a big baby and I do whine to him, but there’s very few people I trust, you know, to do that with.  And so –.

You know, and something else I’d like to point out, your niche has nothing to do with internet marketing, making money.  You’re selling real products to real people, you know.

Mr. X: Right, right.  And also we should add that they’re information products.  So, in fact, we started out, you know, kind of – I had an actual brick and mortar type of business when we first started out, and what happened was I got tired of dealing with my customers on a face-to-face basis.  So then I started looking into starting a mail order company within the same niche.  And right at about that time was when the Internet first started taking off.

And so we started selling originally a book which described, you know, how to find solutions to your problems within that niche, and then we eventually developed a series of five DVD products that went along with that initial book, as well as some audio products, like some cassette tapes at the time and we were selling it online.

But as the years progressed and high-speed Internet became more prevalent, we started taking all of those physical products and digitizing them.  And so now we’re at a point where we just sell access to the digital content, you know, the either downloadable or streaming video or access through membership sites or a membership site to access that information.

So, where was I going with this?

Dan Gallapoo: About – well, we were talking about, you know, your niche and how, you know, you’re not a guru, never have positioned yourself as one.

Mr. X: Oh, right, right.

Dan Gallapoo: Never sold make money on the Internet products.  You’re in a real niche with real people, you know, selling real products .

Mr. X: Right, right.  So, when we say real products, we don’t necessarily mean real, tangible products, although they were tangible products at one point.  But they’re real products that solve real problems, but they’re delivered digitally, so.

Dan Gallapoo: Right, right.  And you know, you brought up something else earlier that I do kinda want to address because we’ve talked about this a lot.  That, well, first of all, one of the reasons I’m really glad to pick your brain tonight is because, you know, you’re one of the top online marketers but you’re not a guru and you kind of – you basically refuse to get in that market, even though I’ve kind of tried to get you into that market a few times, because – how do I say this nicely?  Like, there’s a lot of people who position themselves as gurus, that their only success is selling how to make money on the internet type of products.

Mr. X: Right, basically con men.  I mean I’ll call it for what it is.  I mean there are just – I mean I would say at least 90 percent of the – are you there?

Dan Gallapoo: Yep, yep, yep.

Mr. X: Okay, 90 percent of the Internet marketing industry are just, you know, con men selling stuff that really doesn’t work.

Dan Gallapoo: Yeah, and we know these guys and it sickens me.  I mean, you know, a couple guys who were, you know, guru-du jour a couple years ago, you know, one of em was saying he had a multimillion dollar business, well, I know – you know, I know this guy.  I knew details about his business.  He wasn’t anywhere close to even multimillion.  I mean maybe multi-thousand, maybe a couple few thousand a month, but yet, he was all over the Internet and all over the seminar circuit, you know, claiming he had a multimillion-dollar business.  You know, and selling a $2,000.00 info product.

Mr. X: Yeah, and truth is that there’s so many people who want to be, you know, just for purely egotistical reasons, they want to present themselves as a big swinging you know what, to coin Tom Wolf.  You know, they want to be seen up on stage, they want to be idolized.  They want people to come to them, you know, and you know, beg them to reveal the secrets of how to make money, but the truth is, they’re the blind leading the blind.

You know, they’re selling stuff that sounds good and they’re golden talkers and they go to, you know, speech coaches to learn how to present and how to hock their goods.  But the truth is that, you know, I’ve met a lot of these guys and it’s just – they’re just selling products to people who don’t know any better.

And to me it’s, you know, it really hit me – I had a friend of mine, I got into real estate investing on the side several years ago, and I had a friend of mine who wanted to learn Internet marketing and was interested in what I was doing.  And he was a, we’ll say, moderately successful real estate investor.

And we were sitting outside having lunch one day and we saw a guy walk by with a real estate investor how to make money course.  And the guy came up and he told us this long, drawn out story about how he had spent the last $5,000.00 of his money in the hopes of learning how to make money with real estate in this case, it wasn’t an Internet marketing course but it could have been.

And his wife was dying of cancer and he needed the money to pay for the treatments.  And you know, we looked at that course and we realized that this guy was just another huckster.  And you know, I compare that through analogy to what a lot of these Internet marketing gurus are promoting and selling, and it’s the same, same type of hucksterism.

You know, people are looking for how to make a quick buck.  And I mean if you have all of the – if you have the formula and if you have all the elements, you can make, you know, good and quick money on the Internet, but it’s – you know, really it’s a skill like anything else.  I mean you have to learn to crawl before you learn to walk.  And you know, the percentage of people who can, you know, start out making $10,000.00 a month, you know, after their first or second or third month in the business is very, very small.

Dan Gallapoo: Exactly, but it’s always presented, you know, like buy my $2,000.00 course seminar –.

Mr. X: And you’ll be able to make money in your sleep, yeah.

Dan Gallapoo: Yeah.  And that’s why, you know, I’m glad to have you on the call, you know.  And I should’ve sent in my email, because I mean people have been burned so many times by the guru market that, you know, any tele-seminar is actually not really a tele-seminar, it’s a tiny bit of content and the only reason they have a tele-seminar is because the guru is gonna pitch something at the end, gonna pitch a high priced product.

There is no sales pitch on this tele-seminar.  This is pure, 100 percent content from a real online marketer, the top in his market, you know, telling you how to do this.

Mr. X: Yeah, if I had something to sell, I’d be revealing my name and, you know, what I do and what the website is and everything else.  You know, if I had a backend seminar or course or something to sell you, but you know, I don’t, and because of that, I have no reason to profit from this, which is why I’m not revealing the niche.  You know, I’ll reveal to you details about, you know, how I do what I do.

And by the way, if you take the time to learn the fundamentals, it is a great, great business, and it really is a business that, you know, can become virtually automated, to the point where, you know, you literally are making money in your sleep.  And the other beauty of this business is that you’re not tied to the business for it to make money.  So I can be out, you know, at the store or, you know, shopping for clothes, or taking, you know, my wife out to dinner and the business is running by itself.

So it’s not like I have to – you know, if I’m an auto mechanic and my income comes from spending time working on cars, if I’m not working in the business, the business is not making money.  But with Internet marketing, if you pick the right niche and if you set things up intelligently, you can really have, you know, basically a machine that will, in a very automated manner, process orders for you, sell your products or services for you, deliver the products and deal with all aspects of the business in a virtually automated manner.

So, it’s a really cool business I’m in.  My hobby is actually evaluating different business models, and really this is – the reason I’m in this business is because it is the best business model I’ve been able to find, you know, so far.

Dan Gallapoo: You know, on the tele-seminar I did a couple weeks ago, or a few weeks ago, back in June, I got a ton of questions, but the question that kept popping up was, you know, how do you select a niche, how do you research a niche, you know, and figure out what you want to go into.  And I know that you, you know, you’re not only successful in this rather large niche that you’re in now, but you’ve been successful in a ton of other completely unrelated niches.

So, can you talk about, you know, your steps you take to research niches and how do you choose a niche, what are your, you know, factors in deciding that?

Mr. X: Sure.  Really the first thing that you want to look at is really what are you passionate about and I know everybody says that.  They say, do what you’re passionate about, blah, blah, blah.  I’m not suggesting that you do what you’re passionate about, what I am suggesting is that you use that as a starting point.  Because if you can find something that you’re passionate about, and then if it meets all the other criteria I’m about to share with you, you’re gonna have a tremendous advantage.

So, if you can find something that you’re really interested in, something where, you know, maybe you’re already part of the niche or you already spend time, you know, reading about or doing that activity, that’s great.

And then the second thing I’ll look for when I’m setting up a new site is immediately, being part of the niche, I probably already know where the hubs, where the places that people who are part of that niche go online to read or to communicate with other people in the niche.

So, what I look for is does the niche have a variety, I mean four or five different places where you can advertise and it’s relatively inexpensive to reach the market.  So, what I want is, I don’t want to be dependent upon one venue where I can only advertise in one magazine or on one, you know, discussion forum, and if that discussion forum owner decides he doesn’t like me for some reason, I can’t imagine why with my stunning personality, but if for some reason he decides he wants to get rid of the advertising or he gets jealous and he wants to release his own product which would compete with mine and cuts me out, I’m not up a creek, so I have, you know, I have four or five different places I can advertise for relatively inexpensive and completely reach that niche.

So that one tip right there is really, really important.  Because if you don’t have an inexpensive way to reach your market, you know, you might have a great product but it’s gonna be a real uphill battle and it’s gonna cost you a lot of money to reach the market.  So that’s what I like to look for is where is it easy to advertise.

And then the other thing that I think is really important in a niche is, I touched on this briefly before, is I’m not so interested in how wide the market is, how broad the market is, but rather, how deep the market is.  So, what I want is I want a market where instead of just selling them one product and selling five million people one product, I’d rather have a market where I have, you know, 10,000 people or 100,000 people, and I can sell them 10 different products or 20 or 50 different products.  Or, you know, let’s say, for example, ten different DVDs and a seminar and a workshop and a series of audiotape lectures.

