Podcasting How to | Distributing Your internet marketing message with podcasts, by Russell A Magwood
Podcasting is easy!
If you want to distribute your marketing message all across the internet, one of the best ways to do it is with podcasting. Podcasting is a great internet marketing strategy that has a “social marketing” feel to it. The basic premise of a podcast is that you can create an MP3 file, upload it to the podcast directories, wait for someone to come across your podcast, have them listen to it, and then drive these people back to your website or blog.
That’s it. It’s that easy. Now the “uneasy” part of it is getting the podcast created. You can either have one of those “text-to-speech” robots do it for you. You can do an interview with someone. Or you can simply record the podcast all by yourself (which is very common – nothing wrong with this).
No matter what option you choose, you should know that the resulting podcast can help to improve your sales and profits in a short period of time. You can get a lot of traffic using podcasts. If you want to use it inside of your internet business today, you will want to put this marketing strategy on overdrive.
Make it a point to include it into your weekly marketing campaign. You want to go hard with your marketing efforts, and make podcasting an integral part of getting new content out there in the form of an MP3. People can download your podcast immediately and start listening to all of your advice and information simply and easily.
I like podcasts because they’re similar to the concept of video marketing. With a lot of video sites, the only self promotion that you can give yourself in your videos is the use of displaying your URL in the video yourself. Typically the URL is at the bottom of the video, and it isn’t clickable.
This means that your viewers will have to type in your website address in their web browser, instead of just clicking directly to it. But if you want to get more clicks, make more videos. Similarly, podcasting is the same way. The way people know about your website is when you mention it in your podcast.
And sometimes, you have to spell it out for your listeners so that they type in the right address for your website. This is especially true if you have a long URL. People will have a hard time remembering a long URL.
If you’re new to podcasting, you will want to make sure that you spread the message clearly to your prospects all across the internet. Make sure you go to Feedburner to get an easy RSS feed that website publishers can use to put your content onto their website. This will only mean more traffic, subscribers, and sales for your business.
Take these podcasting tips and use them to take your internet business to the next level. By the time that you do, you’ll have a good chance of getting more of what you want out of your business, in a short period of time.
Good luck with using these tips to earn more money with podcasting today.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Randall Magwood is one of the most respected and highly-regarded online marketing experts on the internet. He currently has a free book about internet marketing that helps small business owners market their business online successfully. To learn more and to download this free book, simply visit his website here: http://www.internetmarketing-rules.com
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Podcasting !
Podcasting info with Francis Bean
Having your own podcasting contribution in the iTunes store is becoming extremely popular. Not just for celebrities or big name organizations but for the small business owner or individual hobbyist.
Podcasting itself began some years ago but with the recent release of portable “streaming” devices such as the iPhone and iPad, this medium is having somewhat of a renaissance around the world.
But to anyone who thinks they can set up a podcast in 5 minutes, a word of warning. Podcasting isn’t easy. Despite a lot of information being online, the majority of this information is out of date and irrelevant. It’s difficult to sort the wheat from the chaff. In my quest to become a podcaster I was taken down several rabbit holes that only added to my confusion and made the dream of having my own podcast in iTunes even more unattainable.
So please take my advice, if you want to podcast then stop searching for and consuming all the free information online. This means steering clear of video sharing sites like YouTube and Vimeo.
My main reason for warning you against this is because of the plethora of mistakes I made from listening to podcasting advice from these unregulated and unreliable sources.
On one occasion, I wasted several hundred dollars on equipment because I listened to a podcast course video on YouTube. By the time I found this information wasn’t accurate it was already too late for me to get a refund. It was a complete waste of my time and my money.
One of the best ways to navigate the often-confusing path of podcasting is by taking a podcast course. There’s only a few good quality podcast courses online.
In my experience the best thing about a reputable podcast course is that it has all the information you need to know and it’s structured and in a logical order.
Like most new media and social media endeavours, with a podcast there are certain protocol and steps you need to understand and implement before you will be up and running.
And there’s a lot to do in the initial set up. To be honest it’s this groundwork that has created a “high entry barrier” for podcasting turning off because of the initial set up.
However once your podcast is created, releasing regular episodes are no more complicated than releasing a new blog post.
One of the easiest ways to know if a podcast course is going to teach you everything you need to know is to ensure it covers the following subjects.
