Fitness Marketing Interview with Zach Even-Esh

Here's a transcript of personal fitness trainer marketing interview I di with Zach Even-Esh. Zach is the man when it comes to marketing your fitness business and about the colloest dude around. Enjoy!

Chris McCombs: I’m here with Zach Evan-Esh. Zach, what do you do?

Zach Evan-Esh: Right now, I’ve got two positions here, with two different ways of which I’m growing my personal training business. One is through the training of clients, which I do in person through semi-private training groups, and probably the other half, or slightly more than the other half of my income, is coming through the online business, and as we get further into the questions, I’ll talk about the different ones I have. But basically, I’ve got membership websites and products. So, I’m able to have a recurring method of products/income, and then the other method is through various products- books, DVDs, and things of that nature.

CM: What kind of fitness products have you created?

ZE: I started off– I’m trying to think– about three years ago, I started off with a real small e-book, and I’m talking small. It was barely over 100 pages. I’m going to tell you the way I created this e-book. It worked out really well. I had a digital camera (a pretty crappy one I had borrowed from my parents) and would take some regular photos of two kids that I used to train at the time, two clients.

That same summer, I had partnered up with somebody to do a DVD. What the guy did was, after he edited that DVD, he took still frames of each movement that we did. So we had beginning and end shots of the movement, and what I did is I just had a couple of short paragraphs that I would work on whenever my girlfriend at the time was at work. So every night after work, I’d write a couple of pages, and literally, in two weeks, I had this e-book done. So that started out as an e-book, and then down the road, that transformed into a large manual, and right now, I’ve got a variety of products. I’ve got e-books, I’ve got a recurring monthly membership website, I’ve got DVDs, manuals, and the products. Some of the products are all-inclusive kits, and my products range anywhere from $19.95 up to $397.

CM: What are the benefits of trading this products?

ZE: The #1 thing I’ve wanted to do as I started to learn about this, is to do a deal to make money in my sleep, which was extremely important. I look at somebody like my dad, who is definitely a large role model for me, but he worked seven days a week; he runs his own business Monday through Friday; he’s out of the house at 7 in the morning, and he’s home between 7 and 8 pm, then he goes in on Saturday and puts in about a half day of work. It’s really difficult for someone like him– which is pretty much the typical way people make money is by putting in more hours–

The key to having products is, once you create them, they’re just being sold about the world, and you’re making money in your sleep, you’re making money 24/7, and if you’re main focus is some sort of performance coach or fitness coach, you have a lot more clout if you created a product, especially if you’ve written a book, and to say “he wrote the book on it”, people freak out when they hear you’ve written a book. It really raises your standards as a coach, fitness coach, fitness trainer, athletic trainer, as well as the #1 thing is, you want to make money in your sleep.

I don’t believe there’s any reason for people to be working their asses off to exhaustion. I believe that you should enjoy what you do, you should love what you do for work. You definitely have to put in the time, but you should have plenty of time to spend doing the things that you love, and that’s what products allow you to do.

CM: What kind of income potential is there in creating and selling your own fitness products?

ZE: It could be could really be quite unlimited. I know guys like Ryan Lee who are making probably millions per month. People are making hundreds of thousands per month, ten of thousands per day by some of the bigger name guys. You could really create a special niche, and just keep getting your word out, and keep trust, and finding a way. The key is, I believe, if you’re going to make a lot of money, is if you find a way where people literally fall in love with you. They love what you talk about, they love your newsletters, they love what you say, and what happens is, they become so loyal to you, that no matter what you put out, they’re going to buy.

Now, on the flip side of that, you’ve got to make sure that whatever information products you put out, that in my mind I believe that whatever the price is, you’ve got to deliver value of at least ten times greater than what it costs them. I believe it should be a hundred time greater value. We’re in the business of making people feel better, look better, and you’re getting them greater health. There’s no better gift than giving somebody their health, because it’s like it transcends the circle of life. You help them give back to their friends, their family, and of course, themselves.

So, your income potential could really be quite unlimited, and I don’t like to put a ceiling on this, because when you start setting limitations for yourself, what you think about– and I’m big on the spiritual aspect of all of what I do, especially through the Internet– what you think about is what you can easily bring about. So I don’t really like to put any limits on what I can do or on what others can do.

CM: How does one go about creating a membership website like Underground Strength Coach?

ZE: The way this started was, not this summer, the previous summer, Ryan Lee had done an interview with me for Sports Specific. He saw the different style training I was doing, and he wanted to have an interview for Sports Specific. As we started going about the interview, and obviously, we finished the interview in a short amount of time, he started getting his– you know, his wheels were turning. He started to think to himself, “Man, there is so much need for this! Every forum I go to, everywhere I look at, people are talking about this underground style of training. Could we create some sort of recurring product for this?” And we started thinking about this, such as a journal that would be mailed out, and then we thought about possibly an e-journal that would go through e-mail, and then we said hey, the easiest way to do something like this is crank out a bunch of articles and create another membership website, because their overhead would be extremely low. So the way I went into this is we had a partner– we knew exactly what each of us was supposed to do. His part was taking care of the technical aspects and helping with the marketing. My part was getting content through myself and through others. I also went on and did my own marketing.