So, deep is really good, because a lot of times, I mean if you think about the things that you’re interested in yourself, you know, a lot of times you get into a hobby or a niche or something that you’re interested in, and you’ll buy everything that you can find on the subject.  And those are the kind of niches that we look for, niches where people are just, you know, completely passionate about that niche, about being part of that niche.

And also one where people really enjoy spending money in that niche.  So, I’ll give you an example.  I’m really into tactical firearms training, you know, I like going out to the gun range and shooting my gun and learning, you know, different tactics and ways to, you know, hit a target and hit a moving target and different tricks and things.  And you know, this is like one of these niches where, you know, if somebody releases a new holster or a new DVD or – it doesn’t matter how many I’ve already bought, you know, I’m still buying more.  You know, show me the latest, coolest thing in the niche and I will whip out my credit card and buy the thing, because it’s something that, you know, I enjoy doing.  I’m smiling about it right now.

So, if you can identify a niche where people are really passionate about it, and it’s one of those deep niches, where you can just keep selling them different things again and again and again, you’re gonna really make a lot of money with that.

Dan Gallapoo: That’s great.  I’m just thinking out loud here, like, I’m trying to think an example of wide niche would probably be like the weight loss market, right.  It’s huge, but you know, those people probably buy one product from you and that’s the end –.  Because how are you gonna approach them a month later, like hey, I know that original product I told you was gonna help you lose weight, but you know, now I’m gonna sell you another – you know.

Mr. X: Yeah, maybe, maybe.  I think even that one could be – I think it would just depend on that niche.  I mean that’s a broad – it’s a broad niche that I’d probably further segment.  So, you might segment it by going specifically after women or specifically trying to, you know, shape and tone their legs or their butt.  You know, and then you can, you know, offer them the latest, greatest product – somebody’s coming out with something new, so maybe you can offer them that.  But, you know, I agree with your point.

You know, my father is into playing craps.  You know, he likes to play dice.  And there’s a guy who he subscribes to that sends out a little newsletter, which is really a sales letter.  And you’d think, like how many different ways to play craps, to play dice can this guy come up with, right, but he’s been on the list for the last 15 years.  I mean I swear to God, every six months the guy has some new system that you’ve just got to have that will help you, you know, win money at the dice table and my father, he buys them all.

So, you know, it’s one of those niches, you could do it with some niches, you can do it with others, but that’s really what I’m looking for now is a niche where I can develop 10 or 15 different DVD titles.  I like DVDs because it’s a real easy product that has a high perceived value but a low reproduction cost and I can reproduce a whole bunch of them real fast if I need to, almost overnight.

So, you know, for $1.65 I can sell a DVD for $40.00 to $50.00, and it has a tremendous markup and I can have somebody else do all the shipping and handling and order processing for me.  Even better if it’s digital, but the DVD product is one I really like because you can have a variety of different titles and you can package the stuff together and you can sell them in all kinds of different venues.  So, I’m probably throwing more at you than you can process right now, but what else?

Dan Gallapoo: Nope, that’s good stuff.  I was just thinking, you know, if I ask you anything that you don’t want to answer just tell me.  So, I was also wondering, what made you decide – in your main market or in your main niche, what made you decide to transition into all digital products and then how did that affect your business, how did it affect your bottom line as – you know, did it lower your costs or how did that all turn out?

Mr. X: Yeah, that’s a great question.  What happened was, at the time, I had gone through two or three different fulfillment houses, and for those of you who may not know what a fulfillment house is, it’s a company that specializes in just doing order processing.  So they will warehouse your products and package your products and take the orders if you want them to and process the credit cards and ship the products out.

And I was – we were selling DVDs and hard copies of the books a the time, and I just got tired of it, because you get – there’s a lot more problems, in the sense that, you know, somebody orders a product and then UPS delivers it but they put it on the back porch and they don’t realize that the dog got the DVD and tore it up or the neighbor stole it off the front porch or – they just think that they never got it and then they call your order processing company back.  And of course, your order processing company, they charge you every time somebody calls regardless of, you know, what the issue is.

So, then, you know, a lot of times you have to reship them the product.  And so it’s just a lot of headaches that I didn’t want to deal with.  And then, you know, if somebody has a conflict with the order processing company and maybe they get online and just say I didn’t receive this.  And it was just a whole lot of tracking and databasing and stuff I didn’t want to deal with.

So, as the high-speed Internet took off, I started testing doing digital downloads of the product or digital access of the same product.  So, instead of having to actually physically ship them something, and have – like for a book, for example, maybe I had $3.00 into the cost of a book, and we sold the book for maybe, you know, $29.00, you have a lot more profit if you didn’t want to have any, you know, physical cost.

So, I really liked the idea of that.  Of course, as high-speed Internet was just taking off, you know, I had a lot more problems than we do now, where people, you know, couldn’t download stuff.  So there was kinda that hurdle to get over too.  But we’re really at a point now where if you market it correctly, a lot of people actually will prefer the digital version, especially with something like a book because they get it immediately.  So there was that benefit, you know, people get that instant gratification.

And then, you don’t have any shipping or any physical costs.  And with like the books, for example, every time you’d have to order like 1,000 to 5,000 at a time, and you have your warehousing costs and expenses and all of that.  So – and then, you know, you’d order a shipment of books and then you realize that they printed it a little bit crooked and you’d have to arrange to ship, you know, 1,000 – a pallet of them, you know, back to the printing company.  So it was just a lot of hassle.  So, I thought, digital download, that sounds good to me.

Dan Gallapoo: That makes sense.  Do the products that were originally DVDs, then, the customer can download those or watch them like directly online immediately after their order?

Mr. X: Yeah.  The way we have it set up now, most of – with the main niche that you’re referring to, it’s set up as more of like a membership site.  So once they pay to join for access, we have like a digital video section of the site, where they can go and actually watch the DVD online.  So it’s not actually downloaded to their site, they have to be logged in to watch it.  And that, you know, prevents a lot of piracy and copying issues, you know, people sending the files to their friends or uploading it to YouTube and those kind of issues.

Now, that being said, the whole information marketer’s life has been changed around a lot, because now there’s services like Kunaki, K-U-N-A-K-I.com, that will allow you to take a DVD product, you know, or a video that you’ve shot, upload the video to their server, and then they will do one-off runs of your DVD product, including the packaging and the shrink wrapping and all of it.  And then even do the order processing and ship it to the customer, and they’ll do it all for like $1.67 or $1.70.

So, that means that you don’t have to have the – you don’t have to order, you know, 1,000 DVDs at a time, have them shipped to your fulfillment house and then have them ship the product.  You know, it just eliminates a lot of different stats.  With Kunaki, basically, you upload it to their server and they handle everything.

So that’s – you know, my main goal is not necessarily how much money, you know, I can make, although I’m making more money than I ever dreamed I could make, but my main goal is that I want maximum freedom in my life.  I don’t want to be tied down with all the hassles and I don’t want a lot of employees.  I mean as it is right now I have one operations guy who kind of runs the main businesses for me, you know, the day-to-day maintenance and operations, and then I have one virtual secretary and that’s it.  So basically a three-man operation.  And occasionally my wife helps for different projects if we’re working on a new marketing push or something.

But with Kunaki, you’re able to deliver a hard product, which can be beneficial for some markets, because a lot of people like, for posterity reasons, they like to actually be able to touch that DVD or put it on their shelf.  So that’s a pretty cool thing, too.  So I think having a variety of different things you can offer to your niche is a really good thing.  And I like DVDs again because, you know, it’s a product that costs you $1.70, you can sell it for $40.00 to $50.00 on average and there’s a real, you know, real high-perceived value to it.

Dan Gallapoo: With the Kunaki service, is that actually like on-demand, you don’t have to have an inventory with them?

Mr. X: Correct.  Yeah, you can – basically, you can just put a – after you upload it, you can put a link and people can order it and they – everything’s completely automated.  I don’t know technically how they do it, but they have it set up in a way that they will, just as soon as the order comes in, they will start the machine up and do a one-off if the customer orders only one.  Or you can tell them, hey, send me, you know, send me 50 personally and I’ll physically ship them out to my customers myself.

You know, if you wanted to do that, let’s say you wanted to package – or let’s say you were having a workshop or an in-person seminar and you wanted to have some quantity of your DVDs on-hand to sell in the back of the room.  You know, you can tell them to just send me 50, you know.  And ten years ago, you had to order, you know, a minimum quantity of, you know, maybe 500 to 1,000.  So this is really cool.  It’s also really cool for testing new product ideas.  But generally for new products I like to do a landing page and see if I can get them to sign up for a free newsletter first, to give me an idea of whether or not they’ll, you know, there’s enough interest to buy.  You know what I mean?

Dan Gallapoo: Yeah.  That’s – yeah, I want to get into that too.  Kunaki rocks.  If that service would have been available when we were first starting, I would have been like tripping all over myself to sign up for that.

