Episode 95 - Anna Talerico, ION Interactive on Honest Seduction, Selling is Dead and Housewives of Beverly Hills

Transcript

Susan Bratton: Welcome to Dishy Mix. I’m your host, Susan Bratton, and on today’s show you’re going to get to meet Anna Talerico. She’s the EVP of software at a solutions company called ION Interactive that focuses on landing page conversion and post click marketing. You know I’m on a jag with all this post click marketing. So Anna has just co-authored a book called Honest Seduction: Using Post Click Marketing to Turn Landing Pages Into Game Changers. It’s a great book, and we’re going to talk to her a lot today about post click marketing and landing page optimization, about the book on seduction, about your book idea, we’ve got one for you. And about being a talk show host and that selling is dead. So lets get Anna on the show. Welcome Anna.

Anna Talerico: Thanks Susan, I’m so glad to be here.

Susan Bratton: It is my pleasure to have you. We met maybe a year and a half ago, and we’ve been kind of tracking each other, and when your book came out, I though, “Uh, that’s a fabulous title, Honest Seduction”, I loved it. Did you come up with that or did one of your co-authors?

Anna Talerico: My brilliant co-author, Scott Brinker, came up with that in a blog post about a year and a half ago, and it just stuck. We’ve just kind of kicked it around since then because we thought it really summed up what you need to do with your landing pages.

Susan Bratton: Absolutely. Well we’re going to come back to Honest Seduction, but first I wanted people to understand what ION Interactive is. You have a product called Live Ball, and I’ve been pretty impressed with the breadth of the solution, and without, you know, without it being a sales pitch, we always ride that line I know, just tell us about Live Ball so everyone kind of understands the perspective that you’re bringing to this discussion about landing page optimization.

Anna Talerico: Sure. Live Ball is a platform that lets a marketing team or a marketing organization create and test their landing pages without needing IT. So it’s really just a specialist tool, just like any other tool a marketing department has in their arsenal, but it was very much born out of a need that we saw across our client base and a common need to kind of have some freedom to experiment and test landing pages without being reliant on some of the other teams were traditionally reliant on as marketers in our agency or our IT department. So at its heart, it’s really about freeing the marketer up to get the job done, and that job is usually around increasing conversion rate.

Susan Bratton: So it strikes me as Live Ball that there are a lot of gazintas and gozoutas on the, on the service as well, so you can track what is bringing people into that, you can replicate landing pages and subtly change them in a lot of different ways. Then you can track where the sources are for both the traffic and specifically the conversions on that landing page, you have the ability to add social media widgets to it… Talk to us about all the kind of constellation of things that one can do once they use this system, ‘cause that was what I thought was really interesting, that you have a lot of levers and dials to change and add to those pages and track things in them, you know, track behavior and occurrences.

Anna Talerico: Yeah, and you actually summed it up so well. So at a basic level a marketer needs to be able to get landing pages up or landing, what we call landing experiences up very simply and easily and to do that without a lot of friction. But of course most of us have to go beyond that, so in terms of creating very rich sophisticated experiences, you know, using widgets, using social media components, video flash, things like that, Live Ball really does that exceptionally well, and again, makes it a friction less experience for the marketer. But probably most important is that we consider Live Ball to be an ecosystem, and that is that you are creating pages, so its got the CMS component, and you’re launching them and you’re testing them and you’re getting the analysis on them all in one place so that it happens really quickly and efficiently and you’re able to test with a lot more, not just knowledge about what’s working, what’s not working, but you’re actually able to see what’s working for each unique traffic source, and we think that’s a key to really boosting your conversion rate, and it’s not just to serve up one thing that works best for everybody, but to serve up the thing that’s working best for each place that you’re driving traffic. So instead of, you know, it’s not about one or two landing pages, it’s about serving up, you know, hundreds of landing pages, all of which are being incredibly effective and efficient towards the stream of traffic that’s coming into it.

Susan Bratton: Who are the other people in the industry that do this same thing, landing page creation and reporting systems?