Before any sort of product is created– this has always been stressed– there needs to be a want and a desire for it. Notice I say a want and a desire; I’m not saying people need it, know what I’m saying? People need to do a lot of things, but there’s no saying they want it. So, how do we decide who wants it? Well, looking at all the forums, the big forums that get tons of visitors, being talked up a lot. So, once we saw that there’s a huge need and desire for it, a want for it. Not necessarily people needed to do this training, but they wanted it, they wanted the information. So we created it, and Ryan’s got a real strong background in these things, and MemberGate, which is the company that we used for the membership website, and he just formatted the whole thing. I don’t have any tech savvy, anything. So, to piggyback on being tech savvy, I outsource all that technical stuff because I like to focus on being creative. If I have to focus on building a website, I’m gonna waste hours, and I’ll lose out on money.  

CM: What are some of the quickest ways to go about trading info products?

ZE: If you want to create an info product, I’d say one way to do it is– and this is a real simple way that I created a book called MMA Experts– I basically wanted to contact about 10 or 12 top-notch strength and conditioning and performance coaches for combat athletes, for martial artists. So instead of me writing a huge book, what I did is I contacted these people individually, and I knew that these people had big lists and big following, so that’s key, because whenever you hear about getting the list– this is important– when you start combining 10 to 12 people, all of a sudden, the “list” grows dramatically. So I contacted these people about the idea I had, told them the benefit that was in it for them, that they’re going to have their links in there, that I’ve got a big following of combat athletes, this is going to get them more exposure, that it’ll always send people back to their site.

So what I did is I basically looked for the best of the best in the field, sent them questions, and we created a compilation manual that now sells. That thing was done in two weeks. Did I take two weeks? I just cranked out a bunch of questions, six, seven questions for each guy, I e-mailed it to him, waited for everybody to reply, and just cut-and-pasted everything into one great big Word document, and boom!– now I’ve got a manual that selling for $67. What did I have to do? I created one article that was going to be one of eleven. And it makes it really easy.

So you could do it where you combine everybody together, make sure you give everybody an affiliate payout (it should be a nice affiliate payout so that they’re excited to become part of it; you always want to make sure there’s a benefit going out to the people that are involved with it), and it’s extremely easy. I’m just creating another product like that, where I just interview other people, and then I send out this information. It’s going to be one of my Real Man fitness products, where I interview others. What do I do? I come up with questions and I find experts in that area.

So, teaming up with a group of people, especially if you’re just starting can make an extremely good, because when you’re just starting, you may only have a couple hundred people on your list. But if it’s 10 or 12 or 15 people together, now we’re talking about 5,000, 7,000, 8,000 people that we can market to, and it just becomes so much easier. It’s an excellent way to start out your first product. Get together with other people. Make sure that they hold a lot of clout and that they’re up-and-comers, or they already are at the top of their game, and it really is so easy. You don’t have to be the perfectionist.

When it’s done, when it’s looking really good, you get some bonuses for it. You always want to have a bonus for these things. If you had ten people you wanted to interview, first they go into the manual, the CD, or the DVD, and then the other two, you say, are the bonuses. This could be done with a book, this could be done for CDs, like audio interviews, and it could even done for DVDs. You have a bunch of people do footage on different things and then you take it to somebody who edits it all down. You play for the editing and the DVD series, or whatnot. It makes it extremely easy and profitable for you in a very fast time. To crank out a project quickly, it’s also another reason to do a compilation product/project.

CM: You were telling me the other day about how you have some keys to edit your DVD, or something like that?

ZE: Yeah. What happened was– this a real funny story. As I was working for a school district two years ago, and this was actually the first DVD I did on my own, and I had done one before that fell through, and we can touch upon that later, it was a great DVD, but it fell through– as far as getting this kid to do things, our school had to do an in-service exhibit, and it had to do with technology. The in-service was being presented by one of the technology teachers at the high school.

After we finished, I had asked the guy– I believe the teacher’s name was Andy– I said “Andy, I got a question for you. Do you know, do the kids in this class create movies? Do you know what software they use?”

He said, “Yeah, we use, um, Sony Wega or Windows,” uh– well, whatever it was, and he said “I actually have a kid in this class who is failing.”

I said to him and his buddies that you guys have to do something to pass this class. “You guys have to do something.”

So he said “All right, we’re going to make a movie.”

These kids went and made their own movie that was like– there’s a show on MTV called Made, and they make into whatever, a singer, a wrestler, some sort of athlete, a prom queen– so these guys did their own Made show. It was like, I want to have a mustache. These kids had fake mustaches. He showed me the movie, and the editing was phenomenal, and I was like “Holy cow!”

It was a senior in high school making movies. I said, “I want to create a DVD, and I was wondering if I can get the information for this kid that you’re talking about.”

So, looking back, this kid that now does all my video editing, he laughs, because he says “Man, that’s the worst way to get a referral! Somebody else needs to make a DVD, I’m going to send you to a kid that doesn’t do his work.”

So I contacted this kid, he got a hold of me and said, “Yeah, I can do this work.” And we made it really simple. He gave me a flat fee and he videotaped everything with a regular camcorder, and then he edited this thing at home. High school kids are really tech-savvy. There’s a tech department in probably every - or a tech class - in probably every high school. Since then he’s been doing all my videos, and the videos are really getting better every year, because now he attends NYU and he’s a film student. So, compared to the first DVD he made for me, these are awesome.

What I do is, when you have someone doing videos for you - there was a time when he’d say, “I’ll have it to you next week,” and he would maybe get it to me two weeks after that. It wasn’t really a big deal, but one thing that Alan Costos [sp?] - he said this could work really cool if you have a deadline, is you could say, “I want this video, I need this DVD edited fully by January 1. If you get it to me earlier I’ll give you –“ he said with one kid he said he’d give him $50 extra if he got it to him earlier. “If you get it to me a day late, I need to take $50 off that. If you get it to me a week late I need to take $100 off that.” Then say, “I’m not trying to be a hard head, but I need to be timely with my projects. This is my business and I need to have it on time.”