Mr. X: Yeah.  I mean it really makes things so easy, because you have – you know, it just dramatically reduces your development costs.  I mean with a handheld, you know, camcorder, you know, and a clip-on mike you buy from Radio Shack, you can go out and basically create an information product by doing interviews with people.

You know, come home and with a $100.00 piece of editing software you buy at Best Buy, edit a video, upload it to Kunaki, and in literally less than a week –.  Oh, plus designing the cover, you have to design the cover, which you can do with, you know, Photoshop, which you can get for 50 bucks at Costco, you know, design the cover for the DVD and have a professional, retail-ready looking product complete with the barcode on the back, in less than a week, have a real product in your hands.  I mean it’s just – the technology now is phenomenal.

Dan Gallapoo: Wow, that pretty much takes all the excuses away for product development there.

Mr. X: Yeah, it really does, you know, and you know, once – one of my philosophies is that, you know, even if you’re not the greatest, you know, at Internet marketing and Google Adwords and everything else, if you have a really deep niche and you could develop a library of, you know, 5 to 10, or 15 different titles on DVD, you know, separate titles that your niche, you know, is salivating to buy, you’re – even not being the best of Internet marketers, you’re still gonna, you know, make a pretty good revenue stream for yourself.

Dan Gallapoo: True.  Hey, I want to talk more about selecting a niche a little bit.  Are there any tools or are there any methods you prefer to use, to like, to select a niche?  Like, on my last tele-seminar, I talk about one of my preferred methods is actually going to one of the big bookstores like B. Dalton or – the other one’s escaping me, whatever, Barnes and Noble, stuff like –.

Mr. X: Borders, Borders, Barnes and Noble.

Dan Gallapoo: Yeah.  Look through magazines and look at the bestseller list.  But I’m just curious what methods or what tools you use or do you do it all online or how do you do it?

Mr. X: I do it mostly online.  You know, usually I’ll use the Google Adwords tool, Google Adwords keyword tool.  And then you could also use Wordtracker, Wordtracker.com.  They have a pretty decent service.  And then just, you know, really knowing the niche.  You really have to be kind of part of the niche so you know where, you know, where the big discussion forums for that niche are, you know, who writes the big blogs for those niches.

And then also seeing, you know, how many Google Adwords there are when you do a keyword search for some of the big keywords for that niche.  Just the ones, you know, that first pop into your head and you type in on Google, you know, how many ads come up.  You know, that’ll give you an idea of how competitive the niche is as well.

So the keyword research is really important but being a part of the niche, I think, is even more important, because you’re gonna really have a good feeling for, you know, for what the niche wants.

By the way, I think one of the best ways to figure out what products – after you’ve chosen the niche or if you’re just considering a niche, go to the discussion forums online.  And what you want to do is you want to look for the questions that keep coming up again and again and again.  You’re gonna see people asking the same questions again and again and again.

So, you know, if, let’s say you’re looking at the Toyota’s FJ Cruiser, you know, it’s one of their 4x4s, and you know, this is a niche with a real passionate following.  So, if you go to the discussion forums, and you know, you see people asking again and again and again that the slant of the front windshield is in such a way that it tends to attract a lot of bugs when you’re driving, and so people keep asking what’s the best windshield wiper, what’s the best windshield wiper, what’s the best windshield wiper for my FJ 40 or my FJ Cruiser, you know, something like that.  If I kept seeing the same question being asked again and again and again, then if I wanted to sell a physical product to that niche, I would then go and maybe do some research and see if I can find the best windshield wiper and then build a site around that.

As it is, personally, I like the digital information products or the DVD products.  So, I might look at the niche and maybe, you know, maybe you see another question that gets asked, like, you know, where are the best places to take my FJ Cruiser, you know, off-road.  You know, so if I saw that question coming up again, I might come up with a DVD tell, you know, the top ten places to take your new FJ Cruiser off-road, you know.  And then do, you know, take the camera out and do some in-the-field filming and footage and interviews and you know, package that together.

And, again, if the people are really passionate about it and if it’s a question that just keeps coming up again and again, you’re gonna make money.

Dan Gallapoo: You know, so you got to get involved in the niche.  You got to become a member of forums, you know, start buying magazines.  So, I’ll go back to what you said earlier –.

Mr. X: You know, I think if you don’t, you’re not really gonna hit it, because you really – you know, like Halbert said, you’ve really got to be able to speak their language.  You know, you need to use the same vocabulary that they use.  And if you’ve ever been involved in any niche, you know that anybody in a certain niche, you know, talks a certain way and it’s different from how outsiders talk, you know.  And if you try and write a, you know, sales copy to appeal to that niche, you better be able to talk like they talk.

Dan Gallapoo: That’s true.  And what you mentioned earlier about it really does help if you have a passion for it, because like, well, you know, I was in the martial arts niche a few years back and the reason –.

Mr. X: Dan, for those of you who don’t know, Dan is a trained killer.

Dan Gallapoo: I can kill you with –.

Mr. X: Don’t mess with Mr. Gallapoo.

Dan Gallapoo: I can kill you just by thinking about it with my mind.

Mr. X: Killer marketing techniques.  Killer copywriting.  Doberman Dan’s killer copywriting.

Dan Gallapoo: So, I selected the martial arts niche, and Adam’s joking.  You know, I took karate as a kid and that’s pretty much the extent of it.  You know, and so I basically was not passionate at all about – I recognized it was a really good niche but not passionate at all about it, and got into it, and it was almost like ah, crap, this is succeeding, oh, darn it, I guess I got to, you know, make products and do fulfillment and blah, blah, blah.

And so I got out of that because it was worked.  You know, if it was something about guns, you know, or guitars, I’d be all over that.

Mr. X: Right.  And that’s really a good point.  You don’t want to spend all this time and effort and just create yourself another job.  I mean if you want a job just, you know, go out to Wal-Mart and get a job.  You know, you want to do something that’s gonna give you a lot of freedom and that you’re not gonna, you know, when you wake up in the morning, you’re not gonna hate yourself.

Dan Gallapoo: Yeah, that’s an important point.  There was a guy, one of Dan Kennedy’s subscribers, who had some, you know, direct response marketing knowledge and background, who owned a martial arts school down in Louisiana, and he bought my martial arts course.  Because I was selling a marketing course for martial arts schools.  He bought my marketing course and he called me, and he was like, hey – he starts asking me questions.

And I told him all about it, and you know, told him I’m really not having fun with this, I’m not a martial artist.  This is like work, and he’s like, yeah, you know, I should probably do something like this.  I told him, yeah, you know, you probably should.  Well, he is huge in that niche, man, he’s a multimillionaire in the information business.  So, sometimes I think, huh, maybe I screwed up by getting out of that niche, but it was really – it was too much like work for me.

Mr. X: Right.

Dan Gallapoo: You know.  Yeah, well, I guess I could’ve made a ton of money but I would’ve been miserable.

Mr. X: Yeah, and I mean there’s a lot of people who say, well, you build up to the point where you can afford to have somebody else kind of run it for you, and that is – to an extent, that’s what I’ve done with my main niche.  You know, I’ve been doing it so long that, you know, I kinda hit a point quite a while ago where I was fairly burnt out of it.  I mean it’s still a big part of my life, I mean it’s something that is and always will be a part of my life because it’s just become part of who I am.  But that being said, you know, I’ve hit a point where, you know, I got to a point where I was successful enough with the business where it made sense that I could delegate a lot of the responsibility of the operations of the business to somebody else who was a really good marketer.  And he gets a pretty good, you know, a pretty good cut of the take for doing that.  But what it does is it frees me up to focus on the parts of the niche that I really enjoy.  So that’s really important.

If I had it to do over again, I think I would probably have spent more time developing, you know, my main thing around something that was just, you know, a little bit more passionate about.  So that’s important, but, you know, the numbers are important too, and again, this – you know, even just the main site is, at this point, is throwing off so much money, it’s just it’s beyond anything I ever imagined I would be able to do.  So – even in this bad economy.  So it just keeps, it keeps chugging along, so.

Dan Gallapoo: Let’s say, okay, so you’ve selected a niche, what’s your next step?  You select a niche, the research reveals that, yeah, this is a good niche, you can make some money here, you’ve gotten involved in discussion forums, like you talked about.  So you know the language of the niche and you know what solutions they’re looking for or what products they’re looking for.  What’s your next step then?

Mr. X: After you’ve identified the niche and after you’ve identified what products you can develop?

Dan Gallapoo: Yes.

Mr. X: Okay.  Well, then you’re basically – what I do then is pretty much start developing the site.  So, you want to get the basic mechanics of the site set up, so that you have a working site.  Yeah, I mentioned a little bit about doing a landing page, you know, where you have people come, you do some basic promotions, which can be just, you know, kind of posting some feelers on discussion forums or running some Google Adwords or just communicating with other people in the niche.

Send them to a landing page, you know, list the main benefits of the main – if you’re doing a product you can list the main benefits of the product.  A lot of times what you’ll want to do is you’ll want to set up a free newsletter just as a lead capturing device.  So you get them – you list some of the main benefits and basically create a sales letter to get them to sign up for your free newsletter.  Because once you’ve got them on your list, your list is money.  I mean it’s just the same as old time direct marketing.  The list is really where the money is.