1. What is podcasting? (a detailed explanation of the medium and iTunes)
2. Equipment and set up (what hardware and software is needed to record your voice)
3. Recording behind the microphone (how to integrate the recording software with your microphone)
4. Creating and submitting an RSS feed into iTunes and other podcast directories (publishing your audio)
Once you’ve found a podcast course that you’re happy with, it’s time to knuckle down do the work. Once you do, you’ll be dominating the charts in iTunes in no time at all!
And finally if you are interested in a podcast course then please check out How To Make Podcasts Like A Pro at http://howtomakepodcastslikeapro.com/podcast-course
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Podcasting and internet marketing with Randall A Magwood
Podcasting is easy!
When recording a podcast, you should know that it can be challenging. You need a good and clear microphone, a good subject to talk about for 30 to 60 minutes, and a way to distribute your podcast all over the internet. If you’re brand new to using podcasts, then I think today’s lesson will be of some use for you.
The first thing that you should know is that podcasting is very easy to do. You can create a podcast, and use it to bring tons of new traffic back to your website on a daily basis. You should know that the best way to conduct your podcasting efforts is to record them yourself. Don’t use one of those cheap “text to speech” software out there. I assure you that this will do no good for your business.
Take some time out for your business so that you can record the podcast yourself. It won’t take long, and it will improve the chances of having someone come back to listen to your podcasting again. The more good information you deliver, the more people will return for more, and the more your popularity will grow with your podcasting fan base.
After you have recorded your podcast, you will want to do some marketing for it. The first place you should submit your podcast to is iTunes. iTunes is the number 1 podcasting directory on the internet, and it gets a lot of visitors to their site each and everyday. People come to this site everyday to download new podcasts that they can use to improve their lives, or just to hear some information and music that is enjoyable.
Make sure you get a good microphone to record your podcast with. It’s something that you will want to do if you want to have the utmost success with your podcast today. You don’t want to record over a low quality webcam that has a lot of noise and static in the background. This is just bad for business.
Instead, purchase a high quality microphone, and use a good program that’s out there that will allow you to record your lengthy podcasts simply and easily. But of course, if you don’t want to do the podcasting yourself… you can always outsource it to someone else. The drawback is that you will have to pay someone to do it for you, but if you’re a busy business owner who wants to get more exposure for your website, this can be a good option for you – especially if you’re getting it done for a low price.
Podcasting is a great way to market your website or blog online. You should consider taking them and using them to earn more money in your business today. Make sure you convert your podcasts into MP3 format, so that they can be a small file, but still have a lot of quality in it that makes it easy to listen to.
If you wanted to make recordings and earn the money in your business that you have been looking for, you will want to incorporate podcasting into your business right away so that you can have the best chances of success as possible when it comes to promoting your website online.
Take these tips and use them to earn more money in your business today.
Good luck with creating podcasts in your business simply and easily.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Randall Magwood is one of the most respected and highly-regarded online marketing experts on the internet. He has a website about internet marketing that helps small business owners learn how to market their business online simply and easily. To learn more, simply visit his website here: http://www.internetmarketing-rules.com
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Podcasting and Direct Response Marketing by Randall A Magwood
Podcasting is easy and beneficial to your business, read on!
Do you know what a podcast is? Podcasting is simply a 30 to 60 minute recording where you distill information about a particular topic. Many people prefer hearing people instead of reading things online, so podcasts are a good option for them. If you want to expand your client base and get more traffic to your website… you should consider using podcasts today.
Podcasting is easy to do. All you need is a microphone and a recording software to help you create the podcast. Some people take a camcorder and create YouTube videos with it, and then extract the audio from the video to instantly turn it into a podcast. You will need a few different kinds of software to do this, but it’s still a great way to take care of 2 things at 1 time.
To attract as many people as possible to your podcasting efforts, the first thing that you will want to do is to enter into a niche. The conventional methods of direct response marketing still apply. If you enter into a niche, you will find that you won’t have a lot of competition as opposed to if you were in a niche like internet marketing, weight loss, or entertainment news.
Niches like these are incredibly crowded, so you will want to make it a point to seek out more other unusual niches to get traffic to your website. You don’t necessarily have to be passionate about something… if you want to make money online, going into a niche is essential.
Think about all of the niches that you can enter into and be a part of. You could take over a niche, and make a name for yourself in that niche for a long, long time. Plus, the more brand recognition you get for yourself in your niche, the more people will come back to you to buy more of your products, and to get their hands on your information so that they can achieve a goal that they have or solve a problem.
Once you’ve found your niche, it’s time to start creating your podcast. You have 2 options: You can either create a high quality podcast, or a low quality podcast — in terms of podcasting equipment. Now I’m sure you would deliver the same good information as usual, but if you use high quality podcasting tools, you will find that people are more likely to stay with you and listen to the information that you have to share week after week.
