The Osmosio blog

DPP027: Tweeting Against Linkbait, Windows on a Mac, and 3 More Great Topics

Tristan — Thu, 23 May 2013 12:20:59 +0000

In this episode of the Digital Publishing Podcast (which you can find a full transcript of below), I cover 5 topics from how you can use Twitter to combat annoyingly-titled articles in your niche to a couple easy ways to run Windows on your Mac.

It would be awesome if you rated and reviewed the podcast in iTunes. If you’re using something other than iTunes, the podcast’s feed is http://blog.osmosio.com/feed/podcast/. The podcast is now available through Stitcher, too.

You can also listen to the episode online by clicking the play button on the player below this. (If you don’t see the player, click here.) It’s about 17 minutes long.

1:24 – 1. Tweeting against linkbait
3:53 – 2. Keywords in domain names
6:52 – 3. The King of Random… dot com
8:39 – 4. Final update on the effortless blog
11:00 – 5. Running Windows on a Mac
14:22 – Pick of the week

DPP027: Tweeting Against Linkbait, Windows on a Mac, and 3 More Great Topics

Hello, I’m Tristan Higbee, and this podcast is all about the things I see and would like to see in the world of digital publishing, from blogging to ebooks to membership sites and more, plus things related to internet business and online marketing. At the end of the podcast I’ll mention my pick of the week, so be sure to stick around for that. You can find a full transcript of each episode of the Digital Publishing Podcast at DigitalPublishingPodcast.com.

I’d love it if you rated this show in iTunes. Go to itunes.digitalpublishingpodcast.com and then click the blue “Rate in iTunes” button in the left sidebar to pull up the podcast in iTunes so you can rate and review it, and it’ll only take a minute or two.

As I had foretold in the podcast two weeks ago, there was no new episode of the podcast last week because I was traveling, but I am now settled in at my new apartment in Tbilisi, Georgia, and it’s a really interesting place to be. But as you can undoubtedly hear, I’m sick. I have a cold and my voice is not quite normal, and so I do apologize in advance for that.

But I do have 5 topics to talk about today, so let’s get started.

1. Tweeting against linkbait

I ran across an interesting concept for a Twitter account recently. The account I saw is @huffpospoilers. The creator of the account got tired of the cryptic, linkbait-y headlines of Huffington Post articles, so he created a Twitter account that in effect explains the headline so you don’t have to click through.

For example, a recent Huffington Post article is titled “The most successful high school dropout ever?”, and @huffpospoilers retweeted that headline with the following in front of it: “David Karp? Tumblr founder/CEO, sold it to Yahoo.”

Here’s another example. The Huffington Post headline is “Is this what will save Best Buy?” and the @huffpospoilers account retweets that and “spoils” it by saying “Expanding Samsung Experience concept to other brands and products.”

The writer and blogger in me sympathizes with the Huffington Post and gives kudos to the writers there for creating headlines that really entice you to click through. But the reader in me loves @huffpospoilers because it means that I don’t have to leave Twitter and spend time clicking through to read through a whole article that can be summed up in a sentence.

I think that this is something that could be applied to other niches. I know that there are travel articles I read that could be summed up or “spoiled” by just a few words, articles like “The One Thing I Miss About New Zealand” or “Never Leave Home Without Doing This First.” There are marketing and business articles that do this, too, with headlines like “The Biggest Mistake I Made in My Business” or “Never Forget This One Customer Service Principle.”

So if you do often see articles like this in your niche, you could start a spoiler alert Twitter account for that niche. It doesn’t have to be all about headlines from a single source like the Huffington Post; the tweets could be for headlines from any site or blog related to your niche.

2. Keywords in domain names

At the end of September last year (2012), Google rolled out an algorithm change that affected some exact match domains, also known as EMDs. These are domain names that are exactly the word or phrase that you want to rank in Google for. So if you’re building a site about sheet metal cutters, you’d get sheetmetalcutters.com or .net. Last year’s EMD update removed a lot of sites with domains like this from high up in the Google search results, and I’ve heard some people say that there is now no point in getting an exact match domain.

I do think there is still power in having keywords in your domain name, though. I do think it still helps rankings. In episode 25, I talked about one of my websites, tradclimbingvideos.com. Trad climbing is a sub-discipline of rock climbing that I’m into. I’ve been #1 in Google for “trad climbing videos” for a long time and for the last couple months have been at #1 or #2 for the phrase “trad climbing.” And then a few days ago, the site started showing up on the first page for the phrase “climbing videos.”

Now, I’m not an SEO expert. I know and do the basics and probably know more than the average person online, but it’s not something that I really enjoy learning about. But I have to think that part of how well that site is ranking for these phrases is due to the domain name. There isn’t a whole lot of content on the site and there aren’t too many backlinks to the site. As much as I’ve heard people say that exact match domains or keywords in domains no longer help you rank, I have to think that they still do to some extent. It seems to be mainly micro sites and niche sites that have exact match domains that were affected by the EMD update, and that having keywords in the domain name of something that isn’t a micro site can still be a plus and give you a leg up in the search results.

It is worth keeping in mind, though, that whether or not it’s a good idea to go with an exact match domain or a domain with keywords for your site from a branding perspective is another argument for another time. They do tend to limit the scope of what you can talk about on the website; I couldn’t put ice climbing videos on tradclimbingvideos.com, for example.

3. The King of Random… dot com

There’s a guy on YouTube named Grant Thompson. He makes videos about things he builds and experiments he does, things like how to turn a stick of butter into a candle or how to make your own arc welder. In all of his videos, he either mentions thekingofrandom.com (if it’s a longer video) or includes the text “thekingofrandom.com” as part of the video if it’s a shorter one. I figured it was the guy’s website, so I typed it in and found out that it just redirects to his YouTube channel. I was a little bit disappointed by that because I wanted to learn more about who this guy was.

But then a couple weeks after I first found out about him and watched a couple of his videos, I remembered him again and wanted to check out his channel to see if he had any new videos. Then I remembered thekingofrandom.com, typed it in, and went straight to his channel.

If you have a YouTube channel, I think that plugging your own domain name in your videos is a great idea (instead of or in addition to saying something like “Subscribe to my channel”). If that domain name just redirects to your YouTube channel, that’s great because it makes an easy way for people to find your channel and videos again. If the domain goes to your own blog or website, that’s great too, because people will presumably still be able to find what they’re looking for, but things like newsletter subscription forms and social media following options will be more prominent.

4. Final update on the effortless blog

In episode 24 I talked about an experiment I’d started. The idea was to start a Tumblr blog and just post videos to it and see if I could get people to click an ad for one of my ebooks that was in the sidebar of that Tumblr blog. So I’d post videos, people looking for keywords relating to the niche would find the videos and presumably click and view the posts on the website instead of their Tumblr dashboard, and then they’d see and click on my book’s ad in the sidebar. I gave an update in episode 25, in which I said that while the blog had several followers, there had been no clicks on the ad. People were following the blog in their Tumblr dashboard, but not many people were clicking through to view the posts separately on the blog. If you’re not familiar with Tumblr, that just means that it’s like people subscribing to a blog’s RSS feed in Google Reader. That person will see the new posts but they won’t see things like the site’s header or menu or sidebar.

Well, I updated the blog and posted a new video every day for a few weeks and got a grand total of one click on the ad for my book. I don’t know if the person who clicked bought the book, but it doesn’t really matter. Three weeks of even minimal work for even one sale is not great. The blog ended up having 73 followers by the time I stopped updating it.

As I also mentioned in episode 25, another option was to include a link to the book in every video I posted. That way, the people who follow the blog will see the ad every time. I didn’t want to do this and still don’t because that’s borderline spammy behavior, but I don’t know. We’ll see. I might try it a few times and see what happens. Otherwise, the effortless blog isn’t worth the even small amount of effort it required. So… now we know!

5. Running Windows on a Mac

This might not apply to everyone listening to this, but hopefully some people out there will find this useful. My main computer is a Mac. It’s a 2011 13″ MacBook Air, to be exact, and I love it. It’s my first Mac and I’ve had no problems being without Windows, but I’ve been thinking about doing some screencasts for Windows software. That means that I need to have access to Windows. I could have bought a new Windows laptop and used that, but because I do live and travel with just a carry-on bag, another computer—even if it’s a laptop—just would not be very practical. So I started looking around at other solutions.

There are two main ways to run Windows on a Mac without getting rid of the Mac OS. So this isn’t replacing your Mac applications or anything, just giving you the option to run Windows when you want or need to. The first way is to install Windows on a partition on your hard drive using Boot Camp. This is a free utility that comes installed on all Macs, and it makes it so that you can boot up into Windows when you restart your computer.

The second main way to run Windows on a Mac is to set up what’s called a virtual machine. This means that you can run Windows inside Mac OS 10 without restarting your computer. In fact, you can have Windows running in a separate window while you’re doing things in other windows. It’s pretty darn neat, and a fast way to hop into Windows without completely inconveniencing everything else you’re doing. I bought and am using some virtual machine software called Parallels (and you can find that at parallels.com). It’s super slick. Setup and installation and using Windows are all super easy but unlike Boot Camp, it isn’t free. It’s $80.

Regardless of whether you use Boot Camp or virtual machine software like Parallels, you do still have to buy a Windows license in order to install it on your machine. I bought a Windows 7 DVD on Amazon so that I could get a legit product key, but I didn’t install Windows using the DVD because my MacBook Air doesn’t have an optical disc drive. Instead, I downloaded what’s called an ISO image of the disc, which is essentially a digital carbon copy of the disc, and I installed Windows from that and activated it with the product key I’d purchased.

If this sounds like something you’d like to do, I’ll have links to the copy of Windows 7 that I bought on Amazon and to the site where I downloaded the ISO file of Windows 7 in the show notes for episode 27 at DigitalPublishingPodcast.com. I’ll also link to Parallels and to information about Boocamp. But overall, I’m really happy with how well Parallels works and how fast and easy it is now to test and work with things in Windows on my Mac.