So you know, once you build up a list, you’re able to hit the person on the list, you know, multiple times with multiple offers or different products and stuff.  So, I would say of everything I do, probably the most important thing is the list.  I mean even if my entire site, you know, if the actual website went down, you know, I could still make enough money to, you know, keep myself in – you know, in the lifestyle that I’ve grown accustomed to, you know, just with the list.  And I could also get up on my feet again pretty fast with ________ list that I’ve built.

And we have – I mean you don’t need hundreds of thousands, either.  We have a purged list of about 60,000 subscribers, which means that these are actual, active, live email addresses.  So, the sooner you start building your list the better off you’re gonna be.  But then, you know, you want to get a basic site up as soon as you can, because the way Google looks at your site, the older your site is, the better they rank at.  So you want to get content up as soon as you can, even if you’re not completely finished or if everything isn’t completely perfect, you know, get it up there and start working on it.  Something is better than nothing.

Dan Gallapoo: When you start that site, initially, do you always start with like a squeeze page type site to start, you know, offering a newsletter or a free report to capture emails or do you start with just a site automatically selling a product?

Mr. X: Well, a lot of people do that.  I mean to be honest, the way I’ve done it is I’ve started – I’ll actually start putting up the basic framework of a site, get a basic working site, even if I don’t have a hundred articles in it yet.  I’ll get a basic site up and do some minimal promotions just so I can start getting some feedback and see if there’s kind of, you know, some excitement and some interest in the site.

And, you know, a lot of times you can do that by either posting on a discussion forum about the site, and you have to be careful about that.  You know, what I recommend is if you’re not on a first-name basis with the owner, you know, offer to subsidize their forum by, you know, running an ad or becoming a sponsor.  And see what kind of response you get.  I mean if people seem to be real excited about it –.

Well, I’ll give you an example.  We’re developing a DVD product for a certain niche, and I floated the idea in one of the discussion forums without providing any links whatsoever.  But the amount of response that I got from it – I think I ran this one by you, the one most recently, I mean it was phenomenal.  I mean it was like, you know, within 24 hours, we got, you know, probably 12 or 13 people just from one discussion forum post on one forum, you know, saying, like, you know, I need this DVD.  You know, I’ll buy it tomorrow if you have it available tomorrow.

So, you know when you get that kind of response, you can then say, all right, I’m gonna build a site around this topic and then the site is gonna be built around the product or products.  And that’s another thing I should probably touch on as well.  When you build a site, you don’t want to just randomly build a site.  There has to be like a starting point and a finishing point for that site.  And the starting point is basically the point where they get to the site.  And then there’s got to be some logical progression that you take them through.

So, one might be, you know, okay, they land on your site because they found an article that you wrote.  And then at the end of the article it says sign up for this free ezine.  And then they sign up for the free ezine, and then the confirmation page for the free ezine redirects them to the sales letter page to the product that you’re pitching, and then the sales letter page finishes with, you know, buy now, click here to submit your order.

So, you know, my main goal with any website is not just to present interesting information or you know, kinda put this stuff out there randomly, it’s to ultimately funnel everybody through to the sales letter page, either sooner or later.  So, you know, hard sale or soft sale, eventually – I know that eventually they’re gonna – I’m gonna have some way, because I make it real easy at the end of every page, to land on that sales letter page, read through it and then buy.  It’s all about asking for money.

Dan Gallapoo: That’s right.  Just kinda – that kind of answers the question I got.

Mr. X: Keep asking me till I answer it, okay.

Dan Gallapoo: Okay.

Mr. X: Sometimes, you know, I get go sidetracked that –.

Dan Gallapoo: No, this is great information.  People could submit questions before the tele-seminar and here’s one from Tammy in Jonesville, I don’t know what state, Jonesville, it could be Arkansas, who knows.  I’m just curious where Tammy lives.  It doesn’t really have anything to do with anything.  She says the thing that has held me up on starting my biz is building a website that is correct in Google’s eyes.  I’ve heard so much about penalties and Google slapping when your website is not perfect.  How does a person who is just getting started know how to build the perfect website to please Google?  Can you comment on that?

Mr. X: Yeah, my advice is don’t worry so much.  You know, put good content out there, you know, make a truly informational site and don’t worry about it.  I mean Google is really, really smart about this stuff.  You know, they know the people who are trying to scam them and trying, you know, to pull a fast one and use, you know, scraper content and all that kind of stuff to get by with something they shouldn’t be getting by with.

So, my personal feeling is you’re probably in most cases not gonna accidentally get slapped.  And again, what we do – you know, even though we want everything to end up back at the sales letter site, we’re creating sites that have real value, you know, real content, you know, lots of information, videos, tips.  You know, you want to create something that’s gonna be – basically, for your niche, it’s gonna be like the place to go, you know, the place where all the cool kids hang out, the popular place.  Because you’ve got such high quality of information at your site, that it’s just a real resource.  And Google lives or dies by whether or not they point to the best resources on the web.

Now that being said, I’ve found that it’s really important to use the right tools, and the tools being the software that drives your website.  So right now, I mean if you’re – I’m assuming most people listening to this are probably on a fairly tight budget.  WordPress is really one of the best solutions out there right now for somebody on a tight budget, and that’s what I use for new, you know, new sites that, you know, may or may not work, because again, even the best Internet marketers don’t know, you know, out of the gate, that everything they do is gonna work.  What’s the number, like one out of seven?

Dan Gallapoo: Yeah, that’s what I hear or even worse sometimes.

Mr. X: Yeah.  Yeah, so –.

Dan Gallapoo: WordPress is a blog software, but you can make it look like anything you want to, right?  It doesn’t have to look like a blog.

Mr. X: Right, right.  And it does have some shortcomings, but in general, it is so widespread and it’s so easy to find techs who will help you tweak it and do the things that you want to do, without, you know, charging you too much, that it’s really a pretty good solution.  And they’re free, they call them plug-ins.  They’re like little add-ons that you can get for free that will make your WordPress site more search engine friendly, more Google friendly.  So that, you know, a lot of that stuff, you don’t really even have to worry, you know, too much about.  So I really like WordPress in that sense.

And if, you know, if you’re a more experienced Internet marketer or you already have a more advanced site, there’s, you know, some other tools that I like to use, some other, you know, software tools, depending on what you want to do.  But, you know, something like WordPress is pretty cool.

Dan Gallapoo: Would you recommend – I mean basically to answer a question, would you go back to the old Halbert thing, motion beats meditation, don’t get hung up on the details just get something out there right now so you can start judging results?

Mr. X: Yeah, absolutely.  I mean absolutely.  I mean you really – I mean you don’t make any money if something sits in the planning stage for a year.  I mean I will be the first one to tell you, and even now, I mean my products have been – some of the products that I offer have been on the market for, you know, over ten years.  And – let me back up.

When I first got into the business, one of the first people that I hooked up with was reading Dan Kennedy’s material, and Dan Kennedy’s whole, his whole thing was like don’t worry about how the product looks, you know, worry about the quality of the information.

And I’ll tell you now, I mean some of my favorite blogs, some of the blogs that I read every single day are really crummy looking.  I mean they’re just like, you know, they’re very simple, you know, blog or just very simple HTML websites, but, you know, they have just great information.  I mean you think about it, you think about, you know, if you have the opportunity – if you want to learn how to play basketball really well and you have the opportunity to train with Michael Jordan.  Michael Jordan says come out to the court tomorrow at [5:00] in the morning.  I’m gonna be there and I’m gonna help you, you know, learn to dribble the basketball.  Are you gonna care how Michael Jordan is dressed?

Dan Gallapoo: Yeah, that’d be the last thing I’d think about.

Mr. X: Right, right, just give me the information.  Just show me how to be, you know, show me how to play basketball like you do.  So, I mean having a professional looking website, it’s important but there’s time for that later.  The most important thing is get it – get stuff out there, get stuff on the web, you know, create content, you know, promote, promote, promote, and you know, test different stuff, but you know, don’t worry if everything’s not perfect.  You know, nobody’s gonna – the people who are gonna complain and scream about it are not the people you want as customers anyway.

You want the people who are just, you know, salivating for the information.  And those kind of people, you know, if your information is top-notch information, it’s really good information, they’re – really they’re not gonna care.  They’re just gonna be like I need that information now.

Dan Gallapoo: That’s true.  So what you’re saying though is that, I mean with – because you do this a lot in the different markets, you test.  You can get something up and going pretty quickly with WordPress that’s gonna look pretty good too, right?

Mr. X: Yeah, and that’s the other benefit.  WordPress has these things called themes, and you can get these themes – you can pay for some, but a lot of em are just free, and you download em.  And a theme is kinda like the window dressing for the site.  It’s like something that has like a – well, a theme, you know, it’s like a color theme or maybe some graphics and it kinda makes everything tie in together.