You will want to go out of your way and create a free podcast blog also. You can do this at a site called “Blogger”. To get your own blog, it will only take you about 5 minutes. Then you will want to go to a site called “Feedburner” to get an RSS feed for your podcast blog. This will allow people to get your podcast information post it onto their website or blog – thus giving you more free exposure for your business.
Podcasting is huge right now and it’s something that you will want to do now rather than later. Keep this in mind the next time that you go out and create a podcast in your business today.
Good luck with using podcasting in your business today.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Randall Magwood is one of the most respected and highly-regarded online marketing experts on the internet. He has a website about internet marketing that helps small business owners learn how to market their business online simply and easily. To learn more, simply visit his website here: http://www.internetmarketing-rules.com
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by Randall A Magwood
Podcasting Made Simple
Podcasting really can be simple!
Podcasting can be a great way for you to expand your marketing message and get more sales for your business. If you want to know how to use podcasts to your advantage today, then you have landed on the right page! I want to show you how you can use podcasts to get you more traffic, and ultimately, more sales.
Podcasting is simply a recorded media file that is typically created into an MP3 format. MP3 format is ideal for its small file size, along with the quality that it can maintain. When you make your podcast, you will want to submit it to all of the podcast directories. One podcast directory in particular that you will want to submit it to is iTunes.
iTunes gets so much traffic on a daily basis that you can use it to improve your business within a short period of time with podcasting. If you find yourself not getting the traffic that you’re looking for in your business, perhaps you should give iTunes a chance. It’s a site that can do a lot of good for your business.
I’m not only a user of iTunes, but there’s someone that I listen to on iTunes that is very popular. Her name is Suze Orman. You may have heard of her, or not. No matter the case, whenever I can’t catch her show when it airs, I immediately go to iTunes to download her podcasting efforts to catch up on things that I have missed.
When you build up a following of people, people will start to do the same thing with you. They will check iTunes every week to see if you’ve posted anything new, because your advice is so sensational that they don’t want to miss it at all. This is the power of podcasting and how it can help to drive tons of targeted traffic to your website or blog everyday.
Once I realized that podcasting can get me a lot of traffic and sales, I wanted to jump on it immediately. This is something that you will want to do also in your business. Just make a podcast about something related to your niche, so that you can develop content simply and easily.
If you’re stuck on ideas, you should know that it’s normal. Just do a bit of brainstorming and come up with topics that you can talk about. I’m sure that you can come up with a lot of topics to write about if you put your mind into it. Or simply join a forum in your niche and see what some of the main problems are, then turn this information into a podcast that you can promote on the forum, and on iTunes.
Now besides iTunes, there are many other podcasting directories out there. These podcast directories serve the same purpose as iTunes, and a lot of people visit these other directories also for podcasts that they can listen to, or even promote on their blog or site. No matter what they do, you will want to submit your podcasts here also so that you can get a lot of exposure for your website.
Podcasts are not new, and have been around for quite sometime now. And if this is your first time hearing about them, you should know that you should enter into the podcast game now if you want to have the most success as possible with getting traffic to your website – because this is exactly what will happen once you launch your podcast marketing plan.
Good luck with using these podcasting tips to make more money in your business today.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Randall Magwood is one of the most respected and highly-regarded online marketing experts on the internet. He has a website about internet marketing that helps small business owners learn how to market their business online simply and easily. To learn more, simply visit his website here: http://www.internetmarketing-rules.com
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Podcasting- and transcripting?
Thankyou to our contributor from E-Zine articles here on podcasting – and transcripting. The source of the article is below.
There are a number of podcasting solution providers who can transcribe your podcast accurately at a cost-effective price. Transcribing your podcast can make your podcast optimized on major search engines and help you to reach a large number of people.
Podcasting transcription software can convert MP4 file format into different text formats such as PDF, Word, and more and can also add images too. When your podcast is converted into text, people can skim through the content and get a brief of your podcast.
