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Unless you’ve been living under a rock you’ll know that building an app for an iPhone could be an excellent marketing opportunity. On this podcast episode I interview Simon Williams, author of a book called Rich App Poor App on how to create an iPhone app.

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Simon 'App Man' Williams

Here’s the full interview transcript:

00:00 David Bain: I am pleased to be joined by Simon Williams, the App man today. Simon’s consulted to many organizations thinking of building an app and he’s also author of the Rich App Poor App book. Simon many thanks for joining in today.

00:14 Simon Williams: Hello there. Yeah, pleasure.

00:16 DB: Good stuff. I’ll be great if you perhaps begin by telling a little bit about your background and how you came to be known as the App-man.

00:24 SW: Sure, okay. Do you want the long version or the short version?

00:28 DB: How long does the long version take?

00:29 SW: Well, okay we’ll do the medium version, how about that?

00:32 DB: That seems good.

00:33 SW: Okay, great. So my background is really in design and so I’ve been working for many, many years, about 18 years in design and this is in graphic design and product and service design. So I basically moved from making things look pretty and for making products get sold. It’s quite a big transition and I’ve been doing that for many, many companies. The companies includes companies like Virgin, Shell, even the Labor Party, EasyJet, Sony, many, many other companies. And then more recently, I think this is quite the short version really, much more recently a few years ago now you see the iPhone came out and this thing called the App Store got invented. I’ve actually written a book a couple years before that talking about how consumer behavior had changed or was changing and was moving much more towards very super niche item and highly emotive experiences.

01:36 SW: And really to provide those kinds of highly niche products you really need to have a completely digital kind of distribution service so as to really make it viable. And then lo and behold this thing called an App Store came out. So I recognized pretty quickly that this was actually the thing that I’ve been talking about and basically I’ve decided that well I best put my money where my mouth is and go and do this thing. So I launched my first application. I was still working full time at that time as a designer and doing a 40, 50, 60-hour a week, I’m sure many of us can relate to. And from there fortunately due a great application, a few months later as I was able to quit that job and that led to me having friends and people asking about how to create mobile apps. And I kind of built and built and then I’ve launched into a more serious business and now that’s what I do 100% of the time, just to help other people produce their first mobile application.

02:35 DB: And I’m sure a lot of the listeners would be thinking, well an app may be nice, but is right for them. So can that be useful for all types of businesses or are there some businesses that shouldn’t consider having an app?

02:48 SW: Good question. How to get… Not keen to give blanket answers, however really an app is a form of distribution, it’s a medium, if you like. And like any medium, I think that it’s fair to say that it can be beneficial to anybody. I mean, I think every form of medium can be beneficial to any kind of company organization. Now I would also say it will fit some businesses better than others in certain situations. So one area I think apps are particularly strongest in is reaching consumers. So perhaps more powerful business to consumer than it is to say B2B or business to business. And that’s because you got this kind of fertile area, lots of potential prospects and potential customers that maybe don’t know you yet, that are kind of sitting around basically waiting to receive your message to some degree. So it can be very, very powerful there. Sure, it can also work business to business as well, but there are also other mechanisms which can be arguably equally rewarding there. So in short, business to consumer is incredibly a powerful device certainly in my humble opinion.

04:12 DB: Okay. And when you talk about apps, do you mean just for the Apple Store or do you mean the android as well or perhaps other sources of applications?

04:21 SW: Yeah, I’m really referring to any mobile application. So just to be clear ourselves we don’t get involved in things like Facebook applications. We leave that to other people who would do a better job than us in the area, but we really know that stuff when it comes to mobile applications and that’s really cross platform. Saying that, still today most of the applications we have produced have been for the IOS or the iPhone, iPad and iPod Touch platform and that’s simply because at the moment, in terms of commercial revenue, that’s really where the commercial income is coming from.

04:58 DB: Why is it some apps are a lot more success more than others? What would you say are the biggest mistakes that you find people make when having the first app developed?

05:08 SW: Oh, I’ve got so many mistakes for you. [chuckle] I don’t know where to start. Okay, so maybe I’d just start with the biggest one and I’ll work my way down. So the number one biggest app rookie mistake, which is what I like to call it, is that, without a shadow of doubt my opinion, assuming that the developer will be able to turn the idea into a commercial product. But I just want to explain that a little bit. So look, I’m a lousy cook, okay? So if you ever come to my house for cooking then we’ll get a take away, alright. I’m a lousy cook, but even I could cook burgers and chips, but that doesn’t mean that I can launch a company that can rival McDonald’s. So even though I can make the product it doesn’t mean I know anything about the business. So by and large, pretty much most app developers know how to write codes, they can make things look pretty and they can produce an application. To be honest, that’s the easy bit, that’s really not the hard bit.

06:08 SW: The goal is not just to make, in almost every situation, the goal is not just to make an application, the goal is to actually make a commercially sound vehicle, to have commercial product. Now even if you’re looking to distribute that application for a very low price or even to distribute it for free, with the view to attracting new customers, new prospects to existing products and services or to educate them of things that you still wanted to do that in a way that’s going to get the most amount eyeballs, the most attraction, and that’s really an area of expertise that falls out of sight, the developer’s error. They just don’t know how to do that stuff and in fairness to them they don’t ever pretend they can. So my number one mistake is that people assume a developer will be able to take their idea and turn it into a commercial product, they don’t, they just know how to produce an application. So we’re very, very lucky and it’s a real shame that other people aren’t in that sort of position and not able to pass off without guidance, we can but because my background is not in coding, in fact I can’t write a line of code if my life depended on it. My knowledge and experience is about launching new products and I just happen to do that now inside the mobile app space.

07:22 DB: Right, okay. And so would you advice a business considering an app for the first time to consider launching their own app and doing everything themselves and managing the process themselves and sourcing their own developer, or is that a little bit too much for a new start as it were to actually consider doing themselves?

07:41 SW: Yeah, my advice there would be that they need to concentrate on their own business and what their primary goals are and then find someone that can help them to deliver that. So, not for a second would I recommend that they actually start to figure out how to write the codes themselves, I also wouldn’t recommend they go and hire some in-house app developer to go and do that. I would advice they go and speak to someone who’s basically an expert in that field and get some advice and I know that might sound like I’m just trying to get them to talk to me, but really it makes sense. For almost everybody as the case of their coming to a new territory, something they have never done before in the large part, there are some tips and tricks along the way, we’ve done hundreds of applications and I assure you we’ve learned a few things along that way. So it’s very easy for us to explain some of what we’ve learned to people, but you’re never going to learn all that stuff without either making a lot of mistakes or having a lot of experience and it’s just very wise thinking, I believe, in any situation to go and get some advice that’s been there before.

08:47 DB: So without knowing what the app is going to do, is it possible for small business to have reasonable budget to develop that app to begin with?

08:56 SW: Yeah, I mean I always like to work on what the goal is first because I think if you start with your budget, that can guide you in a strange direction actually. So I think the goal is to find out what the primary objective is, find out what the best way to achieve that objective is, and then basically see how much it’s going to cost to produce. So if for example we found, also don’t know who this fictitious customer might be, but they might be looking to increase their sales of their existing product for example and we’re working with closely with them, might come up with an app solution that we’re thinking and do that and maybe we can actually even do some testing in advance or producing it to evaluate that. Now if we worked out that actually this is going to bring in ten new customers to them each month but that’s because they are Ford or that’s a big company that’s worth tens of thousands of pounds to them, that could be a pretty easy no-brainer kind of decision, that is the case of how much is it going to cost to produce and how they’re going to fund it. But I do think it needs to be done in that order because things are really only expensive if they don’t work. We have a philosophy of test it before you build it which is about looking very… It’s been quite a bit of time really at that initial concept and defining the weight in it and doing some testing on that before ever going ahead and actually developing it.

10:28 DB: Of course, if you’re having an app to build for an iPhone, your iPhone knows a lot of information about you, what kind of data can an app take from your iPhone to personalize your experience?

10:40 SW: Sure answer is it’s going to take pretty much everything. So, to a degree, if we wanted to it can know who you are, know where you are, it can know what temperature is where you are, it can know which way you’re facing, it can tell what you are looking at, it can tell you how much public transport you take, tell you how much music you buy and how many films you download from Apple et cetera. So, it knows a huge amount of information about you but only if you allow it to. So in terms of Apple, specifically, you basically have to make a request for the information and the user has to allow that device to gather information from them. So it can’t be done kind of secretly and that’s the right way to do it actually.

11:28 DB: And should you have a paid app, a free app or both of paid app and a free app?

11:33 SW: No, blanket answer here, it really depends on the goal. I mean what we find… I mean really the first question I ask people and if anyone does decide to explore it further with us, don’t be surprised if we hit you with this question. Our first question is, “What’s the primary objective of the application?” And I usually get one of three typical answers, actually there are some answers outside this but usually it’s one of these three. It’s either to produce a product that’s going to bring in commercial revenue and in which case they’re usually very interested in it as passive income of course. And the second one is to attract new prospects and customers to existing products or services, or it’s three, they are looking to going to launch a new product or to going to a new market and they want to increase the awareness there, so it’s really sort of a marketing exercise. And we do get it a lot. People come to us say “Yeah, I want all those three things.” That can be harder to achieve. What we want to redo is focus on one and then we can make sure we achieve it. We know ideally everything does all things, but if we can actually tune in to one of those, then it makes us very… Well, relatively easy for us to achieve that.

12:49 SW: So, if for example they are looking to attract new customers to the existing products or services, then there’s a really big argument for actually making that even a very low cost price or to even make it free because you’re going to also have a wider audience, you increase the likelihood of increased downloads and you can actually start to build a rapport and a relationship with them quicker and easier and then you can lead them to other products and services. So, in that situation, there’s a good argument for making this app free. If you’re looking to provide a specific solution and you’re looking for direct income, then there’s probably a very good argument for actually for also having a price for the application in its own right, and there may be a pro level version of the app which is perhaps a higher price for it as well which can lead people to if they wish. So there’s different answers for different situations.

13:45 DB: And how do you decide upon your niche or target market for your app?

13:50 SW: Well, if of course it’s supported some of the existing company products, a business, then that’s usually chosen for them effectively. If they’re looking to do an app, perhaps the first time, not necessarily related to anything they’ve done before, maybe they just thought an idea of having an application and that idea of passive income and who doesn’t, then we have a very simple rule there. The way to have a really great app idea which is the same way to have a really great new product idea, it’s got lots of ideas to test them and pick the best one.

14:23 DB: Okay, excellent stuff. Is it better to pick a niche that doesn’t have much competition or a niche that already has a proven market but more competition?

14:29 SW: I think that’s more a character trait also. So, some people like to be first to market and it has perhaps some inherent risks there because it potentially could be an unproven market. Other people like to see that someone’s actually been there before and they’ve already got proven solution and they like to sort of go in second and attempt to make it better. I say if we were to assume McDonald’s was the first big burger brand then Burger King came along and kind of to a degree copied them and did okay, thank you very much. So, both fruits are valid and I really think, I really try not to push out an answer in there, but it’s really a character trait that decides that.

15:16 DB: And is it easy to get app listed in the app store, and if so, how long does it take to get listed?

15:22 SW: Yeah, this is… I feel there is a huge myth about poor Apple. You really get a poor deal here. A lot of people that come to us believe or been told or read that Apple takes ages to approve apps and people are generally surprised when I tell them it takes between four or five business days for Apple to approve the application. Now what I do think here has caught, that I know, has caught people out is that they wait til the app is produced before they actually go and request an account with Apple. That is the wrong way to do it. So you asked me earlier about the rookie app mistakes, there’s another classic one for you. So, as soon as you decide that you’re going to go ahead with an application, assuming it’s — we’re talking about Apple now for a moment — assuming that it’s going to be distributed out for Apple, go into the App store and become a registered developer.

16:15 SW: Now I know that people probably won’t consider themselves as developer in the true sense of the word, but not suggest that they write the code or anything, but if they do that then that means they have control of their own application. They can change the price and if they want, they can change the information about the app, they can change all the details. And that costs them a whole $99US a year so really, there’s very little barrier there and my strong recommendation would be to go in, get that set up, that will take a little bit of time to do because of course you’re fit to be signing paper works for 97 countries around the world. They don’t have to sign 97 forms, it’s not as scary as that, Apple do make it as easy as possible, but of course there are some documents to complete there, so that can take a little bit of time, that can take a couple of weeks even to do.