So you can get a, you know, a fairly nice looking website, you know, up really, you know, pretty quick.  And that way you’re able to focus more on, you know, adding content and not have to worry about, you know, the HTML and all the formatting and stuff.  I mean there’s still a learning process to it and there’s a learning curve, but you know, you can get stuff up, you know, pretty quick.

And again, think about some of the favorite sites that you go to.  I bet that, you know, a lot of them don’t look at that professional.  In fact, one of the biggest internet marketing sites online is the Warrior Forum, and I think, you know, maybe up until recently, anyways, they were using software that was like, you know, four years old and you know, it just looked real kinda hokey, but you know, that was the place that you’d go, you know, if you wanted to talk to a lot of different Internet marketers, not necessarily the best but a lot of different Internet marketers.  If you want to get a lot of different opinions about something, you’d go to the Warrior Forum and you’d pose the question.

So, you know, there were a lot of other marketing discussion forums that didn’t have as much activity, weren’t as successful as the Warrior Forum, you know, but they looked perfect.

And then the other problem with aiming for perfection is that most of the time, if you’re a perfectionist, the site doesn’t ever get finished, it never gets launched.  So the trick is, get it up there as fast as you can, you can tweak it later.  You can clean it up, you can get somebody else to clean it up, but you got to get, you know, something up there in order to start getting sales.

Dan Gallapoo: That’s true.  You know, Halbert used to say, if you’re gonna fail, fail fast, you know, find out real fast if it’s gonna work or not.  And if, you know, if you get something out there and you don’t think it looks that great but you’re getting results, you know, no problem, it’s already up and running, now you can tweak it as you –.

Mr. X: Yeah.  Yeah, and again, you know, if we’re talking about specifically information products, you know, people are really out there for the information, they’re not – you know, they’re not so –.  You know, it’s not like we’re selling a Mercedes where it’s got to be, you know, shiny.  You know, we’re selling, you know, information.  So, you know, just give me the goods.

I mean you look at – I mean there’s a fella named Ross Jeffries, who used to be kind of the guru in the how to meet women market, and you know, the packaging for his stuff was, you know, was kinda, you know, flim-flammy, it wasn’t retail ready, put it that way.  But for his market, I mean they just did not care.  They were just like show me how to meet women.  You know, you could wrap the thing in a brown paper bag for all I care, people just wanted to know what he had to know.

Dan Gallapoo: Yeah.

Mr. X: Offer good information, in fact, offer the best information you can.  Become known as the Michael Jordan in your niche, and you know, don’t worry so much about, you know, getting Google slapped or if the site looks a certain way or whatever.  Just, you know, become a resource, become a valuable resource and you know, and Google’s gonna like that.

Dan Gallapoo: Did you want to talk about any other tools that you use or tools for advanced marketers or do you not want to get into that?

Mr. X: No, sure, I’ll get into that.  I mean, again, because I don’t sell Internet marketing information, I don’t have a lot of the stuff very well organized, which is another reason I’m, you know, maybe a little bit long-winded, but let me see if I can go through a mental list.

I really like Aweber for my list server, you know, for building your ezine.  I’ve been using them for a number of years now and I haven’t really had any products, and they offer a lot of tools for running, you know, a very professional ezine with a minimal amount of problems.  So, Aweber, A-W-E-B-E-R.com is a great resource.

I also like Links Manager for managing my link swapping campaign.  You know, if you have a site on corvettes and I have a site on corvettes, Google is gonna rank us higher if we are linked to each other, because Google figures that’s like a vote for my site.

If your site on corvettes is linking to my site on corvettes, Google – and if you’re an authority in your niche, in the niche of, you know, corvette owners and you’re linking to my site, then Google thinks, well, my site must be pretty good if Dan’s corvette site is linked into mine.  So, the way we manage that is through Links Manager, and that’s linksmanager.com, and they offer a really good service.  It’s really worth it to have a service like that that just, you know, manages all of your link swaps.

So, that way if Dan decides that his corvette website isn’t gonna link to my corvette website anymore, Links Manager will automatically delete my link back to his site.  So that way, you know, nobody’s getting any free, you know, something for nothing.  So, Links Manager is cool.

I like Host Gator for hosting, at least right now, and that changes a lot.  Hosting companies come and go, but, you know, for the last couple of years Host Gator’s been a really good value.  For $7.00 you can get their – it’s called the Baby Crock account, and you can have as many domains and as many websites as you want.

And they also have something called Fantastico, which is a – it comes with your $7.00 a month hosting account.  It allows you to pretty much automatically install a variety of different software products, free software products like simple machines discussion forum and WordPress and Group Hall and all kinds of different content management software that, you know, normally maybe you’d have to pay somebody to install it for ya, and this Fantastico thing, it does it with the click of a button.  So that’s pretty cool.

I like Member Gate for membership site management.  It’s a little bit more of an expensive solution but if you have – if you already have a successful site, if you have a successful niche and you’re well known in your niche and you know that you’re gonna be running a membership site with several thousand people, it’s the best solution that I’ve been able to find so far.  It’s not perfect, it’s got some things that we’ve had to tweak or, you know, create work-arounds for, but you know, it’s kinda like what they say about the U.S. Army, they may not necessarily be perfect but it’s kinda better than everything else that’s out there.  So Member Gate for membership sites is really worth it, for us anyways.

I use gmail for all my email stuff, because you know, I travel.  Dan knows this, I spent several years traveling around Latin America.  I’ve lived in Costa Rica and Panama and Columbia, and you know, all over the place, and I was able to run my entire business from my laptop.  And part of, you know, being able to do that means that if your laptop gets stolen, you need to have a way to continue accessing and running your business.

So, I like being able to have everything kind of online and gmail allows me to do that.  So that’s kind of a cool factor.  Same thing with Aweber, you know, you have your list hosted with a list server online.

I also use a service called Fox Marks, which they’ve changed their name and I don’t have it – I do have it in front of me, actually.  Now it’s called X Marks.  So, if you have Firefox, you can use a service called X Marks and what it does, it’s kind of like an online server that does a backup of all of your bookmarks.  So again, if you’re traveling and somebody steals your laptop, you can buy a new laptop and download your bookmarks.  And you know, bookmarks can be, you know, really important to running your business, so that’s kind of a cool thing.

I also use Mozy for backing up my – what’s that?

Dan Gallapoo: I’m sorry to interrupt.  I had never heard of that service before.  Tell me the website address again, please.

Mr. X: I think it’s X Marks, M-A-R-K-S, xmarks.com.

Dan Gallapoo: Cool, thanks.  I’m sorry, I interrupted.  Go ahead.

Mr. X: Pull that up.  Yeah, X Marks is it.  So it works with Firefox.  So let’s say I’m flying out to Florida and, you know, I have my laptop, you know, for some reason it gets lost or, you know, it’s shot or something and I lose the laptop, you know, I could log onto your machine and download all of my bookmarks.  So, you know, something like that can really save your hide, especially as you get more and more into this Internet marketing stuff.

And the other thing I use is Mozy, I believe it’s M-O-Z-Y.com, which does automated backups of your hard drive, so you have all of your data backed up, which, you know, again, is really important.  So, you know, one of the – the benefits of this business is that you can, you know, make it pretty much automated and you know, the ability to take your business with you, you know, anywhere you want to go is a really benefit.  But you know, you got to have, you know, Plan Bs for all of it.

Dan Gallapoo: That’s true.  I just have a hard time believing that anybody in Costa Rica, Panama or Columbia would steal your laptop.

Mr. X: Yeah.  Well, enough said on that topic.

Dan Gallapoo: Moving on.  What about getting traffic?  So, I mean you talked about, you know, maybe going into some discussion forums and testing the waters that way.  Once you figure out you’re getting some results and this is gonna actually work and you got some interest, what techniques do you use to get traffic?

Mr. X: Well, natural searches and ranking is great.  I mean it’s wonderful but it’s one of those things that you can’t really depend on because, you know, tomorrow you may have a competitor who’s, you know, maybe better than you are with, you know, natural search engine ranking.  Or, who knows why, for reasons, you know, unknown, Google decides to shine on your competitors more than they shine on you.  So, you know, it’s really – you do everything you can to get as much traffic as you can.

That being said, our best producer is still Google Adwords.  I mean there’s just – there’s no comparison.  I mean, you know, Google Adwords brings, in most cases, I’d say 80 percent of our traffic.  But in addition to Google Adwords, which everybody knows about and Yahoo’s version, article marketing is great.  You know, you write articles, submit them to article directories or to other websites who are looking for content, and you have links within that article which link back to your website.  So that gets your name out there.  Press releases.  Social marketing.

Here’s another one, Ping, P-I-N-G.com is becoming very popular.  What that does is with all the different, you know, MySpace and Facebook and Linked In, and all those, there’s like, you know, 50 or 60 different services, plus YouTube and all the video hosting services.  What Ping does is you open up a free account with Ping and then every time you post something to Ping, it will automatically post it to all of those different websites.