Anna Talerico: Yeah, you know, there’s a, in this industry and certainly over the last year it’s probably really blossomed even more. There’s a sandbox in which there are different kinds of tools and players. You know, there’s CMS tools for creating websites and now some for creating landing pages. There are tools for testing. So for testing you’re always going to be looking at things like, you know, Google Website Optimizer or the Offermatica product that’s now owned by Amateur Test and Target, and you got Optimost, which was purchased by Interwoven. So there’s some testing tools that are definitely part of the sandbox. And then there are some content creation tools that are part of the sandbox as well, but, but not really an enterprise sort of ecosystem solution. It’s very, very specialized what we do, yeah.

Susan Bratton: Right. I was familiar with Offermatica and Optimost and Google Website Analyzer, that makes a lot of sense. It seems like what you do is you really integrate both the CMS, the ability to create landing pages with the testing, which I think is important, you’ve got to, you’ve got to have all that stuff in one place. Nobody wants to use 53 different tools. So lets move to Honest Seduction, your book. Here’s what I thought was interesting about it, very clever. What you really did was take all of the posts, or maybe the best of the posts, from you postclickmarketing.com blog and turn them into a book. I could, I saw that it was self-published, the publisher was ION… How did you do that? Do you use Blurb or where did you go to get it printed? Are you printing on demand? Tell me that piece of it, because there’s so many people that do great blogs that could copy that idea.

Anna Talerico: Oh and they should…

Susan Bratton: Yeah.

Anna Talerico: So we got the idea from Seth Godin actually, he did it a couple years ago and we read the book and we saw that was a great, great execution. So we published through a company called Book Surge, which is owned by amazon.com, and we have had a phenomenal experience with them. It’s all on demand. You can order a book today, they’re going to print it and ship it tonight, and you’re going to have it tomorrow. Their service has been phenomenal, we were really, really pleased with the whole Book Surge experience and they make it really easy, you know, to tie in to amazon.com and affiliate stuff, so it’s been great.

Susan Bratton: So if you’re a good blogger or if you have a fantastic corporate blog, this is an excellent idea for another way to radiate all of the content that you’ve already put into a blog. Now what are you doing for promotional tactics to get Honest Seduction out of the market place? What’s working best for you that you’re doing to get, to drive sales of the book?

Anna Talerico: Yes, well we actually, just last week we launched some Face Book ads, which was just an experiment, and that’s been a phenomenal success. But really prior to (unintelligible) our first till in the water with the advertising last week, we were primarily doing it, some marketing through Twitter, you know, announcing it on the blog, and just using sort of, right now we’re marketing it to our universe, which is quite large if you look at sort of all of our subscribers and our email newsletter subscribers. We’ve got a pretty big universe that we can market it to, so that’s sort of how it started, and then again, sort of phase two just started really last week, we took out some ads on Face Book and on Linked In, we’re doing some SCM, so it’s sort of the next phase of the, the marketing, and we’re really excited about it ‘cause it’s only been a week and so far its been phenomenally successful.

Susan Bratton: Now if you want to follow Anna, you can follow her just by her name, Anna Talerico, that’s t-a-l-e-r-i-c-o, on Twitter. On those Face Book ads and Linked In ads, are they CPM or CPC?

Anna Talerico: We’re trying a little bit of both. So on Linked In, I’ve actually got a couple ads running that are, that are set up to do CPM and CPC. On Face Book we’re doing CPC right now, and we may experiment with that, but right now we’ve been really happy with how its been going, so I don’t know how much I’m going to mess with that.

Susan Bratton: And how are you targeting those ads? Is it key word targeted or what?

Anna Talerico: Well obviously our CPC campaign that we’re launching is key word targeted. But what we’re doing on Face Book and Linked In is actually you can target just by industry and by title and by roll, so it makes it really easy. I mean the great thing about it is that you can have an ad up and running in under five minutes, so they’ve just made it so seem-less and the user experience of kind of giving those ads launched is super easy.

Susan Bratton: Got it. Okay, so I want to move into some of the landing page knowledge that you can bring to the show. The first one I want to know about is you have hundreds of customers doing probably millions of landing pages. What are the greatest and latest most up to date best practices that you can share with us about land, getting better conversions through our landing pages?