17:04 DB: Right, okay. So even if you’re developing your first app to give away free of charge, you still recommend paying that yearly fee with them?

17:11 SW: I would, yeah. I mean for the sake of $99US with the amount of income you like to get, yes. I don’t see any argument at all for not doing it. I would even go as far to say as soon as you believe you’re serious about doing one, just go and get it done there and then. I must tell you a little bit of a horror story, I won’t give any names, but well, one of our very early clients, we worked over completing the application, we explained that they needed to set this account up. For our part we did actually ask that question, I think it was exactly four times, and we’re told, “Yes, it’s been set up correctly,” but only when we actually attempted to upload the app on their behalf that we realized actually they hadn’t completed the paperwork correctly, and therefore Apple weren’t able to release it. So they had marked in budgets for in place, they had, I believe, some point of sale and some fairly good locations all to analysis application, all that of course didn’t happen because Apple weren’t able to release the app at the planned time because they haven’t done that form. So I guess as a provider we’ve learned from that and we really, in a nicest possible way, we’re very keen to ensure that our customers have got that stage done at an early stage to avoid any potential worries later.

18:40 DB: Okay, that’s certainly a big mistake there.

18:42 SW: Yeah.

18:43 DB: Going back to the actual design of the app itself, obviously Apple iPhone users will be comfortable with the way they use their phone, they would like certain aspects of it. So what biggest, perhaps design mistakes do you see people making in apps?

19:00 SW: I’m not sure how do I think specific there in terms of design. I think one thing people need to be perhaps more aware of is that there’s a kind of interface Apple’s built. So if you’re familiar with Apple’s products and if anyone owns an iPhone or iPad, you’ll see inherently will do, there are certain ways, techniques that Apple use to sort of navigate around their application now. Any users are aware of those, they know how to swipe the screen and double tap and zoom in, et cetera. Now if you wish to create a kind of bespoke new navigational system that can be very exciting and that can be quite entertaining and evolving for the user but also it can also cause some quite a lot of irritation because we do like things to work sort of out of the box so to speak. So it does take a lot of extra time, a lot of extra testing to provide a really bespoke, unique kind of navigational system and that’s not testing to make sure it works because if we put buttons somewhere it’s going to work, but to make sure that that’s intuitive to people and until you actually put that app in front of new prospects, it’s very easy to assume they will know that this big orange button on top of the screen which you can see and you think it will be absolutely obvious to everybody they need to tap that, how some people just don’t see it because they’re reading down the page and they’re not looking at the top of the page for example or that they’ve put the buttons at the top of the page and actually because the thumb will actually cover the screen when it’s tapping the buttons, that might not be the best way to do it. So there are quite a lot… It does take quite longer to produce a unique system. So I’m not sure that’s a mistake because sometimes it could be worth it, but it’s something that people are perhaps a little bit unaware of.

20:59 DB: And is it possible to get a few people to test your app before submitting it to the store?

21:04 SW: Yeah, absolutely. I mean we have a very sort of step by step process, I mean we have a two-phase approach producing any of our applications. The first stage is what we called the graphical phase. We start with a very simple pen and ink drawing of this basic app structure. Then we start to do a couple of screen shots and just get it approved just to make sure we’re delivering the right sort of style of graphics. And we have to say touching wood, we don’t really get that wrong because we really work harder with them right at the start to make sure we know who these apps belong to and who the other prospects are et cetera, but we check that. And then the last step of the graphical phase is what we call our graphical blueprint which is a full specification of every single page of the application, exactly a description of every button, what it does when you rotate it, what happens when you shake it, a complete blueprint. That’s the first phase.

22:03 SW: And the second phase is we then take that blueprint and then we physically build the application and it really is like building a house. First of all we need to work out who this house is for, what they need and we’d work on what it’s going to look like and we’ve got the blueprint and then only when the blueprint’s approved do we actually start laying the bricks and actually start building the application. And then we actually deliver that application to test in-house first of course, then we actually deliver that to our client and they actually get to test it out on their own device. Of course they can show that to friends, family, colleagues. If wished, we could even build that in a way that actually gets put into several different devices so they can test all those devices out. So you can have five different people testing out the application every weekend if they so wished to see how they got on with it. Of course, only when they actually approved that do we actually distribute it and upload it to Apple for distribution.

22:57 DB: Yeah, what if a business isn’t sure about what functionality to include on their app, frankly, how should they go about deciding?

23:04 SW: We go through a series exercises. The exercise that really elicit that is understanding who the ideal prospect is and when we ask that question, “Who’s your ideal prospect?” The answer we usually get, “Oh, a man aged between 30 and 55.” Well that’s not an ideal prospect, that’s a whole range of prospects. So we’d like to get into a very emotional understanding of who this prospect is. So we like actually… Perhaps useful to get the exercise right now but we actually have to put a name on them. So if we know that this app is to appeal to Sally who’s a mother of two children, she’s aged 42 and she’s about to go back to work and we have a real understanding of who Sally is and what her needs are and why she’s interested in this application, it makes it very easy for us to deliver the right features but also in the right way. So, depending on what the application might do. It might be providing a solution in which case they might want to get that sort of answer very, very quickly, in which case we need to make the app very kind of authoritative and very simple and easy to use or it might be more of an entertainment application, which maybe is more image-based and maybe there’s a little bit more intricacies there. So, understanding who that primary prospect is tells us really all the information we need to know.

24:28 DB: Okay, excellent. Okay, you’ve got everything up and running. You’ve got your application up there on the store. Now, what about marketing strategy? Can you offer a few tips and perhaps how to market that?

24:39 SW: Oh, yes. So, look of course it’s important of any new product in any area, in any industry, any platform. So we have a three-step formula for creating an application. So I probably should have mentioned this earlier. So step one is the conception. Come out with a really great idea as I think I said we have a philosophy of test it before you build it. Then we have the creation step, which is actually physically producing the item and getting distributed around the world. And the third step is adoption. And we say it’s a little bit… Producing an application is a little bit like giving birth, instead of nine months, it takes like nine weeks. But the bit that’s really different is after producing the baby or the application, you now need to sell that baby as many times and for as much money as you possibly can. And we do that through basically some PR, some marketing and some price optimization.

25:35 SW: So in terms of marketing, we have a database, a company of 83 app review websites and all those websites are very keen to review applications. And with about two or three exceptions, all those will do that for free. If you know who to contact and how to deliver the application to them and they won’t pay for the application. So, there is a technique to actually delivering that application to them in a way it doesn’t cost them anything so that they can actually test it out. Now, if one of those websites gives a review in their experience, that can lead to an extra $10,000 a day, so that can be a very valuable time well spent. And we give that database to our customers so they can leverage that. We also look at things like PR and the device to a successful PR is just a very short list of the right distribution channels. So if it’s a business reg application, there probably are a couple of trade magazines or newspapers related to that industry. Now, chances are, coming from our experience, they’re really interested in a new application in that space as you write 250 words, maybe 250 to 500 words on that with just one paragraph at the end, talking about the application, then chances are, you’re actually going to get that covered. And we have, just to give you some examples, we have some of our clients who have had their apps in a full page articles in leading music magazines in the UK which has lead to huge quantity of traffic and got them a bit famous. So, just by following the steps, it’s relatively easy.

27:14 DB: And so potentially, more valuable than other forms of online marketing.

27:19 SW: Well, that’s a part of it as well. So, we’ve actually found the number one reason people purchase things like smart phones and iPhones, et cetera is to be connected. So, it’s probably no surprise that people who own those devices are particularly heavy browsers. They use their email a lot clearly. And they use things like Twitter or Facebook even more than the average person would. So that’s incredibly viable platform to announce your application and to help market it as well. So, we think all those things are worth spending a little bit of time on. Then there’s only one technique we recommend that actually cost anything. Everything else is completely free to market, it just cost a bit in terms of time. And in our experience, it shows that then that time is well spent.

28:08 DB: Excellent things, well, I’m sure that’s persuaded quite a few people who are perhaps on the cusp of considering in getting their own app to actually think about it a bit more seriously. And have you any perhaps, last tips that you’d like to leave us with?

28:21 SW: Well, I just want people to be aware of this market. So, before we had to know these headlines et cetera, but this market is just accelerating at such a fast rate. And I truly feel that we’re actually just at a start of this phenomenon. And a lot of people come to me and say, there’s just as many in our applications as there are websites. That’s just not the case. We’re around 450,000 to 500,000 applications mark, which sounds like a big number. But it’s approximately seven million times less than the amount of websites out there. And that’s not seven million less, that’s seven million in times less. So, the opportunity to make an impact through an application is so much bigger than some website has a potential to do. So it’s very, very powerful so if people are looking at that or looking for wider distribution, want to communicate to people, particularly if it’s a global audience particularly if their language is English for example, they’re not… No, it doesn’t have to be English. Then it’s really exciting environment and I would recommend people at least to explore a little bit further to find out what’s right for them.

29:37 DB: Now, obviously as I mentioned before, you’re an author of the Rich App Poor App. What I’ll do is I’ll leave a link underneath this interview so people can go directly and then get your… The book if they’re interested in doing so. I also understand that you’d like to make a real special offer to people who’d like to do that?

29:57 SW: That’s right. Just to say thank you if people decide to go to Amazon and buy the Rich App Poor App book, they can just easily go to Amazon and just do the normal search in the normal way; they don’t need an affiliate link or anything like that, just go to Amazon. If they do decide to purchase the book, they send us a copy of that receipt, then what we’ll do is we’ll actually post out a DVD to them, which our Rookie App Mistakes DVD so they can straight away see all the mistakes to avoid and so they will avoid any sort of potential pitfalls. And we hope that will serve them well. We’ll do that for them completely free of charge. Now, if we say that, if people are going to purchase the book in the next 48 hours, as long as they send us the receipt… It doesn’t really matter when they get receipts to us but as long as they’ve purchased that book within that timeframe, we’ll honor that agreement and we’ll get that DVD out to the post. It’s going to take about 5-7 working days to get that DVD out to you once we receive that receipt, and if I can just pass on the email address to send…

30:58 DB: Yes, please. Go ahead.

31:00 SW: Just send that in to suzy@thinkemotion.co.uk. That’s kind of my parent company and Suzy will make sure that that DVD goes straight out to you guys.

31:16 DB: Suzy@thinkemotion.co.uk and getting a free DVD in addition to the book, that’s really kind of you. Thank you very much indeed, Simon.

31:25 SW: Pleasure, pleasure.

31:26 DB: And thanks a lot for joining me today. It’s been a lot of great information that you shared, and I’m sure our listeners will think so as well.

31:34 SW: Great. Thank you. Thanks a lot today. It’s been great.

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Welcome to the 71st episode of the 26-Week Internet Marketing Plan Podcast – today I’m joined by Steve Shaw, founder of the popular article submission service SubmitYourArticle.com. Steve’s been involved in online business for 10 years now so he’s got a lot of knowledge to offer.

Steve Shaw

In this episode we discuss:

• Steve Shaw’s background
• What article marketing used to be like a few years ago
• What’s changed over the past few years
• The duplicate content penalty – fact or fiction?
• Formatting your author bio
• Keyword phrase selection for articles
• Article writing style
• Coming up with ideas for articles
• Minimum and maximum article length
• Whether or not pen names are a good idea
• How many articles you should submit
• The future of article marketing
• How SubmitYourArticle.com works

Here’s the full Steve Shaw interview transcript:

00:00 David Bain: Welcome to the 71st episode of the 26-Week Internet Marketing Plan podcast. Today I’m joined by Steve Shaw, founder of the popular submityourarticle.com service. Steve! Many thanks for joining me.

00:13 Steve Shaw: Thank you, David.

00:14 DB: Excellent! Now, you are trained in Information Technology and went on to work for big companies I know but I presume that you had some kind of entrepreneurial seizure and decided that you’d rather work for yourself and set up online businesses.

00:28 SS: Yeah! It was… It was partly, partly came out of boredom in my last real job, I guess. I was working for an IT company based in York and they didn’t really have any projects on so I spent a lot of time surfing the Internet and it coincided with the birth of my first child who’s now worryingly, nearly eleven years old so [laughter] but she was quite poorly for her first year and I wanted to be home a lot more than I was able to really with a job. So the two coincided and I was really looking to work at home and then I found a way to work online which worked really well for us as a family and me so, yeah.