Useful links

Pick of the week

And that brings us to my pick of the week. This is where I pick one useful thing to share, and it can be an app, a website, a podcast, or just about anything else. My pick of the week is called This Week in YouTube. This is a weekly video podcast, and it is the only video podcast I watch. You can subscribe to it in iTunes or whatever podcatcher app you use on your mobile device, or you can do what I do and just go to twit.tv/yt and watch or download the new episodes.

So this show is all about YouTube-related news and tips, and there are three co-hosts on the podcast. There’s Leo Laporte, who is the founder of the TWiT network of podcasts (and TWiT stands for This Week in Tech). There’s Lamarr Wilson, who is a YouTube celebrity and vlogger. His YouTube channel has 177,000 subscribers and his videos have over 23 million views. And there’s Chad Johnson, who is a TWiT producer and who has a podcast on TWiT about the game Minecraft.

So in the show they talk about YouTube news, like changes to YouTube itself from both the viewer’s and content creator’s side. They talk about what videos have gone viral in the last week or that are otherwise gaining traction. They talk about things video creators can do to get more views and to make better videos. Stuff like that. The three hosts work well together and make for an interesting and fun to listen to show that will get you excited about creating YouTube videos and about checking out what YouTube has to offer that you might not be aware of.

The show is still relatively new—there are only 7 episodes so far and a new one comes out every Sunday—but because it is part of Leo’s TWiT network, it’s professional-quality. You can go check out This Week in YouTube by going to twit.tv/yt. You can watch the episodes there, and there are also download and subscribe links.

Final words

And that’s all for episode 27 of the Digital Publishing Podcast. Be sure to check out digitalpublishingpodcast.com for complete transcriptions and other blog posts there at the blog.

Please don’t hesitate to email me any question you might have regarding digital publishing. I love talking about this stuff, and I’d love to help you out. You can follow me on Twitter by going to twitter.digitalpublishingpodcast.com. That will redirect you to my Twitter account, since my name is a bit tricky to spell. And again and as always, I’d really appreciate it if you went into iTunes and rated and reviewed this podcast, and thanks for listening.

DPP026: Documenting Your Projects for Profit, My Recurring Expenses, and 3 More Ideas

Tristan — Thu, 09 May 2013 12:13:44 +0000

In this episode of the Digital Publishing Podcast (which you can find a full transcript of below), I cover 5 topics from making money from things you’re already doing to products and services I pay a monthly fee for.

You can also listen to the episode online by clicking the play button on the player below this. (If you don’t see the player, click here.) It’s about 18 minutes long.

1:48 – 1. Documenting projects for profit
7:02 – 2. Legacy projects
9:06 – 3. My recurring expenses
12:03 – 4. YouTube channel URLs
13:11 – 5. Three web design pet peeves
15:40 – Pick of the week

DPP026: Documenting Projects for Profit, My Recurring Expenses, and 3 More Ideas

Hey everyone, I’m Tristan Higbee, and before we start, I want to say that there will be no new episode of the podcast next week. When this episode that you’re listening to goes live, I’ll be flying to Houston from Cancun, after having lived in Mexico for the last 8+ months. And then next Thursday, when next week’s episode would come out, I’ll be flying from Houston to Tbilisi, Georgia, via Amsterdam and Munich, and I have a 9-hour layover in Munich. So between being back in the States for only a few days and flying literally to the other side of the world, I won’t have time to record a new episode of the podcast, but there WILL be a new one the week after that, assuming my internet works in Georgia.

And now onto the show! If this is your first time listening, this podcsast is all about the things I see and would like to see in the world of digital publishing, from blogging to ebooks to membership sites and more, plus things related to internet business and online marketing. At the end of the podcast I’ll mention my pick of the week, so be sure to stick around for that. You can find a full transcript of each episode of the Digital Publishing Podcast at DigitalPublishingPodcast.com.

Ok! I’ve got 5 topics to talk about today, so let’s get started.

1. Documenting projects for profit

I read an article online a couple weeks ago about a man who has eaten at more than 6,000 Chinese restaurants over the last 33 years, and he’s logged and tracked all of the restaurants in a spreadsheet.

As I read that article, all I could think about is how this guy should start a blog or write an ebook or something, or at least that’s what I would do if I were to start this kind of project. If you have a goal to do something, or if you’re doing something that is legitimately interesting, why not document the journey and maybe make a bit of money off of it? There’s an ebook called Clamcake Summer: One Man Eats Every Clamcake in Rhode Island. The guy decided to try every clam cake in Rhode Island, and then he wrote a book about it. And the best part is that it’s got 12 reviews on Amazon, most of which are 5-stars.

(And for those of you who, like me, had no idea what a clam cake was, it’s a deep-fried ball of dough with chopped clam and various other ingredients inside, and it’s common in the New England region of the US.)

When I lived in Salt Lake City, I was a regular reader of a blog called SLC Tacos (and it’s still at slctacos.com, though it doesn’t get updated much anymore). The guy behind the blog went to taco stands and taco restaurants around Salt Lake and rated and reviewed the tacos. He doesn’t have any ads on his site and it doesn’t look like he’s making money from it, but I’m sure he could partner up with one of the taco restaurants and offer coupons or something if he really wanted to.

Then there’s A.J Jacobs, the guy who read the Encyclopedia Britannica from A to Z in a year and wrote a book about it. There are multiple books written by people who have gone to games at every major league baseball stadium and written about it (here’s the only one I could find). Even if you’re doing something like building a backyard greenhouse, document the process and you might end up being able to turn it into a how-to ebook (and you wouldn’t be the first). Even if you don’t want to end up selling the ebook, you could give it away as a PDF report.

I know that tons of people have started blogs about things like minimalism or simplicity, and the blog is a way to document what they’ve learned or what they’re doing. Several of these bloggers have gone on to write books or ebooks about their experiences. One that comes to mind is the guy behind the 100 things challenge. He created a blog about living with a hundred things and then wrote a book about it. Or No Impact Man, the guy who decided to see if he could live in New York for a year without causing any negative environmental impact. He started with a blog that turned into a book, documentary, and even a non profit.

There’s a tech journalist named Paul Miller who just finished up a year of living without the internet. He wrote about his thoughts and experiences a couple times a month over at The Verge, and I would be very surprised if he DIDN’T turn those articles into a book.

When I lived in Mexico City for two months, I thought about writing a book about one thing to see or do near every one of the city’s metro stations. I thought it would be cool to explore the city that way, and I figured I might as well write an ebook about it while doing it, though it’s something I never did end up doing.

I’ve been learning the Georgian alphabet recently because I’ll be living in Georgia for a couple months coming up pretty soon here, and there aren’t very many good digital resources out there for learning the Georgian alphabet. I’ve been taking notes and stuff and I could potentially write an ebook about learning the Georgian alphabet. If not, I’ll at least write a blog post about it on my personal blog that will hopefully be helpful to others.

I think the main idea here that I’m trying to get across is that there’s a mindset you can get into, where everything you do in life can be thought of in terms of a digital product of some sort, whether that be a blog or ebook or book or video series or podcast or however you want to do it. When people tell me that they want to write an ebook but don’t know what to write about, I don’t really understand it, because in my mind, EVERYTHING could be a book. Everything is an adventure. I’ve written 40 Kindle books and could probably write hundreds more. I’ve started dozens and dozens of blogs. I’m an idea machine because I see every single thing I do in life, every new project, as a potential book or blog or blog post idea or something that other people could benefit from in some way. When you get into that mindset, it’s hard NOT to come up with tons of ideas.

2. Legacy projects

I’ve been thinking recently about the kind of legacy I want to leave. This is kind of a weird thing for me to think about, because I’m a pretty healthy 27-year-old wand don’t plan on dying anytime soon. But regardless, thinking about the legacy I want to leave has led me to look at the projects I’m doing and figure out where those things fit in with the bigger picture of my life. What value do these things really provide to people?

Someone posted to Hacker News this week a project he’s been working on, called Dave Conservatoire. He billed it as the Khan Academy for music. For those who don’t know, Khan Academy is an educational website and non-profit that started out as a guy recording YouTube videos that teach things like algebra and geometry, and now it’s a big non-profit that has instructional videos on all sorts of things. And this Dave Conservatoire site is one man’s project to essentially educate everyone about music for free. You could create a Khan Academy-style site for any subject you know a lot about.

These two examples happen to be free but at least in my mind, a legacy project doesn’t have to be. I plan on growing Osmosio, which is my soon-to-be-launched membership site about all things digital publishing, into a big business that helps a lot of people and that I can be proud of. That’s a fantastic legacy to leave.

So like I said, thinking about legacy projects has made me take a step back and reevaluate what I’m doing, and I’d really recommend you do the same. If you’re spending the time working on something, why not spend the time working on something that really is awesome, instead of just another lame niche site or something. Build a resource that people want to go to or read or whatever instead of something you need to trick people into looking at.

3. My recurring expenses

A friend of mine said last week that he’d be interested in learning about what my recurring expenses are. I think this is a good thing to share because when I first started getting serious about making a living online, I paid monthly for SEO tools and private forums and all sorts of things that I now realize I didn’t need. Hopefully by sharing my recurring monthly expenses, I can stop some other people from spending more money than they have to.

I spend $29 a month for AWeber, which is my email newsletter provider of choice. I spend $9.95 a month on HostGator hosting, and that’s currently good enough for all of my websites. I spend $15 a month for Libsyn, which is the company I use to host the files for my podcast. I spend $9.99 a month for 100 gigs of Dropbox storage, which I use to back up my computer.

And that’s it for monthly recurring expenses. I do also have a few yearly expenses, like Evernote Premium ($45/year), Amazon Prime ($79/year), and Hotspot Shield, which is the VPN service I use, for $32 a year.