Anna Talerico: I think, well one thing we’re really excited about right now is the move towards video and social media, you know, kind of Web 2.0 features and functionality on, on the landing pages because we’re starting to see the clients who are dipping their toe in that water, and it’s still very much just dipping the toe, I can’t say you’re seeing a mass flock to it, but the clients who are doing that are starting to get some nice good traction and some success, so that’s still really exciting.

Susan Bratton: Now wait, before you go on, I understand the video piece, you put a video clip on the page, that would potentially describe the product or give some food for thought or be a catalyst for conversation, someone else talking about something that’s germaine to your business. But the social media aspects, what kinds of things are people putting on their pages that are paying off for them? Are they using Face Book Connect or putting links to Twitter, or what is it that they’re doing?

Anna Talerico: Yeah, so all of the, all  of the those things and more. So things like brining in your Twitter feed and letting people follow you from, right from your landing page, that kind of thing is very easy to do. Face Book Connect, you know, Google Friend Connect, all of that, you can bring that in pretty, pretty easily. But also just, clients who are ready and who are taking a plunge with some interaction and participation models on their landing pages are starting to see some good strong success as well. In fact we just, we started some of our own landing pages where, you know, people register, for example, for like Webinar, and on the thank you page they can interact with the presenter of the Webinar, so they can, so for example if I’m doing a Webinar next week, if you register you can interact with me right on the thank you page, you can ask me questions or say, “Hey, will you cover this in the Webinar?” We get like 10 percent of our Webinar attendees who actually participate at that level in the forum, so it’s great because it feeds our content, you know, we actually create the Webinar content based on what people want to talk about, but we also start to get engaged and start to interact with people, we, you know, make lots of new friends that way. So those types of things are, well first of all, we’re really, really excited about them, but I think that they’re, we’re moving into a place where those things are almost expected. You know, we expect to be able to interact with the companies that we’re deciding to do business with or we expect some level of transparency, so it makes sense that those things would be coming into those, you know, the landing pages and those pages that are first handshake to our potential customers.

Susan Bratton: When you’re talking about interaction and participation on landing pages using social media, one of the things you mentioned was putting in that, your Twitter feed or Face Book Connect or Google Friend, what’s it called, a Google Friend Connect, right. The tank you is probably a form, the question thing on the thank you page, that’s probably a form they fill out?

Anna Talerico: Mm hmm.

Susan Bratton: Is that what that is?

Anna Talerico: It’s like a discussion board actually, it’s like a bulletin board, so they can see all the questions that have been asked and answered right there, it’s like a running thread and then they can post their own questions too. So it’s, yeah it’s quite nice, because they can see what everybody else is talking about as well.

Susan Bratton: What’s the system that you use for that, the forum thing? Is that off the shelf?

Anna Talerico: We use, I’ll have to check. I think there’s, so we use like a third party tool, I think it’s by a company called JS Kit. But all of the time when we bring in widgets or things like that of blogs rolls or, you know, Twitter feeds, there’s so many third party free tools that you can use now to start to connect with stuff, and they’re of high quality, they’re phenomenal, so usually when we sort of have an idea of some functionality when we want to bring into a landing experience, we can usually find a third party who’s got a tool, whether it’s free or a low cost tool, that’s a great way to bring that stuff all together and get it connected up.

Susan Bratton: What do you think about this, if it were adding all of these components for people to connect with us, link off to Twitter, do, you know, take us some place else, how do we get people to come back to that landing page to convert, if the goal is actually to sell a product or download a white paper or get their name in some way, isn’t giving them the ability to connect with you on Twitter just kind of removing them, taking them away from the process?

