Podcast Episode:
You can publish a polished and professional looking digital magazine. We’ll tell you how on this edition of Frank Relationships.
FRANK RELATIONSHIPS: LARRY GENKIN ON DIGITAL MAGAZINES AND MEDIA
Guests: Larry Genkin
Date: August 29, 2016
Frank: You can publish a polished and professional looking digital magazine. We’ll tell you how on this edition of Frank Relationships.
Yes. As always, those are my babies. Thanks for getting daddy’s daughter today.
Digital media expert, Larry Genkin is with us today and I’m curious… why should every business have a digital magazine? Why should they publish a digital magazine?
Larry: Well I think it’s really simple. Every business exists to make sales or atleast that’s the thing that has to happen to them to do all the good works. So they got to all of these marketing gyrations that range from advertising to PRs, to tradeshows in order to generate leads and awareness and eventually sales.
My belief is that every business would be better off—and probably it’s the shrewdest marketing move that they could make if they owned the media that their customers read, and that’s what’s possible today.
Frank: How have you managed to run a successful digital marketing company basically on a shoestring?
Larry: Well you know, I’m very fortunate because the times have changed. When I started in the magazine business working for big publishing companies, to run a small trade magazine, we budgeted a million dollars just to launch the magazine. Today, the way that technology has evolved, anyone can literally launch a magazine if they’re willing to put in the work for literally zero dollars or if they don’t want to do it all themselves for a couple thousand dollars and literally have a business that has seven figure annual potential for themselves.
Frank: Wow.
Welcome to Frank Relationships, a show for you my brethren who like me, are too young to be considered old and too old to be considered young. It’s also for those of you that love and support us. We’re here to provide weekly wisdom, conversation and the information that’ll help create loving and flexible parents and partners.
I’m Frank Love and you can find me, my blog and my various social media incarnations at franklove.com. If you’re listening to the show on Blog Talk Radio, please follow us and if via iTunes, please subscribe so that you can effortlessly get the show each week.
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Greetings to my super duper co-host, Nancy Goldring.
Nancy: Hi, Frank.
Frank: We’ve got a special guest today. You know that?
Nancy: We have a spe—we have Larry Genkin?
Frank: Yes.
Nancy: Oh absolutely.
Frank: [unclear] build it up.
Nancy: You know what? Why do you do this to me? All I tried to do is cooperate? Good morning, Larry—since I’ve already blown it.
Larry: Yeah. Good morning, good morning.
Frank: This wonderful guest that we have will help us develop an understanding of digital publishing. He’s been declared “a great marketing mind” by business legend Robert Allen, Larry has captured the respect of billionaires, CEO’s, best-selling authors and marketing gurus, and has personally launched 26 magazines in over 10 industries and worked with over 100 media companies, including: USA Today, Forbes, Time, Newsweek, Inc and Fortune. Today he is recognized as one of the world’s foremost experts on digital media.
So if you like me, want to know what kind of toll this… wonderful media or form of media—
Nancy: Or any business, right?
Frank: —how this can benefit your business…
Nancy: Yeah…
Frank: What the major traps in the marketing industry are to avoid so that you can have longevity for your business and how to keep your relationships strong in the business world, then stay tuned as your Frank Relationships Team talk with digital marketing expert and the founder and CEO of Of Eleven Media and the creator of the MagTitan and Ad Einstein suites of software. He is Larry Genkin. Welcome to the show.
Larry: Thanks, Frank. Thanks, Nancy. Good to be here.
Nancy: You’re welcome.
Frank: Before we get too deep in our primary subject matter, which is you today, Larry, is I want to check in to see what’s going on in the relationship world. So Larry, as we ramble about this a little bit, please don’t be bashful. Make sure you weigh in. We want to hear your opinion too.
Alright, alright I got something Tom Hanks said.
Nancy: Oh.
Frank: Yeah.
Nancy: Okay.
Frank: “Truth is, I’ll never know all there is to know about you just as you’ll never know all there is to know about me. Humans are by nature too complicated to be understood fully so we can choose either to approach our fellow human beings with suspicion or to approach them with an open mind, a dash of optimism and a great deal of candour.”
I love it.
Larry: That’s awesome.
Frank: You’ll never know all there is to know about me and I won’t know all there is to know all about you.
Nancy: Yeah, right.
Frank: Can we be comfortable with that?
Nancy: I think so. My grandmother… my grandparents were married for 37 ½ years, right? And my grandmother said, “I was married to your grandfather for 37 ½ years and after all that time, I sill idn’t know it.”
Frank: That sounds like humility and wisdom.