If you divide up the yearly things into monthly payments and add those to the other monthly payments, I pay $76.94 a month. That’s it. Those are nearly all of my recurring payments, not just the business-related ones. I don’t have Netflix or a phone plan (I just use the wi-fi to call or text), and the places I rent take care of Internet and utilities. I say that those are nearly all of my recurring monthly expenses because I do pay for one more monthly service that I’ll talk about later on in the podcast as my pick of the week, but I didn’t include that here because I just stared it last month and will be canceling it next month. I also pay literally between 20 to 30 cents a month for Amazon S3 hosting of some videos, but that’s not really enough to even be a blip on the radar.

So yep, about $77 a month for all I need for my online business and my online life in general. There are a couple other things I would consider paying a monthly fee for that I don’t now, like for educational purposes, for learning new things from a lynda.com subscription or something like that, but what I mentioned here is what I currently pay and I don’t see that changing anytime soon. You really don’t need all sorts of fancy pay-per-month software or services, and I’ve found that those things are usually more of a distraction than anything else anyway.

4. YouTube channel URLs

I feel pretty dumb about what I’ll be talking about next. It’s something that I feel like I should have known a long time ago and that probably everyone else already knows but that I just found out about today.

So when you sign up for a YouTube account, your own channel there on YouTube is normally at youtube.com/user/WHATEVER, whatever your username is. So the ESPN channel on YouTube, for example, is at YouTube.com/user/espn. If you Google “YouTube ESPN”, that’s what comes up. But you can actually take out the /user part, and just send people to youtube.com/espn or whatever your account is. You don’t need that /user part in there. Just YouTube.com and then the name of your channel.

Again, this is probably something that everyone else already knows, but I was really excited to figure that out today, and I think it’s a good thing to know about.

5. Three web design pet peeves

I’m about to talk about three things that I’ve seen a lot of people do on their websites and blogs that I think are pretty terrible. Now, I’m not a web designer, but I do think I can tell when something is terrible, and these are three things that I think should be obvious to everyone but apparently are not. In an audio podcast I can’t show you visual examples of these three things, but I will in the show notes for this episode, which you can find at digitalpublishingpodcast.com.

The first pet peeve is gray text on a white background, especially light gray text. Gray text on a light background is hard to read, plain and simple. There’s not enough contrast. And I’m not the only one that feels this way—go to ContrastRebellion.com and see what I mean.

An example of gray text on a white background. Not good.

My second web design pet peeve is small text. Have you noticed that a lot of the new simple, beautiful websites and blogs that are popping up have large text? That’s because 1) it looks good, 2) it’s easy to read, and 3) it gets people to stay on your site longer because it’s easy to read and they’ll keep reading. There’s no reason to have 11 point text on your website. It’s just ridiculous. I’ve found myself fairly often recently just turning away from websites with small text because I don’t even want to deal with that.

Small text. Too small!

My third web design pet peeve is small images. Not all small images are bad, of course. But if the images are an integral part of your page or blog post—as opposed to just an aesthetic garnish—then make them big. There’s this travel blog I read occasionally that actually hits all three of my pet peeves. It’s a travel blog, so images are pretty important, but all of the images are only 300 pixels wide. That’s just not big enough if you’re trying to show something with your images. Because you can’t see the images very well, they become uninteresting.

A small photo on a page.

These three things are all pretty easily fixable. Please fix them if you can. I’ll be a less angry surfer of the internet, and your audience will appreciate it.

Pick of the week

And that brings us to my pick of the week. This is where I pick one useful thing to share, and it can be an app, a website, a podcast, or just about anything else. My pick this week is Boingo [link]. This is something that’s really great for people who travel a lot, though other people might find it useful too. This is the thing I alluded to earlier that I also pay a monthly fee for. Boingo is a worldwide wi-fi service, and it’s kind of hard to explain, so bear with me here as I try to explain what exactly that means and how I use it. They have different plans for different devices and locations—you can get plans for laptops and mobile devices in certain regions of the world. I signed up for the Boingo Mobile plan. For $7.95 a month, I get wi-fi access on my iPhone at 600,000 locations around the world.

So it’s essentially an app that is a database of a ton of different free and open wi-fi hotspots that your phone or other device can easily connect to, PLUS Boingo has partnerships with a bunch of hotspot areas that are normally password-protected that you otherwise wouldn’t be able to access. So it goes beyond the normal free-wifi-finder apps.

And as I said earlier, I don’t have a mobile phone plan, I just use wifi. And because there are several Boingo-compatible wi-fi hotspots here in Cozumel, I can still text and use Facebook and browse the web in a bunch of different places in town. It’s not even close to being universal coverage all over the city, but there are still plenty of spots. Using the wifi, I’ve Facetimed with my parents from the city’s main square and from the beach, for example.

I’ve only been a Boingo customer for about a month and I’ll only be one for another month or so because there are only like 3 or 4 wifi hotspots in Tbilisi, so the service won’t be of much use to me. But the service is also fantastic for using in places like airports and bus stations. It’s worth getting just for using in airports if you fly a lot. You can check out the service and the different plans at Boingo.com and search for and view the wifi hotspots in any city around the world by going to wifi.boingo.com.

Final words

And that’s all for episode 26 of the Digital Publishing Podcast. Be sure to check out digitalpublishingpodcast.com for complete transcriptions and other blog posts there at the blog.

DPP025: Unhealthy Content, Bribing Readers, Voice Dictation, and 3 More Ideas

Tristan — Thu, 02 May 2013 14:01:41 +0000

In this episode of the Digital Publishing Podcast (which you can find a full transcript of below), I cover 6 topics from bribing readers for reviews to voice dictation.

You can also listen to the episode online by clicking the play button on the player below this. (If you don’t see the player, click here.) It’s about 20 minutes long.

1:03 – 1. Feeding people unhealthy content
3:13 – 2. One simple productivity hack
5:15 – 3. Bribing readers for reviews
9:15 – 4. Update on the effortless blog
11:34 – 5. The easiest blog post idea
14:46 – 6. Voice dictation
18:00 – 7. Pick of the week

DPP025: Unhealthy Content, Bribing Readers, Voice Dictation, and 3 More Ideas

Hey everyone, I’m Tristan Higbee, and this show is all about the things I see and would like to see in the world of digital publishing, from blogging to ebooks to membership sites and more, plus things related to internet business and online marketing. At the end of the podcast I’ll mention my pick of the week, so be sure to stick around for that. You can find a full transcript of each episode of the Digital Publishing Podcast at DigitalPublishingPodcast.com.

Ok! I’ve got 6 topics to talk about today, so let’s get started.

1. Feeding people unhealthy content

A few days ago I saw a link pop up in my Twitter feed. The name of the article was “Top 25 iPhone Apps to Track Your Website Stats On the Go”. Does that strike anyone else as being a bit… unnecessary? Why not pick the one or two best apps? I’ll tell you why, and there are two reasons:

Because this way the person writing the article doesn’t have to actually download, install, and use all 25 apps, which would take a lot of time and research, and
Because this is the kind of list that we think people will like and share. I mean, everyone likes big lists, right?

It’s like feeding your kids junk food. It’s easy for you and it seems like the kind of thing your kids want, but in reality it’s not very good for them. It’s not healthy. An article listing 25 apps that all do the same thing isn’t good or helpful. I can just search in the app store for “Google Analytics” or “web analytics” and come up with a big list of apps. So before you excitedly make a big ol’ list of tools or resources, ask yourself if that’s really the most useful thing you can offer people. More is not always better. Writing about the single best iPhone app for tracking your stats on your go would be much more valuable than listing out 25 of them. There’s enough junk on the internet already.

And in case you’re now wondering about a great iOS app for checking your analytics, I’ve recommended Fast Analytics in the past and I still use it and like it a lot. gAnalytics is apparently a really good one for Android devices, and both of those apps are free.

2. One simple productivity hack

I’m usually not a fan of “productivity hacks” because they tend to turn you into someone who is so concerned about being productive that you never get anything done because you’re so busy learning about how to be productive. And I say “you” here but I’m obviously talking from experience. The very best productivity hack I’ve found is to just turn off the internet, sit your butt in a chair, and do whatever it is that you need to do.

Now, having said that, here’s something I did recently that has helped me avoid mindless web surfing. In my browser—and I use Chrome but this applies to most browsers—I used to have a bunch of my most frequented sites saved in the browser’s bookmarks bar. This is a bar right underneath the box where you enter in website URLs, and in mine I had put bookmarks for Reddit, Evernote, Gmail, Facebook, Feedly, Twitter, and a few other sites that I go to a lot. On one hand, this was great because it meant that I didn’t have to type anything in. I could just click once on the bookmarked website. On the other hand, once I could just click on all of those bookmarked sites without thinking, the result was that I ended up spending a lot of time browsing those sites automatically because it was so easy to do.

So to fix this, I just hid the bookmarks bar. All of those bookmarks are still easily accessible via the bookmarks menu at the top of the screen, but there’s now an out of sight, out of mind thing going on. I have to actively want to go to those sites to click on them, and the result is that it’s cut down a lot on the absentminded browsing and procrastinating that I used to do.

3. Bribing readers for reviews

Amazon has a no-bribes policy when it comes to Kindle book reviews (and reviews for everything else, for that matter). According to Amazon’s official customer review creation guidelines:

“Reviews written for any form of compensation other than a free copy of the product [are not allowed].”

That seems pretty clear, right? “Any form of compensation” is prohibited. In practice, the line isn’t so clear cut. In the past, I’ve offered $5 Amazon gift cards to some reviewers. I had 5 of them to give out, and I told my blog readers that if they bought the ebook and left a review, they could possibly win one of the 5 gift cards. The first time I did it, I got five reviews from doing that, so it turned out that each reviewer did get a gift card. I didn’t specify that the reviews had to be positive or anything like that.

Is that against Amazon’s policies? Honestly, yeah, probably, even though it’s not a direct transaction. But at least I didn’t pay for the individual reviews; the reviewers had to buy the book and review the book honestly and then were eligible to win something in a raffle.

