26-Week Internet Marketing Plan » Week #24 – Audio & Video

#70: Sterling & Jay Interview – Internet Business Mastery Podcast Founders

David Bain — Mon, 28 Mar 2011 18:16:52 +0000

Welcome to the 70th episode of the 26-Week Internet Marketing Plan Podcast and today, I’m joined by the Internet Business Mastery Podcast (InternetBusinessMastery.com) founders, Jeremy Frandsen and Jason Van Orden – otherwise known as Sterling and Jay.

Jay (left) and Sterling from InternetBusinessMastery.com

In this episode we discuss:

Sterling and Jay’s background
How to go about selecting your niche if you want to run your own podcast
What call-to-action if any you should have with your podcast
What kind of software Sterling and Jay recommend to run your podcast
How to ensure that your speakers are presented at the same volume
Why ID3 tags are important
When to submit to iTunes
Which podcast directories to submit to
Why syndicating your content is imperative
What’s going to happen to podcasting over the next few years

and much, much more!

Remember to subscribe to our internet marketing podcast for more great interviews and add your comments below about this interview.

Here’s the full Sterling & Jay interview transcript:

00:00 David Bain: Welcome to the 70th episode of the 26-Week Internet Marketing Plan podcast and today, I’m joined by the founders of InternetBusinessMastery.com, Jeremy Frandsen and Jason Van Orden – otherwise known as Sterling and Jay. These guys have the number one podcast and iTunes for ‘Internet business’. So today, I hope to get a bit of their story from them, and a few nuggets about how to set up and run your very own successful podcast. Thank you both for joining me.

00:28 Jeremy Frandsen: Glad to be here.

00:30 Jason Van Orden: Thank you.

00:31 JF: Hi, I’m just enjoying your accent still…

[laughter]

00:35 DB: I’m enjoying yours.

00:37 JF: Oh, yeah. I forgot, I guess I do have an accent, I know.

[laughter]

00:42 DB: I guess no one thinks they do but…

00:43 JF: Yeah, exactly.

00:46 DB: I’ll tell you what? I really like you guys’ ethos about business because you don’t come across as ‘get rich quick’ marketers. You certainly come across as being long-term strategic thinkers and that’s an approach that I really like to relate with. Could you perhaps begin by telling us a little bit about your backgrounds?

01:04 JO: Yes, sure. Well, this is Jay here and my background comes from being stuck in the nine to five doing kind of what I was told, got a great degree and became an engineer, was working in a cubicle in what I thought was going to be my career for forty years but very quickly, that was not. Something that I was… I can’t… After a couple of years like I can’t do this anymore, I need more freedom, I need more variety, I miss being in school where I could learn and be around a lot of different people. So I set up for a couple of years trying to really learn about myself and find other avenues and fortunately, the long story short, read lots of great books, went to great conferences and met people like Sterling and opened my eyes to some new possibilities and started doing business online. And so, eventually, that led to having the podcast Internet Business Mastery where we play out our… Each of us has similar what we call definite major purpose in life or that’s this thing that fulfils us most and that is now to help others also find similar freedom and fulfilment in their lives with Internet business as a vehicle the same way we were able to several years ago. And that’s from my angle, where that comes from. Sterling, you can share your side as well.

02:23 JF: Yes. We have… Somewhat of a similar story except where I am just a little bit older than Jay. I made it all the way to the cubicle with a door, some people call it office. But the thing that I was really concerned with and I finally read a book that kind of struck a nerve for me but I didn’t have control of two major things in my life; I didn’t have control of my time and I didn’t have control of my money. So best I could hope to do if I worked really hard and did a lot of overtime and really tried hard was maybe make three to six percent more the next year and that was a problem, and then of course they liked me to be there every day which was also a problem.

[laughter]

03:07 JF: But they wanted to me to actually work eight hours or even more most of the time but… And that was just at some point, I was just like I want control of my life, and I definitely wasn’t looking, when I started, for anything get rich quick. I was like… I want something that’s going to last. I don’t want some little fad that’s going to, maybe, make me a few dollars here and there. I want to build a real business that will take care of those two main issues for me. And basically those two issues, also the money obviously was so I could take of my family because I have two kids and it’s so… Like that’s where I came from that I started with, “Look, I want to make this work and I want it to be real.” I don’t need to be selling… What were they called? Those little furby dolls or something on eBay. I don’t need anything like that, I want something real and long term. Because I had a pretty decent income before I left the corporate world so I wanted that at the very least to get back to that as soon as possible but still again, with the mindset of long term.

04:16 DB: Excellent stuff. Now I can definitely relate with that actually. In fact, I probably went down the wrong route initially myself online because back in… Way back in about 2004, I was actually making a full time income through Google AdSense but I felt that just didn’t give me a proper business. And so the things that I’m doing now that you guys are certainly doing is the right approach as far as I’m concerned in developing a long term strategy for things. But why did you actually choose podcasting as a medium for business? How did you do… What got you into that?

