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My name
is Michael Zwerling, a guy who loves radio
broadcasting and whose lifelong dream was always to own and operate a popular
and successful news/talk radio station. That dream was realized
on January 31, 1991 when I became the owner of KSCO
AM 1080, a 10,000 watt station based in the Monterey Bay Area of
California. The station was immediately
popular (we developed many hosts and programs which focused on local issues),
but was never particularly successful in the financial sense. I and my family
subsidized the station for years, and the best we could ever do was break
even, or have a tiny positive cash flow during times of heavy political
advertising. Our major problem during
all those years was finding and keeping good advertising sales people. For all those years, we
ran on compliment power, but we were always broke; always struggling. But our
audience loved us. Then in September of
1996, I discovered and developed a non-traditional revenue method that is so
powerful that I have been able to dispense with our entire sales staff at
KSCO and all the headaches that come along with them. All KSCO advertising
sales are now handled directly by our General Manager, and while it may seem
foolhardy to put all station sales in the hands of only one person, the fact
is, that even if we lost that person, we would not only survive, but continue
to flourish, because we no longer depend on salespeople for station
revenue. Here’s how we got to this wonderful position: We changed the focus through which
we generate station revenue from time sales to commissions on products sold
to our listeners. This may sound simply
like per-inquiry advertising, but it’s not. Rather, it is a marriage
of network marketing (also known as "multi-level marketing") with
broadcasting. Our
station broadcasts a live daily prime time alternative health call-in program
called "Dead Doctors Don’t Lie". The
purpose of the program is to educate (in an entertaining way) people on the
importance of regular use of high quality mineral and vitamin supplements to
achieve optimal health and longevity.
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The goal of the program
is to reduce peoples’ blind reliance on medical doctors, hospitals, and
prescription drugs which frequently cause more heath problems than they
solve. This one hour program has
become very popular on KSCO, and the monthly vitamin
and mineral sales commissions generated by its broadcast now amount to more
than the combined traditional monthly advertising revenue for the
entire station! KSCO now distributes
"Dead Doctors Don’t Lie: The Talk Radio
Program" live via satellite to a growing number of radio stations, each
weekday from 12:06 to 1:00 PM Pacific Time (re-fed the following weekday
morning from 9:06 to 10 AM Pacific Time). The program may also be
obtained on demand or via rss feed from our ftp
site, or from ITunes on the internet. Affiliate stations and
networks (and now podcasters and even websites) may
earn lucrative monthly residual income by becoming Dead Doctors affiliates,
licensed by ZBS Radio Associates, the distributor of the program (see zbsradio.com for more details on
licensing and affiliation) Affiliates receive (based
upon monthly sales volume of supplements sold to listeners of a given
affiliate station) a commission check from Youngevity,
the vitamin and mineral supplement manufacturing company on or about the 18th
of each month. Connected to each check
is an online computer printout which shows the detail of the computation of
each monthly sales commission check. Some affiliate stations
receive very small or no monthly commission checks (because they have small
audiences and/or run the program sporadically or at poor times). .ther
stations earn monthly incomes of several hundred to several thousand dollars
(all from commissions, and not including revenue from traditional advertising
time sales). Still others, like KSCO,
and persons who sponsored those stations have monthly passive incomes in the
tens of thousands of dollars. How much money a station
or website will earn from Dead Doctors will depend on how popular the station
or website is or becomes. The message of personal responsibility for your own health does tend to attract large audiences.
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