Don’t forget to listen in tonite, Tuesday March 25th, as Brian Gardner, designer of the Revolution series of WordPress themes answers your questions about using Premium WordPress themes.

Head over to the site for listening to the telewebcast and ask a question or just listen in and discover the secrets that Brian lets loose.

Why is Mike doing so many teleseminars and virtual book tours ?

That’s what several readers want to know and it’s a fair question.

It’s because Mike likes helping people make more money and because Mike likes making more money.

Simple.

How does a teleseminar or a virtual book tour help people make more money ?

One simple way is by repurposing the content.

You don’t see ALL of the teleseminars or virtual book tours I do posted here.

Many of them are events that I’m paid to host and the author kept control of the content.

I explained the premise to them and they saw the value of talking about their book for 1 to 2 hours and using that content to create articles that drive traffic to their book’s website.

Some of them have used the content to create podcasts and used those to create traffic for a website of choice.

Several have found that the 3-4 hours we were on the phone was as good or better than their book and used that audio content as another product or a relevant bonus for their offer.

One thing that’s simply a surety is that it’s easier to find a new market for your product, after you do a little repurposing, than it is to create a new product from scratch.

Alex Mandossian , is the man who, thru a series of teleseminars over 5 + years, taught me a large portion of what I use as the basis for my methods.

I did add in my two decades of sales and marketing experience, but you can click thru and find out more about the methodology.

His theory, which happens to work very, very well, is that authors “… should have at least three virtual book tours to promote their books - one before the hard cover is launched, one when it is launched and one for the launch of the soft cover. You can even have events to launch you eBook and audio book. This is a great Internet marketing strategy all authors should be taking advantage of. Remember that your hard cover book, soft cover book, eBook and audio book are just a vehicle. You are the message and that’s what is most inspiring - no matter which way the content is repurposed.”

What Can a Dentist Teach You About Business, Life and Success ?

Plenty.

On March 26th at 8 PM Eastern - 5 PM Pacific, I’ll be grilling Dr. Joe Capista about these very topics.

If you’ve read his book or just have a question, click thru and Ask Dr. Joe your most important questions.

If you need to get a copy of his book, which has been getting great reviews, just follow this link.

I just used Google and found over 19,000 references to Dr. Joe, so he must have said something in his book that appealed to everyone !

Join us for 90 minutes of good content and success secrets that you won’t get anywhere else.

Premium WordPress themes are much more professional and profitable than free themes.

There, I said it and I believe it and I’ve been saying it for a long time.

I’m also holding a teleseminar with Brian Gardner, of Revolution fame, to prove it.

Free theme creators support their themes in their spare time and, most of the time, very sparingly.

Premium theme creators support their themes in a professional way.

Free theme creators get tired of the emails and comments and slowly stop upgrading and tweaking.

Premium theme creators are, basically, paid to support and refine their work, so they do a great job and love doing it.

Are those blanket statements fair or gospel ? No.

Are they the norm ? Yes.

Do you have a question about the Revolution series of Premium themes ?

Do you have a question for Brian Gardner ?

Do you have a question about what using a Premium WordPress theme can and will do for your blog and your status as a blogger ?

Click thru and Ask Brian Gardner any question you have and we’ll get as many as we can answered on March 25th at 10 PM Eastern, 9 PM Central and 7 PM Pacific time.

You’ll be able to phone in or use a web player to listen thru your computer. Your choice because we want as many live participants as possible. I’m not sure if Brian will release the replay for free or use it as part of his marketing.

Ask now or forever hold your peace.

We use one of the many styles of Revolution on “several” of our blogs. I hope to have it here soon, but I’ve been waiting for the WordPress upgrade noise to shallow out a tad.

The economy is slowing, so you need to accelerate your knowledge.

March 27th is fast approaching. Have you registered for the teleseminar with Bill Caskey and his tremendous team ?I just noticed that there were several bonuses for attending:

• A copy of Same Game, New Rules
• A 60 minute audio about making that first call
• A copy of The Sales Playbook

Each one of those is worth the price of admission by itself. Easily.

Some of the other topics include:

Another selling strategy that is so simple yet so rarely followed by sales professionals. It has to do with your “Basic Orientation” of selling.

A series of customer questions that you absolutely MUST put in your arsenal during a slowdown. (If you get these, they will change your perspective of professional selling.)