So that’s probably not the best thing to do if you want to stick with the spirit of Amazon’s review policy 100% of the way, but it worked for me, and I’m not averse to doing it again in the future. But how about this. There are a couple sci fi/horror writers I follow named Sean Platt and David Wright, and I’m on their email list. Last week they sent out a call for people to leave reviews on a boxed set of one of their book series. And they did give an incentive, even though it was a very different kind of incentive. They said that if the book got to 100 reviews, Dave (who again, is one of the co-authors of the series) would record a video of himself dancing to a song of the readers’ choice. The other co-author, Sean, had done this several months ago after meeting a review goal, and he danced to Gangnam Style. Horribly, I might add.

When they sent out the email asking for more reviews, the series had 49 reviews. As of recording this, seven days after they sent out the email, they have 68 reviews. So 19 new reviews, nearly all of which are five-star reviews, in a week. Not bad, right? I’m sure some of those could have been gained by just asking for them in the email, but I’m also sure that some of those reviewers genuinely want to see Dave dance.

Technically speaking, I think that even this kind of reward isn’t allowed under Amazon’s policies because it’s a form of compensation, isn’t it? It’s an odd form of compensation, but it still is one. But I think that this kind of bribery is not the kind that Amazon is worried about, and it seems like a great way and reason to ask for reviews. It’s less of a bribe and more of a thank you, and I like that. But it’s worth noting that it doesn’t look like they’re going to reach that goal of 100 reviews anytime soon, so then you have to weigh the effectiveness of this kind of bribe or thank you or whatever you want to call it. 68 reviews is better than 49, but it’s still not 100.

4. Update on the effortless blog

In the last episode of the Digital Publishing Podcast, I talked about how I wanted to see if I could create a blog to help sell ebooks, but do next to nothing when it came to actually creating content for the blog and marketing the blog. So I created a Tumblr blog called Daily Climbing Videos to sell my 101 Rock Climbing Tips and Tricks book, and the idea was that I’d just post a different climbing-related YouTube or Vimeo video each day. I put a little ad for my ebook in the blog’s sidebar and said that I would track the outgoing clicks via Google Analytics.

When I recorded the last podcast, I had made 2 posts and had 4 subscribers on that Tumblr blog. As of recording this now, I’ve done 9 posts and have 31 subscribers, so I’m averaging about 3 new subscribers or followers for every one post.

So now the million dollar question is: Did the ad get any clicks? And the answer is… Nope. Not a one. This isn’t too surprising, since looking at the Google Analytics shows that there are only between 2 and 4 people visiting the site every day. That’s the thing about Tumblr; people follow other blogs on Tumblr and then view the updates in their Tumblr dashboards. This means that while they do see new updates, they don’t see the ad or anything else that’s in my sidebar unless they actually go to dailyclimbingvideos.tumblr.com.

I’m going to keep doing things the way that I’ve been doing them for a couple more weeks, and then re-evaluate. I might end up adding a text link to my ebook in every update I do. We’ll see. People might think that that’s too annoying. If not much has changed by next week, I probably won’t talk about it in the podcast, but I will the week after, so stay tuned for that.

5. The easiest blog post idea

One of the websites that I run for fun is called TradClimbingVideos.com. This is different from the Daily Climbing Videos Tumblr blog, which is a recent experiment and likely won’t be a long-term thing. TradClimbingVideos.com is something I’ve been doing for several months now. Trad climbing is a sub-category or sub-discipline of rock climbing in which you generally don’t clip in or anchor into bolts, but to things that you place and wedge into cracks in the rock. It’s a type of climbing that people are very passionate about.

Anyway, so on this website I post cool trad climbing videos. For each video, I write a one- or two-sentence description, list the climbers in the video, where they’re climbing, and what routes they’re climbing, along with a couple other things. Then I embed the video from YouTube or Vimeo and include a small screenshot of the video, which also shows up as the thumbnail on the main TradClimbingVideos.com page. And then for the blog post title, I describe the video in my own words; I don’t just copy the title of the YouTube video.

So the reason that I’m talking about this is that I’ve been surprised by how much search traffic these posts pull in. There are only like 29 or 30 posts on the blog, but it gets between 50 and 100 visits every day from search traffic. That’s pretty darn good for posts that just take a few minutes to write. This is a great blog post idea if you want to churn out a lot of posts to bring in more search traffic.

And you can even take it a bit further. Let’s say you want to create a bunch of these kinds of posts to hopefully get some long tail search traffic, but you don’t necessarily want to bombard your current subscribers with all of these posts. If you’re on WordPress, you can use a plugin called Ultimate Category Excluder. It makes it so that posts from a certain category or categories don’t show up in your RSS feed and/or on the main front page of your blog. So you could put all of the video posts into their own category and they’d never show up on the front page but would still bring in search traffic. This is also a great tip for writing specific articles around long tail keywords that may bring in search traffic but might not appeal to the wider audience that you’ve developed.

6. Voice dictation

If you’ve listened to this podcast for a while, you’ll remember that several episodes ago I talked about how I write out the transcripts for each episode and then read the transcripts into a microphone. That’s how I create and record these podcasts because speaking coherently is a skill that doesn’t come to me very naturally whereas writing is one of my strong points. And I don’t remember if I mentioned this on the podcast or not but I did mention it in my weekly newsletter that I was in a car accident several weeks ago. I was riding my bike and was hit by a car and almost broke my wrist, though it ended up just being pretty badly sprained. It’s healing well but it still hurts a little bit when I type. This is a problem not only for the podcast but also for the fact that most of what I do throughout the week is write. I can write with the splint on my wrist but I have to hold my arm in a weird angle and it gets tiring after a while.

That’s when I remembered that Mountain Lion, which is the latest release of Apple’s OS X operating system for laptops and desktops, comes with voice dictation capabilities. I’ve been using it on and off for the past week and it’s pretty good. It’s not perfect; it messes up about one word every sentence or every two sentences or so, but in general it works pretty well. I have it configured so that I hit the function key twice to start the voice dictation functionality and then when I’m done talking, I press the function key again and it stops. It’s definitely not perfect, but it’s helped me limit the amount of strain I have to put on my wrist. I can take long pauses between sentences and thoughts and it will still transcribe what I say. About half of this episode’s script was first written out with this voice dictation thing.

It’s been a while since I’ve used Windows but I think Windows has something similar called Windows Speech Recognition. And then there is software called Dragon Naturally Speaking, which is supposed be really good voice dictation software, but it’s $200.* So if for some reason you can’t or don’t want to type, look into using dictation software. If, unlike me, you’re more of a talker than a writer, using some speech recognition and dictation software can make writing ebooks or blog post a lot faster and easier for you.

*EDIT: It’s $200 for the Mac version and $54 for the Windows version.

Pick of the week

And that brings us to my pick of the week. This is where I pick one thing to share, and it can be an app, a website, a podcast, or just about anything else. My pick this week is a Chrome extension called QuickTweet [link]. It makes it easy to log in and out of different Twitter accounts. I have a ton of Twitter accounts for my various projects and it’s a pain to keep track of the passwords and everything for all of them, but this extension really helps here. It’s a pretty simple extension. You install it and open up its options. You then enter in the username and password for each of your Twitter accounts and save them. Then when you want to switch between accounts, all you have to do is click on the extension’s icon next to the browser’s address bar and select the appropriate account from a list that appears. You are automatically logged out of the account you were logged into and then automatically logged in to the new account you selected. It only takes a few seconds to switch between accounts. The extension supports up to 10 different Twitter accounts and between this extension and tools like HootSuite, you’ll be able to manage a relatively large number of Twitter accounts for free.

Final words

And that’s all for episode 25 of the Digital Publishing Podcast. Be sure to check out digitalpublishingpodcast.com for complete transcriptions and other blog posts there at the blog.

DPP024: Checklist Sites, Niche Multi-Author Blogs, a New Test Project, and 3 More Ideas

Tristan — Thu, 25 Apr 2013 13:03:50 +0000

In this episode of the Digital Publishing Podcast (which you can find a full transcript of below), I cover 6 topics, from niche multi-author blogs to a new test project I’m working on.

You can also listen to the episode online by clicking the play button on the player below this. (If you don’t see the player, click here.) It’s about 18 minutes long.

1:00 – 1. Taking time off
3:23 – 2. Meetups
5:31 – 3. Checklist sites
8:00 – 4. There is always room
10:39 – 5. Niche multi-author blogs
13:12 – 6. A new test project
15:31 – Pick of the week

DPP024: Checklist Sites, Niche Multi-Author Blogs, a New Test Project, and 3 More Ideas

Ok! I’ve got 6 topics to talk about today, so let’s get started.

1. Taking time off

Regular readers or listeners might have noticed that there was no new episode of the Digital Publishing Podcast last week, as I warned might be the case in episode 23 from the week before that. For those who don’t know, I’ve been living in Mexico for the last 8 months or so and on the island of Cozumel for the last two and a half months. I’ll be leaving Mexico in a couple weeks and still hadn’t seen some of the larger sights on mainland Mexico’s Yucatan Peninsula, so I decided to spend last week going to some great archaeological and colonial sites that I hadn’t been to. I barely did any work during the week.

Usually, time off is a great thing for me. It’s a time for me to recharge and step back and look at what I’m doing from a more objective angle. I usually listen to tons of podcasts and read tons of articles that I haven’t yet gotten around to, and I usually end up coming back with a big list full of great new ideas on how I can do things differently or better. This time wasn’t like that, though. I came back from the trip with zero additional ideas, plans, or insight. The one overwhelming thought I had the whole time, and what I brought back with me, was that I really needed to launch Osmosio, which is the site that the Digital Publishing Podcast is part of and that will teach people how to format ebooks and stuff like that. That’s really the only thing I was thinking about the entire week, and I guess there wasn’t much room in my brain for anything else.

So this is a reminder, probably like ones you’ve heard before, to occasionally take time off. You’ll either come back with a ton of great new ideas, like I normally do when I take time off, or new clarity and renewed sense of vigor, as happened to me last week. But either way, it’s worth it.

2. Meetups

It’s pretty common these days to see social media icons or buttons or widgets in a blog or website’s sidebar. You see RSS, email, Twitter, and Facebook icons. Sometimes you’ll see Flickr, YouTube, and StumbleUpon icons. But the other day I saw a a Meetup icon in a website’s sidebar. The site was Digital Book World, and in the sidebar it says Follow the DBW Community, and there are Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube, and Meetup icons. I think this is the first time I’ve seen a Meetup link right alongside the regular social media links.