Despite improved speech recognition technologies available, free podcasting software has turned obsolete with lot of gross inadequacies, errors and distortions. Podcasting transcription has replaced software due to complexities in audio to text recognition. Though Podcast software is now widespread, human transcription is becoming increasingly accepted. The high level of integration with word processing has helped human podcast transcription service in the field of document production is proving the ideal choice. There are a number of transcription companies which provides top class Podcasting transcription solutions to enterprises for promoting their product or service online for various podcast such as:
•Podcasting of Meetings
•Podcasting of Lectures
•Podcasting of Conferences
•Podcasting of Seminars
•Podcasting of Speeches
•Podcasting of Focus groups
•Podcasting of TV commentaries
Podcasting services are available in different business domains such as healthcare, Government, Education, Universities, Defence, Telecom, Courts, and more. MP4 transcription services allows you to convert spoken audio into text version accurately, including those with heavy accent, from different audio file formats like MP3, WAV and WMA. Podcast transcription solution helps businesses to increase their visibility in the web, improve their search engine ranking and earn better return on investment. Podcast transcription services are easier to use with listen-and-type process, that are keyword-rich which however comes at a very low cost and high time-to-market factors. Transcription service providers can also provide custom MP4 transcription services in the internet with time-sync that enable people to browse the particular video content by using the relevant hyperlinks. If you understand the world of customers, then a good podcast transcription service should provide effective solutions to meet customer’s requirements even in tight deadlines without affecting the quality of software delivered.
Podcast transcription involves various stages which are as follows:
•Download the digital file from site
•Convert the files into a text format
•Use voice recognition software to convert audio files into text
•Word by word conversion of audio into text by following a listen-and-type process
•Review of content and checking is done for accuracy
•Transcribed files are finally cleaned-up to avoid grammatical errors
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In this episode I interview Jack Humphrey of Blog Success, the next bit! It is in several short, bitesize parts for you. Enjoy!
Jack:Well you have to be plugged into your sources of information. I mean we all succeed on the backs of people who came before us. We are all succeeding now because somebody thought WordPress would be a good idea and now we are all using WordPress and we are succeeding because somebody thought podcasting would be a good idea, and then it’s the same for information.
You have heard the saying ‘there’s nothing new under the sun’ and throughout human history there are certain points where there really is something new like E=mC2, and then the entire scientific community and physics today is built on the shoulders of that thing that was new and there have been new developments from that and okay, so Einstein said this but now we are finding, but through my research that was inspired by Einstein that this and this are true as well, and that’s exactly what we are doing in the blogging community.
I mean if you think you are the first person to write about a lot of the stuff out there in a niche you are probably wrong and what you are doing is you are putting your own spin on it, you are updating people on new information that will change what the original information was or the way people perceive it in some way, and new ideas for how to handle that information and put things into action, for instance.
So if I came out with something on SEO, which I just have, a lot of that stuff is nothing new under the sun but it’s got my own spin on it and it’s got the very most recent developments in SEO included in it where the original content didn’t because those developments didn’t exist at the time.
Neil: Understood, yeah, certainly an evolving leading-edge thing. Now I know you’ve got a certain amount of tools with your business blog success and I do want you to give that very big plug here because I am big fan and for the record I endorse – whole-heartedly endorse everything that you do. I have also consulted with you on some projects as well and I wanted to get that in print as well and you are absolutely fantastic.
So if you got internet projects and wondered about how to launch things and you are looking for a damn fine consultant, Jack Humphrey is your main element to get that immortalizing print.
What tools do you have that help people when they are getting information from a niche and when they are sort of researching their niche, or what tools do you have to help Panda information done and keep it focused when people are using it to get the information that they need, the marketers I mean, does that makes sense?
Jack: Yeah, you are going to have your key websites and from my example, I am glued to Mashable.com because I teach people about social media, social marketing – things like that. If you are a political blogger you are going to have Huffington Post and all the other different US political or wherever you are, you are going to have the leaders in your reader, however you organize that. If it’s in Google Reader or whatever, but you are going to check that on a daily or very frequent basis to see what’s new. What’s new in the world? What’s new in my part of the world that’s going to affect my content, that’s going to affect my readers to get them to talk about my site?
Neil: What specific tools do you have that’s…?
Jack: You use Google Alerts. You go to alerts.google.com and that will tell you whenever, based on any keyword, something new has come on the web, somebody has got a new story or whatever, as soon as it comes up and Google finds it, it sends you an email and lets you know what it’s about.
So you get emails on a constant basis when you set that up for a range of keywords that are the things that you probably set your categories on your site up for – the same thing that you are putting your categories so the things that you talk about is a good place to start with setting up Google Alerts.
The other thing is the most basic is just using Google Reader. You can use any kind of RSS Reader but you need to go around and subscribe to all these top line sources of information – news sites, blog sites, whatever it is in your niche, whoever the biggest movers and shakers are who are developing news, reporting news and publishing on a regular basis, so that you can have a constant flow of ideas coming in.
