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Actor, voiceover artist and intrnet marketer http://www.adventuresininternetmarketing.net/

Would you like to make money from home?

Matt Duggan wanted to find a way to make money from home, so quit as a full time magician, and looked into opportunities on the internet.

We listen to his story here – and get more great insights into the world of internet marketin- a compelling listen if you too want to make money from home.

Matt is also an actor and voiceover artist, which will be obvious when you hear him, he has IMHO a great confident manner. Again, we all have our own path to success, and here is his. He did challenge me to upload a video of doing a magic trick, which I may well do. In fact thinking about it to mystify you more, I will do an AUDIO magic trick, which I have posted below.

Matt offers a quick start guide on www.adventuresininternetmarketing.net, and writes a great, content filled blog there as well.

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Sugar Sugar

Did anyone see in the week that sugar is suspected to be a poison, and dangerous, i don’t know quite wher I sit on this.

One one hand I get it, as diabetes does seem to be on the rise, yet is it the full story?

Have you heard of Stevia? It is a herb that is 100 times sweeter than sugar, and healthier apparantly. I have not done a lot of research into this, but I got the info from a good source not a bloke down the pub! Can’t really imagine the average geezer down the pub discussing the benefits of stevia! Nothing to sell here, I do not have an affiliate link for Stevia.

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Desires and Dreams

I am writing this from my workplace (I am not working today!), and get to hear interesting banter from the folks in the office.

One of my collagues Richard Midsen, is learning to fly, and it got me thinking “Wow I want to do that”.

The closest thing I will do soon is parachute for charity I have wanted to do that for ages, but never got round to it!

I will be raising more money for Changez Charity, the alternative mental health charity in SW London, providing help for those who most need it.

Call 0208 404 5374

I practise NLP there as a volunteer therapist, (Neuro Linguistic Programming), NLP is useful not only in a therapeutic context, but also in sales, marketing, pretty much in any area of life actually!

I have a free e-mail course on it, to teach you the basics, which you can find on www.becomefree.co.uk

How many therapists does it take to change a light bulb? One. But the lighbulb has to really WANT to change:)

Speaking of alternative therapies, my teacher Christopher Paul Jones has a friend who travelled near and far, researching alternative healing techniques, and has documented it in a movie. We call it the “Eat, Pray, Love moment”. I will find out more and give it a plug in the future, if that’s your kind of thing. And no, I am not a jostick consuming hippie. Not during the week anyway!

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The next blog post will be all about “Rich Thinkers and Poor Thinkers”, and the mindset of both of them. It will be an interesting read, make sure you don’t miss that one, if you are wanting to make money from home.

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If you have not done so yet, do download the free £97 worth of internet marketing gifts here, it is a great free package including

• A set of videos “how to build an internet business for years to come”
• An audio with Nicola Cairncross on how to market your business locally
• An audio with a social media master
• A podcast I made at an internet marketing seminar

It’s a nice package, and free which makes it nicer! Many ideas on how to make money from home.

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OK, here’s the audio trick, as always please leave your comments below, anything you want to ask me about how to make money from home, just holler.

Until next time

Neil Long -X-

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Huge profits from a tiny list www.hugeprofitstinylist.com

Connie Regan Green

Presenting more ways to make money from home

Is it really possible to be ranked 12th in an affiliate contest, when the others you are up against have lists of 100,000, and you have a list of 671?

Could this be another great one of the ways to make money from home?

Really?

Um, Yes….

And to go from there to becoming a super affiliate, a book author then a mentor to others….to being involved with an organisation contributing to the eradication of a disease that has been on the planet forever?

Needless to say this lady is an inspiration, and that’s why I wanted her for an interview.

Listen and enjoy to several tips, tricks, tools and strategies, of ways to make money from home

I am always interested in peoples stories, I think it is interesting to hear how people got started, how they overcame their struggles, and triumphed.

At the seminar I want to recently where Chris Farrell was speaking- (he is a master of ways to make money from home!), he talked about how he got started, and I think it is impotant to realize that we all start somewhere! And that’s ok!

In other words, enjoy the learning curve, make it an enjoyable climb, not an impossible mountain.

It was Mark Anastasis Seminar, and he talked about the difference between “Rich” thinkers and “poor” thinkers, which I think it a post in and of itself, and I will do that one in a seperate post, as I don’t want to keep you reading all day!

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Funny moment with my daughter the other day, I did a charity stunt, involving me wearing a rather embarassing bit of clobber-we did raise £200 for Changez charity- a local charity based in South West London, that help for those most in need.

Now for those of us who are parents to teenagers, we know that breathing is enough to embarass them, so dresssing in this way, is virtually (another) disownable offence! I threatened to put it on her Facebook wall- her words- “if you do, I will kill you and block you in that order”

That’s my girl!

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Do leave a comment on Facebook, let me know what you think of the content here, and if I can answer any question, do not hesitate to holler!

Z Point for Peace www.zpointforpeace.com

Would you like peace of mind? Can podcasting how to help here?

Yep!

Had the pleasure of talking to Grant Connolly today, creator of the Z-Point Process- a very clever, yet deceptively simple clearing and healing psychology.

