Episode 209 - David Walsh on Creating Your Passive Income Product

Transcript

Susan Bratton: Welcome to DishyMix. I’m your host, Susan Bratton, and on today’s show you’re going to get to meet David Walsh. David Walsh is the co-founder of a company called Dangerous Publishing, and he has a program, a product, a solution called M6. And it’s a solution, a platform, a series of integrated tools for you to create your own information product and publish it so that you don’t have to be the technical genius that has to figure out how you’re going to put everything together. He and his co-founder, Derrick Johansson, have figured it out for you. And when I learned about these guys and I looked at the laundry list of essentially the foundation of their product, M6, I thought “Ugh, god, if we only had this a couple of years ago we would’ve just bought this instead of covelling together all our stuff and trying to figure out how to make it work.”

It’s absolutely the latest and greatest technologies pulled together for someone who wants to take their knowledge and turn it into a product, but who maybe knows about digital marketing but doesn’t know about all the, you know, membership sites and the payment programs and which theme to buy and how to do a landing page, how to generate landing pages and all that kind of sticky technical stuff that there are tools that can do it, but they’re not always all synchronized together. And so we’re going to talk with David today about how he built this, why he chose what he chose, what the M6 platform does and how you can take your ideas and turn them into, he likes to call it passive income, we’re going to argue about that. So lets get David on the show. Hey David, welcome to DishyMix.

David Walsh: Susan, thank you for having me. I need to hire you for our marketing department because that’s probably the best description I’ve ever heard of our product and our course.

Susan Bratton: Oh good.

David Walsh. Seriously.

Susan Bratton: I’m really glad. Thank you.

David Walsh: I really appreciate that. Absolutely.

Susan Bratton: So your customer is a person who – go ahead, tell us.

David Walsh: Our customer is what we’re finding in the patters that we’re seeing is it’s someone who wants to turn what they know or turn some kind of expertise or knowledge into a product, into an asset. And in most cases – and this surprised us in the beginning – in most cases they’re someone who’s transitioning from a job from, you know, a more traditional career and there’s a lot of reasons that they’re ready to make that move and to build something that’s an asset and to free up their time. So it’s someone who, you know, understands products matter and understands that marketing alone will not get them what they’re looking for and is willing to, you know, do what it takes and just doesn’t want to suffer through the technical madness to get there.

Susan Bratton: Yeah, and that’s really what it is. It’s technical madness. There are so many choices when you’re trying to figure out membership sites and do you do it on a blog or how do you generate your landing pages, you know, what themes do you use, what’s SEO optimized, you know, what shopping cart do you use, you know. Like all of that stuff is just totaling overwhelming. So what I want to do is go through what M6 is. Explain it and then lets go into what the tools are and how they work together. Like, what are all these components that one needs even before they create the actual product.

David Walsh: Absolutely and, you know, that’s a big question. I’ll try and keep it to a simple answer. M6 is an end-to-end start to finish process for publishing information in a profitable way and in a way that is as passive as it can be and as systematic and as automatic as it can be. So it’s a combination of pretty substantive course materials, actual, there’s a full book length of content in there for those who are interested explaining why it all works, why it all makes sense. But the real meat of it and the value of it is answers. It’s decisions that have already been made by us while we figured all the stuff out. So it’s pairing the ideal tools for publishing every step of the way that information, you know, to the market and not simply presenting everyone with options and more options. The last thing we need is more options, but presenting people with answers and ways to move forward. So it’s a course, it’s a community, but most importantly it’s a set of one, two, three simple instructions and clear directives to get your product on the market in the lowers risk most straightforward way possible.

Susan Bratton: Before we go into the actual platform, which is actually the question I asked you so I’m changing my mind, at a high level could you outline what you think is the flow or the process for someone who has, you know, a skill set or a capability and they want to create an information product. What that process that they go through that you teach them to go through?

David Walsh: Well, you know, someone who actually has a skill set or is bringing some kind of expertise or just knowledge to the game, they’re in the best position possible as opposed to someone who just wants a certain outcome, who just likes the idea of making a product. And, you know, there’s a process that we take people through that essentially helps them turn everything in their head and everything in their past, you know, career history or work experience, past problems solving and so on, we help them turn that into an actual, into a course or into a book, and you know, what we found is working with our own authors within our publishing company is there’s a very formulaic way to do that that doesn’t produce formulaic products.