The reason I’m brining up a deadline technique that you can use - and I don’t use it with my kid because I get stuff to him really ahead of time and he’s really good at getting stuff to me on time. He’s just a super cool kid. But, I did try another guy who was recommended to me. I had finished a product that I was filming on all throughout the spring time and I gave it to a kid in early - it may be have been late June. I said to him, pretty laid back, “Get this to me as soon as you can. If you can get it to me by August that’ll be cool.”

Well, July passes. August passes. He’s always saying, “I’ll get it to you next week, next week.” What happened is, it never even came. The DVD never came about. It was a product that was specifically slated for the warmer time of the year. Now I had to get the tapes back and give to this regular kid who does my stuff, because he always gets it to me.

But I had decided that - a friend of mine had recommended his buddy and I figured, “Ah, what the hell. I’ll try him,” and now I have that product being worked on in the winter time when it was finished last late spring, early summer.

So, when you’re getting videos done with somebody, you can still be very cool about it and still be a bit firm and have a deadline set, and say, “If you get it done x amount of days early I’ll give you a $50 bonus. If it’s x number of days late, if it’s a day late, or a week late, I need to cut off this amount.” It’ll get people on the ball. What you always want to do is, when somebody gets your DVD’s done for you, ask them to send you two masters, so when you send the one master out to your fulfillment company - or if you’re doing it - you always have that one extra just in case something happens to it in the mail.

That’s how I came about getting the high school kid to do it. Before that, I was contacting Worker’s University, a huge university near here, and the guy goes “You can send me your projects and I can post it on a bulletin board base, but I’m gonna be honest with you, we get hundreds of requests every semester, and there’s no telling what these kids are going to pick up.”

So, in trying to go to a college, what worked the best for me, the best thing that worked was at a local high school, a kid that could do it– and I’m telling you, DVDs don’t have to look beautiful or phenomenal; I’ve seen some of the best– the guys that make the most income in the fitness industry completely do a job not nearly half as good as the first DVD they made in high school, and these people are selling it because content is what they’re after. As long as the content is good; it doesn’t have to have fancy graphics or anything like that on the DVD. Go to a local high school and see if somebody can do it. I’m telling you; I paid this kid per DVD, usually it comes out to $250, which is nothing, because you sell 5 or 6 DVDs and boom! It’s back, and once you start getting good at this, you’re going to– when you do your sale especially, you’re going to be selling 50 or 60 DVDs in one day, so don’t sweat that little drop in the hat, so to speak.

CM: That’s a great story, by the way. How do you go about marketing products?

ZE: My initial way of marketing the products was, and it’s worked really well, I love to write. I really like to write, so I crank out a boatload of articles, and I make sure the articles are related to the products I’m doing, and I send them to websites that get a lot of traffic. Now in the beginning, you may not be able to; some websites won’t take your articles. When I was starting to write articles, I sent it to the websites that I saw the big names were already writing for, and what happens is, let’s say you have a big-name fitness coach or strength coach. His or her name is being searched a lot on the search engines. So when that name comes up, it goes to that website that you’re writing for, even though you may be a newbie and you’ve never even written before, it comes back to you. So I was cranking out articles on a daily basis and sending them to these websites that had a boat load of track with - and this is key - with the target niche that I am selling too, or that’s my niche. So, it helped a lot.

Little by little, as the years went on, and it hasn’t been a lot of years since I’ve been involved in this business, I’ve become a regular, commenter for Q & A for one of the biggest websites out there. The easiest way to get your name out is through the internet. You have to remember that the internet word can travel around the world in one minute, so it’s much more powerful than if you’re just writing for, possibly a magazine, or what not. I’ve found that work just goes out quickly.

I have played around a little bit with press releases. I definitely need to fool around with that more, but I have found I’ve gotten some good traffic coming back to me by just doing some press releases. I feel that I need to do press releases a little more regularly, and it’s something that, if somebody’s coming out with something that’s newsworthy, or you could always find a way to tie it into the news or to the benefit of others using press releases. A real easy way for marketing: get your articles out there.

Of course, for every article you want your byline with an active link. That link might take them back to a product, or that link might take them back to a squeeze page which has some sort of free course, or free e-book that could be viral. So, if they go to, for example, my one squeeze page would be RealManSixTips.com. They go there, they sign up, they get themselves a free e-book. It puts them on my mailing list and now all these guys have this free e-book and Jim is like, “Damn, this stuff is awesome. I’m going to send it out to Sean, Scott, to this person and that guy.” It becomes like the Pay It Forward movie. You do it for three people and those three people do it for another three people and that becomes 18 people, then those 18 people send each person to another three.

So, you need to have ways that your name is constantly being picked up by search engines, and the articles are going to be key. You can definitely use your own search engine optimization keywords. If you know certain words are searched a lot, you want to throw those specific words into your articles. The way for someone to look at that is just go to overture.com, and I believe it’s called “keyword selector tool,” or something like that. They would put in a word, or two or three words, that they think are going to get searched for a lot. You just do a couple of searches and see which one comes up the most. I also see this certain term keeps coming up the most, and I have a product on this, so now I’ll create a few articles on this and send it to websites that have a lot of traffic. Then the search engines pick it up even faster.