Nancy: So this to me is essentially… summing up the same thing. Yeah, yeah…
Frank: Larry you’re in the marriage game, I understand? What do you think of that quote?
Larry: Well it’s interesting because I just had my 28th wedding anniversary and on the same day, my eldest daughter got married. So you know… it’s very interesting. I think that different people bring out different sides of our personalities and so when you’re with a spouse for so long, you tend to have this one way and then you go out with a different group of friends and it brings out a whole different side of you that you know, maybe you didn’t even know or doesn’t come out unless you’re in that change of series.
So I think that that’s very true because a spouse is only exposed to a certain range of emotions and aspects of a person.
Frank: Speaking of how you deal with other people or what other people bring out of you, I always thought it was interesting to see how someone sitting at a table with you at a restaurant, how they interact with the waitress or the waiter. I’ve always thought that that was an interesting dynamic to witness. You ever thought about something like that?
Nancy: How they interact with the—typically, I’m watching how people interact with one another when they’re supposed to be together.
Frank: Well I’m talking about you. You’re sitting there with somebody—
Nancy: Yeah…
Frank: —and you’ve got prince charming on the other end, and of course you’re going to be…
Nancy: Oh it total—listen, hat can totally set the tone for the whole interaction… how he interacts with the waiter.
Frank: Yeah.
Nancy: No question.
Larry: But—
Nancy: Yeah?
Larry: I have a fascinating… on that exact topic. My mother-in-law is like Dr. Jeckyl and Mr. Hyde when it comes to waiters and waitresses and here is the nicest, most generous woman and yet she’s [unclear] toning her voice the way that she’s interacting with waiters. It’s boggling to where this comes from. So it’s funny that you say that Frank because I’m fascinated by that, atleast in her example.
Frank: Jeff, I saw you cue up.
Jeff: Well only because you can tell, I can tell immediately if someone has been in the service industry… by the way they treat someone. Waiter, waitress, bus boy, bellhop…
Frank: Room attendant.
Jeff: Exactly. And it does speak to their level of consideration and… and understanding what a dollar’s worth. If I’m out with someone, even a business associate and they’re inconsiderate or impatient or roll their eyes or you know, it says a lot to me about their lack of understanding of what it takes to serve and please clients and customers… So yeah, on the business side I never take any of that personally but I’ve been a waiter…
Nancy: Right.
Jeff: …from Pizza Hut to a higher Shalom Resort. So everything in between… and I made my son do it too. And they didn’t make him do—
Nancy: Really?
Jeff: Get the class [unclear] and one summer he served at an Austin Grill and it certainly did teach him about humility and how to deal with people.
Nancy: Okay.
Frank: That’s great.
Nancy: Nice.
Frank: And I’m not saying exactly what I would take from it. I’m sitting with someone… or… my wife doesn’t really qualify… maybe she did when he first time we sat down together. I was checking that out and maybe the first ten times.
Nancy: Here we go…
Frank: But as we’re dealing with someone, maybe even in business, I’m not saying what I would do if that person was rude to the waiter or waitress. I’m just saying I would be in tuned, I’d be gathering an interesting tid bit of information.
Nancy: Well I have an interesting heads up for you.
Frank: Oh boy.
Nancy: So my mom used to work for a major company, right? So she said that they had started this kind of infesting hiring or pre-hiring practice of inviting a potential new hires to say share a meal, have lunch, something like that. So they’re in the cafeteria and there are two guys that they are looking at hiring. One of them, maybe just a little more so than the other… and they go to the cafeteria. They’re just getting lunch and everything so the guy that they’re really excited about is rude to one of the cafeteria attendants, in a way that gets the attention of all parties involved. He did not get the job.
Frank: I understand.
Nancy: He did not get the job. And believe me, this was a 6-figure job.
Frank: I mean, often it’s… there are people who believe that to be rude shows that you’re…
Nancy: In control, in command….
Frank: Yes, better.
Nancy: Right.
Frank: So…
Nancy: And we’re living in a much more circular world these days… not you know… and that whole 6 degrees of separation thing is real. You may be talking to a waiter whose best friend is somebody you’d love to know.
Frank: We’ve gone a long way from Tom Hanks.
Nancy: Indeed.
Frank: But it’s—
Nancy: It’s the nature of the show, Larry.
Frank: Yeah… Alright, Larry let’s get to the good stuff. What do you do?