01:10 DB: Great stuff. So how did you actually get into article marketing because you certainly seemed to be better known for that?

01:18 SS: Yeah, I started… I mean my first sort of foray into the world of self-employment, I guess was working as a developer for people in the States really who came across to me by my first rudimentary website. I had some software on there that enabled people to put pop ups easily on their website and somehow that became quite viral and it got the attention of certain internet marketers in the States. So they got in touch about me doing some programming work for them. And out of that I started to see what they did which was just really developing a product and then sell it multiple times.

01:55 DB: Right.

01:56 SS: And I liked the sound of that so I started to put my own software together to sell online and I found article marketing as result of trying to work out how to market those software products and realized quite critically it’s not just case of building something and then people will start buying. You got to put the work into market it and article marketing, I found that really effective for getting the word out and that just started to really increased traffic to my website.

02:26 DB: So what kind of year was this?

02:27 SS: This goes back to the early ‘naughties’ of 2001 or 2002 was when I really got started.

02:34 DB: Right.

02:35 SS: And Submit Your Article was launched around 2003-ish.

02:39 DB: Okay, excellent! So you’ve been in the business for a long time and certainly, you must have seen an awful lot of changes. What would you say the difference… The main differences are now compared with what article marketing was like perhaps seven or eight years ago or so?

02:58 SS: I think it takes a lot more articles out there to start making an impact. People always want really, really quick result with anything really and they expect overnight success. In the early days of article marketing because very few people were doing it really because it was such a tedious process to go around to different article directories and submit your content. You had to be pretty committed to do that and there wasn’t as much content out there really, but since the development automated tools like Submit Your Article, there is a ton more articles out there. So it takes more work to raise your head above the parapets as it where, with your content but the rewards are certainly still there for those who have again, committed to produce the content and to do the leg work that it requires really.

03:50 DB: Right. Okay. I remember recently, it was perhaps three or four years ago, I was submitting just something like one article a week to Ezine Articles and I’m using a keyword phrase within that and that was enough to rank for reasonably competitive keyword phrases actually. But obviously, the strategy has got to be a lot more thorough and integrated with other types of marketing now I suppose.

04:13 SS: Yes, yeah absolutely yeah. We’re finding that you have to… Well, you don’t really have to submit as many as much as content out there but we have tools for example that allow you to have one base article and have every article derives from that piece of a new version of the article and it helps with the link building and such. And I think as the amounts of content has grown that has comes out of article marketing, Google has become more sophisticated in their methods trying to work out what content comes from where and how to rank sites as a result. So you need to be more sophisticated in your approach than was the case three or four years ago as you say.

05:01 DB: And do you think it’s important to get your articles on lots of different sites?

05:04 SS: Yes, absolutely yeah. I don’t think you can really get the same results from just having an article on Ezine Articles anymore and as they used to. It’s… I always see it as, if you’re going to write a book, you wouldn’t just put it in one book shop; but you want to get as many eyes on it as possible and the different publishers frequent different websites and different websites would have different levels of prominence in the search engines for particular bits of content. So, the more widely you can distribute content, the better really because you’re going to get more eyeballs on it and you can built up more links especially if you’re using tools to reduce the amounts of, not duplicate content but the amount of articles that exist in exactly the same way on different websites. You can get them on there using different versions.

05:59 DB: Okay. You mentioned duplicate content there. What’s your opinion on Google’s opinion of duplicate content at the moment and what do you think are the best strategies to actually get ranked in as many places as possible?

06:14 SS: Yeah. There’s quite a myth really about duplicate content that it’s in some way kind of damaging to websites if you start having the same content everywhere linking back to your sites, that’s going to damage you. And that’s not the case at all. It’s more of a case if you have kind of the same article on 30 different websites, Google isn’t going to give you kind of the credit for 30 links because it’s basically all the same content. So they kind of… They’ll find one and treat that as the most prominent source of that content and treat that as kind of the main link to your site. In terms of duplicate content on your own website or content you might have on your own website that exists elsewhere, it’s certainly important to have content that’s unique as well and that really kind of adds value to the internet space, really.

07:07 DB: Okay. So it’s more important to have a unique content maybe on your own site, but when you’re distributing content elsewhere, as long as you’re getting the content out to decent relevant places, it doesn’t matter so much that it’s duplicated basically on other sites.

07:21 SS: It doesn’t matter at all now. And in terms of your own site, it’s certainly fine to have some content that also exists elsewhere, that’s perfectly sort of normal. And in terms of content, that’s syndicated all around the web like press releases and content from RSS feeds and that sort of thing. It’s kind of expected that a certain proportion of content will exist elsewhere as well. But to get sort of real value, it’s a really good idea to try and get some real unique value on your own website, too. It gives the real value to your website and Google kind of recognizes that and will rank your website accordingly.

07:59 DB: Now, what would you see as a main benefits to submitting articles? Would it be SEO, would it be clickthroughs from the links in your author bio, or perhaps syndication benefits?

08:12 SS: It’s all of them, really. I mean, I see the main benefit coming through SEO improvements that you get from all over, all the inbound linking and such, can really kind of boost your SEO. And as you get higher up the search engines, you can get a lot of traffic from that. But you’ll also get clickthroughs from the articles themselves. This is… Some people kind of expect huge amount of clicks to come through every article that they send out there, and then they send out a couple of articles and they expect an avalanche in traffic as a result. It doesn’t really work like that. It’s really a case of once you have quite a few articles in syndication out there, then the traffic does start to build up. And as you get more sort of consistent in your article marketing, you also start to be recognized by certain publishers who are kind of looking for content in their particular niche. And you might end up with relationships with certain publishers while you’re published more regularly. For example, I have two or three columns in offline publications now as a result of kind of consistent article marketing efforts, so all of that helps, inbound traffic, too, and just general kind of credibility of your business and your own reputation online as well.

09:31 DB: Excellent. So, it’s just a tool to help you build up and demonstrate that you’re an authority in your niche effectively.

09:37 SS: Yes, absolutely.

09:39 DB: Oh, and the keyword phrases, choosing the right keyword phrases for your articles is obviously important. How do you recommend people go about selecting the keyword phrases that they use in their articles?

09:51 SS: It’s pretty important to do some keyword research. I always say that’s kind of the foundation of article marketing. It’s not something you just kind of dive into and start producing content on anything and hope to get good results. It’s… Keyword research is kind of the foundation, really. And to do that, I’d suggest using Google’s Keyword Tool which is really easy to use and very effective. The URL for that is a bit convoluted, but you can just search for Keyword Tool on Google and it should be the first result that comes up on the page there.

10:23 DB: Sure.

10:25 SS: What people are looking for are really sort of two lists of keywords. One consisting of the main keywords for their website that they’re hoping to kind of rank well for. And they tend to kind of have higher competition levels and they have higher traffic levels as well. So there’s a higher reward for that. But because of the higher reward, obviously more website owners are kind of going after that gold as it were. And your second list of keywords are the longer tail keyword phrases where you tend to get lower competition and there’s also kind of lower traffic for that as well. But it means that because there’s lower competition, the individual articles that are written kind of around those longer tail keyword phrases can rise to certainly on the first page of Google quite often, having gotten quite a lot of clickthrough as a result. With the list of main keyword phrases, the keyword phrases that you want your site to rank well for, what you do with article marketing is link back to your website using those keyword phrases, and that helps Google to understand what your site is about really because you have those words in the link. It tells Google what your site is about and it tells visitors who clickthrough what to expect really when they get through to your website. And I’d really advise to kind of have between sort of three to five of those and cycle between them so you get fairly naturally looking links all over the web. You don’t really want to just kind of focus on one and get every link using the same phrase, because it ends up looking very unnatural and it’s not going to be very effective if Google thinks you’re doing something unnatural.

12:09 DB: Okay, great stuff. I’d like to talk a little bit about content writing style as well. There are lots of different options out there. Perhaps you can tell a story, perhaps you can be more factual driven. Is there any particular sign of article that is most effective when it comes to getting you traffic back to your site?

12:31 SS: I think either style can work well. It depends a lot on your niche, I think. Some niches are kind of better adapted to kind of storytelling and others tend to be more factual based, but either, you can mix and match between the two styles really and that’s perfectly fine. The one thing I’d recommend is for people to remember that the articles tend to be read online. The people have kind of lower concentration spans and there’s also lots of things kind of going off around and like new emails coming in and different websites popping up all over the place [laughter] and that sort of thing. And you really got kind of quite a short attention span of the person reading. So you need to make it very readable. And that involves kind of very short paragraphs, lots of bullets points. You don’t want big chunks of text on the screen because people just won’t read it at all and they’ll be very… They’ll have their attention diverted very easily and kind of dive off somewhere else. Just to kind of ensure good readability of the article, it should read very well. It should have good levels of quality and just spell-check it as well. I think quality is kind of becoming more and more important, not just from the point of view of publishers who might potentially want to publish your work but also from Google’s point of view. They can check the quality of readability and spelling and such to some degree, and that will affect the power as well of your inbound links.

13:57 DB: Of course, Google had a fairly significant change to its algorithm quite recently to try and focus on lack of quality and take that out of its search engine listings. So that’s a very important area that you mentioned there. Is there any aspects of the Google algorithm change that you think people should be considering in relation to article marketing?

14:25 SS: Yeah. I think before the change, it was very easy for people who had a lot of different niches to kind of put out very low-quality articles and hope to get a result from that. And I think the real implication of Google’s change was that it’s important for articles that are going out there to have a level of quality to be effective for people. The low-quality stuff is going to be filtered out more and more. Just from looking at EZine Articles response to that by Google, they’ve purged a lot of articles from their article directory because they saw their own kind of traffic take a bit of a dive. And they kind of linked it back to a certain level of quality in some articles on their website and they’ve kind of removed all of those. And to get the results from article marketing, you need to make your article really stand out from the crowd and to make it really… You need to provide some real value to people reading. I think before the change, people tended to write for the search engines and didn’t really think about the end reader at all, and the real implication as far as I can see is that you really need to be thinking more and more out the end kind of user or the reader of your article. The real person is going to get the value out of it rather than just trying to prepare articles for links and such.

15:45 DB: And a lot of people in business will be thinking that their own particular niche is quite a dry area for coming out with good content-rich material to use for article marketing. People would perhaps, just can’t come up with good article marketing ideas and ideas for articles. Are there any tips that you can perhaps offer people to come up with article marketing ideas and ideas for content?

16:16 SS: Yeah. I mean it’s a really common kind of problem in a way that people struggle to come up with the ideas and it’s perfectly normal for that to happen. But the interesting thing is that once you start writing articles, your brain kind of does a bit of a switch and you tend to kind of find ideas all over the place and they tend to come to you more and more the more that you write. Apart from that, some more ideas to think about; firstly listen to your customers and to the people who visit your website because quite often they’re kind of your best source of content ideas and they’ll tell you what they want to know about. They’ll kind of put in customer support inquiries about how to do this and how to do that and your answers to them can often form the basis of great articles. Then of course, you’ll be able to refer future inquirers too that they can just go and read the article that would answer their question. Blogs, if you have a blog on your website, apart from the SEO benefits, they’re a great source for ideas for just that reason. If you’ve got posts out there, people will comment and they can often ask a question. I know a lot of the ideas in the articles I put out come from the visitors to our own websites and to the blog and response to comments that I’ve put on there.

17:37 SS: A great idea is to kind of think about what the 10 most common questions are regarding your particular niche, and you can have an article that answers each one of those. List articles are a really great idea where you can have articles in the formats such as 7 top tips about something or 10 steps to do something. It’s interesting because once you have that kind of article you can then expand each of those tips or each of those steps into an article of its own right. And you can also use what we call article templates which kind of give you the foundation of an article. Some examples might be the dinner party reply-type template which is really… If you’re at a dinner party, people tend to ask what you do, and you can write an article around that kind of concept, introducing people to what your niche is and what you kind of do and what would put them in that niche. You can also use a beginner’s guide templates where you kind of introduce your niche to a complete beginner. You kind of think about what somebody would want to find out if they didn’t know anything about your particular niche. If your niche is fishing, for example, you really introduce it to somebody who knows nothing whatsoever about fishing. There’s an interesting historical figure templates where you can kind of look back through history, find a historical figure, find like a quote from them, and kind of try and relate it back to your niche, and you can talk about that and develop an article from that. It’s important to remember that articles are generally fairly short, 400 words minimum really which is, I mean, only kind of four or five paragraphs really, so it’s quite easy to kind of build up an article from that kind of thing. Another great idea is to kind of use a top mistakes template where you think about what the common issues are people face within your niche and what typically goes wrong for people, the main mistakes that people make, and you kind of go through those mistakes and rectify them within the article and put people right.