It just simply produces very well structured products that are, you know, a strong way to communicate any kind of knowledge. So we have a very, very clear set of instructions and tools and templates that help you capture and articulate and, you know, organize whatever it is you know into something that the marketplace will value and can see, can easily see the value in.

Susan Bratton: So a process, when a customer signs up for M6 – and I want to give a URL here by the way. It’s a bit.ly link, bit.ly/M6Method. Go to that link ‘cause that’s my link if you will. And that’s a capital M, the number 6, a capital M-e-t-h-o-d. So it’s bit.ly/M6Method. So when a person goes there how do you take them through the process? Do they first have to, you know, like what do they have to do? They know what their product basically is going to be, so what do they do next?

David Walsh: In many cases that’s true, and you know, the 6 in M6 is for the six phase process that we’ve, you know, laid out to go from idea to profitable product that sort of runs for itself. But the beauty is if you’re bringing some kind of knowledge or expertise to the game, you’re essentially skipping the first third of the course. You know, you do a light review of the competitive landscape and you really get a sense of where the opportunity is and make sure that there’s people looking for the thing that you hope to create and the value that you have.

But very quickly we take that person into creating the product and to shaping what they know into something that they can sell and communicate very well. So it starts basically with a brainstorming exercise to elicit, you know, the things that you know that are valuable and turn that into something that is substantive, that it high quality and that is still framed around a novice, someone who doesn’t have, you know, the expertise that you have. And, you know, we try and get very niche with this…

Susan Bratton: That’s what I was going to say…

David Walsh: You know, we try and solve very niche problems [inaudible].

Susan Bratton: I call it finding your niche.

David Walsh: Yeah, absolutely. I mean the first step, you know, if you don’t have that, the beauty is we are publishers first and foremost. We have a publishing company, and because of that, you know, in many situations we’re working with experts that have knowledge that we don’t have, and that’s what we enjoy. So even if you don’t personally have this kind of expertise or knowledge to bring to it, you can do it with someone else, and we’ve seen a lot of people be very successful. No matter what we’re, you know, we’re viewing you as a publisher, and sometimes you’re publishing yourself, but you can just as easily publish, you know, someone else that you know or that you’ve worked with.

Susan Bratton: Okay, so I’ve reviewed the competitive landscape. I’ve come up with my product idea. What step am I on?

David Walsh: If you’ve come up with your product idea you’re basically creating the product. You’re in a position where you are shaping the product and, you know, we like to focus on something that our people call, like, minimum viable product, right. Create the least that you need to go to market and find out if people are buying it or if people value it. So the goal is not to kick off a, you know, six month process of creating the most elaborate product you can. I mean most people don’t have time for that honestly.

Susan Bratton: It’s agile development.

David Walsh: Absolutely, it’s very agile, it’s very iterative and the entire, you know, tool chain that we show you how to use, it’s the anti, you know, it’s the anti e-book, right. It’s something where as you change the product, as you grow the product over time, you can quickly go in there and update things. It doesn’t just go stale the moment you put it out. It’s not like putting a book on the shelf. So that’s really important ‘cause it allows you to put out, you can essentially sell your rough drafts because a lot of times if you’re good at what you do or if you can really solve a problem for someone you don’t need to solve it in a polished way. You just need to give them, you know, the least they need to get the value that you have, and it’s an important way to get to market that’s faster than anyone else seems to teach.

Susan Bratton: Right. Otherwise you futz around forever and you never get your product shipped.

David Walsh: Absolutely.

Susan Bratton: Uh huh.

David Walsh: Absolutely. It’s a good way to get past the paralysis that a lot of people feel in, you know, calling something done.

Susan Bratton: What’s next?