Anna Talerico: Yeah, that’s a really good question. So it kind of depends on what the objective of a campaign is and where the social element is introduced. For example, social might be introduced early before the conversion as a way, almost of like social proof, you know, that there are other people here talking about this, interacting with this. But it may just be that it’s something that’s a value add after the conversion, like in the Webinar example I gave when people are interacting with the presenter of the Webinar, that’s happened after they’ve already signed up for the Webinar. So it can be before conversion, it can be after conversion, and sometimes it can even be the reason we’re getting somebody to convert. You know, we’re saying, “Convert, you know, fill out a form or do this to interact with this tool or something, some piece of content that we have”, so you have to experiment with it, and what you can’t do though is allow social to…

Susan Bratton: Derail?

Anna Talerico: draw attention away from, divert attention away from the conversion activity, so really there is a balance, and you have to, you know, decide based on the funnel and based on what the other calls to action are, where to introduce it into the overall experience.

Susan Bratton: And what do you think about the kind of squeeze page, direct marketing landing page that’s one long page where you’re, they’re trying to get a conversion to happen on a single page, not an optimized landing page for a larger website?

Anna Talerico: I think that squeeze pages are great if they’re working. All I really care about is what’s driving conversions, and sometimes that can be a squeeze page. We don’t really use the traditional squeeze page a lot in our professional practice when we’re creating landing pages for clients because we don’t actually see that they work that often, in terms of the long, you know, sales kind of letter with the headlines, I, that kind of squeeze page, we don’t actually see that working very frequently. But in terms of, you know, a page with no navigation, no way out other than just to go through that experience, we use those types of experiences a lot and they can be phenomenally effective.

Susan Bratton: What is it that makes them phenomenally effective?

Anna Talerico: That’s a really good question. So obviously there are landing page best practices and they’re tried and true and, you know, not having a lot of distraction on the page, keeping the pages simple, keeping a clear call to action, very high up and prominent on the page, I mean there are some fundamental basic best practices around landing pages. But it’s also important to remember that, that landing pages don’t have any hard and fast rules, so what’s important is that you test and experiment, because all that matters is what’s working. It doesn’t matter, you know, if I like blue and you like green and we’re trying to decide what color to put on our landing page, that’s actually pretty irrelevant. So we just encourage everybody to test and experiment and try different things, you know, try an apple against an orange to see what’s actually going to result in higher conversion rates, and that’s really all that matters.

Susan Bratton: How do you juggle SEO and hundreds of landing pages?

Anna Talerico: Yeah, that’s a good question. So in terms of our professional practice here at ION, we focus on pages that are created for, you know, for paid media or for specific traffic that is being driven, so…

Susan Bratton: Email, paper click, ad campaigns…

Anna Tolerico: (unintelligible), etcetera. So we don’t do a lot of work on SEO pages ‘cause, and that’s really because philosophically we see them as two different things. If you think about SEO pages, organic traffic, you got to create pages that work for the lowest common denominator. You have all sorts of people funneling into those pages, they, and we don’t always know where they came from. So we don’t, we have a lot come, we don’t have very much control over pages like that. We can optimize them, but that’s really all we can do. But when we have somebody clicking on our message, it’s entirely and fundamentally different, because we know exactly where they were and what they clicked on. So we can create then a hyper mast experience to provide that continuity from the click all the way to the conversion. So they’re really quite different from the types of pages we need to create for SEO, where we have through this, it’s much more, you know, out of our control in terms of who’s coming in and how they got there.

Susan Bratton: Got it. Thank you. So we’re going to go to a break, but you have been kind enough to give us a couple of copies of Honest Seduction, you’re willing to personally autograph them?

Anna Tolerico: Absolutely, I’d love to.

Susan Bratton: So if you’re a member of the Dishy Mix fan club on Face Book, you can get there by going to dishymixfan.com, or you can just type in the word dishymix, all one word, into Face Book. When you go there and you fan the show, we don’t spam you, you can post and ask to be one of the recipients of a personally autographed copy of Honest Seduction. We are swaggalicious at Dishy Mix, and so feel free to come in and fan us and let us know if you’d like Anna to personally autograph a copy of the book for you, and she’ll get it out to you. We are going to go to a break, and when we come back we’re going to talk more to Anna Talerico. She’s the EVP of ION Interactive, their product is Live Ball, I can’t wait to get my hands on it and play with it a little while. And of course the co-author of Honest Seduction: Using Post Click Marketing to Turn Landing Pages Into Game Changers. I’m your host Susan Bratton, and when we get more with Anna. Stay tuned.