19:47 DB: A lot of excellent tips there. You mentioned 400 words minimum. Is there any kind of maximum that you’d advise?

19:54 SS: I generally recommend a maximum of 800 words really because if you get beyond 800 words, it tends to be too long for quite a few publishers to want to publish for EZine editors for example, they tend to want fairly short articles. And above 800 words, people don’t really have the attention span again to kind of read an article much longer than that. And a secondary reason for that is you can get more benefit if you split up a longer article. If it gets above 800 words, you’re probably better off trying to split it up into two different articles and getting the benefit from both articles rather than just one article out there.

20:33 DB: Okay. And in terms of writing your articles, would you always advise writing your own articles, or is there a scenario where it would be appropriate to outsource the writing of your articles and actually distribute the articles under your own name even though someone else’s has written them?

20:54 SS: Yeah. Both can work very well. I think it tends to be more effective if you are able to write your own articles because obviously kind of you’re the expert in your niche and it will come across in a better way perhaps. The one thing people struggle with article marketing is consistency and it can mean if you’re struggling to write the articles each week and do everything else that’s required within the business. You won’t actually be able to take advantage of everything that article marketing can offer. And in that case, it can be wise to outsource the writing. And if you want to do that, I’d really kind of advise to work with somebody on a regular basis so they’ll really get to know your business really well and can write quite easily in the end of different topics on your niche. And if you got ideas, you have somebody to forward ideas to share future writing.

21:48 DB: Are there any places that you could recommend to potentially find outsourced writers?

21:53 SS: Yeah. There are quite a few freelancer-type sites. There are sites like Guru.com, oDesk.com is really good to work with, Freelancer.com as well. There’s also a great site called Textbroker.com, and that’s pretty easy to use. You basically just input the requirements for the article you’ve got. You might want to kind of focus around a particular keyword or on a particular topic, for example, and you can just put in your requirements, and put in the order, and then within sort of a day or two, you’ll get the article back. It tends to be from different writers who provide the content but the quality I find is very good, and you can actually specify in the order the level of quality that you’re looking for.

22:42 DB: And what if you got a reasonable budget and you’re wanting to get quite a few articles written out to promote a fairly big website that you’ve got? And would you, in that circumstance, submit articles promoting the same website in multiple pen names?

23:02 SS: I generally not recommend that really because people… There’s probably no sort of big reason why not, but I always kind of think it’s better to stick with kind of one pen name relating to one niche because people… If they see quite a few articles on any article directory, you can kind of click the pen name and kind of see a list of articles from the same author and that kind of thing.

23:23 DB: Right.

23:23 SS: And it’s a bit neat to just kind of keep it from the same pen name. But I guess there’s no real reason why you couldn’t do with a few pen names out there.

23:32 DB: There’s no issue at all with using pen names, though?

23:34 SS: No, no. There’s no issue using pen names at all. There’s no… Lots of people, for example, have businesses in different niches and write under different pen names for different niches just because they don’t want their own name, for example, associated with a different niche because it might confuse somebody who’s reading an article and clicking through, and reading articles about all manner of different topics on article directories, for example.

23:59 DB: One thing that a lot of people don’t get right is the resource box. What, in your opinion, is the best way to format the author bio resource box?

24:09 SS: Really what you’re looking for, two to four sentences. It’s fairly short; above 400 characters and it’s too long really. So it’s a very short blurb, really. What people tend to look for, you need your name in there generally, may need a bit of information about yourself even if it’s to say you’re the owner of a particular website, a little bit about your business. Generally you need to provide a reason for people to click through so you provide your link in the resource box, a link or two, and you give people a reason to click through. It might be like a free report that you’ve got on your website or just further information that kind of enhances the information you’ve given in the article. That’s probably about it, really. You can write it to make it kind of flow on from the article quite naturally so you don’t give away everything in the article but kind of leave a little bit for people want to find out a bit more about and you can kind of suggest that people click through to a website in a resource box in order to do that.

25:17 DB: Okay. And your resource box is the opportunity, of course, to leave a link to your site as well and get your long-tail keyword phrase back to whatever page you want to on your site. How many links would you advise?

25:30 SS: Yes. Generally you’re only looking at about two links in your resource box. We limit it to two for articles going through our service and that’s generally what publishers want. If you have more than two, it kind of tends to fill up the resource box with just ends up looking like a pure link. You don’t want it kind of look like a link spammer but keep it natural, so just provide a link or two. As you said, one of those links can be kind of the all-important link that contains your main keyword for your site and you link back using that.

26:06 DB: Okay, great stuff. What would you say is the average amount of articles that people would submit per week or per month at an ongoing basis?

26:15 SS: What we recommend is for a website, the people submit about eight or so a month, but it is generally in line with what you’d expect to publish on a blog. For example, if you’re doing a blog, you’d generally look to kind of do two or three posts a week, and it’s a similar kind of routine with article marketing.

26:33 DB: Okay, so eight a month. In terms of article marketing model, is there a consistent strategy that people should follow in terms of type of content, a certain sequence of writing? Should people perhaps try and sit down and write all their articles once a month for the whole month submissions or do you find that there’s no best way to do and it just depends on the individual?

27:04 SS: I think it does depend on the individual. I tend to find it works well if you do it in batches of articles, but each to their own, really. It’s certainly a good thing in terms of maintaining consistency, which is very important for article marketing to ensure that you kind of have a regular slot when you’re actually doing the article writing.

27:28 DB: Also I’d like to cover the blog networks a little bit as well, because I’m aware that a recent addition to the Submit Your Article service was the facility to distribute your article to a few different blogs as well. How does that work and what are the benefits of that?

27:46 SS: Yeah. It’s really without doubt when you’re submitting articles to article directors and hoping that kind of niche websites are going to come along and search out your content and put that content onto their websites. It’s kind of the more niche-focused websites like blogs. In that way, you kind of get the most link power from simply because they’re going to be more related to your own website. If you have links from kind of generic article directories, they’re not as powerful. So really with our blog network, it means that you kind of skip past that and you’re getting content immediately performed to niche-focused websites, then those links have higher value going back to your websites. And it also kind of benefits the blog owner too, because they’re linking to related and useful resources from their blog. It tends to boost their own SEO too. What we offer is something called Naked Articles as well through our service, which is really an article which is kind of stripped of its resource box and any other author attributions. So it’s just kind of the title and the body of the content and it looks very much like so the normal blog post that you’d expect to get on the blog. And but you have the benefit of links within the body of the article itself going back to your website. So they’re more powerful because the links are kind of higher up the page and they’re all going to be sort of keyword-based links so you’ve got keywords and the anchor text linking back to your websites. So it’s a very powerful sort of linking way to get powerful links back to your website from these blogs.

29:21 DB: Now, article marketing has been around for a while, but do you think it will still be around as an effective common form of internet marketing in, say, five years’ time?

29:32 SS: I do actually, yeah. Because at the end of the day, content is kind of what makes the web go round. I think article marketing has always been kind of a component of an internet marketing strategy. It shouldn’t be seen as something on its own as kind of magic bullet. But it’s a very effective part of an overall strategy that people can use and I don’t think that’s going to change. It’s about getting your content out there and connecting with people then finding people who are interested what you’ve got to offer by syndicating your materials around, you’re going to do that very effectively. It ties in very well with social media for example. If you start writing articles regularly, you can then do tweaks on the articles that you’ve written. You can kind of put links up to your articles on Facebook and so on, and it all ties in very nicely. What I tend to recommend people do in terms of kind of a broader strategy is to write content but to put that content onto their own website first, onto a blog. That’s what I’d recommend and for them to then re-purpose that content as articles that they’ll then sort of syndicate for article marketing purposes and kind of bring back, take advantage of that content, start bringing back links as well. So it’s really kind of as kind of a what I see as kind of a central hub of a broader internet marketing strategy. Once you’ve got consistent content going out there, you can then do so much more with it, social bookmarking and so on.

31:04 DB: Do you do anything else with your articles? I’m thinking perhaps making them into PowerPoint slides and creating a video out of them and perhaps adding audio? Have you experimented with that at all?

31:16 SS: I have actually, yeah. I’ve been self-experimenting over the past few months with converting articles into video and into audio, producing kind of a podcast fusion, the articles as the basis of that. It can also work the other way around, of course. If you’re writing reports or if you’re doing a PowerPoint presentation, you can then do it the other way around too and kind of convert that content into articles that you can then syndicate. It can work very, very well both ways around.

31:49 DB: Or perhaps record a podcast and get it transcribed. [laughter]

31:53 SS: Yeah. That’s a great idea. Yes. [laughter]

31:55 DB: That’s a method that I find pretty useful for producing good written content that you can put on your blog as unique content obviously as well.

32:09 SS: Well, just on that note, some people find it difficult to write articles but they find it a lot easier to kind of speak articles as it were. A lot of people can use something in the States, I don’t think it’s available here, called Google Voice. You can kind of call up a number and somebody will transcribe that but the concept is easily extensible. You can just kind of record what you’d want an article to be written about and get somebody else kind of put that into proper article form.

32:40 DB: Obviously we mentioned that your service is called SubmitYourArticle.com. Do you want to maybe go into a little bit more depth about exactly how that works and how it benefits article writers?

32:52 SS: Sure, yeah. We have an extensive network of publishers that we submit to. So it’s not just article directories like Ezine Articles and various other sort of high-profile article directories. We have loads of those as well, but we also submit content through our own email list, which consists of Ezine publishers and other websites who are kind of looking for articles and content in particular areas. We’ve already mentioned the blogs that we submit to too and our own article directory gets a lot of traffic as well with nearly 25,000 visitors a day now on the website. So it’s fairly prominent. So really in terms of our users, all they have to do is kind of write the article and then plug it into our system. And then we take care of distributing that content for them to our network of publishers. We have editorial controls for each article that goes out. So every article is kind of manually reviewed to make sure it kind of… It meets our guidelines and that’s for our members’ benefit because quite often we can spot issues with the article that would prevent its publication. It’s also for the benefit of our publisher network, so they know that they’re getting quality content from us and that kind of attracts other publishers into our network too, and also more benefits to our members in the end. We also allow people to kind of trickle out their submissions naturally, so if you want your article to go out over a 90-day period, for example, you can do that and it will gradually go out over that time to our whole network. And so it can work better than just kind of blasting it out in a day or two. We also allow… We also provide a feature called Article Leverage where people can… Set up variations for each article that they have in the system. So for example, you might have different variations for your article title and you can use… There’s two versions of it, really. One is where you might see a sentence then you can write another version of that sentence and so on. Or you might see your resource box and you might write another two or three versions of that resource box. When the article is going out, we then construct a fresh article based on all those variations. So it reads perfectly normally and naturally but it’s a different version of the original article. We also provide something called Text Spinning where you can use special syntax within the article itself and that allows kind of a much greater control over the level of variation and it could mean the uniqueness of the end article can be a lot higher too, for higher link building. So that’s probably kind of a broad overview of what we offer.

35:44 DB: That’s excellent. You’re obviously very passionate about and knowledgeable about article marketing there. So I think you’ve offered an awful lot of great tips there and certainly SubmityourArticle provides a great service as well. I’ll tell you what… I mean, shall we finish up? If you could possibly give maybe just one or two quick action steps that people could take. We’ve provided an awful lot of information there, but what could people do just to simply start article marketing today? What are the first steps?

36:19 SS: I think the first step is just to write something, because the blank page and the first step is always the hardest bit. So just start writing about anything that you know really, and you’ll find that it naturally starts to flow, and you’ll gradually get into the groove. It can take… Expect it to take a few articles before you really get comfortable with it and that’s just to be expected, so there’s nothing unusual if it doesn’t feel particularly natural when you start doing it. And so that’s kind of the first thing to start doing. And secondly look at the keyword research and start doing a bit of keyword research. Make sure that you’re very clear about what you want your site to rank for because you kind of have to have a name, for article marketing, you have to kind of know what you want to get out of it. So work out where your rank now for those keywords, where you want to be and start sort of aiming towards that by using article marketing to set up those links back to your website and start driving your rankings higher.