David Walsh: So I mean once you’ve actually created the product, I guess the second most important part of this that, I would say the product creation is really the meat of it and that’s where a lot of the tools come in. But equally as important is the goal is not to bring people into a life of full time marketing. The goal is to package up all, you know, value into a product and have that sort of, that’s an investment. So you’re not a success if you have to then market this for the next five years non stop, 50 hours a week. So we really focus on defining the marketing message and materials as much as you can all at once, and then putting that in the hands of people who, you know, are marketers and who are better at that than you ever will be.

So, you know, we have, it’s affiliate marketing at the end of the day, but it’s very, very different than what most people might, you know, have experienced with affiliate marketing. You know, a lot of people have tried that. We really control the message and by controlling the message you can, you make sure it doesn’t get away from you ‘cause that can, you’d be shocked how fast that can crush an otherwise successful product if, you know, if someone gets a hold of it and starts to promote it in a way that’s just completely outside of what you ever would do.

Susan Bratton: Like scam promotions.

David Walsh: Absolutely. And it happens all the time…

Susan Bratton: Keyword ranking scam promotions.

David Walsh: Absolutely. Absolutely, and we’ve solved that. And we’ve solved it because I need to solve it for my own products because I didn’t want, I saw it happen, you know, early on with an early product and I realized, you know, these things can’t get away from you ‘cause once you lose your brand and lose your message you lose your income. You just, you lose your value.

Susan Bratton: How did you solve it?

David Walsh: You solve it, you know, we actually, this whole part of the course we talk a lot about Barack Obama and how he controlled his message in his presidential campaign, and this system’s actually modeled very closes after how he did it, how he empowered his grassroots movement, which is every single detail of his campaign and of his message was rigidly defined and very easily shared in ways that people could use it. So, you know, we basically focus on letting, you know, showing you how to make everything you will need to make as simply and directly as possible to empower people, to be the marketers for you, to be your marketing voice without giving up that control and taking that risk.

So we create very, very robust affiliate hubs that have all these resources, which is exactly what the presidential campaign had. You can go there and get anything you wanted, and it just worked. I mean apparently it worked. I think he was elected president. So yeah, that’s really what we do. We control the message and we’ve come up with, you know, a great set of tools and templates that ensure that you don’t have to recreate all of the little details, because there is so much beneath the surface that you’ll just uncover as you go, and it’s a daunting task, but we’ve really stripped it down and, you know, taken care of 90% of the work.

Susan Bratton: You have a branding package in M6 for visual elements. You have productshoppro.com for creating product imagery. You’ve got the M6 affiliate hub where you can find quality partners that will get started with the assets you’ve created so you keep control of your branding.

David Walsh: Absolutely, yeah. I mean basically the affiliate hub is everything. That’s where everyone goes to be empowered, if you want to run a promotion. If you want to share ad media, if you want to share your email blasts, all the things that they will use to market your product, that’s where you centralize it all and keep it all in order. And it’s great because once you get this up and running – it doesn’t take much time at all – I’ve been on Facebook or on Google and seen ads for a couple of my products that I didn’t run. I’m not running these Google ads. I’m not running these Facebook ads. But the verbiage is mine, and that’s powerful. Because I don’t look at it and say, “Oh god, what are they doing. They’re destroying the brand.” It’s actually people, because I’ve defined that up front, they’re doing, they’re basically out there, you know, preaching out gospel and it’s a beautiful thing to see happen.

Susan Bratton: And now going forward what would be the next step in this six-phase process?

David Walsh: The last piece, you know, everything we just talked about is really, feeds into the last part, which is automating the business, and part of automating it is empowering people to work on your behalf and the other half of the automation is having the right tools in place to basically turn into a machine and to have it run, you know, passively ‘cause, you know, passive income, if that’s what you’re looking for, you know, requires tools that enable, you know, passive operations. It doesn’t mean your business is dormant, it just means it’s running without you.

So and everyone understands that, but the details of getting all the systems clicking together and getting, you know, all the tools talking to each other seamlessly without your intervention, it’s extremely complicated. It really is, and not because it’s the most sophisticated, but because some of these tools are not built, none of them are worked, built to really work together. So you’re sort of cobbling things together in the most intelligent way possible and it can either turn to a complete disaster or it can actually be a really elegant system if you do it right.