04:54 JO: Well, in 2005, when it was just starting to kind of make some buzz on the Internet, it came across my attention and very quickly I was intrigued because I have an audio background, I was an audio engineer before escaping the nine to five, and also a musician, so the audio aspect I really liked. We’re both people who like to inspire and teach others and so we saw an interesting opportunity to reach out to a lot of people in an interesting new way and so we decided, “Well, we don’t see anybody else using this channel to teach and reach out to people, to teach them Internet business so why don’t we give this a try?” And I’d also made the decision at the time I wanted to become really well-versed in all the ways of podcasting because I thought, “This is going to become very significant and for businesses, there’s a lot of potential here.” And funny enough, Internet Business Mastery was kind of just, “Well, let’s try this out. I’ve got a couple of shows and have some things to experiment on,” and it was just something for fun to do because… Together because Sterling lived in Utah and that the time I lived in New York city so like “Well, hey this is something, there’s a little project we can do together.”

06:05 JF: Yeah, because at that time, we were just friends that would get together talking about Internet business. We both had totally separate Internet businesses and we would just get together and talk marketing.

06:15 DB: Right.

06:15 JF: So we… It’s not like… And we didn’t even start with going, “Internet Business Mastery is going to become this business that does everything for us.” [chuckle] It was just, “Let’s do this cool podcast thing that Jay found.”

06:30 DB: Excellent. So it’s certainly a case of choosing something that you enjoy doing and then obviously you did a great job at it and because of that opportunities arise in the future. So if someone was thinking of starting a podcast, how would you advise them about going about to choose the niche that should be involved in?

06:49 JO: Well, the first thing I think that they should think about is who is the audience and all of our… And even when we teach people about designing their business, we have them think about the audience first. Well, think about themselves first on what they really want and what fulfils them but then think about the audience so it’s a little bit of a, “Let’s find an audience and figure out what they want and kind of match that up with who we are and what we feel like our strengths and what fulfils us the most.” And so for us, what fulfils us most is teaching people new skills, inspiring them to see new possibilities and helping them have an increase the degree of freedom. And we very specifically narrowed that down to, “Well, we want to talk to people who were just like us. They’re in the nine to five and they want to get out of the employment and start a business based on their passion.” So we picked that audience and then we decided, “Well we’re going to teach them very specifically how to start an Internet business.” So we kind of picked the niche to fit the audience which was picked to fit our fulfilment factor, what we call our fulfilment factors, and our definite major purpose – the things that we enjoy most. So it was a little bit of a backward planning kind of thing looking that way. But that’s where it really needs to start.

07:59 DB: Okay, so you would advise people who are prospective podcasters to choose an audience before they think of getting started.

08:06 JO: Definitely, yeah.

08:07 DB: Definitely. Okay, excellent.

08:08 JF: Well, in the aspect of themselves is lifestyle because one of the things that we teach in our academy is to design your lifestyle ahead of time which will help you pick the right business because for me I actually started a business on eBay way before I did Internet Business Mastery. And what that ended up meaning was I have physical products that I have to ship and when you start, generally when you start a business you’re doing everything. If you’re lucky enough to have extra money to hire somebody that’s usually considered extra or way down the line. So I was doing everything working 12 hour a day shipping products and stuff through, because of eBay. And I didn’t pick my lifestyle because I definitely did not want to work 12 hours a day. And I definitely didn’t want to be shipping boxes like I became just every aspect of the business; I had to answer emails, I had to do customer service, I had to ship boxes, I had to get the returns.

09:11 JF: I was bored out of my mind. It was definitely not the lifestyle I have chosen but I didn’t know to choose my lifestyle ahead of time. So we talked about that as well because now we’re very much about our own freedom. So with exception of when we record the show and one meeting we do a week, when we do our business, it’s up to us which was part of what we design as our lifestyle design. We don’t have a corporate office, we work from home offices, those are all things that we think it’s really important to pick ahead of time so you don’t end up like I was where I’m working 7 days a week, 12 hours a day, and making under what I was making in my corporate job. You know I’m going “What just happened? I just made myself a part time job and a full time job and I make less.” And that was because I didn’t know to design my lifestyle. We talk a lot about that as well as finding the audience so those are kind of the two aspects. Your side of it and then the audience side of it.

10:11 DB: And something else that people have to think of before they even start podcasting is the style of podcast in terms of should it be audio, should it be video, what kind of length should a podcast be? What kind of call to action should they have at end of the podcast if anything at all? Could you talk a little about making those kinds of strategic decisions about how it actually go about designing the podcast?

10:37 JO: Well, again it comes back to some of the same exact factors, who’s the audience, who are you, and what you enjoy doing most, and then now what’s the topic that you’ve chosen? And so clearly if it’s a yoga podcast, well probably audio is not going to cut it because people are going to want to see you doing the different poses and things. And there might be some, obviously, techniques and mentality kind of things and meditations or whatever you can do is audio but in the video is going to be an appropriate format for that medium whereas if you’re just telling stories or instructing people on something like stock investing, well that could just be audio or if know that you’re going to be… Your audience is really busy medical professionals who have the short bit of time on their commute about 10 to 20 minutes, and on the go, they’re not be able to sit down and engage with the video then maybe audio needs to be the best, would be the best choice for you.