Larry: Well if you’d ask me that question a year ago, I would say I publish magazines. Today, our company is a software company. We now sought the software that we built for our own magazine because the software of the market was completely archaic and we just don’t like—it can’t be that hard to build a software and we were wrong about that by the way, [unclear]. Now [unclear] and we build our own that takes advantage of all the power of computers, and tablets and these wonderful smartphones. And as we started to release our own magazines using this software, other publishers saw and they said, “Wow, how can I use it for our magazine?” And the beginning, we couldn’t. It wasn’t built—I couldn’t give it to people. But we realized by literally dumb luck, that we probably have a better opportunity, a better business letting other people use this great software that we built than just using it ourselves for our own magazines. So that’s where we transitioned. We made the software so anybody can use it on a sell served basis. We either let them use it for free. Literally, people can come in, build a magazine completely for free and use the software.
So now I would consider myself a software developer.
Frank: What’s a digital magazine? Is it basically—I mean when I think of a digital magazine, the first thing that comes to mind is maybe Constant Contact or something like that…
Nancy: Or that I can only get it from online. I mean that’s all I’m thinking…
Larry: You know what traditionally has been a digital magazine has been… print publishers basically take a PDF, an image of their magazine and put it into this very unsophisticated page flip or software. Basically, it’s the image of the print magazine shrunk there. The problem with that is you might guess, you have a magazine that’s designed in 8 ½ x 11 size and you swoosh down on to a computer becomes harder to read. Then you swoosh it down further to a tablet, it becomes even harder to read where most of the reading is occurring today is on these iPhones and these smartphones… and you squish it down there, it’s invisible without pinching and zooming and squinching and it’s a horrible experience and so… what we’ve done is we’ve designed the software so that you can take a magazine, something with a collection ofcontent, right? That’s all that any magazine really is about a particular topic area and we now make it so that the pages are animated. They redesign themselves. So if you take a story that maybe 5 pages on a tablet, it may be 9 pages on a smartphone because our software is so smart. It knows what kind of device and browser and internet connection the person’s on and it redesigns the page so we don’t even have a zoom button so that they can read in this elegant, animated, interactive fashion. And so I think what our hard part is we’re still new and so small that we’re trying to educate people as to what a digital magazine really is and that’s what I spend a lot of my time on these days.
Frank: How do you make money if you’re giving everything away? It sounded as though individuals can do this for free.
Larry: Well they can. So we have a couple different ways that we make money. So while we have free license so you could use the software in that exchange, we insert some ad and we even share some of the revenue with the publishers who publish for free from the ads that we bring in. We get the lion’s share. And then as we also have paid licenses, they’ll offer additional services such as we could do the designs for you and so we can make money off of the licenses, we have design services and circulation services. So if you don’t have designers or you don’t have readers, we can bring that to you and then we have a fair price for that. and then of course, there’s the advertising where… you know, a lot of people want to publish a magazine but they don’t want to get into the whole selling game. So we have a whole network, that’s what our Ad Einstein product is, where we can bring advertisers to our publishers so that they can have revenue and they only have to focus on creating great content.
Frank: So you have someone who is a business owner but they don’t feel like they would be a good person for bringing in content… They’ve got a product, they believe in their product, they believe in their mission but in terms of getting interviews, and whatever have you that goes into running a magazine, they’re doubtful. How do you boost them—or how do you get them enrolled so much in the digital publishing industry or the component of what you’re suggesting that they do so that they’re ready to roll with it?
Larry: Well it first comes from them, understanding and really thinking about their reality when it comes to marketing, right? So a business owner works everyday trying to generate leads and sales for their business and it’s hard in many industries because it’s very, very competitive. You can either compete in this red ocean, this bloody war, get you editors or in the case of owning the media—that’s what I talk about.
Don’t rent the media because when you run an ad, you’re renting the media, right? You stop paying for that ad, you stop getting access to that audience, right? It just goes away. They’re not going to give it to you but you own your own magazine, you can build a massive database that’s very targeted for your product, your service and that’s a key part of this. So you have to first convenience them that strategically, this is a very ninja-kind of move.
Nancy: Well you know what—Larry, the thing that I appreciate it about a conversation we had prior to today, was you used the term “thought leader”. And you said if you want to be a thought leader in your industry, then this is definitely a way to go.
Larry: Well absolutely. Think about to transact business, as we bring it down to the nuts and bolts, people have to 1. Know about you and your business and they have to trust you and your business, right? That’s why having the degree of authority is probably the best thing that any business can do to help make the sale [unclear] shorter and actually make it so that people will make bigger purchases instead of just dipping their toes in. And that comes from exposure as a thought leader because when you can contribute to your prospects—let’s just call this geeky term that I use… their body of intelligence. If you can contribute and—
Nancy: Right.
