Kalzumeus Podcast Episode 6: Teaching As Marketing

Happily, there are many ways to productize your relationships with customers or your expertise as a consultant.

[Patrick notes: The transcript below has my commentary inserted like this, as usual.]

What you’ll learn in this podcast:

• Why vegetarians do not give great advice on pricing hotdogs, and Hacker News comments about the inadviability of selling information very rarely come from people with actual budget to buy information
• Why having multiple packaging options (for example, at an X / 2X / 5X ratio) increases total revenue from products
• Why you don’t have to be “Internet famous” to build an audience via teaching, and perhaps use that to sell things down the road

If You Want To Listen To It

MP3 Download (~90 minutes, ~82MB) : Right-click here and click Save As.

Podcast format: either subscribe to https://www.kalzumeus.com/category/podcasts/feed in your podcast reader of choice or you can search for Kalzumeus Podcast in the iTunes Store.

[powerpress]

Transcript: Teaching As Marketing

Patrick McKenzie:  Hi to everybody. This is Patrick McKenzie, perhaps better known as better known as Patio11 on the Internets. Welcome to the, I think, seventh edition of the Kalzumeus podcast. [Patrick notes: 6th!] I’m joined here by special guest Nathan Barry, author of “Authority,” founder of ConvertKit, and a guy who has a few other things in his expanding product empire.

[Patrick notes: If you sell software, information, or consulting services, take a look at ConvertKit.  I started using it recently for one of my businesses.  It bakes a lot of acquired smarts into an email marketing workflow tool.]

Nathan Barry:  Thanks for having me.

Patrick:  Thanks very much for being here. I think we’re probably going to be talking about info products today, primarily. Let’s ask the obvious question first. Do you like the term “info product”?

Nathan:  I think it’s a little degrading. I tend to just refer them as courses or books. “Info product” always brings up the scammy Internet marketer.

Patrick:  Right. The whole “make money online” niche.

Nathan:  Right, exactly. I just try to write things and teach things that provide value. “Info product” doesn’t demonstrate that very well.

Patrick:  That’s something I totally agree with. I try to call mine “productized consulting” because the book was like a consulting engagement except delivered with less of my hours of unique attention attached to each delivery. I think you were also a consultant before you got into being a publisher, right? How did the arc of that transition go for you?

Nathan:  I did some freelancing in college, and then after I left college, I did a year freelancing full time. That worked pretty well for me, but then I went on an extended five or six week international trip. Didn’t do any work. Came back. It was the beginning of 2009, and there was a recession going on in the US, so nobody wanted to work with me then. I ended up taking a job leading the design team at a local startup, and...

For the full transcript see here.