Susan Bratton: So lets go through some of the basic components that someone would need if they wanted to publish their own information product. They’ve got to have a landing page generator, they’ve got to have a shopping cart, they need a membership site.

David Walsh: Sure.

Susan Bratton: Go through that list for me so that people get a sense of all the different pieces that you’ve pulled together.

David Walsh: Yeah, absolutely. Basically if you want to bring something to market successfully you need to, you know, at the base level, you know, you need the backbone. You need the right hosting provider. You need the right content distribution networks, something like Amazon S3, and setting that up is a little odd. You know, we basically use Word Press as the foundation for all of this as the product itself is delivered with Word Press, but we take that in a very different direction. We use Word Press Multi Site, which very few people actually use and it’s the tool that powers millions and millions of blogs on wordpress.com and it allows you to have many products that are all managed centrally, so that distinction is huge.

It’s the difference between having to reinvent constantly and just having sort of a scalable product framework. We use something called Optimize Press and Wish List Member; we sort of marry those together to handle the protection of content and the drip of content over time, as well as launching, doing evergreen launch cycles. And all these tools they do a little bit. They all bring a little bit to the game. But…

Susan Bratton: You just said two concepts that not everyone might know about. You just said drip system and evergreen. So go back and explain what those are, and also what you’re really talking about is creating a blog where you market your product – you can write about it, you can have it for sale there, there can be a shopping cart integrated with it, right – and when you sell someone something they can become a member of…

David Walsh: Right.

Susan Bratton: your blog…

David Walsh: Right.

Susan Bratton: so that when you add new content it’s protected behind a firewall and only people who paid can see what you’re adding in and that blog can be audio, video, downloadable e-books and workbooks or actual blog post content, right?

David Walsh: Absolutely. And those three things, if you combine those three things you just mentioned, which is evergreen content, sequential or drip content and the access model, they’re critical for a few reasons. The evergreen and drip model are critical because, you know, you don’t want to have to sort of rethink your business, rethink your marketing strategy every quarter or every day. You want something that is as relevant tomorrow as it will be a year from now, and you want that to be true for you content as well as for your marketing message that’s part of your, you know, affiliate hub.

So the concept of evergreen, it’s, doing it is really just a matter of shifting your mindset and following some very strong rules to ensure everything you do is evergreen, but it also requires the right software, the right tools and the right setup. And sequential content is the same thing. That’s a way to draw out a sale over time. If you, our own course is, you know, delivered sequentially ‘cause there’s a lot to consume, but it also keeps people with you and it sort of paces the sale out over a period of time, and again, that’s a great way to sort of keep things going in the background passively rather than having to, you know, just give it to them all at once.

Susan Bratton: So there’s two things about a drip system, I just want to add a point to what you’re saying…

David Walsh: Sure.

Susan Bratton: too, ‘cause I’m hearing you talk and I know that I want to fill a couple of gaps in.

David Walsh: Of course.

Susan Bratton: When you build your information product you can think about it as being something that you’d make in modules – that’s what David was saying about how he walks you through the six phases, it’s M6. You can think about it being modules and you could deliver those over time as a person, you know, completes them. So think about it being temporal, this week or this month you’re getting this content. So that’s one way to drip content. Another thing about a drip system is that you can actually have a continuity program, so instead of selling someone something for $97 or $999, you can sell them something that’s $97 and $17 a month thereafter, and then you give them new content each month, so that’s also the idea of drip and continuity coming together in a financial model. So I just wanted to put a point on that.

David Walsh: No, you could not be more dead on. I mean anyone who’s ever had a gym membership that they didn’t use or, you know, a subscription to Netflix they never used, understands the power of continuity because, you know, once you’ve sort of made that commitment you leave it in place, and whether or not you sort of use the value. It’s important, some of the best products out there, I can think of a few products that are six figure earners that there are essentially 100 emails that are dripped out, one a day for 100 days, and the power of that is the daily drip. Otherwise it’s just, you’re just giving someone a Word document with 100 items in it, and there’s a perceptual kind of angle to it that adds some value to what you’re putting out on.