For those unfamiliar with Meetup, it’s an online service that makes it easy to create offline meetups or meetings or gatherings or whatever you want to call them. The Digital Book World Meetup group is based in New York City, so that’s where its meetings and conferences take place. I don’t think this kind of thing would work well if you were located in Stanley, Idaho, or like me in Cozumel, Mexico. But if you’re in a place like New York, Los Angeles, Portland, London, Sydney, or Berlin, I think this is a great idea. I’d love to meet my readers, listeners, and customers in person. And if your website, business, blog, or whatever is centered around a certain geographical area, like if you blog about surfing around Cape Town, a meetup is a no-brainer.

You could also do this sort of thing without an official Meetup group. Maybe you have a separate email list for people interested in in-person get-togethers, and you send out an email whenever you’ll be in a certain city. Or you could just post to your blog or to Twitter about it, or send an email about where you’ll be and when out to everyone on your regular email list. Regardless of how you do it, I think in-person meetups are an awesome idea, and something you might want to consider adding a link for your sidebar if it makes sense.

3. Checklist sites

I’m always interested in simple kinds of website formats that provide value. In the past I mentioned The Short Cutts, which is a site that boils down Google SEO spokesman Matt Cutts’s long-winded answers to SEO questions into just a few words. I said that that’s an idea that could be applied to any niche, and then here’s another idea that I came across today.

The website is called Userium (userium.com), and it’s a checklist. More specifically, it’s a website usability checklist. The checklist is broken up into 10 different sections, including things like homepage, accessibility, navigation, and layout. Under each one of those sections are three to seven points or things that you can check off, and next to each one is a check box. The idea is that you go through this list of things to see how user-friendly your website is, checking off each one that you’ve done. At the bottom of the page are a print button and a link to a bibliography.

I love lists, so this is something that I instantly liked, and it’s something you could do for any niche. Let’s say you’re into rock climbing. You could make a separate website for a climbing checklist or for multiple climbing checklists, like gear to take with you when hiking, gear to take with you when ice climbing, or things to double-check before you start climbing up a route. Or you could have it all be part of your existing climbing-related website.

I found a WordPress plugin that looks like it makes it pretty easy to create checklists on your WordPress-powered website, though I haven’t yet tried it myself. It’s called Frontend Checklist. It’s free, an I’ll include a link to it in the show notes for episode 24 at DigitalPublishingPodcast.com.

4. There is always room

I read a lot of travel-related articles as part of what I do over at my Travel Knowledge Database site. Some of the articles are great, others are crap, and there are a lot in between. I was reading one article the other day, an interview with a relatively well-established travel blogger. One of the questions that was asked to him was, “Do you think it’s possible for an aspiring travel blogger to quit their job and make a good living from blogging today?” The answer was, “No, not really.”

That surprised me, but I agree with that to a certain extent. The odds of you quitting your job, starting a travel blog, and being able to make a good living from it anytime soon are not very good. If you’ve been blogging about travel for five years already, sure, you might be able to make a living from it, though I don’t know how many full time travel bloggers are making a *good* living.

But let’s step back, broaden the topic here a little bit, and re-examine it. I think that in every niche out there, there is room for something better. This is something I’ve mentioned before but that I think is worth repeating. There are a gazillion travel blogs out there, but I’d say that many (if not most) of them, even the most popular ones, aren’t very good. They’re inconsistent. They talk about dumb things that I think the vast majority of the people in their audiences don’t care about, like PR-esque reviews of uber-luxury hotels in remote and obscure areas that no one else will ever visit. The writing often isn’t very good, and the videos are unprofessional. All of that is to say that if you wanted to create a travel blog, and if you were actually a good writer or video producer, or if you stopped with the crappy 300-word articles that companies paid you to publish in exchange for a backlink, or if you write about things that a billion other travel bloggers haven’t already written about, people would notice. Would your blog gain traction immediately? No. It would still take a really long time to get traction. But there is always room in every niche for excellence, for something better, because readers or buyers or whoever are always looking for the best stuff.

5. Niche multi-author blogs

There’s a blog called The Kill Zone, and it’s at killzoneauthors.blogspot.com. The blog’s tagline is “Insider perspectives from today’s hottest thriller and mystery writers.” It’s a multi-author blog, and there are currently 13 authors that blog there, and there’s a photo of each author in the sidebar, and each photo links to the author’s own website. On average, there are two new posts a day, each author writes a new blog post once a week, and the articles are mostly about writing. The blog seems to be pretty popular, with most posts getting dozens of comments.

I love this idea. Each one of those bloggers has his or her own blog or website, so why would they want to write an article a week for some other blog? Because it’s an easy way to get more attention. There are 13 authors on the blog, and I’d assume that each author has a vested interest in the blog and that each one would tweet and share many of the new articles that are posted to the site. This means that there are 13 different people, each with his or her own unique audience, tweeting new articles, posting the new articles to their Facebook pages, and generally driving traffic to this site. It’s like having 12 other cheerleaders for the stuff you write. Each person writes just once a week but gets the benefits of blogging twice a day, every day.

I feel like fiction authors do this kind of thing a lot. There’s a lot of collaboration. Why don’t people in other niches do it? Let me go back to my favorite example, rock climbing. You could round up a half dozen other climbing bloggers and have each one write a post every two weeks. If you published a new post to the blog every other day, you’d still have a blog that gets updated more than most other climbing blogs out there. It’s essentially like having a reliable, recurring guest posting spot on a blog, and you’re essentially a part owner of that blog. If you have some buddies in your niche, it seems like a good way to get more eyeballs looking at your respective projects.

6. A new test project

I have mixed feelings about Tumblr, the simple blogging platform that is also a social network. It’s a pretty easy way to build a following, but I’m always hesitant to commit too much to any platform that I don’t own. I’m especially wary of Tumblr because I’ve had my Tumblr account suspended before, and lost over a thousand subscribers in the process.

But I’m testing something with a new Tumblr blog. I’ve written a rock climbing book called 101 Rock Climbing Tips and Tricks. If you search for “rock climbing” on Amazon, it shows up on the first page of results, and if you search for rock climbing specifically in the Kindle store on Amazon, it’s usually either the first or second thing to show up. Well, a couple days ago I started a new climbing-related Tumblr blog to try to sell more copies of my ebook. But the goal is to put in as little work and effort as possible into this new blog and see if it still is useful as far as driving sales goes.

So the blog is called Daily Climbing Videos, and it’s at dailyclimbingvideos.tumblr.com. The plan is to just post a new climbing-related video every day. That’s it. Today was day two of the experiment, and the blog has 4 subscribers so far. I have a little 125×125 pixel ad for my ebook in the blog’s sidebar, and I’ve installed Google Analytics on the blog so that I can see how many people leave the site by clicking on that ad. I won’t be able to see how many people actually buy the book, but I will be able to see how many at least click through to look at the thing.

So it’ll be interesting to see if literally one or two minutes of blogging a day can translate into sales of an ebook, and I will keep you posted in future episodes of the podcast. Honestly, I doubt the experiment will work, but it’s worth a minute or two a day to make sure.

Pick of the week

And that brings us to my pick of the week. In weeks past, I’ve chosen both a podcast and a tool for digital publishers for each episode. I listen to a lot of podcasts, but I’ve just about run out of ones that I can recommend that I think would appeal to a broad swath of the people listening to this. So now I’m just going to have a single pick of the week for each episode, and it can be a podcast, a digital publishing tool, a website, an app, or anything else along those lines.

My pick of the week for this episode is a new app that I recently came across. It’s unfortunately iOS-only at this point, so it’ll work on iPads, iPhones, and iPod Touches, but not on Android devices. It’s called Inkvite, and you can learn more about it at Inkvite.me. It’s a collaborative fiction writing tool. You open up the app and choose a genre, like horror, humor, chick lit, or any of a bunch more. And then you’re given a title, and you write a short story based on that title and within the scope of the genre you chose. The neat part is that you can collaborate on the story with up to 3 other people, and each person is limited to only 280 characters. So you write 280 characters and then it’s someone else’s turn to write another 280 characters, and you keep writing back and forth until you’re done or until you’ve reached a pre-set length.

For someone like me who is crap at writing fiction, this is a great way to get the creative juices flowing. Maybe you like a resulting story so much that you decide to flesh it out into a novella or even novel. But if not, you’ve worked your creative muscle, which is never a bad thing.

Final words

And that’s all for episode 24 of the Digital Publishing Podcast. Be sure to check out digitalpublishingpodcast.com for complete transcriptions and other blog posts there at the blog.

DPP023: Writing Under a Pen Name, Collaborating on a Blog, and 3 More Ideas

Tristan — Thu, 11 Apr 2013 13:02:34 +0000

In this episode of the Digital Publishing Podcast (which you can find a full transcript of below), I cover 5 topics, from writing ebooks under a pen name to why I’ve recently been collaborating on a blog.

You can also listen to the episode online by clicking the play button on the player below this. (If you don’t see the player, click here.) It’s about 15 minutes long.

1:07 – 1. Writing under pen names
4:23 – 2. Blog collaboration
7:01 – 3. An email newsletter tip
8:01 – 4. Some Kindle Notes
11:09 – 5. Better guest posts
12:17 – Featured podcast
13:13 – Featured digital publishing tool

DPP023: Writing Under a Pen Name, Collaborating on a Blog, and 3 More Ideas

Hey everyone, I’m Tristan Higbee, and this show is all about the things I see and would like to see in the world of digital publishing, from blogging to ebooks to membership sites and more, plus things related to internet business and online marketing. At the end of the podcast I’ll mention my picks for this week’s featured podcast and featured tool for digital publishers. You can find a full transcript of each episode of the Digital Publishing Podcast at DigitalPublishingPodcast.com.