Larry: —basically teach them something that they didn’t know before, [unclear] all of a sudden and say “Oh my god, Frank or Nancy taught me something. They are experts on this area. I can trust them which by extension, smooth the way to do business together.”
Frank: We’re sitting here looking at some of the magazines that have been created using a software and it looks incredible. I mean…
Larry: Thank you.
Frank: It’s not something that I could imagine anyone that’s as unintelligent as I am, being able to put together but yet, based on what we’re talking about, I get the impression that I could do this.
Nancy: Oh you definitely could.
Larry: Yeah. I mean… It’s drag and drop, right? So for example, what people think of a magazine is not what you’re looking at, right? It’s this hybrid between television and magazines and the internet right in the web. It’s all packaged together but the cool part about it and we spend a lot of time working and building this literally 3 years building this… But those animation tools, those video tools are all drag and drop. You can create an animation that would take an experienced programmer who would write the code for you would take them hours to write the code for a certain animation, you can click and that animation will happen literally in seconds. Don’t like it? You can erase it in seconds and try something else. It’s that easy. So Frank, yes, you could easily do it.
Frank: Any suggestions on building an audience? Okay, I put together a great product and now I need to get somebody to read it.
Larry: Right, well there’s two answers to that question. One is, somebody who is… Let’s just call them a real business or a serious business where they have some money to be able to do that. If you have some money, find the database—like for example, we have a service called “digital direct” which is amazing because you can take, let’s say you wanted to have a magazine for peopel who are very interested in relationships, for example. Well, we could go on to any group on Facebook or any person who has a Twitter account about relationships and the digital direct service can identify who those group members are and about 30% of the cases—because we have a massive database of opting emails of over 1 billion [unclear] emails, we can match about 30% of those.
Frank: 1 billion? Did you say 1 billion?
Larry: 1 billion with a B, right? So imagine, you take somebody who has a [unclear], who wrote an author on relationships and they have a hundred thousand followers… well we can probably have email addresses of about 30,000 of those. We can send them an email because they’re opt in to our service and say “Hey, would you like to get Frank and Nancy’s magazine on relationships?” Some will say no of course but many will opt in and say yes and this service digital direct only charges on success. So you could say “I’d like to have 12,000 subscribers and over time, we build that up. So that’s one way.
The other way of building readers is nothing more than the blocking and tackling of internet marketing which typically means doing social media and sharing the great stories that you publish out there doing emails, working joint ventures where for example, our technology has embed codes just like Youtube. So if you go to let’s say an association who’s always looking for great content to put on their website, you get them the embed code for either a story or your whole magazine and then your magazine becomes available on their website for all of their members. It’s really, really easy to do.
So I actually have a lot of this on our website [unclear]. You’ll be able to get also videos that go into this particular issue but it’s a very important one because at the end of the day Frank, there are three things that somebody needs to do if they’re going to be a successful publisher. And I’m not talking about people who want to do it for their own business because for those people, there’s only two things that you need to do, right?
The first two are: you have to put out great content and you have to get readers, right?
Frank: Yeah.
Nancy: Okay.
Larry: You do those two things and you have a business. You could be successful because you build the database and sell your products or service. If you’re a non-entrepreneur and you want to be a successful publishing, the third thing you have to do is be able to sell advertising. We have all sorts of tools that make it automated so that people can sell advertising literally while they sleep.
Nancy: So advertising is still a big part of the digital magazine, THE magazine business?
Larry: Well it is but here’s the thing that’s really cool about it… and most publishers, most experienced publishers don’t get this for or so stuck in their ways that they can’t get out of their own way. What most publishers do today is they give away ads in their digital edition to people who buy ads in their print publication. So they make nothing digitally.
Our software is like Google Ad Words, right? What happens is, people can come in, they can set their own budget so you only have $112 free, advertised for a $112 and we also have pay per performance ads. So what we say is, if somebody flips past your ads, and doesn’t click on it or doesn’t spend time on it, in our world we call it a “10 second threshold”—
Frank: They don’t pay—
Larry: —they don’t spend atleast 10 seconds on it, they don’t pay. But if they click on it or spend 10 seconds on their ad, we charge them. In most cases, the charge is somewhere around a dollar. So, it’s a great model for advertisers to get an infinite number of pages in their ads that are completely interactive.
So you click the link, a new page opens up, a video plays, a testimonial plays, an order form opens up… So it’s far beyond what you can do with any traditional form of advertising.
Nancy: Alright. That’s intense.
Frank: Why magazines? How’d you get started on just simply… I guess the—you said you’ve been doing it for a long time. How’d you get started in any and all of this?