Susan Bratton: We’re back with Anna Talerico. Anna is the EVP of ION Interactive. We’re talking about landing page conversion and all kinds of good stuff. And Anna one of the interesting things that you and I talked about before the show was, you know, I love to ask people something that happened to them that really pushed their edge in their life, and one of the things that you told me was ION used to be a digital media, digital marketing agency, and then you moved into this SAS landing page conversion world. What is it about that where the marketing strategies changed from agency to vendor that’s really been kind of like a difficult shift for you and what have you learned and how have you modified?

Anna Talerico: Yeah, it’s actually been a radical shift for us. ION Interactive, we’ve been in business for 11 years now, but we were a boutique firm with this small team and really the clients came to us, so we didn’t do marketing, we didn’t do advertising, we had, you know, a small stable group of clients and we, all of our work came by referral, and all of our clients really became our close friends. So that was sort of our model for many years. But what ended up happening is we sort of had this common thread across all the clients, and that was this better conversions, you know, need for a post click marketing system and approach. So as we thought of that, it was sort of a reoccurring things for a couple of years, we were doing more and more post click marketing for our clients and really needing that systemized approach, we said, “Okay, we need a platform to do this and we need to offer it as a software, as a service, because everybody needs the, this, you know, same thing that our clients need now. And with that really came a big business change, which was no longer about a small group of clients becoming our best friends, but a large group of clients becoming our best friends. But really, we radically had to change from not doing any marketing, not doing any advertising or business development to being a sales and marketing driven organization. And doing it for our clients for many years is one thing, but doing it for yourself is really something entirely different, and just the whole process of growing and aggressively growing a business has definitely been the thing that’s pushed my edge the most.

Susan Bratton: Well it sounds like you do so much. You do speak-ups, I know you’ve spoken at AdTech and you do the SES shows, you’ve got this book out, you have your blog, you’re very active in Face Book and Twitter, so you’re working, and teleseminars and a forum, I mean it seems like you’re doing all the right things. Is there something that you don’t have time to do or money to do that you wish you could do, that you think would even get you more customers?

Anna Talerico: Oh lots of things.

Susan Bratton: Well I’ll be your first, I can give you one, that’s all you get. What do you want?

Anna Talerico: Probably more writing. You know, the book was our first step, and I think that got, Justin and I would probably all like to write many books together, we have so much going on, but we just don’t have time. We don’t have time to write together and we don’t have time really to write much for ourselves, so we get the quick blog post out, and that’s about all we can do. So I wish that we had more time to develop more of our own original content and market it and get it out there.

Susan Bratton: Well and, before ION, you were the managing editor of Art Experience Magazine, so you’re a natural writer, and that’s something you enjoy and you feel is powerful obviously.

Anna Talerico: I do. I love to do it, I wish I had time, and I find as the days go by that I have less and less and less time for it.

Susan Bratton: Oh, I know. I just, I just got back from South By Southwest and I did fourteen interviews with fourteen luminaries, kind of the thought leaders that attended, spoke, ran the panels at South By Southwest, and I did a quick interview with them, five to seven minutes, three to, three to seven minutes, you know, quick interviews where I asked them just some really specific, you know, juicy questions to get their perspectives, and I had to edit those podcasts, I’ve got an editor, edited those podcasts and then I had someone transcribe the podcasts for people who, you know, were, didn’t maybe want to listen, they like to read, you know, ‘cause everybody has their different way of learning, and I blogged those, it took me all day Sunday just to get those up and to get them blogged and to put them out there, and then I get an email from someone today through Face Book that was like, “Well I really like this, but you didn’t format that blog post very well.” And I was like, “Sweetie, I got ten products I’m launching, I got a couple shows in production, I do Dishy Mix every week, I’m an entrepreneur trying to bring some cash in the door, I can’t format the fricking transcript today.” And he’s like, “Oh yeah, I totally understand. No worries”, you know.

