ALERT: Podcasting How To- sound like an authority in your niche, and market like a pro
In this episode I interview Jack Humphrey some more of Blog Success, all about podcasting how to….
Here is the next bit! It is in several short, bitesize parts for you. Enjoy! is part 2.
Neil: Before we get onto the nitty grity of podcasting how to, first a little history, and an accolade!
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. Thats a good key to podcasting how to/
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 thes
e 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 th ink 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 podcasting how to – 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. This is the key to podcasting how to.
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?