Larry: Well so I started in print magazine. I worked on trade magazines back in the day. My first magazine that I worked on is the sales rep selling advertising that’s called “Imaging Business” and this was a magazine when we actually thought scanners were an industry. What I eventually came to understand was that magazines were very powerful in our culture.
You can develop—we talked about thought leadership beforehand, right? You can become a thought leader defacto by being an author of a book. But now people don’t read that long, and most books never sell more than 5,000 copies but you have the MAGAZINE, you can get literally hundred of thousands of people reading that magazine. A magazine is much easier to produce. I can show anybody how they can have their magazine that’s really high quality launched in 30-days. It’s really not that hard and literally they can do it for free or for very little out of pocket money.
So that’s why magazines are very leverageable and very powerful and the reason I got into digital magazine was maybe because I failed at print. I literally lost everything. I had 4 print magazines and this is back in 2007 and literally, I went under. I declared personal bankruptcy. It was a horrible, horrible time and you know, you talk about relationships and keeping my marriage together while I went through this was one of the hardest things I’ve ever done but through that challenge, that horrific time, I realized that the reason we failed was because readership was going digital, going from print to digital, and advertising was migrating from print to digital. I had that inspiration that came from a mentor of mine, a self-made millionaire named Bill Bartman who was from Oklahoma, in his own homespun way, he said, ‘You know, being successful in business isn’t hard. All you got to do is be the leader.” He said being the leader isn’t hard. All you have to do is figure out where the herd is running and go get out of the front of it.
Frank: To get in front…
Nancy: Wow…
Larry: [unclear] tongue-in-cheek but I really took that the hardest and said, “Okay, the herd is running digitally. How can I get out ahead of them?” and that’s what lead us to where we are today.
Frank: I haven’t heard you say that you had any particular experience with software or anything like that. so how did you make the jump from publishing to… I guess programming?
Nancy: Software development?
Frank: Yeah.
Larry: You know, I didn’t. This is where sometimes being naive and uninformed actually works out to help you. I have a partner who was with me on those print magazines that went under. And he’s a wonderful, wonderful person who immigrated to the US from Czech Republic, English as a second language with literally $400 I his pocket. I cleared movie theatres and Wal-Mart’s at night but he had a passion for technology. What he would do is he was also taught but he heard and speak one time and then started doing work for me. He would say, “Hey, you should be doing this and I would say “Okay, okay.” And then next thing I know, [unclear] 8 hours would go by and he build me a website to do all these kind of stuff.
Well, it was his expertise that he—I said, “We got to something digital.” And together with the 14 of us and him who was the brains of all the ethnology, who started the business. We literally thought that it would take 3 or 4 months to build the software but because I was [unclear] inexperienced, this guy said, “Okay, it’s going to take longer than we think. So we’ll estimate 6-9 months to build it.”
Frank: 6—right. Or double it.
Larry: It took 3 years, right?
Nancy: Wow.
Larry: But that’s how it happened.
Frank: This is Frank Relationships, a show for you my brethren who like me, are too young to be considered old and too old to be considered young. It’s also for those of you that love and support us. We’re here to provide weekly wisdom, conversation and the information that’ll help create better parents and partners… and business owners. See, because business owners are parents and partners also.
Nancy: Scary thought.
Frank: You can find this in our archive show, they’re well over a hundred at franklove.com, on Blog Talk, iTunes and Stitcher.
Larry, what do you enjoy most about what you do?
Larry: The creation. You know, I guess I’ve learned in my 50 years of life that I just like creating things and it’s the… thinking about what publishers need because publishers right now, the world that I came from, they’re dying. Right? And it’s every day you see another publication shuddering it’s doors, you see layoffs that are happening throughout media and I thought, it’s crazy that there has to be a better way especially when you see these powerful digital devices. And so we’ve developed not only a software but literally a new business model for publishers and I love creating—think about this, right? The economics of it, and it blows my mind that we have many more people using our software who are business people and entrepreneurs than publishers because publishers are so stuck in their way.
But look at the economics of this… Imagine that you make a dollar every time a person clicks on an ad, right? Which is our software allows. So if you have a hundred people who you can bring into your magazine and let’s say each person, while they read the magazine and spend 15 minutes with your magazine or 3—whatever time they spend… Let’s say they click on one ad, right? Well, if you have a hundred people and they all click on one ad, you made a hundred dollars as a publisher. Well if you have a thousand people reading it, you made a thousand dollars. If you have 10,000 people, you make $10,000. And today’s traditional publishers are making zero from their digital product. Literally zero because they’re giving it away to their print advertisers.