So, there’s all kinds of tricks you can do. You can ask certain websites to interview you on that certain topic that would send them back to the project. You can also have an affiliate with somebody that’s got a really big list and you want to give them a big payout. Some people will do - you can say, I’m trying to explain this in a good way - you can contact one person who [indistinct] who you are also very much a follower of and you can say, “I haven’t let anyone know about this new product that’s coming out. Nobody’s an affiliate of it. I was wondering if you would like to become an affiliate and mention it to your list. But, when you mention it - if you mention it to your list, I’m going to have an active link, or a special link inside the order responder forever, that’s going back to your page, or a special product of yours.” So now it becomes, like we mentioned before, win-win.

So, this person is going to say, “You know what, man? This is great because most people call me and they just want to have the interview, or they just want me to help them. But this is a person that’s going to put my specific website, or whatever I ask them to put in their order responder forever.” And you only asked them to promote you once.

I picked that up from an interview that Ronny Lee [?] did with Tommy Knutson [?] and he’s, like, a master at building your list. It just makes so much sense because most people say, “Hey, can you promote my product? Can you promote my product?” You’ve got to always give them a huge benefit because it will come back to you. You’ve got to understand that if you’re asking other people to help you, for marketing or promotional purposes, you’ve got to have a win-win situation there. So that’s another easy way for marketing and it’s in a very powerful way, because it becomes like combining lists.

Another way you can do this is - I’m just getting some ideas through my head, and this happened to me - is I wrote a testimonial for someone’s product. At the bottom of that testimonial was my website link. Every time they use my testimonial, they keep including my link in there. Well, guess what? My subscriber list keeps growing every time they send out an email with my testimonial in it, and it really makes it very powerful, so it’s another way for you to market.

Here’s another. I’m not sure too many people know about it. It’s a real interesting way and it’s really cool, but you can go onto Amazon.com, and let’s say - I’m going to use my product for a specific example - my product [indistinct] so there’s a big book coming out. When an author is releasing a new book and they want to get it onto the number one bestseller list, they get 20 other big name people on there and they have all these bonuses. So, if you buy this $19.95 book you’re going to get, I don’t know, $10,000 in bonuses. Well, here’s what you do. You go to that book, when it’s released on Amazon and you write up a nice review on it. In your review you include your own weblink, and your name on Amazon could be your weblink. So, it could be “review by UndergroundStrengthCoach.com. Now tens of hundreds of thousands of people are seeing that link, and it’s another really cool way that nobody has used to get people to go back to you. You could even create on Amazon.com your own review page of all these books and it’s another way to pick up search engine ranking and to market your own products through a specific website, just by putting that weblink in. So, that’s a really cool way, and these are all very powerful ways to get your name out there.

I don’t think enough people do those things. A lot of people don’t even write articles. You’re not going to - nobody’s going to know what you do unless you’re writing articles and getting your information out there. You’ve got to let people know what you’re doing by putting your information out there.

Last but not least, pick up this idea. This is a really cool idea. YouTube has gotten extremely, extremely popular. People will put up a video on YouTube and will get ranking visitors of over 100,000 people. You could create a mini-commercial for what your product is. You can do it with video footage or with pictures. I have no technical skills at all, but I have a new laptop that I bought over the summer. New computers and laptops, even those that are [indistinct] come with Windows Movie Maker. It’s so freaking easy to click and drag video clips or pictures into a movie, and then just create an intro and then an exit and you have text on there.

So, it could say - and I just released a book called The Picnic Table Workout. Before that I went onto YouTube, and a couple of still photos that I used from the manual and some video clips of picnic table training I put “fitness for man,” and you use all the key words that people would search for, and then we founded PicnicTableWorkout.com. Then they kind of get hyped up. And it’s like a commercial but you don’t even have to pay for it, it’s free.

I’ve seen people that are selling fitness products, they put it on t.v. Yes, it’s very powerful, but YouTube was brought out by Google. It’s massive. People need to do little video clips and little movies on YouTube. It’s so powerful. The other thing is, I make it with my digital camera. I’m not talking about a camcorder, I’m talking about something that you take pictures with. So, it’s so powerful and it’s so easy. Don’t say you can’t do it. I didn’t know how to do any of this stuff. I figured that out and it was so easy. It’s going to be so easy for you.

You’ve got to get your articles out there. You can do press releases. You can partner up with somebody and ask them to promote to their list. Give them an affiliate, as well as putting their link inside your order responder for life. The other you would do is YouTube and get onto Amazon.com and put reviews, especially when someone’s launching a new book. Like I said, I’m with martial arts. If there’s a new, massive book, like a very popular book that’s getting hyped up, that’s going to go to the martial arts community, you can bet your bottom dollar I’m going to be on there writing a review and posting comments on there so everyone who goes there comes across my weblink. So, it’s a very powerful way - or, very powerful ways - that people can market their products.

CM: Those are some great ideas, by the way, Zach. You’ve been featured in a lot of these online magazines and strength training websites. How did you go about getting into those websites and getting articles featured?

ZE: The first time that I got into a magazine was through Men’s Fitness and the way I got into that was I knew a guy who was writing for them on a regular basis. I had asked him, I said, “Do you think they would need any help from the stuff that I do, where I can write it for them?” I said, “I don’t care if it’s an article. I don’t care if it’s maybe even a small paragraph. Anything they need, let me know.”

He said, “I’ll shoot the guy an email, I’ll cc: it to you, and we’ll see what comes about.” The he said, “Just make sure that whatever you put in there, kick some serious ass, because then you’re going to make me look good.”