And so, you know, the more you get your name out there, the more links you have linking back to you site, you know, legitimate links, we’re not talking about spam here, the more of an authority site your site will become.  And also when Google sends their little spiders out to crawl the web, they’re gonna see that, you know, you’ve got links on Facebook linking to you and you’ve got links on MySpace and on all these different places, and it helps with your natural search engine ranking as well.  So that’s worked really well for us.

Let me think what else.  You know, just being a – oh, here’s another tip that’s worked really well for me.  Conflict works really well.  If you have a certain position on an issue within your niche and you very publicly challenge somebody else who has a big name within your niche, because you have legitimate differences, you will generate a lot of controversy.  That controversy will turn into sales.

I should say something else about traffic versus sales, more traffic is not necessarily the answer.  What you want is quality traffic.  So, what I mean by that is I’d rather have 10 people who are buyers, who are ready to buy, than 100,000 people coming to my site but only 1 of em is interested and is really a buyer.

Dan Gallapoo: Right, right, which would cost you a ton of money for a bunch of basically moochers, you know.

Mr. X: Yeah.  Again, let’s say I do a video on how to – let’s use the corvette example, how to make your corvette have 50 more horsepower, and it’s a video, it’s a real simple trick.  It’s just, you know, something you can do at home by mixing vinegar and water together and – again, I know nothing about cars, so I’m just kind of spit-balling it here.

But let’s say you did a DVD about that, and you start running Google Adwords or you start doing other, you know, Internet marketing promotions, and you know, you’re advertising for the keyword cars and horsepower and increase horsepower, but the product is specific to really, you know, corvette owners, you know.  This is something that specifically corvette owners are looking for, not Subaru owners, not – you know.  You’re really gonna be spinning your wheels and wasting a lot of time, you know, focusing on, you know, car forums and just real general stuff.  So just basic, direct response fundamentals.  You know, match your message to the market.

Dan Gallapoo: Makes sense.  I wasted a lot of money in the golf market once testing a product by doing just that, thinking, oh, boy, look how much traffic the keyword golf gets or golf equipment, you know.  And it brought a bunch of really nonqualified people and was expensive.

Mr. X:    Yeah, yeah.  I really – you know, the longer I’m in the Internet marketing game, the more, you know, it’s really a balancing act, and this gets back to choosing your niche, but you know, the more specific you can get, the better off you’re gonna be, generally, as long as it’s a deep niche.

So, you know, if I have a really, really super specific niche, but it’s super deep, you know, I would say – let’s say I have a niche that consists of only like 100 people, but I know that those 100 people will buy like 1,000 different products on this one topic.  Like, let’s say I’m doing a topic on – my niche is, you know, some aspect of Judaism, right, some aspect of like, you know, raising a child – you know, raising a Jewish child – raising a Jewish Orthodox child and –.  I don’t know if that’s a good niche or not, but just as an example.  And I have 100 people who are really into this very, you know, narrow aspect of Judaism, and I can sell them products going from birth all the way to the time the kid is 18 years old.  And they just, they love me, you know, I’m an authority on the niche, maybe I’m a top Rabbi or something, I can create all kinds of products.  It’s not a real wide niche, but it’s a super deep niche.

So those are the kind of things that I really like.  So if you can become an authority in your niche or if you can do a joint venture with an authority, you know, a content provider, where you control the marketing and they’re able to provide the content, you’re gonna do, you know, really well.  So it just, you know, a matter of getting in there and really knowing the niche that you’re targeting.  And going for it, you know, just completing the products, completing the website, getting it done.

Dan Gallapoo: Yeah, you brought up a couple real important points.  I mean you’ve been successful in a lot of different niches.  Your main one is a really, really big niche, but you don’t necessarily need a big niche to make a lot of money, like you said.

Mr. X: Yeah, and you know what, that’s an excellent point too.  Even though we have a huge niche, I mean a lot of people think, you know, our niche is, again, it’s like – it’s kind of like cars, you think, oh, cars, everybody’s got a car, yeah, but just because everybody has a car doesn’t mean that everybody’s gonna buy a car, you know, a fancy car stereo, for example.  You know, there’s only a specific niche of people within the niche of car owners, who will buy real high-end car stereos, you know what I mean.

Dan Gallapoo: That’s right.

Mr. X: So what we do is we focus on, you know, kind of a sub niche.  You know, what we like to do is we focus on people with problems.  You know, they’re passionate about it.  It’d be kind of like – it’s kind of like the marriage niche, for example, you know, you’re married to a woman, you’re committed to her, but you have relationship problems.  You know, so how do I deal with this relationship and how do I deal with the problems that I’m having within this relationship, you know.

And so, you know, our main niche really deals – it’s that type of a niche.  So you have problems and people who are passionate about their niche and really need those problems fixed.  And you know, we come along – I mean everybody’s married, everybody probably has marriage problems at one point or another, but there’s only, you know, a select percentage of that giant market that has bad enough problems that they’re gonna get online and do a web search and look for solutions to those problems.  But boy, when they do, we are right there with a solution.

Dan Gallapoo: Yeah, excellent point.

Mr. X: So, that’s positioning, I guess.

Dan Gallapoo: You said something else I want to bring up too, about you know, when you’re going into a niche or a market, you don’t have to be the guy or gal, for – you know, you don’t have to be the expert or the spokesman, you know, you can find that.  You can pay those people cheap to do that, can’t ya?

Mr. X: Right, absolutely.  Just get it all in writing and make sure it’s a flat fee, you know.  Or, if you are gonna pay them an ongoing fee, make sure that it’s – you’re paying them for the creation of content and not for a percentage of sales or royalties.  You know, the truth is that there are a million experts out there.  There are only a handful of people who really know how to take one of those experts and make them, you know, a superstar within the niche.

So, if you study marketing and if you really, you know, learn the things Dan’s trying to teach you, you’re gonna know how to take information and package that information and sell it.  And so, you know, there’s so many people out there that you can get, and who would just be happy to be – you know, maybe they just want to get their name out there and you don’t even have to pay em.  They just want to, you know, they want to kinda be famous and you know, it’s for ego reasons.

Or maybe they’re not, maybe they’re just, you know, experts.  They happen to be, you know, in the local history department at a local university, and you know, you’ve discovered a niche on some aspect of history, you know, on some aspect of the Civil War and they happen to be an expert, you know, on that aspect of the Civil War.  And you know, maybe they’ll do it for free or maybe they’ll do it for a couple hundred bucks.  And then you create a DVD product or an info product out of it, and you could be selling that info product for the next 50 years.

Dan Gallapoo: Yeah.  Experts are a dime a dozen and –.

Mr. X:    They really are.

Dan Gallapoo: One thing you brought up, don’t do a royalty arrangement, do a flat fee.

Mr. X: Don’t do – exactly.

Dan Gallapoo: There’s a ton of horror stories about that.

Mr. X: Yeah.

Dan Gallapoo: There are two things I’d like to talk about, and anything else you want to talk about, but there’s one thing I do want to talk about.  As long as you don’t think it’s inappropriate to do, because I’d kinda like you to do like a mini hot seat with me about my website at DobermanDan.com.  Are you open to doing it?

Mr. X: Sure, let’s do it.

Dan Gallapoo: I’m just – I’m thinking out loud here.  What I got to thinking was, you know, ’cause I’m gonna be – I’ll expose to you some plans I’ve got for the site, and I want to get your feedback on that, but do you think that’s inappropriate, sharing that information with the subscribers to the site?

Mr. X: Well, maybe I’m not understanding, doing a critique of your site or of my site?

Dan Gallapoo: Yeah, my site, my DobermanDan.com site.  Because –.

Mr. X: Yeah.

Dan Gallapoo: Here – I’m sorry, go ahead.

Mr. X: Yeah, no, I mean, you know, I guess what we could do is I can give you my, you know, my insights, what I would maybe do or change or suggest, and again, it’s – you know, I’ve been successful, but I’m, you know, I’m not God or anything.  So my advice, you know, what I see may or may not be accurate, it’s just, you know, you’re the ultimate authority.  You have to – you know, you have to say yeah, this is good information or not.  But – you want to do that right now?

Dan Gallapoo: Yeah, yeah, I would.  Here’s the deal.  How should I start, can I just give you a little bit of information on where I’d really – what I’d really like to do with this site?

Mr. X: Yeah, let’s do it.

Dan Gallapoo: Okay.

Mr. X: I’m at your site right now, so.

Dan Gallapoo: Okay, all right, cool.  Well, first of all, I started that site, DobermanDan.com, initially, when I was still doing some freelance work.  So, I set it up to try to get more freelance clients.  Well, I don’t do freelance copywriting anymore.  And then it basically turned into a passion.  I just wanted to share some of the stuff I learned and wanted to share a lot of the lessons I learned from Gary Halbert.