37:18 DB: Excellent stuff. Well, Steve, thank you very much for joining me today. It’s been a very useful I’m sure for a lot of people.

37:26 SS: Oh, thank you very much, David.

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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.

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Our 69th podcast episode is an interview with Chris Ducker, founder of Virtual Staff Finder which is based in the Philippines. Chris is a specialist on virtual assistant hire, and we discuss the following in our conversation:

Chris Ducker

• Why the Philippines is a hot spot for outsourcing
• The longevity of the Philippines outsourcing opportunity
• Whether hiring a virtual assistant is similar to hiring a freelancer
• If it’s reasonable to expect your virtual assistant to do a good job for you working from home in the Philippines
• How much you should pay your Philippines based virtual assistant
• How easy it is to train your Philippines based VA
• How to communicate with your VA
• What software to use
• Whether you should share bank details etc. with your VA
• The future of outsourcing
• A few final tips on how to hire a virtual assistant

You can find out more / get in touch with Chris via his Virtual Staff Finder website.

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

Here’s the full Chris Ducker interview transcript:

00:00 David Bain: I’m joined today by Chris Ducker, founder of Live2Sell Group, now with 250 employees based in the Philippines. In January 2010, he launched the Virtual Business Lifestyle blog with an aim to become a virtual CEO himself, which he achieved by the end of the year. Chris, may thanks for joining me.

00:19 Chris Ducker: Thanks very much, David. It’s a pleasure to be here.

00:22 DB: The Philippines had a big surge in popularity for outsourcing in the past of couple of years. But I understand you’ve been living there for about 10 years or so. Can you perhaps give me a brief overview of your background and how you came to be involved in the outsourcing industry?

00:37 CD: Yes, sure. No problem. Well, I’ve basically been in the sales and marketing industries for about 20 years now and after a couple of personal circumstances hit me back in the UK, I went out to Asia and took a little bit of time off and just kind of regroup things a little bit in the late 90′s. And I visited Thailand, I visited Hong Kong quite a bit, and also the Philippines as well. And to cut a slightly long story short, I’ve eventually ended up in the Philippines in 2000 where I was basically doing consulting work for a number of different telemarketing companies and corporations and set ups. I worked with people like Citibank and HSBC and a few other larger corporations before I ended up setting up the Live2Sell group in 2004, based on about two years or so of being involved in the outsourcing industry, usually in a consulting role over here. So that’s basically the path that… You know, I could go in a lot more detail but it would be quite boring for your listeners I think, you know, what I had for lunch on a certain day and that sort of thing. [chuckle] But the fact of the matter is I was in the country for about four years before I actually went ahead and set up my own company. And the reason why I did that is because I don’t really… I’ve pretty much always been involved in entrepreneurial set ups and partnerships and joint ventures and things like that, but one thing that I found when I was doing my consulting work was that, I was nine times out of ten, I was pretty much left alone to do what I was hired to do. And I got to the point where I actually sat down and figured out that, “You know what I’m actually not only helping set up, or correct or run these companies but I’m fundamentally doing it all on my own. And why the hell am I doing it for someone else to make them all the money, when I can just do it myself?” So I sank whatever savings I had. I think it was at that time, I think it’s about $40,000 or something I had saved and majority of that came to me as an inheritance and set it up. And the rest as they say is history.

02:48 DB: Excellent stuff. So, why do you think the Philippines has suddenly become, probably not but certainly as far as you’re concerned, but you know, is a hot spot for outsourcing?

02:57 CD: Well, you know, it’s probably a combination of a few things. I mean it’s certainly is not a new thing over here. And outsourcing as a whole is not a new concept. It’s been around for a long, long, long time; a lot longer than a lot of people think. For instance, I remember working for a publishing company back in London in the early 90′s and they were outsourcing all of their IT set up. So they didn’t want to hire a full-time IT manager, or whatever the case may be. So they had people come in and set up the networks and do all these sort of things and they also did very similar things with things like accounting and bookkeeping. It was a pretty small company but very, very profitable. And I think one of the reasons why is because, although they probably didn’t realized it at the time, they were utilizing what I call the power of outsourcing behind not only keeping costs low but also then been able to focus on using outsourcing as a way to be able to grow your business. So I mean, it’s not a new thing. The Philippines has been on the map for about a decade. It started out mostly with the HR and accounting and things like that, but it is now the hotspot for everything call centre-related. India used to be the headlining act in regards to that stuff, but I think with a little bit of bad press and definitely the quality of the manpower in India dropping over the last few years, the Philippines has really started coming to its own, and is now fundamentally regarded as the destination of choice for anything outsourcing.

04:40 DB: Is the quality of the manpower available going to be there over the long term, do you think, for companies looking to outsource?

04:47 CD: It’s a very… That’s a very, very good question. And I think it’s not… I don’t think it’s going to be the same standard as it is right now five years from now. And I think the main reason why that is going to happen is because I’ve seen a bit of a decrease on kind of recruiting line-ups and recruiting guidelines and things like that with the larger companies out here. I mean, there are some companies here that have 4,000-5,000 seats on their call centre floor which for me, will just give me a heart attack. [laughter] The idea of having 4,000 or 5,000 people working for me. Don’t get me wrong. I’d probably love the profit share at the end of every quarter, but I don’t think that I would like the day to day running of the company. But I mean, yeah… I mean, these are guys that are big corporations. They’ve been in business for a relatively long time. They know what they’re doing and everything. However, what I have seen them do over the last couple of years is lower down their requirements. You know, three or four, five years ago, they needed somebody who is a four-year college graduate from either a Mass Communication or a Hotel management or restaurant management or travel and hospitality. You know, something where not only were the people are educated to that college degree level but they were educated fundamentally in an industry or an industry sector which sort of revolved around English speaking language. Now, these exact same companies are literally saying, “We don’t care what course you are on, we just need you to have completed two of those four years.” So you’re seeing how things have dropped. And the reason why things have dropped is because the sheer demand from the outsourcing planet here in the Philippines has increased so much over the last few years that they haven’t been able to keep the talent pool at the same sort of number. That’s the issue. And for me, personally, with 250 people working for me as of now, I honestly don’t think that particular company of mine is going to get a whole lot bigger. It might hit to 300. I’ve always had the number of 300 in my head ever since I started it, and I guess I’d still like to be able to get to that number if I can. But the bottom line is that I think any more than that, it’s going to become very, very hard to get good, really good quality people come through. We hire as a company, our recruiting procedures are very, very strict and stringent. So it’s going to get tougher and tougher, I think. But ultimately, I still believe that the Philippines will remain the number one, the number one choice, particularly when it comes to anything voice-related.

07:44 DB: Right. Right. That’s also because the history of people being able to speak in a really good level of English over there.

07:50 CD: Oh, it’s huge. You know these guys are educated from kindergarten level — or as we would say in the UK, primary school level or whatever — and from that age group all the way up to and including college mostly in pure English. So it’s… That combined with the fact that it’s a very Westernised country anyway. You go to a 20-screen multiplex cinema, 18 of the movies that are showing are going to be American Hollywood blockbusters. And then you’ll have a couple of cheesy local comedy flicks you have playing on the remaining screens, which are atrocious. [laughter] I’ve only literally sat for a couple of them and they’re just seriously not worth the celluloid that they’re printed on.

[laughter]

08:45 DB: Well, tell, quite a few listeners, they’ve had experience hiring excellent workers from sites like oDesk or maybe even Elance. Would you say that this experience is quite similar to hiring a virtual assistant or is it entirely different?

09:00 CD: Well, I mean, oDesk and Elance and other places like that are good. I believe they’re good for getting people that you need on a per project basis. The sheer idea of putting a, I guess, with putting a profile online to try and get work and have all these people contact you is just too much… It’s just too much for most people to handle. They’re going to… Particularly in a developing country like the Philippines, they’re just going to get anything that they can get their hands on, literally. Which will 9 times out of 10, will mean that they will end up biting off more that they can actually chew and taking on board too many clients because “I want to make the money.” It’s very common, right? It is what it is. So, you know, I think that they’re great. They’re really, really great for finding people one-off projects. Let’s say, you need a logo designed or you need an intro to a podcast recording or voiceovers. You need some video work done or you need to find somebody to build a 100 links to a new website from good quality sources or whatever the case may be. That sort of or type of work is perfect for things like Elance but I believe and I mean, you know…

10:25 CD: At Live2Sell, we set up a service last year which was called Virtual Staff Finder. And what Virtual Staff Finder — and I’m not going into a full blown pitch because it’s just not right — but what Virtual Staff Finder does is what we call we bridge the gap between entrepreneur and the type of virtual assistants that don’t want to work on a project-based work, that they want a full-time job, they want a steady income, they want to work for one person and one person only. And that’s why the Virtual Staff Finder service was set up because we had so many inquiries from people that wanted or needed VAs but for whatever reason did not want to hire us a company in regards to our service-provided VAs which run at around $1200 or $1300 a month, all in. But you know, these are people that are sitting in our office early, with our backbone, our management, our infrastructure and all the rest of it.

11:21 CD: With a home-based VA, they really are home-based. So the cost is a lot less. You can get a good quality general or virtual assistant for and from between $400 to $500. So it’s a fraction of our cost. So, you know, that’s why we set that up. And that’s the big difference. If you’re an entrepreneur and a business owner and you’re looking to try and find someone that you can work with and really, truly own as a member of staff for you and your company, it’s better to utilize a service like Virtual Staff Finder than it is to try and look for those people on Elance, because it’s just the atmosphere, the environment on one of those types of sites is just, for me personally, it’s not the right breeding ground for those kind of people.

12:06 DB: Is it reasonable to expect someone who’s working from home to actually do a reasonable job for you in a full-time basis?

12:12 CD: Absolutely. Yeah, without a doubt. This always makes people wonder why the hell I do this, but I actually have two virtual assistants myself, both of them are based in Manila. I’m down in Cebu, which is about an hour away from Manila by plane and is actually the fastest growing economic zone in the country right now. But I have two virtual assistants, one has worked for me for a couple of years, the other one has been with me for a little over a year and they both do completely different things for me. But the reason why I work with those home-based VAs is because there are certain things that I do as an entrepreneur myself that I don’t want to, shall we say, bring in to my office. Nothing bulgy but [laughter] for instance, I own a handful of niche sites that I work on and I don’t necessarily want people at Live2Sell knowing everything and anything that I do from a business standpoint.

13:10 DB: True.

13:11 CD: I like to keep things a little bit separate. And it also allows me to focus on different things at different times as well. So, if I’m in the Live2Sell office, I’m there for Live2Sell. If I’m working from home or another location, then I work with my other VAs or whatever the case may be. I work with those VAs because I don’t want to lose touch of what it’s like to work with a VA, because I am kind of regarded as, I guess — I hate to use the word expert — but people look to me for knowledge and experience and how-to in regards to everything when it comes to virtual assistance. For example, I have free e-book “Saving the Day, the Virtual Way”. It’s being downloaded well over 4,000 times in just over a year. And when you have that many people downloading a book like that, you know that there’s genuine interest out there for it. And I think the harsh reality here is that, if I was to not work with virtual assistants, I don’t think I could give people the kind of feedback and info and advice that I do even if I am, and have been in the outsourcing industry for a long, long time.

14:25 DB: You mentioned $400 to $500 a month. That sort of could have blown a lot of people’s minds in UK or in the USA. Is that a reasonable amount to be paying to get a decent quality person that you want to stay with you for a reasonable length of time?

14:38 CD: Yeah, it is. I know some people that pay $250 or $300 a month which I just think is just too tight. It’s tied… That’s backside. That is, for me personally, if you want someone to stick with you and not keep continuously looking for other jobs, you need to pay them what they’re worth. And you got to understand, these are home-based workers. They have no commute. They don’t have to go out and buy different wardrobe every three months and all the rest of it. So, there are distinct advantages of working from home not just in the Philippines but anywhere for that matter. Telecommuting has become huge in the United States. Massive in the United States. So, $400 or $500 a month here in the Philippines works out, at today’s exchange rate of 43 Philippine peso to the dollar, $500 is 21,000 pesos which is about 5,000 or 6,000 above the average wage for the country. So they’re getting paid very well right there and they’re working from the comfort of their own home and I think that makes a big, big difference. Not only that, but a lot of virtual assistants will be family-orientated. They might even be single moms and because of that working from home gives them that little bit of additional flexibility. If they need to do the odd thing here and there during the daytime, they can get it done and still get the work done and get paid at the end of the month.