So, he sent it to the editor of the fitness section and what he did is, little by little they sent me some questions. Almost like they were testing me, testing my knowledge to see what I know. I’d answer them right away - and I wasn’t getting paid for it, but who the hell cares? An international magazine, you don’t need to be asking for money. After a couple of little tips that they would put in the magazine by me, they started asking me questions on a regular basis (which is every month), and then they ended up giving me my own little mini-column, so to speak, and that magazine ended up being Men’s Fitness. And it was called “Featured Strength,” and they would always ask me these questions about how to get extremely strong, and certain movements to put them through. It’s great because your name is always in there.

I’ve got to emphasize to people that when you’re getting into the magazines, make sure you’re all about unleashing all these benefits to that magazine that other magazines won’t get, just because you’re going to be specifically with them. In my case it was Men’s Fitness. I knew I could offer all kinds of special tips on getting stronger and improving their strength, and certain things, and they really like that because that wasn’t in other magazines.

Now, when we were at the [indistinct] boot camp the first time, there was a guy there that was speaking about how to get into the magazines. He said, “Obviously, it’s all about who you know.”

And he’s right. It is all about who you know. But I really broke that barrier down because when a new magazine came out in the martial arts community, I had seen that they had some really poor information regarding strength and condition. I mean extremely poor training. I knew my stuff could shock them and bring them a lot more people.

They were new and when I went to their website they had phone numbers that you would contact the owner of the magazine. You’re not going to find that in other magazine’s websites, because it was a launch magazine. I just knew the magazine was going to be really good. It caught my eye. It was a really interesting martial arts magazine. I was calling the guy, and I actually got to speak to him regularly. I was speaking to the guy - I think I was calling him twice a week, once a week. Without fail once a week, but it wasn’t irregular for me to call him twice a week, and I would introduce myself every time because he couldn’t remember my name. It took him two months to remember my name, this guy was so insanely busy trying to get the magazine launched.

Finally what we did was - through me asking him - my mindset was, “Okay, I’ll just keep calling this guy until he curses me out and says, ‘there’s no f-ing way you’re going to write for us.’” He never told me no, but he was never too excited to talk to me. So, I always called and said, “I was just checking to see if you guys need any space for me to write. Are you short on space? Do you want me to come up with anything? If you need something the night before just let me know.”

He’d say, “Well, Zach, we have a limited amount of space because we need to pay for the magazine through advertisements.” So, we’ve got all these people that are advertising and the people that were paying for advertising were the people that were writing for him.

So, I said to the guy, I said, “Look, I need you to know that I’m not full of shit, man. I really know what I’m talking about, and I’m telling you this is win-win for you.” I kept emphasizing, “this is win-win, and I’m gong to tell you why it’s win-win. Nobody’s seen the kind of stuff that I do out in the magazines. You’ve never seen it. Your magazine will be the only one who has it. I won’t write for anyone else about this stuff. Number two, it is absolutely risk free. You don’t even have to pay me a dime. I will do it for free. I will send you all of my products. You can look at them and this way you can see who I am. I’m not just some guy on the phone, all hyped.”

So, he said, “Okay, how about this?” This was two months after we first spoke was when he finally remembered my name. Figure I’m speaking to this guy five, six, seven, eight times a month and he can’t remember my name, he’s probably getting bombarded with a million phone calls and emails. He said, “That’s a good idea. Send me your products. My son is editing a lot of the magazine and we do a product review. How about this? I’ll let my son review your product. My son is involved in wrestling. He wrestled college. He does jiu-jitsu.”

I said, “Awesome! I’ll send it to him right away.”

He called me back, it must have been that same day that his son got the stuff and looked at it. He said, “Zach, I’m calling you up. My son looked at your stuff and he said, ‘Dad, this guy is the real deal. This guy knows his shit and I’ve never seen anything like this before. We’ve got to get this guy writing for us.’”

So, I’m all pumped up. I swear to god, I was ready to just jump through my ceiling. I was bugging out. I didn’t know what to do, but I was trying to stay really calm and cool.

So, he said, “The way we can do it is I’ll give you one page to write.” They weren’t really sure of the whole format of everything and they were fooling around with ideas, and they were getting back and forth feed. They weren’t sure how I could write because everybody else was - they didn’t have room for me to write still. They wanted me to write a page, but they didn’t have the room because the people writing were paying for advertisements. So, they said, “We’ll do this. If you buy $700 worth of advertising per month - or, actually, per issue, it’s a bi-monthly magazine - we’ll give you an article for,” I think they said three pages.

So, I’m thinking, “Yeah, man. Yeah, man. This’ll be great.” Well, a good friend of ours, Bryan Lee said, “Let me help work out an even better deal.” He had me go back and talk to them about - I can’t remember what it was called, something about their paid membership, because they could have been sending out a bunch of freebies. Their paid membership actually wasn’t that high - oh, it was paid circulation - and it wasn’t that high.

He said, “Why don’t you tell them this, Zach. Why don’t you tell them that you don’t have the money to pay them $350 a month,” which I was really ready and willing to do it, I was going to do it because how better can it be to get into a magazine of your niche?

But instead, I offered this as a trade. I said, “I will put your link inside all our newsletters with your own mini-ad that you want to put in there and that newsletter will go out to all these people who are specifically combat athletes. And I’m going to put it up there every time.”

They got so busy they never even put the ad together for me, and they never even cared about it. Once they saw my first article they loved it. They were getting great feedback from it. So, to make a long story short, I was extremely persistent, and I was basically going to be persistent until this owner told me “no.”