11:31 JO: So considering those different things; who’s the audience, what’s the topic, which formats going to fit those things best. You go ahead and choose one of the other and it can always be a mix. It doesn’t have to be either or, but you might want to choose a primary one to start with. Certainly video takes a more effort to produce but it also can have more impact in certain cases. But it wouldn’t automatically assume video is going to trump audio like some people feel like that’s the case. It really just is considering those factors I just talked about. As far as length, the rule of thumb, audio can be longer because people can listen to it more passively as they’re walking the dog, as they’re driving in their car, washing the dishes, exercising. Whereas video they have to be a little bit more engaged. So video, you want to keep shorter to 3-5 minutes is awesome, less than 10 minutes definitely. Audio, a nice rule of thumb that we throw out is somewhere around 20 minutes, though of course if you listen to our show, it is longer than that but that’s just kind of what we’ve done over time and trained our audience to expect. But 20 minutes is the rule of thumb for audio that we would recommend.

12:31 DB: And in terms of call to action, I think for a podcast, it’s easy to be a little bit too ‘selly’ by mistake perhaps and actually put people off, make people unsubscribe from you if you try and ram down too many products and services down people’s throats. What kind of call to action is appropriate to have and where should you have it? Should it be at the beginning, should it be at the end of the podcast, in-between what you’re doing?

13:01 JO: Well we’ve tried some different things when it comes to beginning and end, we’re always kind of testing that kind of thing. I mean the quick answer there would be, I mentioned it a couple of times in the episode and definitely for sure at the end where they’re finishing up, they might be able to actually go and take the action. Usually, we don’t sell directly from the podcasts, that hasn’t proven to be the most direct and effective thing. It’s one piece in a sales funnel in a business, so it’s more about using the show itself to build up kind of that relationship, some reciprocities so that you are connecting with your audience and they’re coming to see you as a trusted advisor. And usually the appropriate next step is, get them on your email list because that’s where you can really sell them over time where… So the show kind of earlier in the sales funnel, so our call to action has for pretty much the whole history of the show, has always been, “For content that you can’t get anywhere else on this podcast, for this special report, this special checklist or this special video presentation, go right now to this URL and sign up for our email list and we’ll send that report to you right away.” And they’ve given us permission to follow-up with them over time for sales purpose, that’s how we’ve approached it.

14:19 JF: Well and we do one… I’ll give you an advance technique as well that’s very subtle. [chuckle] We have a membership site and in the show, I don’t think we’ve ever very specifically tried to sell it or do a selling bit, but we talked about people that are in the academy which is our membership site all the time throughout the show. And that curiosity that you get from hearing, “Oh what’s the academy?” “Oh, this person’s doing really well because of this academy.” And we do a thing where we talk about breakthroughs that people in the academy have, whether they’d be big breakthroughs where they make a certain amount of money or they just got their website up or whatever, we talk about those things which are very, very subtle ways to basically sell your product as well, it’s just not direct. It’s not going, “Now go buy this, right now,” you know, in that way. It’s just hearing about how great people are having breakthroughs with our product.

15:25 DB: So next after that when it comes recording the podcast itself, now I’m using, it’s kind of obvious, Skype to Skype and what’s called an MX Skype Recorder which gives me a reasonable result most of the time. What would you say are the biggest mistakes that people make when they’re trying to record a podcast that perhaps delivers an inferior quality recording?

15:47 JO: Well, two things you can do right off to get a higher level of audio quality, which is important because if there’s a lot of hiss or pops or crackles or room noise or just things, it can really be distracting for people, but the good news is that for very inexpensively, it’s easy to get a quality sound going, recording into your computer these days whether that’s over Skype or just you recording yourself on your computer. So, the two things we recommend is get yourself a USB microphone, so it’s a microphone that just plugs in into the USB jack on your computer. And the reason for that is it gets a nice digital sound straight into your computer whereas if you plug into the little mic jack sometimes it ends up getting a kind of noisy sound quality going in. There’s a lot of great USB microphones out there. One that we like is the Blue microphone, it’s called the Blue Snowball, and it looks like a little snowball that sits on your desk and it’s under a hundred dollars US. So that would be something you can grab relatively easily.

16:45 JO: And then the other thing is to use what’s called a pop filter, and the reason for that as we speak, we have all these Ps and Ts and consonants that are coming out of our mouth that have this really breathy sounds, that really get picked up and accentuated by a microphone. And so the pop filter, you’ve probably seen… If you ever see on a TV show, on the TV or something, a singer inside of the music studio and they’ve got the headphones on, they’re singing into a mic and right in front of their mouth there’s kind of a this little hoop thing that looks like it has a nylon stretched over it, that’s to catch those breathy sounds and prevent them from hitting the microphone in a kind of an objectionable way. It’s a small thing and they’re relatively cheap to get, but it really can increase your sound and make it sound immediately so it’s not amateurish. That’s like a quick cue to people, whether they… I mean they’re not thinking, “Oh, he’s not using a pop filter.” All they know is that the sound is, “Yeah, sound’s not very good on this.” And so they’ll stop listening. So those are two things that are very easy for getting a better quality sound when recording your show.