Nancy: Isn’t that dollar like a little strong? I thought online—
Larry: Say it again?
Nancy: Isn’t a dollar a little strong? I thought online you may only be getting a nickel for every time somebody engage to ad because so many people could engage your ad. That could get super expensive, I’m thinking.
Frank: But it depends on how powerful your magazine is… because you create a targeted audience and if someone wants to get that targeted audience—
Nancy: Okay.
Frank: So if it’s a general audience, I can imagine it’ll be…
Nancy: Okay.
Frank: $.05.
Nancy: I hear you.
Frank: But if it’s targeted, if I’m a real estate developer and I want to reach out to people in that industry and I go to a real estate developer magazine, —
Nancy: A community of that?
Frank: Yeah.
Nancy: Okay, okay.
Frank: That’s my answer but what’s yours Larry?
Larry: Well, you’re exactly right. We have some trade publishers, for example I have an insurance magazine publisher called “24/7 Annuities” who’s charging $5 for what we call a verified view. A verified view is either a click or a 10 second view. I have a magazine called “Spa Retailer” who’s charging $10 per view.
What you’re talking about Nancy, you’re not wrong, is all of the banner ads that are a nickel or under a dollar, what they call “CPM” worth per one thousand.
Nancy: Okay.
Larry: And the reason that those prices are so low is because there’s banner blindness. When was the last time you clicked on a banner ad on purpose, right?
Nancy: Typically I’m clicking the X to get rid of it.
Larry: Right. It’s very, very rare and so banner ads don’t work and so what we offer… And also what you’re referring to is like the Google Pay Per Click Ad where they range from a nickel on the low end to tens of dollars depending on the keywords. But there you only get a couple hundred characters of text in our ads. Not only is it targeted exactly what Frank said, which is correct but every ad is not only whole page but it contains an infinite number of pages.
So for example, we have a BMW ad where it says on the front page, “Are you interested in SUVs, Sedans, or Coupes?” instead of they click “SUV” that it shows them the old models of SUVs, you click on a model of an SUV and it gives you a video test drive and all these information about it, so literally instead of a couple character of text you’re getting, typically it’s like a website inside your ad and so you can do so much more than an advertiser says “Huh, I guess [unclear] my own budget. Well let me test this. I’ll test the…”
Nancy: Well Larry, the ads could be sexy I forget to read the articles.
Larry: Well, you know what? [unclear] many magazines for that exact point, especially trade magazines. One of the major reasons that the readers read is to look at the ads and see what new products and services are offered to their particular industry. So you’re exactly right.
Frank: And if you’re going to… If you’re looking at my magazine and you click on one of the ads and you’re paying me $5,—
Nancy: You don’t care about me.
Frank: —Yeah, you don’t come back to my man, yeah you’re good with me.
Larry: Well and you know what Frank?
Frank: Hit it.
Larry: The more technology, you click on the ads, you stay in the magazine. That’s one of the things that we built because it’s silly to take them out of the magazine because that’s one [unclear] for the publisher because we want them to click on lots of ads and we want them to read our content and share our content. That’s also bad for the advertiser because the readers are in your magazine because of your contents. If you click on their ad and you force them to leave the magazine to go to the advertiser’s website, a percentage of those people won’t be—
Nancy: Will never get back.
Larry: So the advertiser just lost the lead that they would have otherwise got. So we built it so it’s all self-contained and literally even they can literally place credit card orders within the ad, within your magazine.
Nancy: Nice.
Larry: How close do you find yourself getting to individuals who have magazines usig your software? I mean, have you created relationships with people who use your software?
Larry: Oh we’re a small business. I mean, literally, there’s a group of us, a core group about 5 of us, we have also some designers and things like that but the core management team is 5 people. And so, yes, I literally handle support calls, I’m on… publishers are asking advice all the time. So most of my publishers today on the platform, I‘ve communicated with at some point in time.
Frank: Okay. On the relationships side… On the I guess romantic relationship side because we’ve been talking about relationships quite a bit. You’ve got a few magazines. Let me throw it out there and get your summary of what they are or what they talk about all of that good stuff. Couple’s Max.
Larry: Hahaha. One of my favorites… You know Couple’s Max Magazine, this is back when we were actually producing our own magazines and looking for niche topics. Well, we thought, you know what there’s [unclear] magazines for men and there’s even more magazines for women.
Frank: I was about to say you said men first and that—when I think of all these magazines, I’m certainly thinking all these magazines for women—
Larry: Yeah!
Frank: —but you cleaned it up. You said that more for women.