How to be relevant to your prospect. This strategy works in good times and slow times, but if you don’t understand “Value Relevance” then you’ll be pushing a rope uphill.

What the “Imaginary Budget” line is inside companies. Do you know some people in companies are not hindered or limited by budget. If you’re getting the objection, “It’s not in the budget,” you’re talking to the wrong person.

How to inventory your assets. (You have assets you don’t know you have). But its’ hard to leverage something that isn’t identified. We’ll give you 5 ways to do this. You’ll be pleasantly surprise and inspired when you make this list.

15 actions items that you will begin implementing the next day. We’ll give you lists to make, thoughts to think and words to say - so that this call will change how you sell during 2008.

That’s more than enough incentive to sign up, so head over and join in on making profits when others aren’t.

The fabulous Sethmeister’s going on tour !

WARNING ! The best part, in my opinion, of this post is near the end, so don’t stop til you’ve read it all.

I recently got an email from a new blog friend, Edith, who’s located way out west and associated with SFentrepreneur, the host for this event.

Seth Godin’s doing a free call with them and the only requirement beyond registration is that you own a copy of Meatball Sundae.

I’ve provided their info below and as everybody who’ll pimp this will do, I suggest that any time you get a chance to hear Seth, you should take it.

Event Details:

Is the New Marketing stuff working for you ?

Are you mixing your meatball business with your marketing sundae ?

Seth Godin, marketing guru and bestselling author has the answer for you.

In his new book Meatball Sundae, the definitive guide to the fourteen trends no marketer can afford to ignore, Seth explains what to do about the increasing power of stories, not facts. About shorter and shorter attention spans and about the new math that says five thousand people who want to hear your message are more valuable than five million who don’t.

Seth doesn’t pretend that it’s easy to get your products, marketing messages and internal systems in sync, but he’ll convince you that
it’s worth the effort.

Ignore it at your own risk and peril. You will be left behind or end up with a “meatball sundae” (a big, ineffective mess).

By the end of an hour, Godin will have us looking at the world we live in very differently - the new rules create new winners (and losers) and there’s no time to waste.

When: April 9th 12:00 at 1:00 p.m (Pacific Time)

What: Conference Call with Seth Godin (Call details will be provided after you sign up)

Follow this magical link to sign up for Seth’s call and there’s a chance to get a copy of Meatball Sundae if you don’t already own a copy.

Join this conference call on and learn directly from Seth Godin himself.

The Fine Print:

1) Participants must purchase a copy of Meatball Sundae in order to register for this conference call. If you are already a meatball fan, great. We will ask you a simple question when you register.

2) If you are new to Meatball, that’s fine too. We’ll let you buy the book and send you the call details and the book.

Mike’s Simple Take On This Event:

1) I’ll have trouble making the event live, as I have a daytime career, so next time you guys at SFentrepreneur need to schedule this type of thing in the evening.

2) I’m in the process of trying to get Seth to agree to a virtual book tour.

Him talking about what his fans want to hear is way more powerful than him talking about what he thinks they want to hear. Simple.

Think of a virtual book tour like this:

When you read a book, you have questions that you wish you could ask the author, you have points you’d like clarified and any author who doesn’t make use of this new way of promoting their book is missing a VERY LARGE, VERY EASY opportunity to satisfy current customers and create evangelists.

Just to show Seth and any other author out there what it would look like, I created a site as an example:

Ask Seth a question about Meatball Sundae

If you’ve actually read Meatball Sundae, stop by and ask a question. I’ll compile them and send ‘em to Seth. Or remove the page quickly if he emails and asks me to.

I’ve done “several” of these, the last of which was with David Meerman Scott and his viral marketing ebook and every time we do one, the “fans” love it and the author gains an even greater hold on his position in his niche. I’m just starting to post them under the Teleseminars and Virtual Book Tour Categories in the right-hand sidebar.

Simple.

Today we’ll take one of Aesop’s fables and try to use it to teach a lesson to some stupid marketer’s.

There was once a young shepherd boy ( internet marketer ) who tended his sheep ( his ezine list ) at the foot of a mountain near a dark forest.

It was rather lonely for him all day ( plotting ways to extract money from his list, rather than creating unique, remarkable content ), so he thought upon a plan by which he could get a little company and some excitement ( rather he looked for affiliate offers to send out at a rate of 20:1 over content ).

He rushed down towards the village calling out “Wolf, Wolf,” ( he sent out offer after offer ) and the villagers came out to meet him, and some of them stopped with him for a considerable time ( they read his crap for a week or a month ).

