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!
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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 i s a
transcript of a conversation between Neil Long, and internet mentor and genius, Nicola Cairncross.
Leverage your podcast content and increase your traffic - part 1 [ 6:30 ] Play Now | Play in Popup | Download (77)
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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Podcasts are fast becoming one of the more popular Internet communication mediums. You might have even sung the praises of podcasts like so many others. The praises may include the fact that a business leadership podcast (or any podcast for that matter) can help you increase your SEO visibility or that a podcast–if done well–can position you as an industry expert. However, you may not have considered the following 10 benefits of a business leadership podcast, but first, what is a business leadership podcast?
A Business Leadership Podcast: What is it? A business leadership podcast is a podcast that may directly or indirectly mention your products or services but first and foremost requires that you inspire your audience to gain valuable leadership skills.
10 Benefits of a Business Leadership Podcast
1) A Business Leadership Podcast Can Help You to Reevaluate Your Audience…..Again! When it comes right down to it, every thing in business is about reaching the CORRECT audience…the people who have a valid interest in your services or products but who also want to be inspired. With a podcast, not only do you have the chance to audibly explain your market niche but whoever is listening WANTS to be listening. Whether they’ve clicked through an email to your podcast, found it via your website or greedily grabbed for it via an RSS feed they want that information!
2) A Business Leadership Podcast with Personality! When it comes to business leadership and communication, personality counts…..a lot! Whoever said experience counts may have been wise but personality seems to be the inevitable default choice. The great thing about a podcast is it takes communication from the written word to a convenient audible expression of what your company is all about. So even if you work for a “boring” software company, your podcasts can be witty and clever and charm the socks off your interested audience. This of course also requires that you find talented script writers and energetic spokespeople.
3) A Business Leadership Podcast for People on the Go! For your adoring audience, podcasts are the perfect element of convenience. You can download them onto portable devices like an iPOD, an MP3 player, etc. For all you know, Mr. Joe Giles on 7th Street in Michigan likes to listen to your podcast as he runs in the morning. Time for your audience is often more valuable than money and if you save them more of it, your audience will notice.
4) The Benefit of Repetition in a Business Leadership Podcast This might be an obvious benefit, but hey a podcast is obviously a better option than a radio spot. After all, your audience can skip forward and skip back from segment to segment and perhaps even rewind and fast forward. If they miss the announcement of the new launch of your website or an important phone number, all they have to do is access the info with the quick click of a button.
5) Your Customers Can Access a Business Leadership Podcast via RSS Feeds As mentioned above, RSS feeds allow interested members to find information from a specific category that they have been looking for. Once they find your podcast for instance, they can sign up for an RSS feed (if you make it available) that will notify them when a new podcast is available.
6) A Business Leadership Podcast can Increase Involvement with Your Audience Your audience could even be a part of your podcasts. You could include podcast testimonials with clients who are willing to participate and invite other audience members to call in and share their experiences for future podcasts.
Perhaps you could host a contest for the most interesting testimonial.
7) A Business Leadership Podcast Requires Research Entertaining and Informative podcasts require research and thought…..continued research and thought, which makes it difficult (if you keep making podcasts) not to remain on the leading edge of your industry. Most savvy business professionals know that continued research and study is essential for a healthy business but how many businesses continually act on that knowledge?
A Business Leadership Podcast Creates Unity Within a Company If you use individuals from every branch of your company or at least request the advice of many trusted members, you will find that a business leadership podcast–especially an entertaining one–can indeed create unity within your company. As in #7, most business professionals know that creating unity is essential within a successful business but once again, how many professionals are consistent in their unification endeavors?
9) A Business Leadership Podcast can be a Boon for Your SEO Campaign
Podcasts can indeed bolster your SEO visibility! According to an online podcast sponsored by Pod Blaze, “…Yahoo and MSN both have the ability to search for content that is presented in an RSS format,” and to paraphrase, there are also a variety of podcast online directories where people are searching for the information that they are interested in. These directories in combination with RSS technology make it easy for you to get the information that you need to savvy information seekers. 10) Better Leadership with a Business Leadership Podcast When you are required to be a leader in your industry, it’s hopefully easy to see new ways in which you can improve. A leader has to be willing to try, fail at times and succeed at times. Use your business leadership podcast to increase your own leadership skills and those of the people you work with.
