MindValley Labs Internet Marketing Blog

We all know what karma is. What goes around comes around… it’s the law of the uni­verse. Sim­ply put, the more you give, the more you get… or as Robert Cial­dini puts it in the sci­ence of “Influ­ence”, it’s the rule of reciprocity.

Now, we’ve all heard of reci­procity with our cus­tomers. Give them bonuses, sur­prise them, and as we’ve riffed on, basi­cally delight the cus­tomer to get them to love you.

Lets back­track a lit­tle bit. Two years ago we wanted to go into a new niche mar­ket. To test the mar­ket waters, we setup a land­ing page and saw a really great sign up rate. So we started to look for part­ners to help cre­ate a product.

And we hit a wall.

Experts were just not respond­ing to our emails or calls. It was dif­fi­cult to get their atten­tion, much less try to start a part­ner­ship with them. So we put the project on the back burner for a long time.

And then one fine day, I came across this prod­uct “The Secret Six and The Power of Inti­mate Inter­views — Advanced Edi­tion” by Shaune Clarke. If you haven’t already heard of it, the course teaches you how not just to do an inter­view as a bor­ing Q&A ses­sion — it teaches you how to do an inti­mate interview.

But it wasn’t just the tech­niques of doing an inti­mate inter­view that really caught my atten­tion. It was this one line on page 17 that rang the prover­bial bell:

“As An Inter­viewer, You Are In A Rare Posi­tion To Access Experts”

That insight blew me away. I real­ized then what we had been miss­ing… we needed to delight our poten­tial busi­ness part­ners too. So I put aside the time to study the course. Okay, I’ll admit… it did seem a bit dreary at first, lis­ten­ing to 12 hours of audio… but let me tell you it was well worth it in the end.

The guide walks you through every­thing from the power of lis­ten­ing (it’s sur­pris­ing how often we for­get to lis­ten!) to the six dif­fer­ent types of ques­tions (and when to use each type) to draw­ing out best responses from inter­vie­wees. Every­thing is bro­ken down into golden nugget tech­niques for easy consumption.

What is espe­cially help­ful is that every les­son plan links to real life inter­views done by Shaune him­self (the 12 long hours of audio I was talk­ing about), mak­ing it easy to see the prac­ti­cal appli­ca­tion of the strategies.

We began imple­ment­ing the new knowl­edge immediately.

We sent out emails to experts offer­ing to inter­view them. We offered to intro­duce them and their prod­ucts to our mar­ket — for free. All we want is an inter­view and they can tell every­one on our list in their own words about them­selves and their product.

The result?

In one week, the top five lead­ing experts of that niche mar­ket replied back with their inter­est. (not too shabby)

We’ve now used inter­views to approach experts across all our projects, and it’s never been eas­ier. By offer­ing just one inter­view, we get in return:

* access to experts
* cred­i­bil­ity
* back end prod­ucts
* bonus give­aways
* free arti­cle con­tent for our blogs and newslet­ter (where we also get to test the market’s response)
* poten­tial JV partners

…and really, the list goes on.

The more you give, the more you get indeed. That’s the power of karma.

You can check out Shaune’s offer here (recommended).

Last 5 posts by

• VIDEO: Max­i­miz­ing Traf­fic Marks Results and Get­ting Back Links Fast — August 11th, 2008
• 150% More Traf­fic and 133% More Sales From A Few Tweaks. You Can’t Be Seri­ous… Can You? — May 26th, 2008
• The Beach Bum’s Guide to Land­ing Pages — May 5th, 2008
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About the Author

Mike is an internet marketer at MindValley responsible for running marketing tests, designing product launches, and leading an eCommerce project.

Check out other posts by Mike W.

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