Ok! I’ve got 5 topics to talk about today, so let’s get started. This podcast will be a bit shorter than usual, and I will be traveling a lot next week, so know that there may or may not be an episode next week. If not, I apologize in advance.

1. Writing under pen names

I recently got an email from someone asking me about writing using pen names. Here’s the question:

“What do you think about pen names for fiction or nonfiction writing? Even “real” publishers expect their authors to promote themselves in interviews and social media. What if you want to hide behind a pen name?”

And here was my response.

I currently write my books under my real name and two pen names. The ones under my real name are ones that are more or less professional. They’re nonfiction books about the things that I have a lot of experience with. The ones under one of my pen names (T.H. Wilde) are for fun. Those books include a couple children’s books and a book of poetry, and I think I even say on the Amazon author profile that it’s the pen name of Tristan Higbee. I don’t care that people know that T.H. Wilde is Tristan Higbee, but I don’t want my zombie book for kids showing up in the search results when people search my name.

And then I have a series of other books that are all in a very specific niche that I wrote mainly just to make money from, and those I wrote under a pen name. No one knows that that person is me.

As far as social media and interviews go, I don’t see pen names as a problem. If you want your real identity to remain unknown, you can just create new social media profiles, email addresses, etc. for the pen name. You could do audio and text interviews without any problem, but I guess you’d have to wear a mask or something for any video interview, and that’s just weird. That’s the only issue I see.

As far as pen names and Amazon go, you can have two pen names, complete with their own individual Amazon author profiles, in addition to your real name. So if people click on the name T.H. Wilde on one of the books I’ve written under that name, they’ll go to the page that shows my bio and the other books I’ve written under that name. If you want to use more than the two pen names, you can without a problem, but you can’t create separate author profiles for them. In that case, if your pen name is Jane Smith and someone clicks on the name Jane Smith on your book’s page, they’ll be taken to an Amazon page that shows the results for all books written by people named Jane Smith, not just you.

2. Blog collaboration

I recently started a new blog with a friend of mine. It’s called Gripped and it’s at gripped.org. I’m really interested in what’s going on in different parts of the world, and my friend, who I first met in Moscow 13 years ago and then re-met in Utah when we became rock climbing partners, is always sharing interesting news articles about various places on Facebook. So I sent him a message on Facebook, asking him if he wanted to start a blog with me, where we both just share links to the cool articles we come across. He said yes, so I set up the site and we’ve been both been posting to it daily since.

It’s a simple Tumblr link blog and will never be anything more than a fun side project, but even so, this is the first time I’ve ever done a collaborative blog like this, and it’s great. The blog gets updated without me doing anything! That’s a new experience for me!

The only other time I’ve really worked with someone else on a project is when I wrote a children’s book called Vegesaurus Rex, about a tyrannosaurus rex who’s a vegetarian. I wrote it and a friend of mine illustrated it. That worked out great, too, because though I could do and have done my own illustrations, I much prefer the writing side of things.

I’m a very independent person and like doing things myself and being in total control, but I’m slowly warming up to the idea of collaboration. Neither one of those two projects I talked about, though, makes any significant money, and I doubt either one ever will. While I like how collaboration takes some of the burden off of my shoulders, I’m less enthused about having to split up any earnings with someone else. Still, I could see myself doing something like writing an ebook with someone else in the future.

Like I said, this collaboration thing is new to me, but I like it so far, and I’d recommend that anyone else who is fiercely and happily independent and a control freak like I am finds a side project to work on with someone else. You might like it and you might hate it, but at least you’ll know.

3. An email newsletter tip

I don’t remember where I saw this recently, but I read that in the first email you send to people when they sign up to your mailing list, you should ask the person to email you back and introduce themselves and let them know that you’d love to hear back from them. I think this is a great idea, and its is definitely something I’m going to do for my email lists.

One thing I DO do when I send out new editions of my newsletter is at the end say something like, “I’d love to hear about what you’ve been up to or got done in the last week. Just hit reply to this email and tell me about it.” That actually works really well. It’s fun hearing about what people are up to, and a lot of people reply back with questions that I can help them with, that I can also answer here on the podcast or in a blog post.

4. Some Kindle notes

Here are a few random notes about Kindle ebook publishing. One of the ebooks that I wrote and published last month is called 101 Travel Tips. I mentioned two episodes ago that I recorded an audio version of the book and included a download link and password in the book for free. On the cover of the book is the book’s title and subtitle, “101 Travel Tips: The Essential Guide to Making the Most of Your Adventures.” To highlight the fact that the ebook comes with an audiobook, I included the words “Free Free Audio Version” in a little circular badge thing on the cover, and in the official title of the book on Amazon, I included “Free Audio Version” in parentheses. About a week after I published the book, I got an email from Amazon saying that I had to change the title of the book because it contained “extra descriptive content.” The email went on to say:

“Extra descriptive content in your book’s title field that is not part of your book’s actual title can be distracting or misleading to our customers. Your book’s title field should only contain the actual title of your book as it appears on your book’s cover and would appear on the spine of your book. Examples of items that are prohibited in the title field include but are not limited to unauthorized reference to other authors or titles, advertisements, or reference to sales rank. If you would like to provide information that describes your book or its content, you may include it in the product’s description.”

So that makes sense and isn’t a huge deal, but I wonder if I could have gotten away with it if I had made it part of the book’s subtitle on the cover. It’s something I might try in the future, but we’ll see.

If you listened to last week’s episode, you’ll remember that I gave away that travel tips book and my travel apps book for two days. In the past, I’ve given my books away for only one day at a time. This was the first time I’d done two days. By the end of the first day, both books were in the top 10 free travel books, with one at #1 and the other at #7, and both stayed in the top 10 for the whole of the second day, even though there were actually fewer downloads on that second day than there were the first day. I’m guessing that those sales rankings have got to be cumulative to at least a tiny degree for them to stay there in the top 10. I guess now I’ll have to try 3 and 4 days and see how those work out.

5. Better guest posts

I know that some people aren’t fans of reading guest posts on the blogs they like, read, and subscribe to. It’s one reason why I don’t allow guest posts on my blogs. The idea is that you subscribe to a blog to hear one person’s take on a subject, and you don’t want someone else to hijack the blog.

I read a guest post on author Tim Ferris’s blog the other day, and I really liked the way that Tim handled it. Throughout the length of the other person’s article are brief comments in brackets made by Tim. The result is that you read this great article written by someone with expertise that Tim doesn’t have, so it’s information you normally wouldn’t get, but you still get Tim’s opinions on what the person wrote. It’s the best of both worlds.

Featured podcast and tool

And now it’s time for this week’s featured podcast and featured tool for digital publishers. If this is your first time listening to the show or if you’ve been wondering how the featured podcast I talk about each week relates to digital publishing, it doesn’t. It’s just a podcast that I like and want to share. Having said that, this week’s featured podcast is called How to Do Everything [link]. It’s a pretty random show. There’s no general theme from episode to episode or even within episodes, but as the name suggests, the podcast is all about how to do various things, from how to rescue a deer stuck on a floating piece of ice to how to fly a jet fighter. The hosts usually interview people that have done these things, and there are usually a few different topics in each episode. Each episode is generally 15 to 30 minutes long, and a new episode comes out roughly every week. Check it out at howtodoeverything.org.

My pick for this week’s featured tool for digital publishers is a WordPress plugin called FooBar [link]. This is not a free plugin. It’s $16 at codecanyon.net. You might be familiar with a service called HelloBar. It displays a bar across the top of your website with a message of some kind on it, like “Click here to like this page on Facebook,” or “Click here to download my free ebook.” Something like that. HelloBar is great, but they charge a monthly fee once you get above a certain number of pageviews. They do have one that you can pay a one-time $29 fee for, but it’s not a WordPress plugin, even though there is apparently a workaround to get it on your WordPress blog. But FooBar is a great alternative. It’s a one-time $16 fee and you can have an unlimited number of bars on an unlimited number of websites. I’ve been using it for several months now on fkb.me, which is my free Kindle book website, and it works great. Again, head on over to CodeCanyon.net and search for Foobar.

Final words

And that’s all for episode 23 of the Digital Publishing Podcast. Be sure to check out digitalpublishingpodcast.com for complete transcriptions and other blog posts there at the blog.

DPP022: Monetizing Your Free Time, Measuring Opportunity Costs, SMS Alerts, and 4 More Ideas

Tristan — Thu, 04 Apr 2013 12:01:18 +0000

In this episode of the Digital Publishing Podcast (which you can find a full transcript of below), I cover 7 topics from thinking in terms of opportunity costs to a great use for SMS alerts.

You can also listen to the episode online by clicking the play button on the player below this. (If you don’t see the player, click here.) It’s about 18 minutes long.

My two latest Kindle books are free today and tomorrow (Thursday and Friday)

They’re free because I want people to leave reviews, so please, leave a review on the books that you download. I’d really appreciate it. Note that the books may not be free in all countries.

And now back to the podcast…

1:41 - 1. Measuring with opportunity costs
4:02 – 2. Monetize your free time
5:24 - 3. 1000 Awesome Things
7:27 - 4. SMS alerts
9:19 - 5. Things I think
10:37 - 6. Rapid fire interviews
11:37 - 7. Why I prefer writing ebooks to blogging
13:56 - Featured podcast
15:04 - Featured tool

DPP022: Monetizing Your Free Time, Measuring Opportunity Costs, SMS Alerts, and 4 More Ideas

Before we get started here I just want to say that two of my most recent Kindle ebooks are free on Thursday and Friday, April 4th and 5th. That’s the day this episode goes live and the day after. The books are 101 Travel Tips and 101 Travel Apps. You can find links to both of those by going to DigitalPublishingPodcast.com and clicking on episode 22. I’d really appreciate it if you downloaded the books, shared the links with your friends, and especially left a review for the books. That would be a big help to me and hey, you get free stuff. It’s a win-win. Thanks.