Larry: There’s more for women but none for couples. And you think about all the problems that we have with [unclear] in our country, but why isn’t there a magazine about making your life… your romantic life—and not even romantic life… romance is part of it, right? Your life with your partner exciting, interesting, deep and that’s what Couple’s Max is. We cover everything from sex and romance to cooking and all of that. It’s a fascinating magazine and I think it’s an important one.
Frank: It’s funny when you basically said that cooking, when you say cooking as it pertains to relationships, it reminds me of how I try to structure this show talking about so many different things as it relates to relationships. So you know, relationships isn’t just talking about men and women and how they deal with one another. It’s also things that they can do together.
Nancy: Yeah.
Frank: Get a massage together, or—
Larry: Absolutely.
Frank: —travelling or cooking, or…
Nancy: Working?
Frank: Yeah, or being concerned about how they are going to survive a police stop, you know just…
Nancy: Whatever.
Frank: Anything.
Larry: Yes.
Frank: Anything…
Larry: Yes. And you know there was an article that obviously you [unclear] because—it’s funny right… we had an attorney who said you go out for a night and you’re drinking and you get stopped. Well, how do you handle it right? It’s mainly helpful but it’s also fun and interesting. I’m a big believer in publishing that you can’t bore people into reading copies that’s good for them. You have to make it interesting and you’ll look at some of the covers that these video montage just for Couple’s Max where you’ll see this kind of edgy, sexual kind of thing and it’s an article about editions of stuff like that. this comes up to the edge but I don’t think crosses it. But again, isn’t that what we want for our romantic relationships, to be interesting and edgy and keep us alive?
Frank: Hear, hear. My hand is a…
Nancy: Amen.
Frank: Alright next, you got another… and we’re talking about the magazine Next. Tell us about that one.
Larry: Well, so what we just kind of touched on… when a relationship doesn’t work, people end up splitting up and divorce is a horrible problem in our country and Next is a magazine for people to move beyond their ex, people go into divorce. I had no idea about all these issues that people go through from custody issues, the legal issues, the banking issues, the real estate and all these.
So Next is the magazine for moving beyond your ex and it help people to deal with divorce and move on.
Nancy: Alright.
Frank/Nancy: Nice.
Frank: And finally, Super Baby.
Larry: Yes. Well, and that’s the magazine for parents, right? We all want the best for our children and Super Baby is about how do you create exceptional children whether exceptional means musically, athletically, academically, self-esteem-wise and the title is meant a little tongue-in-cheek but you know, it’s all about bring together experts who can help parents to help their children to really be successful.
Frank: What makes your platform better than let’s say Constant Contact and I’m assuming you know what Constant Contact is because of what you do and Constant Contact is a big deal in…
Nancy: So please tell us what it is for our listeners, please.
Frank: Yeah, yeah. Tell us what it is and then answer the other question, why you’re better.
Larry: Well Constant Contact is really not in our space because Constant Contact is a way of managing databases and sending out emails and managing those emails. A lot of our clients use Constant Contact to send out their magazines. We don’t create that piece of the puzzle. What our software, MagTitan, so if you go to magtitan.com, you’ll see the software. What we do is we create the software for creating the magazine content. There’s animated-interactive content, the advertising that allows these advertisers to create these animated beautiful ads and that’s all self-contained in a viewer. So when a reader is reading one of our magazines, that software, the MagTitan viewer is what we do.
So that’s the [unclear] that we do and then they email this out to [unclear] using Constant Contact or infusion soft or dozens of email service providers.
Frank: Ah, so you all may very well complement each other?
Larry: Totally a complement. We’re not competitive in any shape. You need to distribute your magazine… I think Nancy touched on that earlier. How do you get this thing out there and Constant Contact is a very powerful program. Email is doing that database and being able to email your database, your readers, your issue or when you put out a new update to drive them back into the platform, you need that piece.
Frank: You’re listening to Frank Relationships and we’re talking with the founder and CEO at Of Eleven Media. The creators of MagTitan and Ad Einstein suites of software. He is Larry Genkin.
Larry, would you tell us how to find you?
Larry: Well, it’s really easy to find me. I’m glad the mob’s not after me because I do very easy [unclear]. You can get me emails the best way, larry@ofelevenmedia.com and you could also, I have a pre-newsletter called the Digital Publishing Profit that anybody’s welcome to subscribe to. If you go to magtitan.com, right on the Home Page there, you’ll see a little box that anybody can subscribe to the Digital Publishing Profit. So that’s another way of kind of hearing my takes on digital publishing and making money on digital publishing.
Frank: Would you say networking has been a key to success for you?
Larry: 100%.
Frank: Really?