17:48 JF: Yeah. I’d say you don’t want to sound like your recording in your basement, even if you are. [laughter] You can make the show still be banter or whatever, because our show, most of the time, is just chitchat between us even though we’re on an outline of what we want to talk about. But I think if it sounds like you’re far away and just in this basement recording, anytime I hear something like that it throws me off even though you generally think of podcast as a little bit more amateur compared to let’s say radio or something. Still, it’s got to at the very least sound decent.

18:27 DB: Well, certainly, one of the things that puts me off when I’m listening to a couple of podcasts is one speaker being quite loud and the other speaker being quite soft. And you turn your volume up to listen to the guy that’s speaking quietly and then you get deafened when the other speaker comes on. Did you want to give a quick tip about how to actually make sure that that doesn’t happen?

18:51 JO: Well for us, the way we do it is, when there’s two co-hosts… When you run into that problem. Sometimes, if you’re recording over Skype like this, it can be a little bit tricky because you’re recording us on your end, David, so that hopefully, we’re all coming in pretty even. But if not, you either have to put it into some kind of audio editor and sit there and adjust the volumes yourself. But a really quick and easy tool that you can use for that is called the Levelator, that’s L-E-V-E-L-A-T-O-R, Levelator, and that’s a free piece of software that you can download and you throw your audio in there and it kind of tries to even those out for you. So that can work quite well. Or the other thing is, with the way we record our show is we call each other up on Skype but then we kind of do a quick countdown and then we start a recording.

19:45 JO: But I only record myself on my computer, Sterling records himself on his computer, so each of us has an audio track with just us speaking. So if you’ll to listen to mine, you would hear me talk and then silence and then you would hear me talk and then silence and vice versa for his. We send those to an editor so they’re on two separate tracks in the recording-editing program and he’s able to just turn the whole track up or down on either ours so they match and then edit it together to make it sound nice. And in that case it sounds like we’re actually sitting in the same room even though I don’t think we’ve ever recorded, in almost 120 plus episodes that we’ve recorded, we’ve actually never recorded an episode in the same room together.

20:22 DB: That’s an excellent tip. Thanks for sharing that. And just thinking a little bit about maybe other points with regard to getting a decent quality recording, and obviously if you get any other computers or equipment that hiss around the room, make sure everything is turned down certainly. And what about recording software? At the moment what I’m doing is I’m recording you using both MX Skype Recorder and also Audacity as well. Is there any software that you’d favour to record people when using Skype to Skype?

20:59 JO: Well, Audacity is exactly what we recommend people to start with because it works for a PC or a Mac and it’s very easy to use and it’s free. If you just Google for Audacity, you’ll be able to find that. So that’s perfect recommendation and then I’ve actually never heard of the MX Skype Recorder though there are a number of Skype recorders out there. We use Pamela which is Pamela for Skype is software on the PC. On the Mac, there is called Call Recorder or Audio Hijack or there’s that MX one that you mentioned. So, if you do your calls over Skype that can record straight out of Skype for you and then give you an audio file that if you’d still want to edit up a little bit, in fact right before we got on the phone with you, I was doing an interview with somebody and I’ve recorded that through Pamela and I will send it to our editor and he’ll put it in Audacity and just clean it up a little bit for us. And then it will be perfect and ready to use.

21:47 JF: And almost every time with the Pamela, any time recording it on Skype, I think almost every time we have to throw it through the Levelator just because someone’s always a little bit louder for whatever reason.

21:59 DB: Right, okay. I mean that’s an interesting tip. But I mean I’ve done a slightly thing differently myself. What I’ve done is I recorded the two different conversations in mono and then increased the volume on one of the tracks if necessary, so the Levelator can be a slightly easier way to do that certainly. And obviously the final type for an audio conversation tends to be MP3 and that’s going to be encoded with ID3 tags. Could you perhaps talk a little bit about that?

22:32 JO: Anybody who has used like iTunes or Windows Media Player to listen to music, they’ve noticed that the file has these tags in it, they have like the artist and the track name and the track number. That allows us to organize our music and listen to a particular album or to know what it is that we’re listening to when it comes up on our player. If you look at your iPod or your iPhone, whatever the case may be, it just shows some of that track information on there. Well, in the exact same way, podcasts use that same data that gets stored inside of the audio file in order to provide information about what it is that the person is listening to. So you have an episode title, you have a show name which is your album name, you have the artist that’s just the show host.