Hey everyone, I’m Tristan Higbee, and this show is all about the things I see and would like to see in the world of digital publishing, from blogging to ebooks to membership sites and more, plus things related to internet business and online marketing. At the end of the podcast I’ll mention my picks for this week’s featured podcast and featured tool for digital publishers. You can find a full transcript of each episode of the Digital Publishing Podcast at DigitalPublishingPodcast.com.

Ok! I’ve got 7 topics to talk about today, so let’s get started.

1. Measuring with opportunity costs

An opportunity cost is what you give up when you choose to do something else. I’ve been thinking a ton about opportunity costs in the last few weeks, and it’s changed the way I work more than almost anything else that I’ve done recently. Every time I think about doing something that isn’t related to my work, I think about the time that I would spend doing that non-work thing and think about what work I could get done instead.

For example, I usually have a handful of TV shows that I watch every week, but I’ve barely been watching any for the past month or so. Every time I want to watch something, I think about what work I could do instead and weigh the two. Would I rather spend 50 minutes watching the Walking Dead, or would I rather have another thousand words written in my ebook. In this particular case, the Walking Dead wins out because I freaking love the show, but for nearly everything else, I’d rather spend that time writing and get an extra thousand words in.

We hear a lot about your work should be your passion, and there are a lot of nuances and asterisks to that statement that I won’t get into now, but when you’d rather work than watch TV, you can get a lot of work done. You feel totally spent by the end of the day, but it’s a really good feeling. In the month of March I fully wrote and published two new Kindle books, one was 26,000 words long and the other was almost 18,000 words long. I also recorded a full audio version of the 26,000 word ebook, and I also launched a couple new websites. The recipe here is threefold:

doing things you really enjoy doing,
having your butt in the chair for twelve or fourteen hours a day,
always thinking about the opportunity costs of distractions and other activities.

2. Monetize your free time

There’s a pretty popular blog called Postmasculine that I don’t read, but I did read one of the articles there that came up in my Twitter feed. The article was titled 33 Things Every Aspiring Entrepreneur Should Know, and the second point in the article really stuck out to me, and goes along with what I was just talking about regarding opportunity costs. The second point was to monetize your free time, and here’s an excerpt of what came after that:

“If it feels like you’re giving up your free time to work on a second job, then youíre screwed before you even start. Take what you love to do anyway—basketball stat analysis, home gardening, furniture carving, whatever—and simply monetize that. That’s your most obvious starting point.”

It’s not quite as easy as “simply monetize that,” but again, this idea of doing things that you really do enjoy doing is so important. Instead of “needing” to carve out an hour here and there to work on your project, you need to carve out an hour from working on your project to eat or bathe. That’s when you know you’re on to something that you can stick with.

3. 1000 Awesome Things

I ran across a great site this week called 1000 Awesome Things. It’s a daily countdown of 1000 awesome things, and every day a new awesome thing is posted to the site. These are usually experiences, and they range from watching something download really fast to the feeling of wearing your favorite old, comfy t-shirt. There have actually been two countdowns from 1000 that have already been completed, and the person behind the blog turned each batch of a thousand into a book, creating The Book of Awesome and The Book of Even More Awesome, both of which became bestsellers. There is also The Book of Holiday Awesome, The App of Awesome, The Calendar of Awesome, and The Journal of Awesome.

All of those stemmed from the blog. According to the author’s bio on Amazon, he has an office job, but I wouldn’t be surprised if he makes the equivalent of a full time living off of all of these things. This model where you write a series of posts and then turn them all into a book is a fantastic one, and one that I think could be applied to a ton of different niches. An obvious one that comes to mind first is travel. You could make something along the lines those 1,000 Places to See Before You Die books. You could do it for songs. You could do it for famous people in sports, or interesting buildings, or businesses that you think are unique, or photos of amazing graffiti or classic paintings. It could be anything.

The number doesn’t have to be 1000, either, and you don’t have to blog about it every day. You could do it once a week for a year and then create a book of 52 awesome paintings or interesting buildings or whatever.

4. SMS alerts

Back in the day when I was commenting on tons and tons of blogs in order to get traffic, I remember buying a little program for Windows that alerted me whenever a new Problogger post went live, because then I could go be one of the first commenters on the blog and get a bit more traffic because my comment was higher up.

I’m not that crazy about commenting these days, but I’ve been using something in that same vein for the last couple weeks. Last month I created Travel Knowledge Database, which is a site that curates and indexes articles from about 140 different travel blogs. I mentioned it in a previous episode of the podcast. Every day I come across a couple travel-related blog posts that I want to comment on and I do. I’ve been keeping an eye on my stats and noticed that I consistently get more traffic through the comments on some blogs more than others. And so I figured hey, if I’m going to comment on these blogs, I might as well be the first one to do it and maybe eke out an extra click or two. So I set up an alert using IFTTT. IFTTT (ifttt.com) is something that you’ve heard me talk about in almost every recent episode, and it’s one of my favorite online tools. I set up a couple alerts so that whenever a new post on one of those blogs goes live, I get sent a text message. When I get the message, I go to the site, read the article, and leave a comment if I have something to say.

This might not make a huge amount of difference, but I am convinced that it does equate into at least some extra clickthroughs.

5. Things I think

I recently saw a blog post by an angel investor named David Lee where he mentioned a weekly column by Sports Illustrated writer Peter King, and the column is called Ten Things I Think I Think. I actually couldn’t find any good links to King’s columns, but David Lee, the angel investor, created his own Ten Things I Think I Think article. He wrote about ten things he thinks about the technology and startup spaces, like how Google is the LeBron James of technology and that 3D printers are overyhyped in the short term but underhyped in the long term.

I really like this “things I think” blog post format. It makes clear that you’re not making bold predictions or assumptions, and you don’t necessarily need to go into a ton of detail that back up what you’re saying; it’s just what you think. Because you’ll probably be creating a list of these, you can just write a couple sentences about each one. It’s a good way to get ideas out that probably don’t warrant their own separate blog posts.

6. Rapid fire interviews

I’ve noticed a trend of blog interviews that consist of many questions that are designed to be answered in just a phrase, or a couple sentences at most. Most of the interviews consist of the same set of questions emailed to different people, who then respond to the same set of questions. Travel blogger Johnny Jet calls them his Travel Style series of interviews. Copyblogger has a How person X writes series.

These types of interviews are great for everyone involved. It doesn’t take forever for the interviewee to answer the questions, there are enough questions that the readers find them interesting and helpful, and all the interviewer has to do is email some predetermined questions.

7. Why I prefer writing ebooks to blogging

Last week I read a blog post by Craig McBreen titled Hey blogger: Please don’t quit. He talks about how before you quit a blog, think about all of the thousands of hours you’ve spent and why you started the blog in the first place. And that you should ignore the “success” you see others have, because who knows if they’re really as successful as they make themselves out to be.

I love blogging, and I’ve been doing it for almost ten years. But Craig said something in the article that I think highlights why I now spend more of my time these days writing ebooks than I do blogging. He said:

“With blogging, there is no finish line.”

That right there is the beauty of blogging and also the reason why so many people quit their blogs. It’s great that a blog can be a continuous thing that grows with you over time. But it’s bad that there’s no finish line because you feel like you always have to do more. Always get more subscribers, always write more blog posts. With ebooks, there is a defined finish line. You get to a point where you are done with an ebook. When it’s published, you’re done. As someone who has trouble focusing on one thing for a long time because I have a lot of ideas and interests, creating ebooks is something that very much gels with my personality. I like being able to say, “Ok, I’m done, and now I can move on to something else that interests me just as much.” And the great thing is that it never gets old.

So my recommendation is yes, to blog. I love blogging and I will never stop blogging. But pick up some projects that have distinct starts and finishes. The feeling of accomplishment is great, and it takes pressure off of your blogging. Blogging becomes fun again instead of a chore.

Featured podcast and digital publishing tool

And now it’s time for this week’s featured podcast and featured digital publishing tool. My pick for featured podcast is called the Russian Rulers History Podcast [link]. I think that the first time I had a podcast pick of the week was in episode three of this podcast, and it was for the amazing History of Rome podcast. The Russian Rulers History Podcast is a similar style of podcast. In roughly every episode, the host talks about a different Russian ruler, though it can often take a few episodes to get through one ruler. As of recording this, there are 112 episodes and the podcast has gotten as far as Boris Yeltsin and the collapse of the Soviet Union.

I’ve been to Russia and lived in Ukraine for two years and Kazakhstan for six months, and will be heading to the former Soviet republic of Georgia next month. So Russia is a place near and dear to my heart, but this is a great podcast that should also be interesting to people who like history in general.

My pick for featured digital publishing tool of the week is called Compfight [link]. That’s one word, and it’s at compfight.com. It’s a search engine for photo sharing site Flickr. The great thing is that the photos are all under creative commons licenses, meaning photos that you can use in blog posts. You can also have it show only photos that can be used for commercial purposes. I’ve written a couple posts this last week that I needed photos for, so I went to Compfight, typed in the words, and easily found a couple photos to use. It’s great, and it’s easier to use than the default Flickr search. Just be aware that the top couple rows of photos that show up in the search results are stock photos that you have to pay for; they link to Shutterstock and iStockPhoto. Below that are the rows of Flickr photos.

You could also use the site to get travel photo inspiration. If you’re going to Moscow and want to see what kinds of photos other people are taking of Moscow, go to Compfight, type in Moscow, and see what photos come up. Compfight also has a free WordPress plugin, making it easy to find and insert Flickr photos right from the WordPress new post screen. I tried it and it does work pretty well. It’s easy to use.

Final words

And that’s all for episode 22 of the Digital Publishing Podcast. Be sure to check out digitalpublishingpodcast.com for complete transcriptions and other blog posts there at the blog. And remember that my two travel ebooks are free today and tomorrow if you’re listening to this on the day the podcast goes live or the day after. Just go to DigitalPublishingPodcast.com, click on episode 22, and look for the links.

Note: This article contains a handful of Amazon affiliate links. If you click through and buy something on Amazon, I make a very small commission. This in no way affects your shopping experience.