Marci Crane is a web content specialist for Innuity. To get a better idea of a business leadership podcast, feel free to visit the VitalSmarts website which boasts an excellent example.
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Do you value community outreach activities? Are you looking for better ways to communicate with—and educate—your patients, your peers, or even the media? If your goal is to deliver your message to more people, more effectively, more often, then I have the answer you’ve been looking for … and it’s powerful, fun and remarkably simple.
Why not use the cutting edge technology of podcasting to spread awareness about the importance of proper oral health? Stay with me now—if you have a slight case of technophobia, that’s okay. I’m confident that if your practice has the technical know-how to produce an online newsletter, then learning to integrate podcasting into your outreach activities will be a snap. And believe me—podcasting is the most innovative mass-communication vehicle to emerge in years, and will greatly increase the impact and reach of your message.
Let’s begin with the basics. Think of a podcast as a radio program that anyone can download from the Internet. Put another way, a podcast is a digital file that is available to everyone—via free subscription—over the web. Most podcasts are audio files only (like CDs), but video content can be added as well (like DVDs). The main advantage of podcasting over traditional broadcasting is that users can download these web files to their personal computers, mp3 players, and/or CDs, and then listen to them at their convenience—in their car, during their morning run, or even in your reception area.
More and more, podcasts are becoming recognized as the latest robust communication tool to harness the Internet’s power to reach a large number of listeners quickly. If your podcast contains valuable information, your listeners will share it with others, rapidly disseminating your message around the globe. Also, because podcasts use RSS (really simply syndication) technology, new episodes are delivered to your subscribers seamlessly. Once a listener subscribes to a podcast using iTunes or another similar service, that service automatically downloads new episodes as they are released, making it practically instantaneous and effortless for your audience to receive your message.
Putting together a professional-sounding podcast is easier than you might think. Since valuable content is paramount, the first step is to prepare interesting topics for your episodes. I suggest that you commit to producing bi-monthly episodes, meaning that you initially need only six topics per year. Once podcasting becomes part of your routine, increase your production to twelve topics per year. If you are already producing a paper or online newsletter for your patients, the most logical progression would be to reformat some of that content into podcasts. A good way to start is to identify topics that you could cover in more detail by talking about them in a podcast rather than writing about them in a newsletter.
For example, the most recent newsletter that my dentist emailed to me included an article about the dangers of periodontal disease, including information on how it may be connected to the development of heart disease, warning signs to watch out for, and recommended preventative actions. This is valuable information that I am interested in, and I am thankful to be on this mailing list. But imagine that I have received this information in the form of an audio podcast, personally recorded by my dentist, urging me to book an appointment for a much-needed checkup. I am immediately spurred to action! Speaking directly to your audience—in your own voice and with your own inflection, tone and spirit—creates a much more intimate connection with your patients. This relationship-building quality is inherent in audio, and it’s part of what makes podcasting so powerful.
If you have doubts about the widespread acceptance of digital audio files, consider this statistic: on April 9, 2007, Apple announced the sale of its 100 millionth iPod and more than 2.5 billion songs from the iTunes Music Store. Now consider that anyone can download podcasts from this same music store and listen to them via their mp3 player or their computer, or burn them to CD … for free! As more and more people (including your patients) “tune in” to audio files via the web, offering them podcasts that complement and expand on the content of your existing newsletters provides you with another way to remind them about the importance of proper oral health and the services you provide.
So, what equipment and software do you need to record
and produce a podcast? You can become a podcasting pro in just seven simple steps:
1. Verify that your PC is running Windows 2000, XP or Vista, and has the ability to play audio files.
2. Invest in a microphone. Altec Lansing makes decent products, some of which list for under $30, and are available at Future Shop. But I recommend splurging a little to improve your audio quality. Blue Microphones makes a great USB mic called the Snowball, which retails for $130 on the Canadian online Apple Store. (This mic will also work with your Windows PC.)