And, you know, what is really important about the membership or the access model, rather than just giving someone an e-book or anything like that, is every time someone wants to come back to your product, once someone buys they’re coming back to your store.  They’re coming in to your environment and you can then cross sell and up sell them to the things that you’ve released, and it’s so powerful because otherwise you have to bring them back in any time. You have to say, “Hey, come back. Come check out what we have.” But if they’re consuming your product and valuing your product in the same environment where you can show them the value and sell them new things or up sell them into things, that’s huge. That’s a huge, huge way of keeping your business going and to scale it and to grow it without really having to do too much marketing.

Susan Bratton: A quick question on that. What’s the email infrastructure that’s part – is there an email infrastructure that’s part of M6?

David Walsh: There is. There is. Yeah, there’s a tool. The one that we found was best was AWeber at the time, and we’ve experimented with all of them and they all have their quirks, but part of the criteria for choosing any tool is the interconnectivity with the other tools and finding the best integration. So AWeber with its automated [inaudible] follow up items or follow up emails, that all ties into wish lists, so the moment someone becomes your customer you can kick them, kick off a, you know, certain follow up cycle that’s intended to lets say up sell them to a different tier or to just give them the product content over time. It’s really critical to have that; it’s basically your marketing machine and your way to communicate passively or in an automatic way to all your customers. So it’s very important. You don’t want to ever be actually sending one off emails.

Susan Bratton: Exactly. Okay, so we have the optimized press, the M6 theme, wish list member, which makes it a membership blog so you can put a door on the front of your blog that people have to pay to access. You have the asset creation so once you’ve got your product you also have the ability to create the marketing assets for it.

David Walsh: Right.

Susan Bratton: You have a partner area where you can get people to promote for you and you can promote for them. And then what about the shopping cart, the money piece of it? Are you, how are you handling the commerce and the…

David Walsh: Right.

Susan Bratton: you know, PayPal and all those things, right?

David Walsh: Don’t ever say that word to me.

Susan Bratton: I said it on purpose because I know you’re a PayPal hater.

David Walsh: I am. I am a, I’m a hater through and through. Every night I go to bed and I scratch their name on the wall with a knife. I’ll be honest, and I’m glad you brought this up because as important as using the right tools is – and it is particularly relevant here – is making the right decisions that might not seem like major decisions at the time. For instance, and I think I mentioned this to you before Susan, is the decision as to who processes your payments for instance or what shopping cart you use. It might seem trivial, especially if you’re selling a small product or a first product, but I promise you it can be one of those things that does keep you up at night because you made the wrong decision.

There have been cases, there’s actually a massive – I don’t want to slander anyone – but PayPal we mentioned. I can tell you from our own experience that situations can arise with them where you can make five figures overnight because your product was successful and then not be able to touch it for six months. That’s the kind of thing that can happen just by not making a few small moves or taking a few steps, if you know, you know, do work with them, to prepare for that. And there are these sort of face smack moments that just can halt your business in its tracks and can just crush you. And we’ve, you know, we’ve dealt with a lot of that, and the reality is, you know, there are right decisions to be made.

There are, there are ideal providers for the stuff. There’s a best shopping system, and I see every single day from people, I see them making the wrong decisions and paying for it. And, you know, both with their time and their stress, but you know, from their wallet too. It’s, I hate to watch it, you know, and I wish people would just listen to us about this.

Susan Bratton: Well you have to earn peoples trust by, you know, showing them that you’re building a really quality system that works.

David Walsh: Absolutely.

Susan Bratton: So what do you use for merchant transactions, and how does a person process their JV partner and affiliate payments as well through M6?

David Walsh: Right. So there’s basically two tiers. The one that most people have heard of or have already started using sort of on the low end is Click Bank, and Click Bank is a great marketplace and handles a lot of the affiliate payouts and a lot of the details for you. The trouble is it’s hard to get premium priced products on Click Bank. There’s sort of an approval process and you can’t do that when you’re selling something that’s expensive. So when you sort of want to play with the big boys and sell something of greater value, the combination that we use is one shopping cart, which many people know of, and there’s a provider called Power Pay or they’re also known as E Online Data, and they are, you know, after much struggle with companies like PayPal and experimenting with others, these guys are great. These are some of the biggest names use, some of the biggest launches that, you know, people might know of, use these guys.