16:10 DB: Okay, so outsourcing businesses should have no ethical issue whatsoever with paying $400 a month for someone like that but it’s a simple matter of fact that ultimately, as he says, that’s more than the average wage which is quite incredible.

16:24 CD: Yes.

16:27 DB: So, I heard you also have to pay or advised to pay, as part of their culture, to pay a 13th month tradition in the Philippines.

16:34 CD: Well, it’s… Because people are home-based, it’s not really required.

16:40 DB: Right.

16:40 CD: As a government-mandated corporation, Live2Sell certainly needs to do it. If we don’t, we’d get into trouble. But as a home-based setup, you don’t have to pay it. But I’m on the strong belief that if you have long-term in mind with working with somebody and happy with their work, then what the hell is an extra bonus at Christmas time? We’re talking about a few hundred dollars here, not a few thousands. So, I certainly pay it to my VAs and I suggest that if you’re happy with somebody and you want to keep them with you and keep them happy particularly around that time of the year, then it’s a very good thing. Generally you’re going to need to pay that around the 15th of December.

17:23 CD: Right. What about holiday and medical cover?

17:26 CD: Not really… It doesn’t really come in to communication or conversation rather. It is what it is. I pay my VAs the flat fee every month whether they worked the full month or not. You know, there had been times when people had been sick and I got an email and “Sorry boss, I can’t work a full day today. I’ll do everything I deem is a priority or urgency basis, but I’d appreciate if I could take a little bit easier today.” I’m a good boss. [chuckle] I’m not…

18:00 DB: Yes.

18:01 CD: I’m not one of those guys that sort of cracks the whip too much. I can crack it if I need to, but you know, generally, if… Unless I’m getting an e-mail like that once a week, that’s a different ball game. But I, you know, I believe I pick my people well, and I treat them well at the same time.

18:16 DB: Okay, good stuff. And what kind of training does a virtual assistant require? How easy is it to train them? How much time is required?

18:23 CD: Well, it really depends on the task. And I mean for instance, if you’re looking for something like a web developer, nine times out of ten, the people are hiring web developers because they don’t know how to do the work themselves. So, at that point, you need to hire somebody that’s very well trained and experienced already. But generally, the majority of the training that I see taking place usually comes down to the general VA role. And the general VA can handle everything from managing social media or accounts to online research, filtering e-mail, putting together key word research, and all that sort of type of stuff. And you know, as entrepreneurs, it’s sometimes a little hard for us to let go. We tend to believe that we’re the best at everything and nobody’s better than us. I’m sure you know what I’m talking about.

19:13 DB: Absolutely.

19:14 CD: Yeah and it’s one of those things and… You know, I did a post on the blog awhile back called Ending the Entrepreneurial Madness, and I talked about everything from getting notes down and out of your head from ideas, right way to micromanaging, and all the rest of it. And I’m a strong believer that, if there are certain things that you want done in a certain way, then you need to tell somebody, or train somebody, or give them the tools they need to be able to train themselves up. And one of the things that I utilize a hell of a lot is videos. And I mean if you want… If you want to teach your VA, say, how to install WordPress onto a server, you can go to YouTube and find a video showing you how to do that. You can go to YouTube and find a video showing you how to do pretty much anything nowadays. I’m sure there are certain things that they don’t put live. [chuckle] But I’m pretty sure that the majority of the stuff you might want your general VA to do for you, there’s probably a video on YouTube right there. So, I utilize YouTube a lot for that sort of type of thing.

20:17 CD: But you can also do audio training and screen casting, and things like that as well. One thing I’ve started to do quite a bit also is share my screen via Skype, which you can now do. So, that way you can get on the audio, and speak with each other at the same time as you’re showing them how to do this, and how to do that, or where you want something placed on a website, or whatever the case may be. And I think, generally speaking, as long as the communication doors are open and you’re talking and you’re communicating properly, then training is not as much of a headache as you might think it is. Now, if you’re going to hire someone that hasn’t got a lot of experience, expect to do more training, obviously.

20:59 CD: But I mean with something like Virtual Staff Finder, for example, majority, in fact not the majority, all of our virtual assistants with Virtual Staff Finder are experienced people. They’ve got at least, usually around a minimum of about a year in regards to experience of working from a home-based setup, or working with people overseas, and things like that. And that’s another reason why I believe the service is so valuable for entrepreneurs because it means that they don’t have to spend so much time kind of micromanaging and training people particularly at the beginning of a relationship. So, yeah, it’s one of those things. But, you know, it can come down to everything from teaching people how to put together a document for you, or telling them what fonts or colour you want used, and things like that. There’s just… There’s a lot of things involved. And I think that it… A lot of the time people get a little bit scared about the idea, or sitting or having to train somebody, but you’d be surprised how smart some of these little cookies are. They’re pretty damn good at what they do nowadays.

22:10 DB: So, what kind of level and style of ongoing communication do you recommend having with your virtual assistant? Would it be a case of catching up on Skype once a week, an e-mail once a day, or more involved than that?

22:23 CD: I think it comes down to the person. Like I say, the entrepreneurs are tough buggers. I mean [chuckle] we… You know, we don’t like to let go a lot. But I, yeah myself included, I used to be an incredible micromanager, I mean, really bad micromanager and that stopped a couple of years ago and I slowly but surely took myself away from a lot things. And like you said in the intro to the podcast here, you know last year, I fundamentally removed myself from my business on a day to day basis. And I couldn’t have done that, obviously, if I hadn’t stopped being an amazing micromanager. But I think, you know, it really is a personal preference thing. A lot of people like to get a daily report, some people are happy with a weekly, kind of touch base phone call, but I think it also comes down to the type of work somebody’s doing for you, as well. If they’re doing a lot of revolving tasks, and a lot of tasks that are changing from day to day then probably a daily report of some sort is a good idea. But if their building a website, for example, then you don’t need a… They… You don’t need to know that they added three pages that day, and created three icons or buttons, and things like that. You just want to know that this is a four week project, this is where we are today, and this is where I want to be in four weeks. Give me a daily, or give me a weekly up to date kind of report as to where you are to make sure that we’re on track. So, you know, that sort of type of thing.

23:45 CD: But for me, personally, I get a daily e-mail from both of my VAs every day. But they are literally bullet point, six seven point e-mails. And you know, I can scan them within a minute, both of them. And if there’s anything I need to react upon or reply on I can do it immediately. Just write in a reply and bam, bam, bam. Done. Over and done with. But again, these are people that worked for me for sometimes so they know how I like things done and things like that. So, I think at first when you get going with somebody it might be a nice idea particularly from an entrepreneurial mindset standpoint to maybe get a daily update for the first week or two. But after that I suggest that you take it off the gas a little bit and try to take yourself out of the day-to-day side of things a little bit.

24:30 DB: Okay, so not necessary to micromanage your virtual assistant. What about software and systems? What software would an entrepreneur find most useful? I mean if you could possibly get two or three better software that are good resources for people to perhaps manage time or use for perhaps storing documents, sharing documents, and maybe communicating a little bit more effectively.

24:52 CD: Sure. Well, you know, a lot of people like to utilize project management systems. I have played around with two or three of them. There’s one called Hive Desk, there’s another one called Huddle which is a UK company, then also one called Basecamp. Now I favour Basecamp, which you can get at basecamphq.com. It’s done by the guys over at 37signals who are incredibly smart people. And why I like Basecamp is because Basecamp is very simple to use. You can… Never used it before in your life and within half an hour you know exactly how to navigate it and utilize it and all the rest of it. So, for me, Basecamp is probably the best project management system. In there you can post new projects, milestones, to-do lists. You can even message each other, share the odd file here and there, and it’s a very kind of simple, easily used project management system. When it comes to sharing documents particularly things like audio and video files, I used Dropbox which is phenomenally great. I’m a massive, massive Dropbox fan. I use it on all of my devices. I have it on my laptop, my computer at home, my iPad, my iPhone, across the board. I used it everywhere and anywhere. And I found it incredibly useful when I’m working on the hop, in other location independent places like beach resorts and things like that. I know that even if I don’t have my laptop with me, if there’s a report or a video I need to look or an audio file I need to check out quickly, I just can get straight into Dropbox and check it out by my iPhone and my iPad. So, it’s incredibly powerful, and free to start off with as well. And if you refer a few buddies you get small storage space as well. So, Dropbox is definitely another really good one. And, let me think of some more. I think Skype is a no-brainer. I think a lot of people are already involved with Skype. I’ve been on Skype for many, many years. And sometimes you can be kind of like a victim of its own success. You do get the odd choppy line here and there, but I think on the whole, Skype is a great, great piece of equipment to be able to use. I mean generally other than that I think it comes down to at that point personal preference thing. But those are the ones that I really use I would say on a day-to-day basis for sure.

27:20 DB: Okay, Chris. That sounds pretty great tips, thanks. What if it does not work out? It is not nice to talk about it, but is it difficult to fire and replace?

27:29 CD: No. I mean at the end of the day, people are home-based. And if you’re not happy with somebody just let him know. It’s one of those things unfortunately, you’re right, it’s not a nice thing to discuss but at the end of the day everybody has their, they run sort of lineup in terms of what they want from an employee. And if you’re not getting it, it’s best to remove that employee and replace them earlier rather than later. You know, simple as that. But you can go about it by just disappearing, I suppose, if you want or you can tell this person what the situation is and everything. I mean with Virtual Staff Finder we have what we call our 10-day promise where if for whatever reason the virtual assistant we found for you is not up to scratch for whatever reason, and again it differs from one person to another, and we will run through the entire process for a second time completely free of charge. And you know you can come to us and tell us that immediately as soon as you feel negatively about it. But we placed well over 70 to 80 of VAs now in the last 7 or 8 months. And we’ve done it literally handful of times. Some people are fastidious than others but fact of the matter is our sourcing setup and our testing setup is in place so that we do only get good quality people.

28:53 DB: What about things like security with different private login details like bank information. Is there anything that you wouldn’t recommend sharing with your virtual assistant?

29:03 CD: Yeah, anything moneywise for me is a no-no.

29:07 DB: Right.

29:09 CD: I think a lot of people are reluctant to give away that sort of info anyway. I certainly wouldn’t do it. I mean, it right the away down from my PayPal account, credit cards, bank. Come on, are you kidding me? No way would I ever give anybody my bank details. So, again, a personal preference part of thing. Some people have given their VAs the ability to use maximum of $100 or something on their credit card. I know some people actually overcome this by getting prepaid credit cards or debit cards where there’s 500 bucks on it and that’s what you can use if you need to purchase this book or that piece of software for me or whatever, which I guess is one way to get around it. But yeah for me anything financial for me is just off limits. That’s one of the things I will not let go off. Simple as that. As for passwords, there are things around like onepassword.com and lastpass.com that you can use where you can colloquial of your individual password which is one password and get your VA to sign in to all of those services which is one particular password, for all of those sites with one password. So it’s a lot easier obviously if at that point, the VA disappears or you fire them or whatever the case maybe. You just have to change one password not 25,000 of them. So simple as that.

30:35 DB: Okay, that is a great tip as well. What about other points? Are there any other points that prospective entrepreneurs looking to outsource should consider before making the first hire? Or is it a case of just going first and just jumping right in there with the toothpick first?

30:52 CD: Some people are happy doing that. And I guess sometimes it works out, sometimes it doesn’t. I think like anything else, anything business related. Before you do actually get involved with something, it is always a good idea to research and read up on it and really try and get to grips with the entire process from start to finish. I mean, again I hate to sort of try and go into a pitch here, but one of the reasons why I produce my free eBooks “Saving the day the virtual way”, was It was because I got all these questions on a very regular basis from people looking at hiring VAs for the first time and I just found myself writing one email after another with the same stuff. So I put the eBook together and, I mean, if any of your listeners or followers or whatever are interested, you can download the book directly from virtualassistantebook.com. And they’ll be able to sort of learn everything and anything there is to know about finding, hiring, training, motivating and working with a VA on a day to day basis. And again, it just comes down to a personal preference thing. Some people are, they have an immediate requirement. I mean you need to hire somebody ASAP. You haven’t got so much time to research. But if you got a little bit of time and you don’t mind doing a bit of research and reading, then that is always a good thing to do.