23:18 JO: So if you look at one of our shows, it might say “Episode 121″ or whatever the case may be and then the title of the track might be “Three tips for Making More Money Online” or whatever. I’m just making this up at the top of my head. And then the artist field would say “Sterling and Jay” as we’re the ones that host the show, and let’s say “Track Number 121″ because that’s the episode number. So, you can just throw your MP3 file into something like iTunes and add those tags just like you would to any of your music files and that’s just simply so that your… It makes your show more usable so that the person can find it and listen to it. Otherwise it just ends up being in this random MP3 file on their computer or on their iPod and they forget where they got it from and it may not even come up for them to listen to as they’re spinning through their different tracks because it’s not tagged properly. So that is an important kind of piece of the whole puzzle just for the user experience to be all put together.

24:12 JF: Well of course, you can add an image as well, so we have our logo on there, so that just in case they’re using it on higher end items like Apple TV, or even on their iPhone or their MP3, you’ve got this nice image their as well, that they can quickly as they are thumbing through things, see that image and know they’re at least on the show and then look at the title and that kind of thing.

24:35 DB: And now that you’ve got your file, you obviously need a website, somewhere to host the files, and is there any one you can particularly recommend as a reasonable, reliable, not too costly host?

24:48 JO: With the host we send people to, you can find at getourhosting.com and that is easy enough to install free software WordPress is perfect thing to run your podcast with because it’s priced to feed for you and makes it very easy for you to post your shows to the site and you need to have a… The feed is the thing that you submit to stuff like iTunes so that your show is inside their directory all the time. And so if you get that hosting and install WordPress and then just post your episodes with the links to the MP3 files in your posts, that is the basics of instantly creating a site with a podcast-ready blog and feed.

25:27 DB: And then when you submit to iTunes, would you submit after the first episode or record a few episodes before you do that?

25:34 JO: Usually we recommend people have a couple of episodes on their site – 2 or 3 before they submit, the only reason for that is just because every show… And this is purely conjecture, I mean we don’t have any testing for this, but every show that’s submitted gets reviewed by somebody and it’s not necessarily hard to get allowed into iTunes as long as you don’t have any material that’s horribly objectionable in some way, you’ll get accepted, but the nice thing that can happen sometimes is you might be included and featured as, “Here’s something that’s new and notable,” they call it and iTunes giving you some more traction. So we’d like to think that if you do 2 or 3 episodes, you’ve got all your image, like, Sterling was mentioning all these things put together nicely, then they’re going to have something to look at and go, “Okay, looks likes this person is not a flash in the pan, we can see the quality is there, they put together a nice package, okay.” And then, it might have a little better chance. Again, this is kind of theory on our side but it is kind of stacking things in your favour to maybe get that extra traction when you submit to iTunes.

26:34 DB: And are there any other podcast directories that are fairly notable with you absolutely should be submitting to as well?

26:41 JO: Well, it’s kind of always changing and there’s certainly hundreds out there, but what I would recommend doing is just go to Google, search for podcast directories and any of the ones that come up on the first page, I would submit to those because if they were getting listed well in Google then they probably have pretty good authority. And so getting your link and listing on those sites is just kind of give you the best traction and exposure, so that’s what I’d recommend.

27:08 DB: I’d like to just get a few of your thoughts about the future of podcasting, what do you think as a medium over the next few years, will it be so very important in five years time?

27:23 JO: An important thing to note is that, and this is something we started saying many years ago when podcasting was still this great buzz word, it’s still very viable. Our bank account would tell you that because, it’s definitely our primary channel for attracting our following, it’s because people find the podcast and iTunes and other directories like that. But the thing you have to realize it’s just one channel of many. Really, if you were for instance to signup for one our coaching courses or in our academy membership site, the first thing we teach you as well, after you choose your audience and your niche and all those things talked about earlier, you need to start creating great content, that you know your target audience is just going to love and want and keep coming back over and over for, and then syndicate that content or spread it all over the Internet in many ways as you can, podcasting one of them but why not also have a transcribe this blog post or split up into Twitter tips and you put out on Twitter or getting it exposed through Facebook and so on and so forth.

28:31 JO: So the point here is not to be a podcaster, it’s actually just to be an authority, an expert that produces great frequent relevant and authoritative content online through as many channels as you can and repurpose that across all the different channels. Then you really establish yourself everywhere your market is looking they are running into you and you’re attracting that strong following, that’s how we’ve built our following, though we started with podcasting as our very first channel. So the point being, as time goes on, well yeah, I think content marketing always has worked great now and will always work. It’s one of those things that’s not a flash in the pan when it comes to making money online, getting traffic and converting sales. If you’re creating great content that’s always going to work for you. The channels might change a bit, I mean five years ago we didn’t have Facebook like we do today, but right now it’s a predominant place that people visit and has all the eyeballs, so yes you want to show up there, iTunes has become incredibly powerful.

29:27 JO: But whether iTunes goes away, or the iPod disappears in 5 years, not likely, as long as you’re creating great content and putting it out through whatever channels are available to you, you’re going to do well. But I think podcasts whether that’s audio, whether that’s video, blogging, all these things, they’re going to continue to be strong and work well, and I don’t think video is going to overcome audio, because it’s just going depend, just not like TV got rid of radio, or like the Internet destroyed magazines, there’s still… Everything has its place just depending on the niche, just depending on the audience, just depending on the topic. It’s just all about channels for delivering your message and selling the value that you have to your audience.