Well I need to do a post on that but I think this person is wrong here and my post is going to be about that news item so I am going to have that keyword but I am also going to give my own two cents about this, or I am going to develop a podcast show around this issue because it just blew up. It’s trending.
And speaking of trending you can go to Twitter, you can go search.twitter.com and do searches on keywords and find out what people are talking about. There’s also one called TrendWatching.com and there are several tools like that. You can just go to Google and type in trends, trend watching.
Google has got a trending tool for search and you can start to understand how these really big sites that are really popular and they are always coming out with content like crazy and now they have a staff of maybe 20-30 people and they are coming out with 50 to 100 posts a day with the entire site because it’s got different sections in it and they are sort of the uber sites – how do they do that?
Well they’ve got people out there using tools like this and their each person is assigned the latest news and politics desk person and that’s all that’s their whole filter. So they set up their alerts to Google Alerts, they follow the sites that are making the most news in that particular area and when anything happens in that area they come back to the blog and report it and they use those tools to do it.
That’s how they stay so plugged in and they have multiplied that over many, many staff members, or when you are doing it by yourself you have to use the same tools as they do and you are responsible for the content and everything and in two different ways in this particular scenario what’s going to be a good blog post and what’s going to be a good podcast to maybe get a guest star.
This is a great way to find people who are movers and shakers that you didn’t know about for interviews, if that’s your podcast style, doing an interview and just interviewing successful people or experts in certain things where you don’t even have to know all the stuff in that industry; you just have to be a good interviewers and all the questions are typically the same across every niche.
If it’s an economist you are going to talk about the same kind of things – it’s going to be your current events, and so you don’t have to be the expert to do all of that stuff.
Neil: Thank you. Are people very open to be interviewed? I mean are people fairly approachable?
Jack: Oh it’s so easy. People have egos and they have their own goals and they need to get out there. When you said you wanted to interview me I didn’t even blink because I know you have a following and I know you are well known and I definitely always want to do interviews with people when I know I am going to get something out of it. I mean I am getting exposure through this – very, very easy to do.
So what you do when you are starting out is you move up the ladder. You start interviewing peers and those peers have connections that you don’t. You try to get a bigger connection and you just keep going for bigger and bigger fish and then leverage the last fish that you were on with to get the bigger fish.
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In this episode I interview Jack Humphrey of Blog Success, the next bit! It is in several short, bitesize parts for you. Enjoy!
Listen or read, and if you like it, please leave a comment below.
Neil: Your greatest success by far was the Authority Blackbook, wasn’t it? I mean that was just incredible that launched you as quite literally as an authority on the scene, I mean it was huge, wasn’t it?
Jack: Yeah, but we weren’t able to take advantage of Twitter and Facebook at the time because there weren’t all the tools so you could put right on your site. Now you can have an html plugin for landing pages where they would download the Authority Blackbook and people can comment on it.
Jack: What we did back then was we setup a blog where people had an autoresponder message after they downloaded the book, it says, “Hey, tell us what you think on the blog”, and we got a massive amount of comments doing that but it would have been so much bigger and better if the Facebook commenting was right under there. If anybody listening has seen that it basically looks just like Facebook. It’s a Facebook comment area and if you are logged into Facebook your little face, icon, whatever your profile picture is already there and when you type a comment out for what you think of that, say the Authority Blackbook, also goes on your Facebook wall, which then takes it viral.
I mean we got viral the old-fashion way. I can only imagine what Authority Blackbook comments would have been like had we had the ‘Tweet’ buttons and everything that we do today. It just would have been unheard of. In the end, so we got well over 100,000 downloads of that book and we still get about 50-70 downloads a day of that book without any…it hit critical mass. There’s so many links out there about it now.
And then the Twitter and the Facebook stuff did pick up. We don’t do anything with that anymore; people just still find it everywhere. All the places we wrote about it, all the places that other people wrote about it on their blogs, people did reviews – lots and lots and lots of reviews came out of it and I tell you it wasn’t as much as us pushing it as putting up a really, really excellent product, and most of those things were people being moved by the product itself to do it and we didn’t have to go around and the weight of the world was not on our shoulders to get all the links that you’d see to the Authority Blackbook.
Neil: It was a fact that it was just so damn good, and you use that as a free give away to start with and then you start things on the backend of that rather than setting that individually, which is a very good strategy I thought.
Jack: Well and it is just podcasting how to. I mean you’ve got a monetization idea but you are not charging people for like my weekly radio show is free, and again which we work really hard to make it attractive and get people talking about it and that starts with taking it off of, I’d use BlogTalkRadio, taking that immediately off there and putting it on FridayTrafficReport.com and that’s my clientele right now.