32:14 DB: Okay. And outsourcing internationally is probably still very much in ascendency. How do you see the industry changing over the next couple of years?

32:24 CD: I think it’s going to become a hell of a lot more mainstream than it is now, for sure, particularly for entrepreneurs and small business owners. Since the Four Hour Workweek book a few years back, there is definitely more and more people utilizing VAs now than they were before. And the VAs are nothing new. Tim Ferris did not discover virtual assistants. There’ve been virtual assistants working for ten odd years, you know what I mean? But I think what Tim did with a very, very good book was bring it to the mass; the mass community of entrepreneurs or savvy business owners that wanted to sort of try and leverage their time a little bit more and things like that. So ultimately, it will become more mainstream. I think that more and more markets are going to come in to play in certain countries as well. The Philippines right now does have the stronghold, but I see a lot of movement over in the Eastern European countries particularly with things like web development and iPhone Apps and things like that. And I just think that overall… We are all bang smack in the middle of the global economy now. People should not feel bad about utilizing the services of somebody outside of their own country, for two reasons. Number one, it’s going to save them money. And as a businessman or business owner, if you are not looking at the pennies and the pounds, they are not going to look after themselves, plain and simple. So that is the first reason you shouldn’t feel bad about outsourcing. The second reason is because it will help you grow your business, plain and simple. Because of the fact that you are leveraging your time, if you have to do all the things that you will give to your VA every day, there is now way in the world you could be able to strategize more, mind map more, spend more time with clients on the golf course, take more potential clients out to lunch and dinner and close more deal and produce new products and services and all the rest of that. Utilizing outsourcing enables you to incredibly leverage your own time. And as an entrepreneur or business owner, that is very, very important.

34:35 DB: So if you are an entrepreneur based in the UK now, then it will be no brainer if you are looking to take on someone else, the chances are it will definitely be an outsourced person based in the Philippines as opposed to unemployed person based in the UK?

34:50 CD: Well I mean, you’re saying no brainer, but for some people it wouldn’t be a no brainer because they might not look at it like that. For me personally, knowing what I know about the outsourcing industry… And again, I think it’s going to become a lot more mainstream two, three years now, certainly has done in the last two or three years. And it’s not necessarily just come down to the Philippines. Then there’s a lot of people all around the world that you could outsource work to. So I think just ultimately if you are a business owner and you are not utilizing outsourcing yet, it is just a matter of time before you do so doing it for a number of reasons.

35:28 DB: Great stuff. Well, you certainly given a lot of nuggets there. Are there any, maybe final tips that you don’t want to leave on?

35:39 CD: I think we’ve covered a hell of a lot in this interview actually. I’ve been interviewed a lot on this particular subject and I must say that with your questions we’re bang on. I think they are very relevant. And I hope that your listeners have been able to take or are going to be able to take away a lot from this chat because based on the type of readership that you have, I know that a lot of people listening in probably should certainly start looking outsourcing for sure if their not already doing it. But I think it all comes down to just getting your feet wet, above and beyond everything else. I think that if they haven’t been involved in outsourcing yet, have some fun with it to begin with. Hire somebody on Elance to… Whatever, phone ten of your friends up. Or maybe send twenty or thirty e-mails to invite them to a dinner party, or a barbecue, or something like that, or just have a little bit of fun with it to begin with and test the waters out a little bit. Get someone to do some online research on a product, or a service that you might be thinking about buying, or utilizing. Just get your feet wet a little bit and when people are ready to take the bigger plunge, if they want to get in touch with me, I’ll be more than happy to chat with them.

36:57 DB: Excellent. Well Chris, many thanks indeed for joining me. It’s been a pleasure. Now if people want to find more about you, or your services, what’s the best place for, for them to go to?

37:07 CD: I think probably my blog is the best place. It’s certainly the most accessible for most people nowadays. So if they want to pop over to virtualbusinesslifestyle.com, they can certainly do that.

37:18 DB: Excellent stuff. Thanks again.

37:20 CD: No problems. Take good care David.

You can now download the 26-Week Internet Marketing Plan Blueprint
- here’s the link:
http://www.26weekplan.com/blueprint/

What exactly is the Blueprint?

It’s a step-by-step internet marketing plan for marketing managers,
business owners and entrepreneurs.

Does it cost anything?

You can download the Blueprint when you’re a member of the 26-Week
Internet Marketing Plan Inner Circle Community – that costs just $7
for the first month and $17 per month after that.

What is the Inner Circle Community?

It’s a place where we publish internet marketing tips that we’re
not willing to publish in the general public domain. It’s also a
great place to have your internet marketing questions answered and
interact with others doing the same thing.

Why should you sign up now?

We’ve just launched. If you sign-up now then you’ll be joining
other members at the very start of the plan – it’ll be a lot more
effective if you’re learning and implementing the same thing at the
same time as other people.

Is it right for me?

If you’re a marketing person inside a business who’s in charge of
online marketing then the 26-Week Internet Marketing Plan Blueprint
and Inner Circle Community is perfect for you. It’s also great for
business owners and entrepreneurs – and at just $7 for the first
month can you afford not to take part?!

Where do I sign up?

Just go to http://www.26weekplan.com/blueprint/ and click on the
‘Add to Cart’ button. Within a couple of minutes you’ll be fully
signed-up.

See you in the Inner Circle Community!

Today I’d like to make a short, special announcement about what’s going to be happening with the 26-Week Internet Marketing Plan over the coming few weeks.

The original 26-Week Plan structure was designed in 2007 – and although the vast majority of it is still extremely relevant, internet marketing techniques and strategies change over time.

For the past few months I’ve been re-writing the plan – including up-to-date online business strategy techniques like online reputation management, local search marketing and cutting-edge use of Facebook and Twitter.

I’ve recently published a brand new 26-Week Internet Marketing Plan Framework PDF – if you haven’t downloaded this yet get it free-of-charge from www.26weekplan.com/framework.

The framework offers you a really useful structure of what you should be doing and when you should be doing it.

Here’s what’s going to be hapening in early 2011…

Watch out for a series of 4 videos I’ll be releasing from the 10th January. These videos will provide a good, solid overview of the 26-Week Plan Framework – so make sure you’re subscribed to our free newsletter from www.26weekplan.com/newsletter to get alerted where and when these videos will be published.

A week after the 4 videos are released – on Monday 17th January 2011 we’re going to be launching something really special – our 26-Week Internet Marketing Plan Blueprint and Inner Circle Community.

The Blueprint is an extensive document which gives you a step-by-step action plan of everything you need to be doing each week – and our Inner Circle Community will provide you with a support network of people going through the same experiences as you.

In the 13 weeks between Monday 17th January and Sunday 17th April I’m going to handhold everyone who signs up for the Blueprint & Inner Circle Community through the brand new version of the 26-Week Internet Marketing Plan – at double pace! That means me cover everything in depth in 13 weeks – and you’ll have the opportunity to ask any question you want along the way.

So if you’re serious about marketing your business successfully online, keep a few hours a week free in your diary between 17th January and 17th April.

Just make sure you’re subscribed to our free newsletter from www.26weekplan.com/newsletter so you’re aware when and where we release everything so you don’t miss out.

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Our 68th podcast is an interview with Ed Dale, founder of the 30-Day Challenge. In this conversaton we talk about social media marketing opportunities, online reputation management and local search marketing.

Here’s the full Ed Dale interview transcript:

Ed Dale, Founder of the 30-Day Challenge

00:00 David Bain: I’m joined today by Ed Dale and Ed is a very successful internet marketer having already sold a portfolio of websites for several million dollars; and these days he is probably best-known for running the 30-Day Challenge, a high quality free introductory internet marketing course which has now been taken by over a hundred and fifty thousand people. Ed, many thanks indeed for joining me.

00:23 Ed Dale: My pleasure David.

00:24 DB: Could you perhaps begin by telling me a little a bit about your background and how you ended up getting into online marketing?

00:30 ED: Well, look, way back, last century… [chuckle] I had a very successful web development company which I ended up selling and that was certainly my first big break. And then… As you did… I actually came over to London and raised a whole lot of capital for an idea that we had and that all ended up pretty much in tears, great classic ‘.com’… we had a 150 people all over the place. And I suppose after that whole experience that left a pretty bad taste in my mouth, so I was thinking more on the lines of what can I do to help businesses knowing that I love marketing and so on. So I got involved, as sort of as an angel investor into different small businesses, coffee shops, soup businesses, a whole bunch of things. And that was great. But the trouble with small businesses is that they’re bit like the mafia in Godfather III. [chuckle] Every time you try to get out, they drag you back in. And so I was always just looking for what’s the best business opportunity out there, I was always interested and looking for it. And I went to a conference. I’d started learning how to do copywriting and I went to a Dan Kennedy retirement copywriting conference in Phoenix in Arizona, and ironical because, of course, he never did retire but anyway, but it was brilliant. It was a brilliant conference.

02:12 ED: And not only did I learn a lot about copywriting which I think is just one of the most important skills in business to have. More importantly, I actually met people there who were actually making money on the internet, selling real stuff to real people. My view at that time was that the only people who are making money selling stuff on the internet were people who were teaching people how to sell my stuff on the internet to other people and train them how to make money on the internet. And so I thought this is interesting so I’ll go home and try this. And it would be unfair me doing it because obviously I had a lot of the resources, so I got my sister-in-law and some friends and we thought, “Well let’s see if we can actually get real people to buy real stuff.” And the thing I did in hindsight which was a cool thing was that I decided that what we would do is we would have a very specific deadline and the… If it works that’ll be great and we’d have this little conference and we’d show friends and family and so on what we were up to and if it didn’t work, I suppose it’d be the shortest conference of all time, you know, “Thanks for coming, didn’t work. Yeah, stay safe on the roads.” And as it turned out, of course it did work and we did make a dollar and it was obvious that real people were starting to buy real stuff on the internet.

03:34 DB: So what year would this have been?

03:36 ED: No, no, no that was the… I suppose that was the key… Key understanding there that this was an… It had all the hallmarks of being the ultimate business because there was no stock, no silly teenagers. People actually read something that you wrote and pulled out their credit card over the other side of the world and paid you for, in those days e-books on different subjects.

04:04 DB: Yeah sure. No, sorry. I was just wondering what year approximately this would’ve been.

04:08 ED: Well, this is 2003, 2004.

04:12 DB: Right.

04:13 ED: Not that long to come into context of things but it seems like a lifetime ago now. And so, with that, that convinced me that that was… This was the business to get into and then we did.

04:27 DB: Okay, excellent. And with a lot of positive effects, obviously. And one of the things that I’m aware that you’re known for certainly is developing a big portfolio of websites. And would you say that… I mean, for instance, a lot of listeners to my podcast are actually marketing managers as well as business owners and that there are some people looking to earn maybe a part-time income, but a lot of people are working in perhaps a larger business. So would you say that building a portfolio of websites is a reasonable strategy for an existing brand, a bigger business as well to look at?

05:09 ED: Okay. Well, let’s look at the word portfolio for a second because for the longest time that was exactly how you would do things because traffic was super easy. You could pay Google 5 cents a click, you could throw up 30,000 key words in a day and was, it was all honey and manna from heaven, it was wonderful. Now you have to be a lot more sophisticated about it because traffic is hard and traffic is expensive. So it’s very important that you understand the strategy. I suppose to break down the various businesses, if you look at a lot of the people who are in a business and looking to promote their online business, do they have to promote online? Absolutely because, bluntly, bottom line they are promoting online whether they are actually doing it actively or not because your users, your clients, your customers are creating your online presence if you won’t.

06:04 ED: It’s amazing when I speak to companies about this stuff and I actually just show them, “Look, did you know you’re being reviewed?” Restaurants are used to getting reviewed. Hotels are used to getting reviewed. Nobody else is. Not dentists, not accountants, not lawyers, not graphic design firms. They’re not used to getting rated, but they are. Everybody’s getting rated. There are reviews everywhere. People comment about good and, more importantly, bad service all the time. And so, if the company is not creating a presence in having a strategy for their presence and their online reputation management which I think is one of the hugest big growth and crucial issues, it’s a big deal.