3. Download and install your recording software. Audacity is an excellent audio editor that is available for download from http://audacity.sourceforge.net. And you can’t beat their price point: it’s free.
4. Record and edit your podcast.
5. Partner with an online hosting service to set up a website specifically for your podcast. Liberated Syndication is extremely inexpensive and gives me everything I need. At $5 USD per month, I can lease 100 megabytes of storage space per month, which translates into about two hours of audio. This basic hosting account gives me unlimited bandwidth, meaning that even as my audience grows exponentially, my monthly cost never increases. LibSyn also provides me with easy-to-use templates for my podcast’s website, and automatically generates and updates my podcast’s RRS feed. Another, similar service worth considering is Go Daddy.
6. Upload your new podcast to your hosting service using their simple submission page. Completing the submission page is similar to sending an email. Simply type in the title of your podcast (like a subject line), add the description of your episode (like the body of your email), and include your mp3 file (as an attachment). You can even attach a corresponding image, if you like. Uploading your podcast stores the mp3 file online and makes it available to your audience—they can download your podcast from your newly created podcast website.
7. Promote your podcast! This is as easy as sending an email announcement to your contact list with the URL of your podcast’s website. But to take advantage of the various online podcast directories, you need to visit their websites and submit your podcast’s RSS feed.
You should never pay to be included in these directories, since the best ones—including iTunes, Podcast Alley, Odeo, and Podcast Pickle—are free.
For Mac users, these steps are even simpler, thanks to Garage Band and iWeb. As a Mac user myself, I’d be happy to pass along some pointers to get you started.
Like you, I believe it’s important to remain connected with my client base, and as a lover of all things tech, I choose to use innovative approaches. I have successfully engaged the power of podcasting to promote my company in two weekly podcasts with rapidly growing success. And by following these seven simple steps, you too can become a podcasting pro!
Copyright 2007 – Blue Melnick. All Rights Reserved Worldwide. Reprint Rights: You may reprint this article as long as you leave all of the links active, do not edit the article in any way, and include the following by-line:
Blue Melnick is a professional podcast producer, and the co-host of two weekly podcasts: Biz Link Radio and The Tech Advisors. Contact Blue through www.bizlinkradio.com [http://www.bizlinkradio.com/], through www.thetechadvisors.ca [http://www.thetechadvisors.ca], or by phone at 416-462-3323. To listen to podcasting for dental practitioners in action, download the April 30, 2007 episode of Biz Link Radio, featuring Toronto dental surgeon Dr. Lancelot A. Brown!
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The term podcasting has been floating about on the radio and in discussions with
friends, but you’re still not sure what it’s all about and if it’s relevant to your
business.
I’ll start by explaining in simplest terms what a podcast is.
A podcast is the combination of an audio or video file and a RSS publishing file,
placed on an Internet server and available for downloading.
Let’s say you plug a microphone into your computer and record a 15 minute blurb
about an area of knowledge you have. Now you have a sound file on your computer
waiting for a home, and you want that home to be on the Internet for millions of
people to listen to.
You will first need to find a “host” company to take your file and put it on their
“server” to make the file available to the world. This is called a “podcasting” server.
Once you have contacted a server and have placed your file on their server, you will
want people to find your file. To do this you have to create a special document that
“publishes” your file to the world.
This document is called an “RSS” file – which stands for Really Simple Syndication. In
this document you will put vital information like subject matter, keywords, website,
contact info and other information about the podcast and your business.
When this RSS file has been created, it is placed in the same folder as the audio file
on the podcasting server. When you have posted an audio file and published it using
your RSS file, you have successfully created a “podcast”.
Now you want people to be able to find your podcast
There are many online directories for podcasts that have searchable databases.
These services are generally free. On these sites people with new podcasts fill out a
form telling the world about the subject of the podcast, which is posted to the
directory.
Once your podcast information has been posted, anyone visiting that directory
searching for podcasts containing the subject matter of your podcast, will
immediately find a link to your podcast.
Of course the more directories you list with, the more people you’ll expose your
podcast to.