The last two things I got published there that weren’t podcasts were two guest articles and I used to publish and you should when you are starting out. You should publish every day. If you are in the right kind of niche with a lot of topics, a lot of questions being asked out there by people, where you need to be providing the answers and providing link posts, things like that where you have just got a list of resources like ‘the top 10 places to do this’ or ‘top 10 tips for ______’, in the dog training thing how to get your dog stop jumping up on people when they come in the house or whatever.
Neil: So yeah, you are kind of answering the questions to get along on, thank you. It’s odd of but the original question I thought, I have this terrible tendency to go for tangents, which was how do you monetize audio content? We have established, you are a Web 2 master, we have established the tools much better than they actually were and that’s basically what you are doing, you are posting every day doing a radio show and then putting that on the post as well. You are obviously not charging for the radio content but you are finding out what people want and then creating appropriate radio content to answer the questions, would that be right?
Jack: Yeah, and I mean people will ask questions. When you start picking up a little gravity and people are starting to comment and things and you do things like you invite them to ask anything. Ask me anything about dog training, anything you want and if I choose your question I will use your name and if you want, or I’ll even link to your site if you own a website and I’ll answer it on the blog and then all of a sudden you’ve got content coming in that you can’t even handle all of it because there’s so many people are like, “Well, what do you do in this instance; what do you do in that instance?”
That’s a good niche because you can put up a post or you can do a show that answers the questions that way you think they need to be answered but if you are in a really rich niche, like dog training you’ve got millions of different breeds of dogs, you know, and just all kinds of different things. So you can only do so much in your podcast to answer questions. You want your podcast to bring up more questions.
In fact there was a trick that Andy Beal uses at MarketingPilgrim.com which is really a good one and it’s ‘don’t answer every question’, like know the answer to the overall question, give four or five different tips and purposely leave out one of the big tips that someone is going to go ‘Wait a minute, he didn’t say anything about this’ and they will make a comment and they’ll say, ‘What about that’ and that usually is a starter and that gets spread around because on your blog you should have a Facebook ‘like’ button and there’s a plugin for that, and you should have a ‘Twitter’ button – there’s a plugin for that, and those being separate are much more important than using the plugin called ‘ShareThis’ which is sort of overwhelming. When you click on that it’s a little green thing with two little nodules on the end. It opens up into this window that says, “You can share to all these different places”, and most people don’t belong to the vast majority of them. It gets confusing and they end up not sharing as much and we have tested that.
Neil: Yeah, yeah, that did confuse. That’s an aspect that confused me. There’s so much information.
Jack: That you end up doing nothing.
Neil: Yeah, coming in all directions. I love one of your phrases, I have read one of the things you wrote, ‘it’s becoming information overlord rather than the information overload’, which I thought was brilliant and perhaps if we could talk a little bit about tools that help you head down, that laser light focus that is obviously necessary. So it’s interesting you brought out and you talked about sharing because you are right, you don’t want to confuse people. Not that people are stupid, far from it but people are easily confused. You come to the website and say, “Well, what am I going to do here?”
Jack: Right, and that you need to give them very…everything on your site is designed for desirable actions that you want people to take, like opting into your lists or clicking on a link to go to your product page or an affiliate link – I mean you have all of these desirable actions you want people to take and you’ve got to get them to take those actions with the least resistance and friction as possible. They cannot be expected to figure things out in any way; it needs to be handed to them.
Neil: Yes.
Jack: So it makes you pare things down. So the ‘ShareThis’ plugin, if anybody is using that and they are wondering why they are not getting shared a lot, it’s because it’s too complicated. It’s really, really geeky. You have to go back and remember what it was like when you started surfing the web, and you will remember that you didn’t know what all of these buttons meant and ‘ShareThis’ gives you a million buttons to click on.
Most people don’t belong to any of those services and if you are going to share on the web you are going to do it on Twitter or Facebook, that’s just where everybody is. I mean plain and simple, there’s 500 million on Facebook, there’s a 145-150 million on Twitter and those are the places where you are going to want to go to get the most buzz for yourself. So you want those buttons individually at the bottom of each post.
Neil: Right.