What if there were a way of letting go of the stress we all experience on a daily basis.

Peace of mind on demand! Lovely! And simple? Yep.

Perhaps you have important insights that would benefit loads of people, you provide the insights, we will provide the podcasting how to!

If you are a student of the Law of Attraction, this is in alignment with the teachings of it, as in making peace with where you are- ie Non resistance, or allowing.

This has the potential to make a HUGE difference to people!

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.

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?

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.

If this is of value to you, please leave a comment below!

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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.

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.

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 i s a

transcript of a conversation between Neil Long, and internet mentor and genius, Nicola Cairncross.

Neil:         …think I can get you to spill about podcasting how to and how it’s been of great benefit to you etc. and we will shamelessly transcript it and put it on the blog and please feel free to plug your wares because I know, that Nicola does an awful lot of different things, a lot of which are very, very valuable to many, many people.  So do feel free to plug away shamelessly anything you have and use this as your forum.       Ladies and gentlemen, Nicola Cairncross talking about how to make a podcast.

Nicola:       Hi there!  Thank you for having me on your call again.

Shall we talk about podcast creation?

Neil:            Welcome!

Nicola:       Well, we can talk about podcasting because I have to come a massive, massive convert since you have taught me how to do it.  I did a little bit about years ago and then I just let it slip because it seemed like awfully hard work but you inspired me again and then you helped me to set the tone up and now what I am doing is I am recording most of my blog posts and turn them into podcasts and more than that, I am working on my sister’s album which is being recorded now and she is doing an album probably called ‘At last’, which is ironic, and she has recorded old standards from the 20s, 30s and 40s in a contemporary accessible jazzy style but I think that they are really intimate. Think Adele.

She had about 28 people on mailing list and about 70 followers on Twitter and a blog that she had not been blogged on.  So I am getting her not only to blog three times a week but then to read those blogs out loud so we can turn them into a podcast and then on taking those audio recordings and as well as podcasting them on I-Tunes and taking them and turn them into videos and uploading them to her YouTube channel- if you create your own podcast, you can leverage your content in this way.

Yes, so every bit of writing she does is being leveraged in three places.

Neil:            And what does that do for the traffic?  Does that literally triple the traffic?

Nicola:       Well it takes a little while to build up Neil, but when I look her stats for traffic, she was jogging along getting about 10 visitors a day since about last June or July and suddenly, in the last three months she is up to nearly 100 visitors a day.

So when you look at where it was just coming from, it is Google organic search, it is Twitter and it is Facebook.  YouTube is building very slowly but once you reach a certain critical mass on YouTube I think it’s probably when you got about 50 to 100 videos, your YouTube traffic starts to dramatically increase because your videos are shown higher in the list of related videos when other people are watching stuff that’s related to what your video is about.

Neil:            Ah, so it’s a sort of compound interest, if I may.

Nicola:       Exactly, yes.  Exactly, compound interest on traffic but the point is it’s so easy.  She takes a while to write a blog post because she likes to include also detailed pictures and things but then it only takes her five minutes to read it out loud and let me say she sounds very Radio 4!

And then it only takes me the work of minutes to put a picture on it in my movie editing software on my computer.  I let her just input the audio, put a picture on it and then save it as a video and then upload it to YouTube.  So each bit of writing is being leveraged in three ways and it inspired me to start doing the same with my blog.  Well, it shamed(!) me actually to start doing this…but it’s had a dramatic effect on by far traffic which is rather marvelous.

Neil:            All right, so what you are saying is it is not as hard as it sounds; it is easily teachable and you just brought one thing – you said you put a picture in.  I have once, see I am a bit of geek, once I get on the Movie Maker Software, I think ‘Oh, that picture would be nice’, and I turn it into sort of an epic production again.  It gets turned in Star Wars or something but really actually for the sake of this one picture would do, one still picture, right?

Nicola:       Yeah, I mean what I have done is I have created them…she has got a logo for her podcast and then I just duplicated that but changed the word to ‘Vidcast’ and so I put that at the beginning and then she always puts that tools for your pictures in her blog-post anyway.  So it’s not really very hard for me just to copy those into the movie.

So I have a 15-minute movie; she might have three or four pictures and then perhaps the webcast – one at the beginning and the end and it mainly is effortless almost because it’s working away in the background process in the movie while I am getting over the other stuff and then you just upload it to YouTube and that happens in the background too.

The key thing with YouTube is to go and write a keyword-heavy description.  So what I am doing with her things is wherever she is writing about, you know she likes to get down to John Wilson, ‘Hooray for Hollywood Prom’ and so I went and put in ‘Hooray for Hollywood’ on YouTube and I found the most viewed videos and I looked to the tags they had used and I included those tags in Heather’s video tags.  Yeah, and that’s the best way to make sure your video is get shown off to other people watching high traffic videos.  That’s a good trick for you if you make your own podcast.

Neil:            Yes, sorry I was so blown away by this internet marketing acumen.  I am sorry, I was trying to think about three things at once but I was very blown away and that is a fantastic tip.

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