Anna Talerico: Exactly.

Susan Bratton: You can, even blog posts take a tremendous amount of time.

Anna Talerico: They do, they do…

Susan Bratton: They really do.

Anna Talerico: and I think there’s a misconception that creating content doesn’t take time, but it really does, and to do it well it does.

Susan Bratton: Me too. I have this little system where every time I think about a blog post I want to do, I just write it on a Post-It note and stick it on my monitor, and then I just say, “Well okay, do I still like that idea, do I still like that idea”, and a lot of times I batch process my blog posts. Like I get in that zone, you know…

Anna Talerico: Yeah, that’s exactly what I do.

Susan Bratton: where I’m ready to write, I’m feeling creative, and I’ll write three or four blog posts, and then I stage them to come out throughout the week, and that works well for me when I can kind of clear my schedule, so I love to blog on Sunday’s.

Anna Talerico: Nice.

Susan Bratton: Yeah.

Anna Talerico: I, actually it’s funny, I do the exact same thing because I, you have to be in the zone and you can’t just parse out ten minute pieces, so once you start writing you need to just keep in that flow. So I actually do the same thing, I have a little sticky note of all the blog ideas and, you know, some, some hang out there and don’t get written for a while and some drop off, but it’s, you kind of have to collect it all, I agree.

Susan Bratton: That’s, we’re doing the same thing. And then I use this Tweet Later product as well. I’m going to, I’m working on a blog post about Tweet Later too because I’ve been using that, kind of like I stage my blog posts, then I stage Twitter’s about my blog posts, and that works really well. So I’ve been using that for about three weeks and kind of understating the in’s and out’s of it, so that’ll be on my Dishy Mix blog as well. Maybe it’ll help you.

Anna Talerico: Yeah, I’m dying to read that ‘cause I have not done Tweet Later yet, but I know I probably need to look at it.

Susan Bratton: Yeah, also I’m getting the arrows in my back for you, because I can tell you I’ve made some mistakes with it and you get an instant feedback. When you don’t do something right in the Twittersphere or the blogosphere, there are no amount of people, I mean there are plenty of people who will say to you, “You know, I didn’t like the way you did that.” You do get a lot of criticism. That was one of the key takeaways from my interview with Guy Kawasaki, he said, “If you’re not pissing somebody off every day, then you’re probably not, you know, don’t worry about it, because everybody’s going to tell you when you do something wrong, just you can’t take it personally. If you’ve got a lot of followers, someone’s going to yell at you.” And I thought, “Okay, I can live with that. So Selling is Dead, this is the book that you said that you recommend by Mark Miller, I hadn’t heard about that, and I went to Amazon just to look at the book, see who wrote it, see what the reviews were, and I saw that they’re selling it in conjunction with my favorite sales book ever called SPIN Selling, that’s situation, problem, implication, need. It teaches you how to be a consultative seller. And now I see that this is being packaged with my favorite sales book ever, so can I borrow your copy?

Anna Talerico: Absolutely.

Susan Bratton: Awesome.

Anna Talerico: I keep a stack of copies on my desk, I have everybody on our team read it, and I constantly pass it out actually. I love the book, it’s phenomenal.

Susan Bratton: Alright, I want to read it. I’ve been borrowing books lately. My god, my book budget is outrageous, so I decided lately, I’m just going to start, you know, I’m always sending books out to people, and I’m going to start saying, “Can I read your copy?” I just Twittered, “I want to read Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell, I don’t want to buy it, I just want to read it.” The first two responses I got back were, “Well I have it on my Kindle, so I can’t really loan it to you.” The other one was, “Well I have it as an audio book, so I can’t really loan it to you”, and I thought, “Wow, it’s, the world is really changing.”

Anna Talerico: I’m dying to get my Kindle. I haven’t gotten one yet, but I…

Susan Bratton: I know.

Anna Talerico: need to.