Jack: And if you want to throw one more in there you throw in Google Buzz and there is a plugin for that. So you have three buttons and three chances. So if somebody is really loving more than any other, they love Google Buzz then that’s what they are going to push. They are not going to probably come back and push the Twitter button or the Facebook button. You are going to get people to do one thing if anything and so when you are publishing your content just sings to them, is their muse and if they really like it, they like the tune, they are going to spread it around and that’s how you leverage your following – the traffic you are getting from the search engines and the traffic you are getting from the search engines again, to your podcast page. If you use like BlogTalkRadio or you are just podcasting on your own, you are recording stuff and putting it right on the blog, you build up a following and that following needs to know at all times that you would like them to ‘like’ ‘tweet’ or put it on Google Buzz or otherwise blog about it. You’ve got to get people blogging about your stuff too.
If you surf around in any niche you have these little movers and shakers and you are either one or you are going to be one, and what they will do to come up with content is start with a quote from someone else. Somebody came out with a blog post about an interesting dog training trick and you quote them in your podcast and in the notes for your podcast on that same blog post. You might even link to them.
You are doing to them what you want them doing for you and what did they do to get you to do that? They said something interesting and very relevant to your audience, something that your audience you thought really needed to know.
So it all originates with the content. You can’t polish a turd, as we say, and so if you are just slapping up stuff and you are doing it from the sake of it, because you heard podcasting was a great way to, and it is, get a bunch of links, get out in areas that most people don’t think to market in and add really quality different kind of content and especially different mode of delivery to your site, then you can do that. You can’t just go through the motions; there’s got to be good stuff and if it’s good stuff then that’s what gets passed around and getting it passed around, you have to make it very, very easy for people to do that.
Neil: Let’s just destroy the myth that you can just put aside that, put a few plugins on to something and little too much to go far and to make you a millionaire of the night because that’s the impression you would get from some of the websites out there. I mean like you say, it’s got to be good quality stuff, the tools. Of course the tools are secondary to the good quality content. But if you want to make your own podcast it certainly can’t help you.
Jack: And don’t confuse good quality with you’ve got to be able to produce a podcast like Neil does with all the bells and…that’s not the quality, when you create your own podcast – The quality is the information and it’s more specifically answering questions that desperately need answers, that people have already been out there going I wish somebody would just break this issue down for me or keep me up to date on the latest information in a certain area and do it in a way that…you know the way that you do it is not as important as that you are doing it and that you know where to find the content that people really want, the ideas for content that people really want to know about.
Neil: And how would you find that if you were researching on these? I mean so we have established beginning user with the podcasting as our mode of delivery, we’ve got some good tools in place to do it, we’ve set ourselves up on BlogTalkRadio, we’ve got the right plugins but then how do we go and find good old niche finding in the very beginning – how do we get that there?
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In this episode I interview Jack Humphrey of Blog Success. It is in several short, bitesize parts for you. Enjoy!
Listen or read, and if you like it, please leave a comment below.
Neil: Thanks so much for agreeing to do this. What I want to talk to you about Jack was you have a very successful – if busy internet business, and radio show , and a blogging master-what I wanted to really focus on was how you get your audio and market it on the blog and with Web 2.0 (Social media), and how to make a successful business model out of that.
Jack:
Well, I did it kind of backwards in a way, I mean I did the FridayTrafficReport.com was a blog that was mostly text-based original content and what I call foundation contents. In every market you need to have content on your site that people expect to see. So if you have a site about dog training there are pieces of content that everybody needs to have on the site. It shouldn’t be all the same. It should be original content but it should be, if you are on a dog training site you are going to want to see that they have all the different aspects – puppy training, leash training, paper training – all these different kinds of things which make up the foundation content. Every dog training site should have that foundation.
That foundation content gets you rankings to start and gets you the respect that you need when people land at your site that you are an authority in that niche at market, and that’s basically what I did for a couple of years on Friday Traffic Report. I just blogged.
If I was to start over with the idea of having a podcast right from the very beginning I would do the same thing. I would blog as much as possible. If you really are honest about your niche and you have chosen a good one, that’s really good version and topic range and all the different things that you can do then you will have a lot of things to write about or have written, outsource it – however you want to do it. But that’s not just doing keyword research and saying ‘this is what I need’; it’s also doing competitive research with people who are already out there doing this stuff who probably have the popularity that you want at some point and looking at their best pieces, the ones that get the most traffic, using compete.com and your Google Tools and things like that to analyze.
There’s a really good tool actually for analysis. It’s at SEObook.com, that’s Aaron Wall and he has got a really cool SEO toolbar that can tell you a lot about every individual page that you land on with your competition and go ‘wow, this content really got a lot of lengths’, you can see the comments without having a toolbar, got a lot of comments interaction.