You call them up and they know the business, they know what’s going on, and if you can set the terms with them early, even if you’re brand new, which is important, if you’re brand new to the industry you don’t really have a track record of payment processing, and that can really hold you back unless you find someone who gets that, who understands that, you know, you can make good money overnight in this industry and they have to be set up to support that and to trust that. So authorized.net is basically who they talk to, Power Pay speaks to authorize.net, which is sort of the plumbing behind all of this, and it all sort of ties together nicely. It all hooks into Wish List and it creates this pretty elegant machine that can run your business and handle all the money aspects and things like that.

Susan Bratton: All right. I need to collect my thoughts here because we’ve really laid a lot on a person, especially somebody who wants to, you know, they’re thinking, “Oh, I’d like to create an e-book, and I’d like to, you know, sell that to my fans, followers and subscribers. I want to build an email database…

David Walsh: Sure.

Susan Bratton: and I want to, you know, start mining my expertise for profit, you know. I’m working full time and this is something I’m going to do on the nights weekend, and when I can sneak it at work.”

David Walsh: Right, right. No, I’ve been there. Absolutely.

Susan Bratton: So could a person who isn’t technical, like maybe somebody who can, you know, set up a simple Facebook page or someone who can use web apps…

David Walsh: Right.

Susan Bratton: If there’s somebody who knows a bit about digital marketing and who has some expertise and can use, you know, media, like they could use Base Camp, but they may not be able to use…

David Walsh: Sure.

Susan Bratton: you know, something a little harder than that. Could that person effectively use M6 or does it take someone a little bit more – like do you need to be a young technical dude to use M6, like you and Derrick are? Or could, you know, somebody who’s maybe like a fitness trainer or a holistic healer…

David Walsh: Right.

Susan Bratton: or a whatever, like where’s your real sweet spot in the marketplace?

David Walsh: Yeah. No, I mean I like how you phrase that because you don’t need to be a young sort of brash tech savvy dude to use M6. You need to be that to build it and to figure it out to begin with. So you’re basically, the whole purpose of this, like I said for a publishing company you need to simplify this because you’re not working with technical experts. You’re working with people who are the experts in the most random of field, and, you know, they don’t want to learn these things. It’s a stupid use of their time to use these, to learn these tools and to get into the details. So you know, that’s the whole point of it.

We basically needed to create a model, a replicable way of doing this, and the result is these I would call them IT of simple instructions to set up all these very complex things because the execution is not hard. The doing is not hard. It’s as simple as, you know, logging into any web account. It’s very simple. You just need to know what are the decisions along the way that will otherwise trip you up. The doing isn’t hard. You’re not writing code, you know. You’re not really getting into the weeds. You just, you know, you’re being constantly presented with these forks in the road. It’s like choose your own adventure, you know, and you need to make the right decision, and we basically proactively made those decisions, you know, so that we can work with experts, we can work with people who just, you know – keep in mind everything that we talked about in the past 20 minutes, all these tools and all the stuff, none of that has anything to do with the actual value that someone wants to put out into the world with the content, the thing that makes them weak.

So, you know, the more that they can, the more that someone can eliminate all the things that have nothing to do with what’s ultimately going to, you know, make them successful as a product publisher, the more that, the more you can focus on creating the asset, creating the value and getting it out there. Otherwise, you’re just, you know, you’re just becoming a techy, and not a good one.

Susan Bratton: Exactly. Now one of the things that I also know is that once you build your product there is a lot of marketing that has to happen. I mean creating the product and putting it up on a membership site is like the first 20% of the effort.

David Walsh: Sure.

Susan Bratton: Then the other 80% of the effort is actually getting it into the hands of customers, finding customers, getting your offer to convert and finding…

David Walsh: Right.

Susan Bratton: trafficking sources, whether that’s affiliate marketing, JV’s, Facebook pages, whatever. We are, as a DishyMix listener, we know, we know how to find traffic and send it to a page, but it’s the conversion of the page, the conversion optimization of the page that ultimately is the thing that’s most important. So and the way that landing pages that sell online products, the way that works is that it’s a constantly moving target, it’s an arms race.