Another great thing about these directories is that Google and other search engines
visit these sites to find content, so there is an even greater chance of people finding
your podcast.
Once your podcast has been posted to a number of podcasting directories, it is now
available to millions of potential listeners worldwide.
How does one listen to a podcast, you might ask?
It is very simple. Once they have clicked the link on the directory or your website,
the podcast will automatically download and play in whatever audio player is
appropriate for the podcast file.
Then VOILA, they are listening to your podcast.
The beautiful thing about an RSS file is that once it is registered with a directory,
you don’t need to go back to the directory if you decide to add new podcast
episodes. All you need to do is update your RSS file to show that there more
episodes associated with the podcast. Listeners will be made aware of this if they
locate your podcast after a new episode has been added.
Millions of listeners and Google users are searching for information in podcast form
to listen to at their leisure. This is the most beautiful part of podcasts. The listener,
once they have downloaded a podcast, can listen to it many times over, at their
convenience.
How can podcasting help your business?
Simple, a key part of your RSS document is your website URL and company
information.
When someone listens to your podcast, this information is made clear to them
inside your podcasting information. Consequently this can generate a serious boost
in Internet traffic to your website which can result in more sales.
You don’t need to be a radio professional!
If you speak with customers on a daily basis about your specialized knowledge, you
are perfectly positioned to record and release a podcast.
Where to start
?
First, get a decent microphone for your computer – USB microphones are best – and
practice recording to get comfortable recording yourself and delivering your
message. The process is the same for video, but a video file will be created instead
of an audio file.
When you have a recording you’re happy with, save it as a file in its own folder, and
contact a podcasting service provider. You can find one on the Internet.
Once you have located a podcasting service provider they will help you with the rest
of your podcast, right down to creating an RSS file and properly posting it on a
podcasting directory.
It is important to find a host that provides ‘unmetered’ hosting. If your hosting is
metered, the more often your podcast is downloaded, the more your service
provider will charge. An unmetered host charges a set rate regardless of the number
of downloads.
Podcasting is a wonderfully affordable way to be heard and found. It is portable and
easy to access. Once you get the hang of it, podcasting can be an easy way to reach
potential clients.
Podcasting truly is a great gift for small business.
Sean Paddison is the president of Northstreams Inc., a company that specializes in the production of audio and video podcasts and electronic press kits (EPKs) for clients in the Greater Toronto Area.
[http://www.northstreams.com]
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Listening to podcasts isn’t something I enjoy or take time for, quite frankly. I’m a visual learner and prefer to read something rather than listen to it, as I find reading a much quicker way to gather the info that
I need. However, with the proliferation of audio listening devices, like the whole iPod family and other mp3 players, I have to acknowledge that I’m in the minority, I believe. The world is listening to a wide variety of audio files, much more so than ever before in history, and I need to get on the bandwagon or be lost in the dust.
What is a podcast, anyway? A podcast is an audio file that you create in .mp3 format that is uploaded with an RSS (Really Simple Syndication) file to your server for your target market to download on any number of programs created to receive or subscribe to your audio file so that they can listen to it at their leisure on their computer or a personal mp3 device.
Why should you create a podcast? I think it serves as a marketing tool for the solo service professional, who might want to do one of the following:
–create an Internet radio show or talk show in which you create content-rich broadcasts for your target market
–conduct a teleclass series in which you interview experts who have solutions to problems faced by your target market
–promote a printed book, ebook, or CD/DVD series by releasing promotional snippets to a wider audience
–provide short and valuable expert tips to your target market (my Get More Clients Online podcast consists of the weekly article I write for my newsletter)
Many podcasts are about an hour in length, especially when they consist of recordings of radio shows or teleclasses. However, I think that the listening threshold for most people is about 10 minutes. So, that means that your podcast needs to be 10 minutes or less in length. If it’s longer, you really have to grab their attention in
the first 10 minutes to keep them listening for the full amount of time.