Well, since he never told me “no,” I did all I could, and I only offered to help. That’s all I was calling him for, to help. “Do you need me to do anything for you? Are you short on articles? Are you short on information?” Be cool. Don’t be pushy. Get into people’s space and turn out, you must crank out quality information that really kicks ass, that’s different from other magazines, because they don’t need the same stuff over and over again. They need stuff that’s different. They need stuff that works. And they want variety to represent their magazine in the highest quality fashion.

So I got in there and now I write for this magazine every issue that goes out, which is every two months. But I don’t get paid for it, not a problem. Why is it not a problem? Because every time I write an article, what do I get at the bottom? Same thing I get with every article on the internet. I get a byline. Writing articles is an extremely powerful way to get your clout. People see you writing articles and you’re automatically looked at as an expert. What’s the other thing? I’m the only person in the magazine that’s writing for the strength and conditioning. There’s no one else in the magazine writing about those things. So, they already see.

They can either look at the advertisements in the magazine about strength and conditioning, or they are going to go to the guy who is writing the articles. It’s very likely that they are going to be more influenced with the articles, because with the articles I can make it very personal and I can make it more connected to them. It’s a really - it was a shocker to me to get in there because I had absolutely no connection. I was really - to be honest I was finally expecting the guy to tell me to go screw myself and leave him alone. But it worked out, man.

The one thing you leave with this in mind is that, what’s the worst someone’s going to say to you? No? Okay, what if the guy cursed me out? Big deal. It could happen. I’d rather keep trying than wonder what could have happened. There’s times where I’ve contacted many people who don’t respond, who never reply. You’ve just got to keep trying. This all worked out for me. It’s because I focused on what I wanted and it just manifested itself through the good energy.

CM: What kind of website works best to sell an info-product?

ZE: That’s tough. I’ve got websites that are stand-alone pages. But I’ve also got websites that are on - like a website that has multiple pages. The stand-alone pages are very good in the matter that no body can get distracted. For example, if you go to one of my products, UndergroundStrengthKit.com, that’s all there in on that website. You can’t click and see my bio, you can’t click on action photos, interviews, videos, or anything like that. It’s only the stand-alone website.

If you have a website that has multiple pages and you have, let’s say, JohnSmith.com/fitnessbook, JohnSmith.com/legtrainingbook, you know, and you have all this - people can get kind of confused with all those things. So, what I do is I have my main website and then there’s a store. If they click on the photo which has a short, brief description of the product, it takes them to the stand-alone webpage, the solo webpage. I’ve found that to work pretty well.

Like I said before, you want to avoid the distraction as much as possible so if there are any websites with multiple pages they can end up doing a number of things on your website instead of buying.

CM: How much of the sales and marketing process can you automate, and how do you go about doing that?

ZE: One thing you want to do is you want to have order responders set up for your products. Inside the order responders you can give them instructions, you thank them for purchasing the product, you reinforce the fact that they made a good decision so they don’t feel bad after they maybe spent $50, $25, $400, whatever it is. You can automate several order responders. You follow up maybe a few weeks later asking for a testimonial, things like that. That’s key to being automated.

You definitely want to get a fulfillment company that’s taking care of your product, because you can kill so much time if you’re every day going to the post office. You’re going to the post office, then before you know it you pull off and get something to eat, or you do a little bit of food shopping, then your day is shot. You need to spend your day being as creative as possible and outsourcing little things that don’t need to be required of your to be wasted. I use Vervante.com, but you could use a young high school kid who could burn a bunch of DVD’s and ship them out for you.

Here’s what I say. I have customers that are international. Most people who create products will have that. You want your DVD’s to be playable around the world, so that way if the company - if there’s any glitch in the DVD, boom, they just ship out another one. It makes it so easy with Vervante.

Another thing that you could automate, we’ve got the production which is outsourcing. You want to get those testimonials, or ask for the testimonials through auto responders. You could also have - when people sign up for your newsletter - they might get an autoresponder series where that same day, or a few days later, it has links inside all the responders where it says, “If you really like that free e-book, I’ve got a free e-course. You might want to check out this product of ours.” So, creating autoresponders for your products and through lists, and newsletters, and things like that can really get you very far.

You can outsource absolutely everything. The only thing I do now when I’m doing, let’s say a video, I tell the kid - I don’t even like filming it. I tell him to come with his camera. We’re going to film for x number of hours, and before the outset, I create an outline. He takes it, edits the whole thing down. So, I try to outsource as much as I can. Even when you outsource a bunch of stuff, your day could easily get spent on non-productive, or non-money making activities. Which could be a real big problem. You end up checking your email all day. You need to outsource that stuff too. Have an assistant check all your email. Let him or her delete all the garbage, all the spam, all the people that are asking for free stuff, and let them only forward you things that you want to see. You can even outsource customer service. I have a couple of email addresses and they all get forward to one email address, like every other day, or every fourth day, that way I can get on it. It’s customer service. It’s sent to me ASAP, and that way I can get on it.

You can outsource and delegate literally anything. I’ve found that, since I’ve done that, my income has been greater and I also just feel - I’m a person more on top of my [indistinct] and I don’t feel like I’m this busy body who’s struggling. When you hear about the richest people in the world, they spend time on productive tasks. I always say to myself, “What does Donald Trump do? Does he do all these little things?” No, he’s got a team. He’s got people working with him taking care of these little things so he can spend time on making money. That’s how you’ve got to think.