You can also analyze how many times that was ‘retweeted’ and ‘liked’ on Facebook. Typically that will be writing your phase-2, that’s widget’s report back on that and then those…
Neil: Can you just explain ‘retweet’ quickly for the benefit of those that wouldn’t understand that, what does ‘retweeting’ mean?
Jack: Basically it’s when someone grabs a piece of content on the web and tweets about it and usually your blog should be set up with a plug in and there’s many plug ins that do this but when you are working with WordPress you just go into the ‘plug ins’ database and do a search on Twitter and you will find every plug in that does anything with Twitter. Most of them do something to connect your blog to Twitter and so you are the one who is actually putting your content on Twitter all the time. Every time you post it goes up on Twitter.
And ‘retweets’ are when somebody goes ‘I like this enough; I am going to retweet it’, that means they pass it on to their followers by retweeting and it goes on and on and on like that. Their followers can do the same thing and it can get viral sometimes. So that’s retweeting.
‘Liking’ is Facebook and that’s when people click the ‘like’ button. Everybody is familiar with the ‘like’ button now and what happens there is same thing.
More in part 2.
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OK, you have heard (correctly), that podcasting is good for brand awareness, and you know pretty much how to do it.
But then you realise that the search engines do not index audio – I mean, technology is good, but not THAT good.
So, is it possible to leverage your work , and vastly increase your traffic? Yes, read on to learn how, this is a transcript of a conversation between Neil Long, and internet mentor and genius, Nicola Cairncross.
Podcasting How To | Leveraging your podcasting and increasing traffic (part 2) [ 4:40 ] Play Now | Play in Popup | Download (81)
How do you come up with content because I am starting to get the impression that there’s almost a way of making this like a demonstration of continuous motion. We find things to talk about; we find people to interview, convert it, get traffic from it, which draws people who have got stuff to tell you. I mean is it like that? Is it like a perpetual motion machine?
Nicola: Absolutely Neil and that’s why I call my company the Business Success Factory because I wanted to make people realize that business success can be systemized. It can become like a factory and production line and people, they sort of don’t like that idea – because they think ‘oh well, we know there is no entrepreneurial spirit or anything’ but the thing that having systems in your business does for you is, you know, I am still a one-man band. I am just trying to take on the first apprentice and I am outsourcing bits and pieces here and there but the thing about having systems means that you could get on the exciting fun stuff but you need traffic to convert to a mailing list, the mailing list you could sell the things to and you could get feedbacks.
So for example, I am just about to launch a very short, sharp, shock coaching program 4 weeks – very affordable and I got that idea from talking to our list about what they want because there’s a large portion that can’t afford my up market mentoring programs but they really did well, a nice little short, sharp shock.
So that’s I wouldn’t have got that I do if I hadn’t been talking to our list about what they need.
Neil: Interested about yeah, communication – different levels of, yeah. So you would recommend podcasting as a good medium of communication and easily done.
Nicola: Yeah, one of the easiest because everyone can talk can’t they, not everyone can write but everyone can talk and everybody can interview people so even if you have got a little blog, a little website, but still get to need traffic and it’s about a particular topic, you could identify your top ten experts in the field and go and interview them on the telephone for an hour each, not only could you then transform that and get it on your blog but you could podcast it and you can turn it into video for YouTube and then you could make a little product out of it from your website.
Neil: Well thank you for this wonderful information. What about transcripting – is that expensive?
Nicola: No, I have got a lovely lady in the Philippines who I thought was called ‘Aa’ because whenever she wrote to me she just signed herself ‘Aa’ and it turns out that’s actually her initials and I think pulling her off at last. But she cost me about $10.00 an hour for transcription. If I send her an hour’s worth of audio it costs me $10.00 to get it transcribed and she has got used to my little colloquialisms now so she comes back very accurate indeed.
Neil: Yeah, well thanks so much for sharing this information with us. I am off to do exactly that to follow your advice to the letter. So Nicola Cairncross, thanks ever so much but before we go because this is going to be on my blog and on YouTube and podcasted, as you know, please give us some details about what you are offering and where people can find that.
Nicola: Okay, I have a nice little webinar going at the moment which is called ’17 Things Every Entrepreneur Must Know to Profit in Tough times’ and you can find that at www.NicolaCairncross.dom/17things
– that’s the number 17 and the word ‘things’, so www.NicolaCairncross.com/17things
Neil: Okay, thank you very much indeed Nicola Cairncross.
Nicola: You are welcome any time.
Neil: Thank you.
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