30:09 JF: Yeah, we’re able to shift without a beat. So YouTube starts getting to be a big place where everybody’s going. We can put a video screen or… What’s the word? We can put a title page or slide up and put our show underneath so now it’s a video. So at least it’s there to be indexed, if you go to YouTube and type in “Internet Business Mastery”, Bam! We’re there as well. So whatever happens, whatever becomes the new big thing, as soon as Twitter came along, Boom! We started using Twitter and bringing people through Twitter to our show and to our website. So with the content… Being that we’re content marketers really is what we are, content creators, no matter what comes along, we can fit that content to the new medium.

31:05 DB: So viewing yourself as a content marketer and syndicating your content is certainly the way to go by the sound of it.

31:12 JO: Absolutely…

31:12 JF: Yeah, that’s the long term aspect. That’s the difference than taking our entire business and base it all on Twitter and then watching Twitter disappear. Or for instance MySpace, if all I did was teach and market through MySpace, how long has it been since everybody talked about MySpace? You’d be really sad, I think, if your business was based on just simply one medium.

31:37 DB: Right. Absolutely. It’s just like having the one customer and that customer suddenly leaving you.

31:42 JF: Exactly.

31:44 DB: And then you mentioned also getting things transcribed. Google is at a funny stage at the moment. It certainly is still relying an awful lot on text and it’s algorithm ranks pages according to text on page. Is it going to get to the stage soon where it can reasonably start to analyze what is being said and rank podcast and audio files and videos, based upon the content of that audio or video piece?

32:18 JO: You know, I really don’t know the… I can’t give an exact answer to that question, I mean if five years ago when podcasting kind of first came around and people… Videos becoming more important online, audio becoming more important online, it seem inevitable that Google would start transcribing, running it through algorithms to determine what was being said, but that has still not happened or changed, and there might be different reasons for why Google is not doing that. Although there are different clues that Google can use to know what… It’s the same thing they do with images, it’s the same thing to do with video or audio, is they can look at the text that’s around that link to that audio or that’s around that image, that’s probably referring to the audio or that video, or that image, and they can look at the types of links that point to that particular file.

33:07 JO: So yes, it’s absolutely important to not just simply link to an audio file on your site but you also include with it at the very least a good title and kind of some good bullet points about what that audio file is about. But even if you want to take it, make it even stronger than… Yeah, we’ve always gone about getting our stuff transcribed and posting that on their site as well, the kind of increase those other touch points inside the search engines or to blog as well as to your audio. Text is still very viable, very powerful, it’s still kind of drives Google and what they look at so… Yeah, you want… You got to mix it up in your strategy and include each of those formats.

33:46 DB: Excellent guys. You shared a lot of… really outstanding information there. And maybe just to finish off, someone just thinking of starting a podcast, thinking of using audio and video a little bit more, what are one or two just quick action steps that you could start doing today just to get moving with things?

34:04 JO: Well the number one thing is to sit down and decide who… What is it that I enjoy doing most? What am I really passionate about? What are some of the topics that I could be fulfilled doing content about even if it was in five years? The stuff people are always asking me about that people depend on me for. So that’s the YOU part of the equation we are talking about earlier. And then think about who exactly is the audience? What is it that they really want? And define a specific person. So you got to define all those things out. Define a specific audience member that one person you can envision that if you were sitting down in a coffee shop with them, what would you be saying to them? That’s what your show should be like. So if you define those things out, that’s absolutely the first step otherwise you’re kind of shooting in the dark.

34:50 JO: You’ll save yourself a lot of headache if you plan those things out first. But then the second thing is to simply get the microphone, download audacity and just start recording some stuff and messing around. It might seem intimidating at first but the great thing about recording on your computer and using something like Audacity to edit is that you can do multiple takes, you can cut things out, you can splice them together, and you should hear our show before we actually get edited and put it online. I mean it sounds like we’re perfectly eloquent and know exactly what to say at any moment but every one of our shows gets edited before it gets put up. So just dive in and start giving it a try. Would you add anything, Sterling?

35:28 JF: I guess the other thing I would say is don’t be afraid if there’s already competition and in fact that’s probably a good sign.

35:34 JO: Right.

35:35 JF: No matter what it is. I just went to lunch with a friend that does a lot of work in a crazy field – I didn’t even know how popular it was, it’s urban survival. So survivalist guys. And he loves it, he’s totally into it, and one of the things he had to look at was, is there competition? And of course there was and that was a good sign. That means people are making money. If there isn’t, that’s a little scarier. It doesn’t mean you… You know, maybe on iTunes, something hasn’t hit there yet but don’t be afraid of competition. That’s just one of the things I hear all the time, “Oh, looks like there’s so many people already doing this.” When we started doing Internet Business Mastery, there were big, big guys in there and we went to number one right away because we did something different.