This pleased the boy so much that a few days afterwards he tried the same trick, and again the villagers came to his help ( in other words, the fool though he could just send offer after offer and not try to educate, entertain or enlighten his readers ).

But shortly after this a Wolf actually did come out from the forest, and began to worry the sheep, and the boy of course cried out “Wolf, Wolf,” still louder than before ( which means everybody got tired of being pummeled with crappy offers and unsubscribed from the list/ezine ).

But this time the villagers, who had been fooled twice before, thought the boy was again deceiving them, and nobody stirred to come to his help. So the Wolf made a good meal off the boy’s flock, and when the boy complained, the wise man of the village said:

“A LIAR WILL NOT BE BELIEVED, EVEN WHEN HE SPEAKS THE TRUTH.”

The moral to today’s lesson is one you need to learn, if you’re going to have an ezine in today’s world of webbiness:

You absolutely must provide unique, creative, maybe even remarkable content at a ratio of 4:1, I’d prefer 7:1, over offers, if you’re going to cultivate a relationship with your list, which will enable you to harvest the fruits of your labor, which is that list buying from you when you make an offer of a product or service that’s relevant to the topic of the ezine.

I have unsubscribed from multiple lists over the last 6 months because, it seemed, that the ezine owner had forgotten what his/her purpose in life was.

Either that or Glenn Frey, of The Eagles, was right when he said: ” Words are not a replenishable resource. “

Bloggers and ezine owner all over the world are finding this to be true, as they let their blogs die and/or pummel their list with offers, because they ran out of things to say.

For those of you out there who subscribe to multiple ezines, do yourself a favor and see if you can remember the last time an issue actually contained some viable, unique, creative content. If you can’t remember, use the unsubscribe link and use the time you used to use reading all that trash as time to create your own unique, creative, remarkable content … and then sell it !

I’m grilling my good friend, Tony Laidig, The Public Domain Expert, Thursday night, March 13th on a teleseminar.

I’ll be squeezing and wringing every drop of info out of him that I possibly can about finding and using works in the public domain.

If you’re a blogger or product creator of any kind, you need to be on this call. Tony’s also got a special deal on some of his best selling products just for my friends.

Head over to the site and find out what The Public Domain Expert knows that you don’t know … but need to know !

When Bill Caskey speaks, you should listen, even if your name is E.F. Hutton.

I recently had the chance to talk to Bill about sales and marketing during an economic downturn.

He and his team are doing a teleseminar about this same topic on March 27th.

If you choose to invest in yourself and your future by attending this teleseminar, here’s some of what you’ll discover:

• The phases of a slowdown so you can determine where your clients are in it. (You can’t know where you’re going until you know where you are).
• The five economic trends that a well-known economist, who will be on the call, says will influence people into a slowdown.
• The “Fundamental Shift” you need to make in order to get your head right in your dealings with prospects and clients.
• The five elements of the “Buyer Psyche” that will help you understand his/her motive better.
• A selling strategy that will help you detach emotionally and think clearly so you always know what to do next. (And you stop getting in the way of the sale).

Over the next few days I’ll give you more advice on what to do and what to not do to prosper during an economic downturn.

I highly recommend that you take 15-20 minutes and listen to my interview with Bill.

You can listen thru the web audio player.

Back on Tuesday, March 4th, I was fortunate to be the host of a teleseminar about The New Rules of Viral Marketing with thought leader David Meerman Scott.

During the 60+ minutes we were on the phone, David answered a multitude of questions about viral marketing.

You can download the entire mp3 or you can listen in, thru your computer, on a webcast player, your choice.

By listening in, as I grill David about viral marketing is:

• Professional versus amateur productions
• Viral marketing for services versus products
• Finding time to blog, visit other blogs and leaving comments
• How corporations should approach viral marketing
• Whether or not to bother with audio and video content
• How to allocate funds for viral marketing
• How to organize content on your website
• Social networking and viral marketing - How they can coexist
• What’s next in the field of viral marketing
• How to avoid the major mistakes in viral marketing
• How technology works for and against viral marketing campaigns
• What viral marketing is and isn’t

Download the mp3and listen on your iPod or listen thru the webcast palyer, but don’t miss this opportunity to listen in and learn from the guy who wrote the book.

EDIT: Yes, I was getting over the flu and my voice was low and scratchy. Thanks for asking.