06:46 ED: The other side of it, of course, is on the traffic side. And, yeah, where are you in Google? Google is the new yellow pages. Google is the new who’s who. Where are you? Where do you exist? When somebody types in if you’re a dentist, when somebody types in “dentist London” where do you come up? Where are you? And, typically, a lot of these businesses… Because why would they know about SEO? Why should they know about SEO if they’re in the business of being dentists, not SEO experts? But, sadly, there’s a bunch of little, easy, simple things that you could get any sort of surly teenager to do, [chuckle] and you’ll be instantly that much better. Here in Australia, we have this horrific, and it’s particularly bad in Australia and in the UK as well, I might add, where savvy SEO-based directories are actually taking up most of the traffic for particular business search phrases. And then, of course, the grand irony is they effectively charge you for entry in their directories, or worse, send your traffic, traffic that should have been coming to you, to your competitors all for the lack of just the most basic of basic stuff, and this is not thousands of dollars of stuff, David, this is stuff that you can do. It takes you two hours max, totally free, as I say, any surly teenager who can pimp their MySpace page could do it.

08:18 DB: So you touched on reputation management there, is there a bigger danger for negative reviews out there about your business or someone perhaps getting a hold of their Facebook and Twitter account and doing things that they think are proactively promoting their business, but actually coming across as spamming? Well, what would you say is the biggest danger there?

08:41 ED: I think, without question, negative… Allowing negative reviews and comments and so on unchallenged. If they’re actually out there and actually have a Twitter account, they actually have a Facebook page and they’re trying, then that is… That is, let’s face it, much better than 95% of businesses are doing at the moment for all the heat and light about online which I would imagine less than 5% of businesses actually have some sort of proactive strategy.

09:15 DB: Right. You have to give it a go and then learn on the move then.

09:17 ED: Yeah, exactly. So it’s much better to be giving it a go and maybe making the occasional error than sticking your fingers in your ears and going, which is the typical response, “I’m not listening, I’m not listening, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.” Because they’ve got so much… And I can’t blame them for that. They’ve got so much on. Let’s face it, they’re just trying to deal with the global financial crisis and economies and all these sort of thing and they’re just trying to deal with the customers they have and you’re saying to me this is whole other layer I need to now understand? The way I… The analogy I give, David, is when I was renovating our house, I’m the least practical person you will ever meet in your life. So all I heard when the builders were talking to me was “Blah, blah, blah, blah, $2,000 extra. Blah, blah, blah, blah, three-week delay.” That’s all I heard, right? And this is effectively what’s happening with business owners. And ultimately it will… Typically it comes from pain, doesn’t it? And they’ll be such harsh and vicious reviews or more. Because think about it, it’s… I think of a whole bunch of sayings. The first one is, “People always slow down for a car accident, but never for the beautiful sunset.” “The market goes up by the stairs and down by the elevator shaft.” It is anytime they’re… If somebody had a bad experience with your business, they’re going to want to vent and they’re going to vent online.

10:49 ED: And, currently, we’ve got this huge social shift going on because typically, and obviously I’m massively stereotyping here, people believe what they read. We’ve grown up, most of us have grown up being in an environment where there were only four channels on TV and there were newspapers. And, typically, if somebody said something on the newspaper or on radio or on the television and it was fact, regardless if it was fact or not. And of course now, we’ve got a million publishers, even a billion publishers of information and, quite often, the stuff that’s published is trash and these reviews undeserved. But unanswered or uncombatted or at least try to listen to what the market is saying about your product or service and sticking your fingers in the ear and going, “I’m not listening, I’m not listening,” is not a strategy that’s going to get you much past March 2011 because it’s happening.

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I’ve got an excellent interview for you today on the 4 Golden Rules of Keyword Research with Eugene Ware, CEO of Nobel Samurai, creator of market-leading keyword research software Market Samurai.

Eugene Ware

I’ve set up and link at www.26WeekPlan.com/ms which takes you straight to the Market Samurai download page, so make sure you get your copy.

Here’s the full interview transcript…

Eugene Ware Interview Transcript Part 1/5

00:00 David Bain: I am very lucky to be joined with… Joined by Eugene Ware today, the CEO of Noble Samurai. Eugene has been involved at the high-end of internet marketing for years, but quite often as a trusted man behind the scenes. He has successes that include making $570,000 online in just 37 minutes and Ed Dale described him as the smartest internet marketer that nobody’s ever heard about. But that certainly changed since the launch of his Market Samurai. Eugene, many thanks indeed for joining me.

00:32 Eugene Ware: Pleasure to be here. Thanks for inviting me.

00:34 DB: Thanks. I’ll tell you what, can you possibly begin by telling us a little bit about you and your background and a little introduction to Market Samurai perhaps?

00:43 EW: Yeah, sure. I guess my… Unlike probably a lot of big name marketers and such, my background is actually from a software engineering background so, I was a software engineer. I was quite heavily involved in dot-com booms and worked in Silicon Valley and all that kind of stuff. And I usually tell that just because I know there’s a lot of people who are interested in internet marketing who go, “Hey, you know, I’m a techie guy, and all this marketing stuff just seems really, really difficult. I can never do that kind of stuff,” but that’s my background, I didn’t have a marketing bone in my body so that’s my… That’s sort of where I come from and I’m just being… I guess doing the internet marketing thing for probably about 10 years now? So probably before most people sort of heard of the way or the concept of internet marketing. I guess, I have worked behind the scenes. I worked with Ed Dale on this project called the Internet Eagle’s Project which was basically a forerunner of what came to be known as Ed Dale’s and Frank Kern’s Underachiever Method. I was… one of the people that were part of that team.

02:02 EW: I also worked for an internet marketing company that was in the property investing industry and sort of cut my teeth doing a lot of marketing, direct marketing to via email through that business and that story about the $570,000 in 37 minutes was… We heard about this whole concept of launches and we decided, “Hey, let’s give it a go. Like, you know, if it works in America, let’s give a go in Australia in this market.” And it sort of worked way too well. It crashed a lot of servers and all that kind of stuff. And in fact, the reason it was 37 minutes was basically the host of the server went down and we basically posted: “Web page going on, it’s all broken. Please send through emails to us with your phone number and we’ll actually call up and take the payment details.” So, basically it went… It took us about three days to actually call everyone up to take payments for this service, but the actual… The time stamp of the last email that we took before we sold out this mentoring program for probably investing was 37 minutes. So yeah, this lot of stuff actually does work.

03:26 EW: Then I guess after that I went on to basically do internet marketing consulting in ’02, something like yourself David. And I did a lot of SEO, that kind of work. As a result of that I basically developed a range of tools that I was just using on a day to day basis for doing all sorts of SEO kind of work and in particular, I’m quite passionate about market research, in particular, keyword research on the internet. And one day I was at a conference with Ed Dale and I was just showing what I was working on and he goes, “Hang on, we got this… That’s really awesome. We got this thing called the 30-day challenge if you would turn that into a commercial product, that would help a lot of the people who do this 30-day challenge every year.” And that was basically the start of Market Samurai. That day it was actually called Keyword Samurai and yeah that was actually three months away from the actual the beginning of the 30-day challenge so it was an incredibly stressful three months, to try turn around a commercial product in that period of time and there was a time where actually, we didn’t actually leave the offices for four days. In fact one of our business partners came in and brought us clean pairs of underwear, deodorants, and toothbrushes, just because personal hygiene wasn’t that too great of a period. We’re sleeping in server rooms and to the buzz of servers and basically taking shifts sleeping, coding around the clock to make this very, very tight deadline of the first of August which was typically when the 30-day challenge started every year.

05:09 EW: So, yeah that’s it and with 30 days later, when the 30-day challenge was over, basically it was quite an incredible, we weren’t sure what the response would be. It’s one of those ironic things when you actually do keyword research around the market of actual keyword research, trying to build up a keyword research tool, it’s not a very positive picture, but the result was very, very well received. And after 30 days, I think 12,000 people had tried it and half of these people ended up buying which was just incredible. So, that was basically how we got started.

05:48 DB: Wow, superb. So you’re obviously certainly known as the keyword research expert as it were at the moment. Was that by choice or is that an area of internet marketing that you particularly enjoy more than anything else or do you think you got a particular skill for that?

06:02 EW: It’s probably like everyone who is into internet marketing. They sort of get known for one thing that’s not necessarily the area that they are most passionate about or that they’re best at. It’s just that you tend to remember people like that and that’s how they’re known. One of the ironic things I’ve done a ton of SEO optimization, made my living from it, made hundreds of thousands of dollars a year from SEO activities, but I enjoy it. That’s, I guess, I mean only part of the things I’m actually interested in. I’m more interested in solving hard problems to do with marketing, things like copywriting for example. If you want to get known as a copywriter or that kind of stuff, but producing software to help people to do copywriting and solving hard problems I’m passionate about. People start off in this world of internet marketing but don’t necessarily have all the skills or have their ten thousand hours of shift instead if they’re into the Outliers book by Malcolm Gladwell and trying to give them tools to help them to succeed and cash in on this dream, which is internet marketing, which gets sold by too many people, too many snake oil salespeople, get rich quick and stuff, and I really actually say… Actually it is really, really possible. It’s not as easy as what people think, and that’s why a lot of… In fact you’ve got this 26-week plan, I mean; it’s a lot easier to sell the 3-minute plan.

[laughter]

07:37 DB: I know, I know.

07:38 EW: The 26-week plan, so that good on you, if you’re going to actually… It’s giving people some realistic time frames to get some results and learn the core skills in starting out. It’s not even about getting the results; it’s about learning and acquiring the skills so it’s not so scary and then building upon that skill base over time and then taking action towards getting those results.

08:05 DB: Indeed, indeed. I’d like to focus on keyword research a little bit then, if that’s okay.

08:11 EW: Yeah.

08:13 DB: In terms of starting out a brand new website, how do you go about deciding which keyword phrases are just right to target at the beginning?

08:21 EW: Well, I mean, in all of our training material and things, I like to talk about something called The 4 golden rules of keyword research. And there’s some really obvious in hindsight. Not just because it’s obvious doesn’t mean that it’s easy, and doesn’t mean that like common sense isn’t common. But I highly recommend, obviously, that even before the keyword research process, that you identify something that you’re actually passionate about, interested about, because you’re going to be spending a lot of time in this business. I remember once I started a business around weight loss products and things, and I didn’t have a lot of weight to lose and I wasn’t particularly interested in that market. So I think that’s the first one. But assuming that you’ve mostly chosen a business or a market that you might be interested in entering, then I suggest that people apply the 4 golden rules.

09:23 EW: And golden rule number one is keyword relevance. It sounds really stupid but a lot of people, they choose keywords which are not really highly-related to their product and market or might only be moderately related. And so for example if you’re trying to sell, say you’re choosing… You’re selling dog collars or something like that, a lot of people who do pay per click understand this, but the effect that they might run some ads for dog collars and they might start getting some sales might go, “Hey, this is great. How do I get more traffic and more sales?” So they go to a less relevant keyword. Or they go, “Hey, if people are buying dog collars then potentially people are searching for dog training, which has even more searches than dog collars might… Surely I’ll get more sales.” And then they advertise for dog training, and they end up losing a bunch of money because it’s not as highly targeted.

10:24 EW: There are obviously a percentage of people that are interested in dog collars that search for dog training, but it’s a much less specific kind of search. And there’s definite rule which sort of says that if you can’t make money on a very, very highly targeted keyword phrase, a buy keyword phrase specific about your product or service that you’re trying to sell, then you are not going to get better results branching out to high traffic keyword terms, you’re going to get less results. So if you can’t make money on a targeted keyword phrase then just look at something else, look at what you’re doing wrong before running around for another keyword phrase. So relevance is really, really important and going after highly targeted keyword phrases is a really good place to start as well as having a lot less competition around it. So that’s golden rule number one, which is keyword relevance.

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.

Why are we giving all this great video content away for free?

Although these videos still offer a lot of great tips, internet marketing methods change over time. We’re going to be launching a brand new version of the plan soon, and we’re sure that by sharing these original video recordings for free, you’ll be persuaded to jump on-board when the new paid-for version launches! Stay tuned to our newsletter to find out more.

The 65th edition of our podcast brings you week #26 from the original 26-Week Internet Marketing Plan. This video gives some web log analysis tips.

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.

Why are we giving all this great video content away for free?

Although these videos still offer a lot of great tips, internet marketing methods change over time. We’re going to be launching a brand new version of the plan soon, and we’re sure that by sharing these original video recordings for free, you’ll be persuaded to jump on-board when the new paid-for version launches! Stay tuned to our newsletter to find out more.