Good content and a good speaking voice are key to maintaining interest. Don’t make your podcast one long advertisement for your services or products — share some useful information with your target market to help them solve their problems. And, you need to have a good speaking voice. Nothing is worse than listening to someone read a speech with a monotone delivery. So, for maximum impact when you record your podcast (especially if you’re just recording yourself), get up and walk around, smile, gesture, or do whatever you normally do when you deliver a speech. Modulate your voice, much in the same way that you would when you have a 1:1 conversation with someone — put feeling and emotion into your words. I pretend like I’m talking to my best friend, and that helps me with a lively delivery.
What are the steps to creating a podcast?
1. Listen to a few podcasts to get a feel for what others are doing. To listen, you’ll need a podcatcher (podcast reader), which permits you to subscribe to podcasts in the same way you subscribe to blogs. I favor iTunes as my podcatcher of choice, which is a free online download. You’ll also need to find podcasts, and the quickest way to do that is via podcast directories, which include the iTunes store. Podcast Alley, one of the most popular podcasting sites, has a large podcast directory, and Yahoo Podcasts has a podcast search. To find others, simply search online for “podcast directory.”
2. Plan your podcast. Who is your target market? What do they want to listen to? How will your podcast be unique from others in your industry? What’s your format (interview others, host a teleclass, or record yourself)? How long will your podcast be? How frequently will you deliver your podcasts?
3. Record your podcast. Many people choose to record their podcast with a free piece of software called Audacity. It has an easy learning curve and advanced features for more experienced podcasters. Mac users might want to check out Garage Band. For best recording sound, don’t use the microphone that came with your computer or that is built into your laptop. You’ll want to get a more professional one, such as the ones offered at Plantronics or Radio Shack.
4. Save and upload your podcast to your server. Once you’ve created your podcast in an mp3 file, now you have to save it and upload it to a server via an FTP program (like CuteFTP) so that it’s readily available. You can upload it to your website, or use one of the many podcasting hosting services available. The problem with uploading it to your website is that audio files are space hogs, and you can quickly exhaust all the storage capacity of your hosting account, not to mention your monthly bandwidth capacity if your podcast is popular and is downloaded frequently. That’s why I use a fee-based audio service hosting company, Audio Acrobat, which offers me generous storage and bandwidth capacity for a semi-annual fee. Another popular podcast hosting company is Hipcast.com.
5. Create your podcast feed. You can create your podcast feed from scratch, but I recommend you use a feed service to do so. If you use a podcasting hosting service, this feature is included in your service package. For everyone else, the quickest way to create your podcast feed is through Feedburner.com. This is the same service that creates RSS feeds for blogs. The advantage of creating your podcast feed from this site is that you can create a browser-friendly feed, track your circulation, and enhance your feed with its SmartCast technology.
6. Publish and promote your podcast. If you use a podcasting hosting service, the service will publish your podcast and notify various podcast directories about the availability of your new podcast. Or, you can enter the info directly into the major podcast directories. You’ll also want to promote the podcast on your website, blog, and in your email newsletter. One of the easiest ways to do this is to add feed subscription buttons (called chiclets) to your sites. You’ll have to cut and paste the HTML code into your templates to create the chiclets. You can get directions on how to publish subscription buttons from the various podcasters you want to feature. Lastly, you’ll want to create “album art” for your podcast, or a graphic representation that many podcatchers upload with the mp3 file. Album art may be from 170×170 to 300×300 pixels square at 72 dpi. Any graphic designer can help you create this graphics file.
7. Make money from your podcast. Advertising on podcasts is still fairly new, but some companies like Fruitcast.com or PodcasterAds.com are places to start. Another option is to place Google Adsense listings on all of your sites listing your podcast, or seek sponsors for your podcasts, just like you would for a radio show.
Don’t let the audio world pass you by! Podcasting is a very inexpensive way of helping you get the word out about what you do and what you offer to the world.
Copyright (c) 2006 Donna Gunter
Online Business Resource Queen (TM) and Business Coach Donna Gunter helps self-employed service professionals learn how to get more clients online. To sign up for more FREE tips like these and claim your FREE gift, TurboCharge Your Online Marketing Toolkit, visit her site at Get More Clients Online. Read about running an online biz at her blog, Get More Clients Online Blog.
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Enjoy
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