Larry: 100%. No probably the biggest aspect of it has been my network whether it’s from editorial contributors or to investors. We only have a couple angel investors who are behind us to even the people who are the early adopters of our platform either comes from my network or from my network telling their network “Hye you need to take a look at this” and in fact, we’re here because of our network. David Bullock who’s a client of ours and a good friend, made that introduction so we wouldn’t be talking if it wasn’t for network.
Nancy: True.
Frank: How would you say a person should go about… You mentioned Bill Bartman earlier?
Larry: Yup.
Frank: How would someone, a business owner go about finding a Bill Bartman to mentor them?
Larry: Give first. That’s how I built the—when I went through all the financial troubles that I did, Bill hired me. He hired me and gave me more than he needed to because I gave first. I came to him, I read a book of his that was amazing that’s called “Billionaire’s Secrets to Success” and it’s nothing like you think it would be. It’s just an amazing book about psychology and all because I highly recommend it. At the end of the book, not the very last page but near the end, so you have to really read the book to see it. He has an email in there. And I wrote [unclear] because I was just publishing. I can [unclear] as an [unclear] book but you’re marketing it terribly and I gave first. I helped him in marketing that book and that lead him to see that I had a brain in my head and that I knew what I was talking about and that’s what started it. so that’s the biggest networking secret that I’ve learned from a great author, business person [unclear] that just give first. Help others and it will come back to you and it will come back to you faster than you ever, ever can see that it will.
Frank: That’s powerful. You got a good book for—well, you’ve already given us a few…
Nancy: Yeah, yeah…
Frank: Alright, alright. Well scratch that one. Any good movie, any good story you got as we wrap up.
Larry: Well let’s see, you know a book… Let me tell you one book and I’m not even religious person. I’m going to jump back to a book that I found fascinating—
Frank: You’re not allowed to say the bible.
Larry: No, it’s not the bible but it’s a book called “Conversations with God” and—
Nancy: Ahh… Neale Donald Walsch.
Larry: Neale Donald Walsch. This will change my whole perception [unclear] and as a guy who lost everything, was homeless and basically has a conversation with himself that he calls a conversation with god but he transcribed this dialogue with himself and is absolutely fascinating. So I would highly recommend that. The first movie that pops into my head, I might lose my man-card over this but one of my—
Nancy: Oh my…
Frank: We do that around here.
Larry: Probably my favorite movie of all time is possibly Love Actually and it is all about relationships and it’s just a feel-good movie and so if you haven’t seen Love Actually, watch it with somebody you love because it’ll put a smile on your face and you can’t help but feel good after watching it.
Nancy: Nice.
Frank: Very nice.
Nancy: Thank you.
Frank: You’ve been listening to Frank Relationships and we’ve been talking with the founder and CEO of Of Eleven Media. That’s such a tongue twister… The founder and CEO of Of Eleven Media.
Nancy: What did that come from? You got 30 seconds, tell us.
Larry: [unclear] there’s a whole funny story about that. People ask “How did you come up with that crazy name?” and the reality is, when we started the company, it wasn’t for the publishing and it was because my father’s a partner in the business and my mom would always yell at the 3 boys, you know our bedtime must be 11:00, right? So she would always yell, “Boys, get to bed! It’s of eleven!” and it could be like 8:30 right? But she has had enough, right? So we kept it because now we tell people what people think it is that it’s like the end of the day of traditional publishing. So the jigs of [unclear] that’s why I just go with magtitan.com. But there is a story behind Of Eleven Media…
Nancy: Nice.
Frank: Okay, alright. So he’s the founder and CEO of Of Eleven Media, the creator of MagTitan and the creator of the Ad Einstein suites of software. He is Larry Genkin. Did I say that correctly, Larry?
Larry: You got it and its been wonderful to be with you guys
Nancy: Thank you.
Frank: Thank you.
Nancy: Great to have you.
Frank: Along today’s journey, we’ve discussed digital marketing, creating content, networking and mentoring. Thank you to my co-host, Nancy; thank to Jeff Newman, my engineer; and thank you to my guest, Larry Genkin. You’ve been great. I hope you’ve had as much fun as I’ve had hanging out with today’s ensemble.
As always, it’s my wish for you to walk away from this conversation with a heaping helping of useful information that I hope you create a relation that’s as loving and accepting as possible.
Let us know what you think of today’s show at facebook.com/relationshipflove, on Twitter at @mrfranklove or at franklove.com. If you’re listening via Blog Talk Radio, make sure you like us there and if via iTunes, make sure you subscribe so that you can receive each week’s show each week.
This is Frank love.
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