Susan Bratton: Well I’m torn because I really want a new high end camera and I want a Kindle, so I’m just like kind of, I can only ask for one thing for my birthday, so I got to, you know, really figure out what I want. So Selling is Dead, just give us the top level perspective on that, ‘cause it sounded really interesting from the review on Amazon.

Anna Talerico: Yeah, it is a very meaty book, so it’s not the kind, it’s not beach reading, which so many of our books these days tend to be lighter weight. This is a pretty heavy book. Obviously, a lot about being a consultant, not being, not selling, which I think there’s probably a lot of material out there on that. But fundamentally that, recognizing where your buyer is, and if it’s a concurrent sale or a divergent sale. And so it’s a lot about where is the buyer in there, in the funnel and in their evaluation phase and what type of sales approach you need to match to the buyer and where they are. But I think the big picture, and that’s sort of the nuts and bolts and the nitty gritty to the book, which is just fascinating if you’re marketing a product like ours, you know, to read about sort of divergent sales versus concurrent sales as, anybody launching a product needs to read the book. It’s sort of a Cross in the Chasm for sales people, but…

Susan Bratton: Nice.

Anna Talerico: the overall subtext of the book itself is, is that, you know, the traditional sales approach no longer works. I’m a big, my big thing is I always say that modern sales have to be a mash up of sales and marketing, that we can’t think of them as two different functions anymore, and this book really aligns with that.

Susan Bratton: Well I can’t wait to read it, so definitely send me a copy. If you have Outliers stick that in the envelope too, and I’ll send you three or four. You know what I’m going to do? I’m going to go take a picture of the stacks of books in my library that I’ve recently read, and I’ll post it on Face Book and you can look at it, and if you want any of the ones I just finished I’ll send them to you.

Anna Talerico: That’s such a good idea. I love that.

Susan Bratton: Totally. Alright, so, here, lets, this is, I want to do a little trashy talking. So we have to go, we have to go all the way down…

Anna Talerico: Okay.

Susan Bratton: your sinful decadent pleasure, Real Housewives of Beverly Hills or Orange County? Beverly Hills.

Anna Talerico: Orange County, Beverly Hills, New York, Atlanta, I watch it all.

Susan Bratton: You do? Is that, they’re on I think Bravo?

Anna Talerico: They’re on Bravo.

Susan Bratton: I love Bravo.

Anna Talerico: Yeah, I do too. I do too, and about once or twice a month, I don’t watch them when they come out, but a couple times a month they do like an all night thing where they put like six of them back to back, and I just stay up all night and watch them, and I just can’t help it.

Susan Bratton: Well I’m stuck on The Millionaire Matchmaker with Patty Stanger…

Anna Talerico: Yeah, that’s…

Susan Bratton: Oh my god, it is so trashy, I love it so much, and I of course TiVo it and then I watch three or four in a row and stay up ‘til way too late watching that ridiculous show. I love Bravo right now. It is super trashy reality fabulous stuff, very, very transporting, you know.

Anna Talerico: Yes, yeah.

Susan Bratton: You’re just living vicariously through someone else’s life. It’s so darn fun. I like the Housewives of New York City. I don’t watch them a lot, but just from the previews I think I’d like to watch the New York girls ‘cause they’re so different than the Orange County girls.

Anna Talerico: Yes.

Susan Bratton: Yeah, it’s amazing how culturally different…

Anna Talerico: Oh, I know.

Susan Bratton: each area is, don’t you think?

Anna Talerico: Yeah, it really is. And they had Atlanta last year, which was also very different too…

Susan Bratton: Well you’re down in Florida, so what are the housewives of Florida like?

Anna Talerico: You know what, there’s a big rumor going around our town in Florida that they’re going to have The Real Housewives of Boca Raton soon, so I wouldn’t be surprised.

Susan Bratton: Well you told me that one of the, if you weren’t the EVP of ION Interactive, selling software as solution landing page conversions stuff, you would want to be a teacher, a horse trainer, a housewife or a radio talk show host, so maybe what you could do is you could become one of the real housewives of Boca Raton, and you could kind of just vicariously fulfill that need. What do you think?