36:27 JF: So, it doesn’t… You know, it’s not a scary thing if there’s other people that you’re going to be competing with. And you might even think, “I can’t do it any better than them.” And you can just twist your format a little bit like we did it different instead of the guys that were doing it at the time, were doing it like they were big guru guys that knew everything and you had to kind of sit at their feet and, “Please give us information.” It felt like… And we just came as what we were, just regular guys that happen to be full time doing this Internet marketing stuff. And that resonated with people in a different way and we were able to beat those other guys just because we had a different way of coming at it. So, again, the competition thing, that’s just something I hear all the time, people are worried about. And I would say definitely not to be worried but don’t just copy the other guys. Come up with your own way of doing it.

37:22 DB: Right. Okay. So, find the angle that’s right for you.

37:25 JF: Yeah.

37:25 DB: And do it, do it a little bit differently, add your personality and there’s certainly room for you in the market.

37:30 JF: Yes.

37:31 DB: You’ve certainly offered an awful lot of information there, much appreciated. I’m sure people listening will want to find out more about you if they don’t know about you already. So, where’s the best place that they can go to to find out more about you?

37:44 JO: Well, you can go and check out the show. It’s free. We publish new episodes all the time at Internet Business Mastery .com.

37:52 DB: Great stuff. Well, thanks again for joining me, guys.

37:55 JO: Thank you.

37:55 JF: Thanks for having us.

How to create a video sales page

26weekplan — Tue, 22 Mar 2011 11:27:07 +0000

Video sales pages are becoming so popular online, quite simply because they have produced very successful results. Many Internet marketers are realizing the importance of having videos on their sales pages, instead of plain content. So let’s see how to create a video sales page…

Are you thinking of creating a video sales page?

Creating a successful sales page is no child’s play. This is because there are many things that you have to remember. Sure, it would be easy to produce a video that describes the benefits that your product provides. But, will that get you any feedback? Will that help you to get the type of feedback that you want? Will this make you more money? The purpose of this article is to let you know what must be done if you desire to have a video sales page that succeeds. This is the key thing that will get you conversions.

Remember to provide your product’s main benefits

First, do not dangle your product in front of your prospects without letting them know what they can expect to receive from it. You should attempt to provide the main benefit of your video at the very beginning. Just like you would talk about your USP in the headline and develop it, you have to do the same thing with your video sales page. Trying to produce too much excitement will actually make things worse than better. So stay away from the dramatics and remain focused. Do not delay in relation to informing your prospects about the key benefit of your product.

Make it easy for your videos to go viral

Secondly, if your potential clients choose to share your videos, make it a lot easier for them to do. But, this does not mean distracting your potential customers from responding to your call to action. But, instead, put a share button by your video. This is so that if they like your content, they can pass it along to others. You must be cautious about how you handle this. This is because you obviously don’t want your viewers getting distracted. After all, they are your would-be customers.

Making a balanced video sales page should be one of your top priorities.

Tell people to watch your video

Lastly, don’t rely on the fact that people will just watch your video, you need to encourage them to do it. If your video doesn’t start playing as soon as your website loads, then you need to make sure that you put up good call to action message next to it to entice your audience to click the play button.

All video sales pages can be different, however, the basics are always the same. If you truly desire to have a video sales page with an extremely high conversion rate and people who are climbing the walls to purchase your product, then you have a lot of hard work to get done. You cannot think that you will put up a video on your sales pages and get automatic results. Like the other elements in your e-marketing plan that are worthwhile, success doesn’t happen overnight!

YouTube SEO Tips – Eugene Ware Interview Transcript Part 5/5

David Bain — Mon, 22 Nov 2010 08:56:44 +0000

This transcript is the fifth part of my Eugene Ware interview and this part offers some YouTube SEO tips. Remember, if you haven’t done so already make sure you download your free trial copy of Eugene’s Market Samurai.

36:00 DB: Excellent. And a lot of really good tips there. Thanks. And you mentioned social media sites there. A lot of people are thinking of producing videos on their sites now and submitting these videos to YouTube. Do you know of… would you be able to offer any YouTube SEO tips at all?

36:18 EW: Yeah. I mean, I’ve done… I’ve done quite a bit of research in this sort of area. I guess in a nutshell, it’s very… Anyone who’s ever done any YouTube stuff realizes that it’s actually relatively simple to get a lot of video stuff ranking in search engines video as preferred by Google and different YouTube content. And the big mistake people make when they’re producing videos and submitting it to YouTube is they don’t take time to build any off page authority to the YouTube videos when I’ve done some backlink analysis with friends. Out of a whole bunch of YouTube videos, there’s only a handful of links to ever get built, often with no links at all. So if you just take that one step of submitting YouTube videos, doing the keyword research again so you’re tagging it, you got the keywords and the title and you actually build some links, even if all you do is just embed the YouTube video in your own blog and you can get a hyperlink on that blog with the anchor text of the keywords you want to rank at YouTube video, to and then link… Put that link to the YouTube video, you’re going to find it considerably easier to rank your videos in the search engine because no one else is really doing that on any sort of great scale.