And I have, you know – it was hit or miss, I was on and off.  I’d post something maybe one month and then go for months without doing anything.  But most recently, within the past month or so, I’m really enjoying it more and I’ve got a small group of subscribers, but everybody’s so nice, as opposed to my other niche, my bodybuilding niche, I get so many assholes, you know.  Get just completely asshole emails from people and you know, it’s like – it makes me think, you know, I don’t want to deal with assholes, but my Doberman Dan subscribers are so darn nice.

Mr. X: Now he’s flattering ya.

Dan Gallapoo: Yeah.

Mr. X: The two of you who are left after my long-winded explanations, the two of you who are left, now he’s flattering ya.

Dan Gallapoo: And after the flattery, here comes the sales pitch.  No, I’m really enjoying it.  I’m enjoying getting stuff down on paper or online, so to speak, lessons that I’ve learned years ago.  I’m enjoying sharing that.  I’m getting a lot of – definitely getting my ego stroked a lot by people.  I’m just really having fun with it.  I’m more excited about doing more content for that site than I am for my main niche.

So, one of the things I like to do, I would really like to build up my subscriber list and, two, I would like to somehow work at, you know, making a living from that site too, and if possible, maybe kind of bow out gradually or sell my other business, my bodybuilding business and focus on the Doberman Dan site, so there you go.

Mr. X: Yeah.  It sounds good to me, I mean especially if you’re, you know, you’re passionate about it.  And I mean you have – you’re one of the few people who really, you know, I mean you have the pedigree.  I mean you’ve worked with – I mean you know pretty much everybody in the industry going back, you know, years and years.

I mean and you – you know, we’ve talked before.  I mean you have great stories, and about Halbert and Dan Kennedy, and all of these big – just a long list of pretty much everybody who was anybody.  So I think your positioned, you know, as good or probably better than, you know, 90 percent of the people out there who are selling direct marketing information.  So, yeah, I think you should do it.

What I would probably do looking at this site is, I think that – I’m a real big believer in not trying to reinvent the wheel.  So what I would do is I would find somebody who – and I mean you’ve talked about this in some of your stuff, find somebody who’s already kind of doing what you want to do, and then put the Doberman Dan polish on it, you know.

So, set up the structure of your site and everything, just basically, you know, model their site and then improve on it.  I mean I really enjoyed the last video that you did, I think it was the last one, where you talked about the guy with the guitar, the perfect pitch ad.

Dan Gallapoo: Yeah.

Mr. X:    You know, how you look at something and then, you know, model it and then figure out how you can make it better.  And I mean I’ve done that.  I will freely admit, a big part of my success was –.  Actually, my initial site grew out of an initial sales letter and the initial sales letter was – some guy had a car book, and my niche, by the way, is not in cars.  I have several niches, but my main niche has nothing to do with cars.

But he was selling a car book or some kind of car secrets book, and I modeled my sales letter after his, the original one.  And then I found another guy who had some other – was selling something else, completely unrelated to my niche, and he some other kinda cool aspects to it and I incorporated that.  And then when I developed a full-blown site around the sales letter, you know, which included like the main niche page that you would land on, you know, I modeled it after somebody else.  So, you know, as long as you’re not copying from the same niche, you’re okay.

Dan Gallapoo: I’ve got something else I want to bring up too, since we’ve talked about this a lot, you and I personally have talked about this.  You know, I really don’t want to get in the guru market.  I do not want to position myself as a guru.  I do not want to be lumped in with that crowd because, you know, like we said, unfortunately, a majority of them are basically con men.

Mr. X: Right.

Dan Gallapoo: You know, I mean not all of em, there’s a lot of legit guys, Clayton Makepeace, John Carlton, you know, Michel Fortin, and I probably shouldn’t have started naming names, because I’ll leave people out and then, like, people listening to this will think, oh, well, so and so’s a conman because Dan didn’t mention him.  But, you know – but I just don’t want to be lumped into that crowd, but also I know that what I have to offer is extremely valuable because I’ve done, you know, I’ve done what I teach, and I refuse to teach anything that I haven’t done, you know.

Mr. X: Right.

Dan Gallapoo: I don’t want to talk about writing direct mail controls for Agora or for, you know, for credit card companies, because I’ve never done that.  I only teach what I’ve done, and I know that my knowledge is worth a lot of money but, you know, that’s a big concern of mine.  If I position the DobermanDan.com site, you know, as that, and I do offer some sort of products or coaching or something like that, you know, I’m concerned about getting lumped in with that crowd.

Mr. X: Right.

Dan Gallapoo: Do you have any thoughts on that?

Mr. X: Yeah, I think maybe – yeah, it’s funny, because what I’m realizing as we’re talking is that this is one of those things where, you know, it’s like the shoemaker whose kids have no shoes.  You know, it’s very difficult, I think for us sometimes, even though we know the fundamentals of marketing, to apply them to ourselves.  And I think that’s what’s been so cool about our friendship is, we’ve been able to hold up kind of like a mirror to each other and say, well, you know, you know all these rules and now you need to apply them to yourself and you’ve done that to me many times, so I’m gonna do it to you.

I think you need to really define who your market is, because you know, your market is gonna determine how you go about reaching the market and what message you hit them with.  You know, and I mean I really think that the reason that, you know, a lot of these con men are using these real, you know, real hard copy, you know, hard sales tactics, you know, and it’s just real over the top and these huge claims, and you know, you’ll make $30,000.00 today kind of thing, and you know, just all this hype, I think they do that ’cause they’re kinda going after the lowest common denominator in the market.

So, I think maybe you need to decide if you – you know, if you want to direct your services to, you know, maybe, you know, people more like myself, you know, who are more experienced marketers and they’re looking for, you know, somebody else who can, you know, help them take their business to the next level.

Dan Gallapoo: Right.

Mr. X: You know, or are you gonna go after the complete newbie.  And then, you know, decide, you know, decide, you know, who is your market, specifically and then tailor your message to that market.

Dan Gallapoo: Yeah, excellent point.  Do you have any recommendations for what I should be doing with the website or in general to build up the subscriber list?

Mr. X: Yeah, I think – you know, again, I think for your niche, I think that, you know, you definitely want to find a model, but I mean what – me personally, what I like in website is I kinda like the three-column design, you know, where you have a big middle column and then a, smaller left and a smaller right column.  And then you know, you got to have the sign up form, and you know, usually it’s the upper right hand corner.  And then that way you’re able to fit in a whole bunch of content as well as, you know, your sales message here.

Because I’m looking at, like, the above the page fold, and you know, I see this big banner, and it’s a cool banner, but you know, I don’t know if it really does anything.  It says, you know, Doberman Dan, Direct Response Copywriter.  Well, that’s great, but it’s kinda like, yeah, okay, you know, that’s another copywriter guy.

And the other thing I was gonna tell you was, I mean you’re really – I mean you are a direct marketing expert.  So what I would like to see is more like you kinda play up that part of it.  Is that, you know, I’m not just – I mean there’s all kinds of copy – hiring a copywriter is like hiring an auto mechanic.  Hiring a direct marketing expert is like hiring – or is like, you know, dealing with a priest or a life coach or something.  You know, it’s something more important and it’s like, you know, you’re more than just a copywriter, Dan.  So, you know, I think that that needs to be kinda worked in there.

And then what I would also do is I would also structure the site so you’re throwing a lot more headlines to different articles more up towards the top.  So like right now you have one main kind of story here, you have your masthead and then one main story.  So you have basically two shots to grab me.  But with a three-column format, you know, you can have down, you know, like the left column, you could have like headlines from maybe 10 or 12 different articles.

Dan Gallapoo: Good point.  You know, this goes back to what you were talking about, using WordPress, because a friend of my, Caleb Osborne, another copywriter, actually as a favor for me, changed this site over a couple months ago to a WordPress site.  It’s using the Thesis Theme.

Mr. X: Uh huh.

Dan Gallapoo: And I’m still going through the learning curve on it, but as far as changing the look of the site to what you’re talking about, I think it’s as simple as pushing a couple buttons or clicking a couple boxes and hitting publish, and I’m good to go.

Mr. X: It is, yeah, it is.  In fact, I’m gonna show you something that, you know, a new project that I’m working on.  Again, this hasn’t been – it’s not done.  I wasn’t planning on revealing this here, but just to give you an idea of what I’m talking about.  And again, this hasn’t been monetized, but if you go to recessionanxiety.com, that’s a WordPress site, and – have you pulled that up yet?

Dan Gallapoo: It’s coming up right – this is pretty cool.  I didn’t know you were gonna actually show an actual –.

Mr. X: Yeah, didn’t either, but you suckered me in with your strong persuasion skills.

Dan Gallapoo: RecessionAnxiety.com.  I’m there.  It doesn’t look like – yeah, it doesn’t look like your typical blog, it’s got a different look.  It looks like more of a, you know, a website look than a blog look.

Mr. X: A website, right.  And what I’ve noticed, depending on what browser you’re using, it may look a little bit different.  But generally, it has the name at the top, which I’m not real crazy about having the domain name that big, but that was the theme thing, so we may play with that.  Then we have Survival Strategies for Hacking the Recession.  Okay, so that’s kinda interesting.