Anna Talerico: I think I definitely don’t qualify as a real housewife of Boca Raton.

Susan Bratton: No you don’t, even though you have two beautiful children, right?

Anna Talerico: Yes.

Susan Bratton: And your husbands your business partner, right?

Anna Talerico: He is, he’s one of our business partners, yeah.

Susan Bratton: Yeah. That’s, that’s my life. My husband is my business partner.

Anna Talerico: Yeah…

Susan Bratton: I love it.

Anna Talerico: I love it, and we’re so lucky because our third partner, Scott Brinker, has been with us for like 11 years, so I kind of feel like I have two husbands sometimes. They’re both phenomenal and we’re lucky because we make a great, a great threesome for sure.

Susan Bratton: That’s so awesome. It’s so nice to hear that. And, you know, it was funny when you mentioned that you wanted to be a horse trainer, I thought, oh, you know, I’m kind of afraid of horses, my daughter’s a huge horse lover, and I thought, I think I’m going to go tell her, “Hey, one of the things you could be when you grow up is a horse trainer”, ‘cause it sounds like it’s so much fun to be outside all the time, don’t you think?

Anna Talerico: Absolutely. I mean it’s hard work, definitely, but I do think that training horses has a lot of life lessons built into it.

Susan Bratton: Definitely. And working with those beautiful animals everyday, how great is that?

Anna Talerico: Yeah.

Susan Bratton: It’s very much a fantasy too, isn’t it.

Anna Talerico: Absolutely.

Susan Bratton: I think you’re better off becoming a horse trainer on the side than doing a reality television show ‘cause they’re going to make you look so bad on that reality television show, ‘cause that’s what they do.

Anna Talerico: I’d put the audience to sleep to no doubt, but yeah…

Susan Bratton: Oh, you think? Well I’ll tell you, if you want to be a radio talk show host I have a new ebook coming out, and I’ll send you one when I get it launched because it’s all about how to host a talk show.

Anna Talerico: Wow!

Susan Bratton: I’ve just like written down every, using my little Post-It notes again, I’m just such a Post-It note girl, I, I’ve written down everything I know, have learned over the past, I’ve been doing the talk show since 2005, everything that I’ve learned about doing it, ‘cause with podcasting and video casting, video blogging, blogging, so many people are doing interviews now, and they’re doing a crappy job. And so I’m writing an ebook and I’m going to have landing pages.

Anna Talerico: That is such a good idea. I love that idea.

Susan Bratton: I know, exciting.

Anna Talerico: Yeah, you need to do that because you’re right, with all the podcasters, and they’re just, yeah, it’s a great idea. I’m so proud of you.

Susan Bratton: Somebody just needs to tell you what to do. It’s not that hard, you just have to kind follow some pretty simple rules.

Anna Talerico: Yeah.

Susan Bratton: Yeah, so we’ll see, wish me luck. You can, you can critique my landing pages when I get them launched, how ‘bout that?

Anna Talerico: Absolutely.

Susan Bratton: Alright, good. Well it’s been so much fun to talk Anna, and thank you so much for the two free personally autographed copies of Honest Seduction for Dishy Mix fans on Face Book, I appreciate that.

Anna Talerico: My pleasure.

Susan Bratton: Yeah. And anyone can come check you out. Do you want to tell us anymore coordinates or web URL’s or, give it all to us, and we’ll make sure it’s also on the site.

Anna Talerico: Absolutely. Our website’s ioninteractive.com, it’s i-o-n, interactive.com. Again, Twitter, annatalerico, all one word. Twitter, I’d love for people to follow me, and that’s probably the best place to reach us.

Susan Bratton: Perfect. We will follow you. Anna thank you so much for all of the great insight and fun that you’ve brought us today. It was awesome to have you on the show.

Anna Talerico: Thank you so much. It’s always good to talk to you Susan.

Susan Bratton: Alright. I’m your host Susan Bratton. You’ve been enjoying Dishy Mix with Anna Talerico. Have a great day, and I hope you’ll join me next week, ‘cause I’ll have somebody else super fun for you and we’ll learn too. Bye.