37:49 EW: That being said, the same wild belief is that YouTube is certainly favoring videos in the search engines like when you actually type to look at what its ranking is. It’s not like… It’s a massive boost. You still need to… Google will rank YouTube videos and use the same sort of quality factors to rank that content so this… If it’s a very, very competitive keywords, if, for example, if the front page is full of page rank six websites then you might need a page rank of four or five linked to YouTube video to get your video ranking. Another thing about YouTube videos is that, like any SEO, there is certainly a recency factor, so often people submit a video, it will number one for a couple of days and then drop off because that recency stuff fades away, but that’s really a factor of all SEO but it’s very, very noticeable in YouTube because you can often, I’ve submitted a video and five minutes later it’s ranking number one in Google. It’s incredible how quickly that stuff can get indexed and picked up but expecting it to stay there in the long term is another matter.

39:16 DB: But of course Google is ranking YouTube videos within search results now as well. Is this another way of getting your content within the first page of Google?

39:25 EW: Yeah, that’s specifically what I’m talking about in terms of actually getting your stuff… YouTube is basically the number two search engine at the moment in terms of getting your stuff ranking. And so YouTube results… The biggest asset that you have in your business is really the ability to generate traffic on demand and whether you’re trying to build traffic from SEO or other sources, it’s very, very important that you convert that traffic through to an email list of people that trust and have given you permission to email them. And certainly one of the biggest factors for YouTube ranking is the number of views and the number of people that click the ‘Like’ button. And so this is the same for YouTube, for blog posts, for anything, if you want something to rank, drive traffic to it. You know I’ve got countless examples of blog posts and things where basically if you… If you have two blog posts, one you email traffic to and the other one, you don’t email traffic. The one that you email to is just going to be picked up, more people are going to click the ‘Like’ button, they’re going to tweet it and there’s going to be much more… You’re basically leveraging natural link building by putting a whole bunch of traffic at it. And YouTube is the same so by driving a lot of… Emailing a lot of people to go and visit YouTube video, you will naturally skew the search engines in their favor.

40:57 DB: Absolutely. And because less people are doing it obviously it’s a little bit more easier to get out there on the top of YouTube’s search rankings. I remember the first video that I submitted to YouTube with regards internet marketing training, I actually had a little list at the time, I emailed my list and said, “Do me a favor and if you like it, give a rating and add a comment.” And that in itself was enough to actually keep it on the first page of YouTube rankings for the phrase “internet marketing”. It had about 20,000 views or so. So it’s incredible what’s possible with YouTube so that certainly encourage people to take a look at that and it’s important to augment standard SEO with that as well. I tell you what, I really love to kind of go into Market Samurai, as well, Eugene, if that’s alright and I know you’re really busy there and I don’t want to take advantage of your time too much here. So… At the moment you’re still offering your Market Samurai software with your keyword research module completely free of charge to download, is that right?

42:07 EW: That’s right. Yes, I mean, we tell people about it but I think most people realize that Market Samurai is known to be a keyword research tool and so it is one of the best ones that are out there. But the actual keyword research, we’ve actually give that for free. Market Samurai is a whole bunch of different modules that’ll help you just in general SEO and do competition analysis and track your rankings in Google and find affiliate products to sell and research content about your niche and help you to build backlinks. So, Market Samurai, is actually a big work flow tool for SEO. But the most popular module, and certainly the one that most people buy for is the keyword research module which is a hundred percent free, so we make it available for… There’s a twelve day trial where you get access to all the modules for twelve days for free. But even after that twelve days, if you don’t decide to purchase it, the research module stays fully functional, it’s not degraded in any way. And so you’d be silly not to go with it.

43:26 DB: So that’s an outstanding offer. I have actually setup a link up for people who want to directly to it, just a quick link it’s 26weekplan.com/ms, ms for Market Samurai, obviously. So if people go to that link now, they’ll be able to download Market Samurai free of charge and try everything for twelve days as you said, then keep the keyword research module after that. I would imagine if people wanted to get in touch with you, they just do so through the Market Samurai website?

43:58 EW: That’s right, yeah. On our Noble Samurai website, on my website noblesamurai.com. If you go there, there’s a whole different bunch of ways to be able to contact us.

44:07 DB: Absolutely superb. Well, I really appreciate you’re joining me today, Eugene. A lot of valuable information there you’ve shared and I look forward to publishing this as a podcast episode very soon!

44:20 EW: My pleasure, thanks for having me, David.

44:21 DB: Thanks Eugene.

#66: 26-Week Plan Internet Marketing Course Summary Video

David Bain — Tue, 19 Oct 2010 07:10:58 +0000

The 66th edition of our podcast brings you a summary of our original 26-Week Internet Marketing Plan. This video gives you a full internet marketing course summary.

The recording is taken from our original 2007 seminar. At the time it sold for £399 as part of our 26-Week Internet Marketing Plan home study package. Now, for the first time we’re giving it away for free via our internet marketing podcast.