Write a list out of all the things you do on one day, then maybe highlight everything in blue that can be outsourced to somebody. In the beginning you’re like, “Oh, man, I’m going to outsource somebody to check my email and it’s going to be hundreds of dollars a month.” Well, say it comes out to $100 a month. Big deal. You sell three DVD’s, boom, it’s covered. You have to think of prosperity. That’s what you need to think about. So, let’s outsource things, and you have to understand that it’s going to come back to you ten-fold at least. Those are the things that I definitely emphasize.

CM: You mentioned affiliate marketing a little earlier. Can you get a little more into that for people who aren’t really familiar with that?

ZE: That’s definitely something that I need to get more into. I’ve spoken to Yanik Silver before, and 40 percent of his net income - or his gross income, I’m not sure - almost half his income comes from affiliates, which, in his words, is like having “little soldiers working for you.”

I rank affiliates through e-books, such ClickBank, because there’s not overhead at all. This goes back to the sharing of lists, and getting involved with other people’s lists. Let’s talk about how I created that last e-book. I took a bunch of pictures in one day, very easy. Every chapter of this e-book was extremely easy to make. Before I was going to get the webpage up, I needed testimonials. So, I contacted my friends/colleagues in this business, sent them the e-book, asked for a testimonial, and at the same time there was about ten, eleven, twelve of these guys and I said, “Here’s what I’m going to do. Nobody else will know about it except for you guys. You guys can promote it to your list first and you guys will have the affiliate.”

This way, the whole world, when it’s up on the website, anyone who has a MySpace account, a blog, a website can become an affiliate. Well, what shall we tell these 10 powerful people with big lists about this [indistinct] affiliates? They’ll be more than happy to access more of them for you. They sign up as affiliates first, and they are going to be excited to do it because they know they are going to get the most money back. Why? Because it hasn’t been sent out to the market yet, because it’s only going to be sent out by the heavy hitters. So you combine the risk. So between these 10 people we had over 100,000 people that the e-book went to, and it made me a lot more money than if it just went to my list and that’s it. So we combined the power.

And once again it comes back to team work. It’s like a little team of people working together. And it obviously made the product more profitable on my part, and it was more profitable for them because they were the first ones to launch it and we launched it all together on the same day. So we’re all - we shared skin in the same project. So having an affiliate on e-books is something that I really like.

Other people like to have affiliates on all their products. You could do it in several ways. You could let anybody sign up as an affiliate. Or you can do affiliates by invite only and the people that you’re inviting, the people you know will do a good job promoting it and marketing it. When you have affiliates, you want to connect and stay in contact with your affiliates and send them promotional materials.

The guys who do - Patrick Beith and LeTeif [ph] Thomas - they do athlete’s acceleration. They have that speed training product, complete speed training. What do they do? They have a whole page of affiliate resources, articles and newsletters that their affiliates can send out to help them make money, make more sales.

People are hungry to make money. There’s people that don’t want to create. They want to have a website with a bunch of affiliates on there, and there’s people that make a boatload of money only as affiliates. The one thing I definitely recommend an affiliate is getting on ClickBank, having your own e-book. It’s very easy because that thing is completely automated. Completely automated. You don’t have to send out all these order responders. They send out the paycheck to you and your affiliates, and I like that. It’s very simple. So one thing I highly recommend is getting a good e-book up on ClickBank.

CM: You mentioned spirituality, which to me is, by far, the most important thing in my success. I mean, hands down, nothing else comes close. You mentioned words like “manifest, good energy, spirituality,” can you elaborate?

ZE: It’s something that’s so powerful that will not only change your business, but will change everything around you. Now obviously the movie The Secret has been a huge influence on me. But before I ever saw The Secret, I was involved in a mastermind group which Jim Labadie started. And once we got into this mastermind group with a group of people, we raised the energy levels of each other.

The more we masterminded and masterminded on our own, what you start to do is you start to write your own book, your own book of life. You start to create the life you want, the goodness you want, simply through putting out good energy and good thoughts. So whatever you’re thinking about, whatever you’re feeling, you turn those things into - how should I say this? - you turn it into fact. You turn fantasy into fact, and it all comes down to your thoughts and your feelings.

Every day, throughout my day, and at night I’m always feeling how it feels like to become a millionaire and I always have in my head the feeling it’s going to be like to live in the house that I’m going to live in, and where I’m going to have all these houses. And I believe - I just believe without a doubt - what I will become and who I am. These things, these deep - we could call it spirituality, we could call it believing, whatever somebody wants - it sends out messages to the universe and it comes back to you.

For others it sounds crazy, but you could literally transform your life by constantly focusing on the good things that you want. We could easily - everyone who is listening to this could say, “I know somebody who always talks about these bad things.” And that’s why they keep getting more bad things. Wherever you put your energy towards is where it will come back to you.

So I do things such as my visualization is definitely key, but what goes beyond visualization is the feeling that comes about through your visualization. And I always go back to the Olympians, the Olympic athletes. The Olympic athletes, they visualize so powerfully, they probably - when they’re moving around, or close their eyes and meditate - they can feel what it’s like to get the gold medal placed around their neck. They can feel what it’s like to stand before their country’s national anthem. They can feel what it’s like to be going through the movements.

If you put yourself in that experience it will have - and it has to be done on a regular basis. It’s like exercising the body, I’m exercising my thoughts, I’m exercising my feelings and I don’t allow any negativity to creep in. If negativity starts to creep in, you can control it, you can turn it around by simply starting to think about the things you are grateful for and the things that you want to happen. Because, like I mentioned before, what you focus on grows. What you think about and give gratitude towards, those are the things that will come about. So the people that - look around you. It’s crazy, because they can’t understand, they can’t imagine how these things are actually happening, but when you start to do it and you start to experience it, you really start to - you just get more of a rooted belief that you can trust the world. That it will bring you what you want.