And then you see on the right, it’s not a three-column layout, it’s a two-column, but you see that I’ve got like one, two, three, four, five, six different categories, okay.  And then on my screen, anyways, I have – there’s two articles up top.  So I have –you know, we have the sub-head here, if the main name doesn’t pull you into the site, we have the sub-head that might pull you into the site.  We have headlines for two different articles on the left, and then six different categories, each of them that has kind of the catchy name, which you know, you might find interesting right there.

And then as you scroll down, we’ll probably end up moving this up, you see recent posts on the right.  You’ll see there’s like a long list of like 15 different, you know, recently added news stories here.  So the more I can move up kind of above the fold, you know what I mean by, you know, above the fold, the stronger the site’s gonna be.

So, what I would probably do is in the upper right-hand corner, where it says search, go, you see that on your –?

Dan Gallapoo: Yeah, yeah.

Mr. X: On your screen?  What I would do in that area would be, I’d probably put a little blurb about why’d want to subscribe to my ezine, okay, because that’s the top right.  And then below it have all the different categories and stuff.  There’s just more – I have a – you know, it’s like fishing with a hook that has like four or six different hooks on it instead of just one.  You know, you’re giving yourself a much greater chance of hooking somebody.

And then when they click on one of these things – oh, and then I’ve also got the, you know, the menu bar which says Home, About and DVDs, and that’ll be – you know, we’re gonna expand that too, so it’s got more stuff, all of it above the page.  So the chance that as soon as you hit on this, it’s probably – you know, if you’re interested in, you know, surviving the recession, there’s probably gonna be something up here that hits you immediately that you’re gonna find, you know, pretty interesting and want to go deeper into the site.

And as you go deeper into the site, I have a greater chance of funneling you over to, you know, my sales letter to sell you the DVD or a number of DVDs or, you know, whatever it is I decide I’m gonna sell.  So yeah, with this site.

Dan Gallapoo: You know, something else, in addition to the recent posts, like little thing on the right, I see what you mean now when you’re talking about my site.  Like, you go to my site and it’s basically only gonna show the headlines of two articles, and you got to actually scroll way down to get to the second headline of the second article.

Mr. X: Yeah.

Dan Gallapoo: But this one here, you know, like you’ve got one, two, three, four, five, six, seven – I don’t know, 12 or more headlines –.  It’s a headline, just a tiny little part of the article.

Mr. X: Right.

Dan Gallapoo: So there’s way more headlines to grab attention and keep people on the site.

Mr. X: Yeah, yeah.  And there’s room for more, and it still looks pretty good.  I mean it doesn’t look like some of those sites that are just, you know, information overload.

Dan Gallapoo: Yeah, exactly.  So I – you know, I’ll basically rip off your –.

Mr. X: Yeah, do it.

Dan Gallapoo: Layout here for the Doberman Dan site.

Mr. X: Yeah, exactly, exactly.  And you know, testing is so important.  I mean there’s – I mean that’s probably – you know, everybody talks about testing but it really is the most important thing.  I mean because you can – you know, I could talk all I want but until we actually test this site to see, you know, what the click-through rates are like, you know, we don’t really know.

So, you know, we may find that there’s really too much stuff on this site, too many distractions or –.  You know, one of the problems with this site is that when you click on one of the articles it takes you to the actual article which takes you away from the site, which is not good.  In fact, the way this was supposed to be designed was it should’ve launched a new window when you click on that.  So that – you know, this is a work in progress.

But again, this is a website that, you know, I literally started the website like two days ago, two days ago.  You know, so I’ve put in, you know, maybe like – maybe at the most six hours, and most of that was just kind of, you know, messing around, trying – you know, ’cause I’m still learning the software.

But anyway, so I mean it’s pretty cool for a minimum amount of time.  And you know, normally I would use, you know, HTML, I would upload actual pages when I was doing the website.  But this, you know, WordPress, it’s pretty cool.

Dan Gallapoo: Yep, that makes sense.  I see what you’re getting at now.  How’d you get so much content up so fast?

Mr. X: We’re using a feed, it’s like a RSS feed, that pipes in content from the news servers.  So those are all, you know, news articles.  I haven’t written – well, some of them, you know, we get from like free ezine articles, where they’re people who write articles and then you post the article that they wrote on your site but with a link back to their site, so it helps them out and it helps you out.

Dan Gallapoo: Okay, all right, that’s cool.  That’s the – hey, I appreciate the example.  This was a little surprise I wasn’t expecting.

Mr. X: Yeah, you know me, full of surprises.  And tomorrow there will be ten other recession related sites just like this one.

Dan Gallapoo: I guarantee it.  In fact, some of em will – might even rip off the exact – it’ll be the exact same except up top it will have a light blue background.

Mr. X: Right, exactly.  It may not even have that, you know, whatever.  But yeah, I mean this thing, the – I’m looking at your site.  It says sign up for the Doberman Dan letter.  Why?  Why would I want to do that.

Dan Gallapoo: Right.

Mr. X: You know, so –.

Dan Gallapoo: Because it’s pretty and my dog is pretty.

Mr. X: Yeah, exactly, exactly.  So, I need, you know, I need – I mean and you have so many reasons.  I mean it’d be like, you know, want to know what Gary Halbert told me when he was drunk and we were floating around in his boat on the coast of Florida, about the real secrets behind, you know, your favorite Internet marketing gurus, you know, sign up for the Doberman Dan letter.  I mean that’s the type of thing where like, you know, you have the – you know, they call them in Spanish, the chisme, you know, the gossip, the juice.

You know, I mean something like that would like – you’d be like, yeah, you know, send me that stuff, here’s my email address.  I want to know that stuff.  I want to know what – you know, once you separate the hype from, you know, all the rest, you know, what did Halbert really say, you know, what happened when you went to that seminar with Dan Kennedy and you know, they all got drunk one night and started telling you what the numbers were really like, you know.  Send me that information.

That’s just me, again, you know, it’s like you have to, you know, for your market, you need to figure out what it is, you know, what it is that they really want, and you know, maybe they’re not a gossip hound like I am but they want, you know, they want to know something else.

So, I don’t know, I think maybe – I mean, your credibility is important, but my guess would be that by the time they hit your site, they probably already know something about you, because they’ve read your posts on other discussion forums or they’ve seen, you know, some of your ads and stuff.  So by the time they hit your site, maybe it would work better if you offered more marketing information, like, you know, kinda the what’s in it for them thing.  And then you know, have the – you know, all the articles linked to basically a sales letter which sells the service or the product that you want to offer.

Dan Gallapoo: Right, yeah, that makes sense.  You know, it’s kind of funny because, you know, a lot of these gurus will tell you, you know, just put a bunch of content up there, you know, which is true.  I mean that’s great to have good content, but you know, there also needs to be a reason why they should subscribe, you know.

Mr. X: Right.

Dan Gallapoo: Although I still think, you know, I am pretty good looking in that picture and Donner’s really good looking, so to me that seems like it should be enough to get em to sign up.

Mr. X: Well, it was interesting, I read through some of your comments.  It was interesting how much people wanted to know more about the dog, you know.  And I don’t know what they think about your looks, but, you know, it seemed like everybody wanted you to write more about the dog, you know.

Dan Gallapoo: By the way, I should probably share that – did you hear Donner barking just a few minutes ago?

Mr. X: No, I didn’t.

Dan Gallapoo: Oh, okay, well, he put a few barks in it.  It’s almost like, you know, every tele-seminar I do, even though he’s sleeping when I start, he always gets recorded somehow or another, like he knows, you know, like I want to make sure I get on this recording.

Mr. X: Hey, he’s as much a part of this enterprise as you are, at this point.

Dan Gallapoo: Yeah, and you’re directly responsible of that because –.

Mr. X: Right, yeah.

Dan Gallapoo: You know, well, not – you’re directly responsible for that, you’re also directly responsible for the Doberman Dan moniker, you know, that I’m stuck with now, ’cause you introduced me to the breeder where I got my dog.

Mr. X: Well, in considering that Donner has to put his two cents in, you know, through barking into practically every tele-seminar you do, I think you should probably change the name of the site to Doberman and Dan.

Dan Gallapoo: I will definitely consider that.

Mr. X: Yeah, kind of a partnership.  You know, like Olgivy and Mather.  You know, it’ll be Doberman and Dan.  They have to pay extra if they want to get Donner’s advice.

Dan Gallapoo: That’s right, and he probably will be able to word things more eloquently than I am, too.

Mr. X: Yeah, yeah.  No, dogs, there’s a niche.  But I’ll tell you, that’s for another day.  So – listen, my wife is calling me, dinner is on the table.  I’m gonna get in trouble if I don’t go now.

Dan Gallapoo: Nope, you better go eat.  Hey, I just want to say thanks, man, I really appreciate it.

Mr. X: Hey, my pleasure.  Let’s do this again soon.

Dan Gallapoo: Okay, sounds good.  Take care.

Mr. X: Great, take care, bye.

Dan Gallapoo: Bye.

[End of Audio]