David Walsh: Right.

Susan Bratton: There’s always a new, you know, Ryan Dice says you’ve got to have the thing on the left and the iPath on the right and the, you know, blah, blah, blah.

David Walsh: Right, right.

Susan Bratton: “You’ve got to have captions on your thing and you got to,” like there’s constantly this updating of this. So two things: number one – and I know we’ve got to keep our answers tight here, I totally understand that…

David Walsh: Sure, sure.

Susan Bratton: ‘cause we’ve gone on for a while, but it’s good stuff.

David Walsh: Yeah, absolutely.

Susan Bratton: How would you handle conversion optimization and web analytics around your, the pages that are created on the optimize press site, and then what do you do to help people understand how they can go out and do the hard work, which is marketing? Is that any part of your domain outside of the affiliate hub or not?

David Walsh: No, and I’ll tell you why. That’s a very conscious decision from day one. The fact is there are, there’s an entire industry teeming with people who are experts at that, and those people in the same way that we don’t want, you know, you to become a marketer through this whole process, to have that be your, sort of your full time gig, they also aren’t the person that the marketers, the real marketers, the ones out there doing this for a living and are passionate about it, they don’t likely want to create product that might not be, you know, where they come into the equation. So we’re basically bringing together two sides of this and working off of both, kind of both side’s strengths.

So yes you want to be very conscious of what works and what doesn’t, what converts and what doesn’t, but the majority of that is simply, you know, monitoring what works and what doesn’t as partners start to bring people to you and send people to your offer and share that with them and create a feedback loop and say, “Hey, you know, this ad converts better than this ad we’ve noticed.” Or, you know, “This approach seems to work very well,” and your job is not marketing; it’s sharing the insights of what marketing works. So it’s a feedback loop between you and your, you know, your marketing army and that can be automated.

You basically just create, part of your hub is centralizing the knowledge that they’ll need to sell your product. So no, we are not a marketing course. We are not, and we could teach marketing and be very different than anything, you know, than anyone’s heard, but that’s not where we are right now. It’s not what we’re interested in. So a lot of people, you know, have a good grasp of marketing. You don’t need to be a top tier expert to do really well selling the stuff and to get a product out there and profitable. Sort of a functional grasp and the understanding that you need to work with the right JV’s, that can be enough if the product is there and everything else is in place.

Susan Bratton: Okay. So if you want to check this out you’d go to bit.ly/M6Method, and the M’s are capitalized ‘cause bit.ly is fussy about that, which I didn’t realize at first.

David Walsh: It is, I know.

Susan Bratton: It is fussy about that. And tell us how much it costs and how people can pay for it, because it’s not a big investment in the grand scheme of things. If you were going to go out and spend a year figuring out how to cobble all this together, the time that you would waste trying to make all this stuff work together would take you a year and then you’d end up still choosing exactly what David put in M6, honest to god.

David Walsh: Yeah.

Susan Bratton: Like, I know what the stuff is out there and I felt like when I saw this, like, the minute I saw it I thought, “This is exactly what will onramp people quickly. No longer do they have to go to one shopping cart and try to figure out Infusion Soft and do all this stuff and try to cobble it together themselves.” I think you are in exactly the right place at exactly the right time ‘cause everyone’s doing information products, and you’ve picked a really great suite of tools. So if someone wants to just get started, how much does it cost? I feel like I’m doing a commercial or something…

David Walsh: Yeah.

Susan Bratton: an infomercial for you, and I really, really like what you guys have done.

David Walsh: Yeah, I appreciate it. I mean it’s, you know, our product is $2,000. It’s $1,997, and you can pay for that…

Susan Bratton: It’s totally affordable.

David Walsh: any which way. You know, it’s however you perceive it. I agree.

Susan Bratton: Yeah.

David Walsh: But I have the luxury of hindsight and I know that I am an exceptionally capable person from a design and technical perspective and a business perspective and it still took me two years to find the answers to all these things, not because it’s complicated, but because a lot of it is ass backwards and a lot of it doesn’t work as you’d expect. So it’s almost like the more logical and systematic you are as a problem solver, the more the stuff can baffle you. So it’s, yeah, it’s a very, very wise move if you don’t want to recreate what I’ve, you know, sort of experienced the past couple years, which is just chaos and a lot of wrong turns before the right turns, and you sort of value your time enough to save it a little bit.