I’m a big follower. One guy I follow heavily is Dr. Joe Vitale. His website is MrFire.com. Well, I’m not only a believer in all his marketing efforts, which I follow heavily, but the way that this guy was homeless for a little bit. He lived in poverty for 15-20 years. But he manifested things. He called it the “attractor factor,” and it’s because your thoughts attract whatever is going to happen to you.

Looking back at my life I can see how I attracted all bad things and all good things. Now I know what to focus on. Back when I was a kid, there was a crazy story, but I was always concerned about my bike getting stolen. It was on my mind all the time. It was constantly on my mind. Well, guess what? My bike got stolen. Why? Because I constantly thought about it. I attracted that energy to come to me and my bike got stolen.

Looking back at that, I think that happened to me when I was in fourth or fifth grade, I was only 10 years old, or something like that. I’m 31 years old now. Twenty-one years. I remember always thinking about it. Every time we rode our bikes somewhere, I was always looking out the store window. If we stopped at a Quick Check, or a pizzeria, I’m the little kid out there, my bike is upside down. I’m always looking. Every minute I’m running out of the store. Well, I manifested that to happen. I brought it upon myself because I focused on it so much.

If you can focus on the way you want to feel, and the way you want your business to build, it will come to you. At the same time, it’s very beautiful and it’s very powerful, but you must take action. Your thoughts and your feelings must be combined and connected with action. You can’t just expect things to happen. You’ve got to be an action taker. Every single day you’ve got to chip away at the stone and sculpt. You’ve got to sculpt what you want. It’s the bottom line. You’re a big stone in the beginning and everyday, little by little, you chip away and you start creating your own masterpiece. Maybe I was a big boulder when I first started. And maybe the people, or the person, listening now is a big boulder, but envision what you want to become.

Like, right now I’m in my office. To my left I’ve got my vision board. There’s these houses up here. I mean, these beautiful houses with these pools that are right on ocean side and these beautiful lakes, and there’s a million dollar bill up here. That stuff, to me, I look at that and I swear to you it just fills up my whole, entire body. It’s something that I know is going to happen. And why? Because I will create it by thinking about it. It’s just an exciting energy that comes about me. And you’ve got to believe.

And there’s no doubt in my mind that the most powerful, the most successful people in this world use these manifestation techniques. They use it. That is how they become so successful. Donald Trump is not a success because he keeps putting stuff down and talking about things that aren’t going his way. He knows what he wants. He envisions it. He feels it. He puts himself in the situation. When he wants to build a golf course he goes out to the dirt area and he stands on it and he talks about how he wants it to look. Well, I do very similar things.

About a month or two ago we were taking regular trips to the area where we want to buy our new house in. Why did I go there? So I could feel what it’s like to be down there and make it become part of my life. Now I know that it’s going to happen, because I trust that the energy I put out is just going to come back to me. It will make itself happen.

So there’s a lot of resources that people can look into doing this, but something that I would definitely recommend people to do is go to Joe Vitale’s website, MrFire.com. You want to pick up his book The Attractor Factor that’s where it starts at. You need to see the movie The Secret at TheSecret.tv. I listen to The Secret CDs all the time in my car.

And then Joe Vitale’s got a lot of audio books through ClickBank, and e-books that you can check out. He’s got How to Attract a New Car. And it’s really not just to attract a new car, it’s to attract anything that you want into your life. If you want to think about the bed and how this could work, my background of coming from martial arts is always about the battle and the challenge, and making everything difficult. Well, every night I would go to bed and I would thank God for all the challenges getting to me in my life. I was thanking him because I felt the challenges made me a better person. Then I would write down, “I’m not getting any clients. I’m not selling anything. I don’t sell anything for five days at a time. What the heck is wrong with me? I’m working so hard here.”

I was speaking with Jim Labadie about it, who was my business coach, and he said, “You are manifesting lack of business. You have lack programming because you keep thanking for the challenges and, guess what? Because you’re thankful for them, the universe thinks you want more, so it’s giving you more.” The first thing he recommended me to do, and I’m recommending for people to do, is go to RandyGage.com and pick up the Prosperity Series. It’s these five little books. I think it costs, like, $25. I don’t care how much you think that’s a stretch for you, you need to get them, because it’s all about lack programming. It teaches you that you were born to be rich. You were born to be great. And you just need to decide to do so. If you’re not doing great things, if you’re not rich, you’re doing a disservice to yourself and to other people, because the more money you have, the more you can give to others. The more you can do for others. The more you can do for yourself. Wealth and prosperity - it starts from the inside and then it goes out.

It’s the same thing with fitness. If you want to get people results, you’ve got to get the inside of them. If you focus solely on the outside, the results will definitely come, but first I believe you must create fitness from the inside out. Wealth, prosperity, abundance, starts from the inside with thoughts and feelings, without a doubt.

CM: Zach, where can people learn more about you, your websites, your products, etc?

ZE: A couple places you could go to. You could go to - if you’re involved in martial arts and serious strength training, you would go to CombatGrappler.com. Then I’ve got a product series that’s coming out specifically for men, for busy men, and it’s a combination of fitness as well as prosperity in coaching - prosperity in abundant coaching. That’s at RealManFitness.com. If you want to just check out my membership site, UndergroundStrengthCoach.com.
 

The has been a personal trainer and fitness business marketing interview