Susan Bratton: And you also have payment plans right, you don’t have to…?

David Walsh: Yeah, we break it down into six, three and one.

Susan Bratton: Okay, good. Perfect.

David Walsh: You know, whatever works.

Susan Bratton: I think that helps for people to just to get started, etcetera.

David Walsh: Absolutely. It’s a way to get in there and try it…

Susan Bratton: Exactly.

David Walsh: and sort of see what’s in there.

Susan Bratton: Yeah. All right, well David, congratulations on I think starting one of the smartest things I’ve seen in a long time. I really like what you and Derrick are doing. I really commend you. And I also, I can just tell how systematically excellent you are with the level of preparation that you created for this interview for me to get me up to speed. Like, just the way you educated me, the way you guys gave me the quick download so I could really understand what you were doing and have an appreciation for it, I can tell that that comes through in the product training videos and the way you do that.

So thank you and I wish you much success, and am a true champion of your business and I hope that DishyMix listeners who are thinking that they have a product inside them will feel now empowered to go check it out because the technology might’ve been daunting, and I really don’t think it has to be anymore. The market is mature enough that the solution set that you’ve pulled together into a platform and then put the systematic, you know, like, “Here’s what you do next, here’s what you do next, here’s what you do next,” that’s what people needed. It’s time, and you did it, so thank you.

David Walsh: Hey, well thank you. You’re doing wonders for my ego, but you’re right. The stuff was not possible two years ago. It was much more chaotic, so it is the right time and two years from now it’s going to be drastically different ‘cause it’s going to get a hell of a lot easier, and it’s going to be even easier for people to jump in and sort of take over the markets that right now are only available to the people who can, you know, get through these hurtles. So…

Susan Bratton: It’s true.

David Walsh: I appreciate that. Yeah.

Susan Bratton: There’s a market opportunity, there’s a first mover advantage right now. There’s like a sweet spot where you’ve integrated a toolset, and people who are thinking about their product and they’re not going to do this, you know, agile development, someone else is going to fill that niche and they’re going to miss the opportunity. And…

David Walsh: Absolutely.

Susan Bratton: you know, so I love the concept of getting something out there and then going back and refine. Like, I just put up some videos that I think look like crap of me, but I don’t care ‘cause I know I’m going to go film them again and they’re going to be totally different…

David Walsh: Absolutely.

Susan Bratton: So…

David Walsh: And you know what, they’re out there.

Susan Bratton: They are.

David Walsh: They’re out there and they are, they’re providing the value that they’re supposed to provide.

Susan Bratton: Yes.

David Walsh: It’s critical, and…

Susan Bratton: It is.

David Walsh: yeah. You know, the, there’s this window of opportunity that demands that you get something out there so people can tell you if it’s right, and they can tell you with the purchase or they can tell you with their voice, but the important thing is to start getting those answers and doing it as quickly as possible without losing, you know, sleep, hair or your retirement.

Susan Bratton: Exactly. All right, well lets make…

David Walsh: Thanks so much Susan.

Susan Bratton: Lets make our retirement with our own products, right? Bring our knowledge to the world and create our retirement, ‘cause lord knows we’re not getting retirement in the, you know, companies that we’re working in these days, right?

David Walsh: Yeah, no, I mean it’s all about creating value now. You got to create value instead of sort of pushing around existing value for someone else. So for the people who get that, you know, that’s who wins in the marketplace.

Susan Bratton: All right, well we want you to win. I’m your host, Susan Bratton. You got to meet David Walsh, the co-founder of M6 and Dangerous Publishing. I’m going to give you the URL one more time. I like it when you use my link so that David knows that I’m driving traffic to his products through my show, so if you will use the bit.ly link, bit.ly/M6Method, make the M’s capital, and you got it. All right, I’m your host, Susan Bratton. Have a great day. I hope you enjoyed this, and David thank you so much.