Hmmm… A Third of Amazon’s Top Free Nonfiction Kindle Books Are Novels

Tristan — Mon, 01 Apr 2013 12:35:55 +0000

As a nonfiction author, I was curious about which types of books made up the bulk of Amazon’s 100 bestselling nonfiction ebooks, and the results were surprising.

First I looked at the free books. Here’s the breakdown:

What really surprised me is that there are 32 fiction books in the free nonfiction bestseller list. Most of those books are historical romance novels or Christian fiction, though a couple were regular old mysteries or thrillers. That’s almost a third of the top 100.

Then I looked at the top 100 paid Kindle books and found that there were 15 fiction books in the paid nonfiction bestseller list. Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged was among these. There is something wrong here. Atlas Shrugged is not a work of nonfiction. Historical romance novels set in the 1800s are not works of nonfiction.

This bothers me both as a nonfiction author and nonfiction reader. As a nonfiction author, I’m annoyed that fiction books are taking up some of the coveted top 100 bestseller spaces. As a consumer of nonfiction, I’m annoyed that I’m seeing romance novels when I’m looking for, well, nonfiction.

I love you, Amazon, but when this…

… is the #1 bestseller in free Kindle nonfiction (which it was as of writing this), there’s a real problem.

DPP021: Curating Whole Websites, Using Multiple Browsers, and 5 More Ideas

Tristan — Thu, 28 Mar 2013 12:27:00 +0000

In this episode of the Digital Publishing Podcast (which you can find a full transcript of below), I cover 7 topics from the lost art of curating entire websites to a great reason to have and use multiple browsers.

You can also listen to the episode online by clicking the play button on the player right below this. (If you don’t see the player, click here.) It’s about 18 minutes long.

0:59 – 1. Curating websites
2:48 – 2. The Short Cutts
5:17 – 3. Getting mentioned
7:56 – 4. Niche travels revisited
9:19 – 5. A good use of different browsers
10:53 – 6. Nonstandard refunds
12:48 – 7. The easiest blog post ideas
16:09 – Featured podcast
16:45 – Featured digital publishing tool

DPP021: Curating Whole Websites, Using Multiple Browsers, and 5 More Ideas

Hey everyone, I’m Tristan Higbee, and this show is all about the things I see and would like to see in the world of digital publishing, from blogging to ebooks to membership sites and more, plus things related to internet business and online marketing. At the end of the podcast I’ll mention my picks for this week’s featured podcast and featured tool for digital publishers. You can find a full transcript of each episode of the Digital Publishing Podcast at DigitalPublishingPodcast.com.

Ok! I’ve got 7 topics to talk about today, so let’s get started.

1. Curating websites

Curation is one of my favorite things to talk about on this podcast, but most of the time I talk about curating individual bits of content—things like videos, blog posts, and articles. But what about curating good websites themselves? I have a friend who is really into lifestyle design. He could create a blog or newsletter that highlights different lifestyle design blogs and websites. If I were into lifestyle design, that is definitely a blog or newsletter I would subscribe to. If I were really into mountain biking, I could find and share the best sites related to mountain biking. You could do this for a lot of different niches.

I know that several years ago there were sites that would link to one cool site every day, and I just found one of them called CoolPick.com that hasn’t been updated since 2008. On the site there it says, “coolpick.com quit picking sites in June 2008. digg.com, reddit.com, [and others] have certainly relegated daily pick sites to the dustbin of history.” I don’t think that’s true. I am a very avid user of Reddit and go there multiple times every day. It’s a great way to find individual interesting articles or photos, but not so good for finding whole new sites. I think that more niched versions of those daily pick sites would be great nowadays, though picking a new site every single day might be a bit much. You could do it on a once-a-week or couple-times-a-week schedule and I still think people would think it was a valuable resource.

2. The Short Cutts

I ran across a really cool website recently. It’s called The Short Cutts, and there are two T’s in “Cutts.” It’s at TheShortCutts.com. So there’s a guy named Matt Cutts who is the head of webspam at Google. This means that he is the guy who talks about SEO, what is good and bad from Google’s point of view, and what website owners should and shouldn’t do. He’s recorded a ton of YouTube videos in which he answers people’s SEO questions, and here’s the pitch or extended tagline of the Short Cutts website:

“Since early 2009 Google’s Matt Cutts has recorded a superhuman number of videos to help struggling site owners understand their site in search. While the videos are great, sometimes the guy just needs to get to the point. With that in mind we’ve done the hard work and watched every Matt Cutts video to pull out simple, concise versions of his answers.”

So if you go to the site, you’ll see a grid of video thumbnails. Below each thumbnail is the question Matt is answering in the video, like “Will Google suspect that useful links on our site are paid?” And then below each question is the brief version of the answer Matt gives, and this answer was pulled from the video by the people that made the Short Cutts site. So in the case of the “Will Google suspect that useful links on our site are paid?” question, the answer is just “No.” This is great because it saves you from watching the whole video (which in this case is 2:10 long), though you can still click on the thumbnail to watch the video if you’re interested and gain a bit more depth of insight into the answer.

This kind of site is a great resource for anyone interested in SEO, and I think that this is a format that could be carried over to subjects other than SEO. Find videos about a niche you’re interested in and distill down their essence into a short statement or sentence or couple of sentences.

And this could also be done for things other than videos, things like blog posts or even books.

3. Getting mentioned

This American Life is currently the #1 podcast in iTunes (or in the US iTunes store, anyway). It’s massively popular, and really awesome. It’s probably my #1 favorite podcast. Each week they choose a different theme and then there are a handful of really interesting true stories related to that theme.

A couple weeks ago in episode 233, the theme was “Starting from Scratch,” and one of the stories was about a guy who wanted to start a new cable TV channel called The Puppy Channel. It would just be all puppies all the time. No TV shows, just footage of puppies being their adorable little selves. ThePuppyChannel.com is mentioned in the podcast episode. I listened to this episode of This American Life the night it came out, and went to ThePuppyChannel.com right away to look at the site. At the time, the site had 1,167 likes on Facebook, and again, that was right after the episode came out. Now, a week and a half later, the site has 1,387 likes. So here you’ve got the single most popular podcast in America mentioning your site (and even linking to it from thisamericanlife.org), and your Facebook page only gets about 200 new likes. The podcast has millions of listeners, but the Puppy Channel gets only 200 new likes. That’s a surprisingly small amount,

This goes to show that audience size isn’t everything. I remember guest posting on a really, really popular blog but getting surprisingly little traffic from that blog. On the other hand, I’ve gotten more traffic back to my site from guest posting on smaller blogs that have engaged audiences, that don’t have huge audiences but still get dozens of comments more than much larger blogs. I think audience engagement is as important as audience size, if not more so, and of course how targeted the audience is is also really important. So keep all of those things in mind when considering what sites to guest post on or even just comment on.

4. Niche travels revisited

Last week in episode 20, I talked about an idea I had for a niche travel blog. The idea was to write about strange and interesting statues in various parts of the world, the logic behind that being that it’s interesting content that you don’t already see on a million other travel blogs, so it’s the kind of blog that would stand out in what is a crowded niche.

At the time I didn’t have a good existing example of a narrow-niche-broad-appeal site to point to, but I found one this past week. It’s called Go Big or Go Home, and it’s at gobigorgohomeblog.com. The blog documents the adventures of a family that goes and sees the biggest whatevers in a state or in the world. Like the world’s biggest tooth or New Jersey’s tallest lighthouse, that kind of stuff. I love this. This is such a freaking good idea for a travel blog because again, it’s something different but also something inherently interesting. And other people seem to like it, too, because it was voted one of the 13 best travel blogs for 2013. I just wanted to mention that in case you were left kind of scratching your head after last episode.

5. A good use of different browsers

I was talking with my friend Sean the other day. Sean is an American who lives here in Cozumel with his wife and three kids. He runs an online marketing company called Social Rocketship and writes about family-focused lifestyle design at his blog Family Rocketship. I was over at his house and we both had our computers out and he mentioned that he uses different browsers for his different sites. He uses one browser (like Firefox) for all of his Social Rocketship logins and another (like Chrome) for his Family Rocketship logins. This is a really good idea, and I’m kind of mad that I haven’t been doing this. It’ll save you from having to log in and out of multiple Google accounts, Twitter accounts, or any other accounts. This is definitely something I’m going to start doing now. It might not be a huge deal for sites like Twitter and Facebook because there are already tools out there like Buffer and Hootsuite that make it easy to manage multiple accounts. But for things like Scribd, Slideshare, Pinterest, or YouTube, it’s not so easy, and using different browsers for your different sites is a great way to make all of that a lot easier.

6. Non-standard refunds

Apple’s iTunes App Store has a no refunds policy. I guess the idea is that at the end of the day, you’re only out a dollar or two anyway, and a bad experience will motivate you to go rate and review the app. But as I was browsing apps this last week, I came across one company that does offer returns. It was on Jimbl Software’s Ultimate Checklist app. In the app description, they said:

“We offer [a] 100% refund (via PayPal) if you do not like our app. Just email us at iphone@jimbl.com. Before leaving a negative review, do give us an opportunity to address your concerns. We are here to help you.”

This is really interesting, because this comes out of the developer’s pocket. Since Apple doesn’t do refunds, that refund money comes straight from the developer. I’ve downloaded a couple hundred apps, but this is the first time I’ve seen something like this. I don’t know if in practice it really does keep people from writing one-star reviews, but it probably has kept some people from doing that.

I think it’s a great way to differentiate your app or any other low-priced product like an ebook and give people a bit more confidence in what they’re buying. Amazon does have 7-day refunds on its ebooks, but you could go a step above and say that you’ll offer an extended refund policy if they provide proof of purchase. And on top of the fact that it might stop people from writing a bad review, you’d get really valuable feedback from the people who bought and didn’t like your product. That’s feedback you could use to make the product even better.

7. The easiest blog post ideas

In a few months, I’ll have been blogging for ten years. I’ve written thousands of blog posts and probably millions of words on various blogs over the years, and have even compiled what I think is the world’s largest collection of blog post ideas (which will be included in my site Osmosio when it launches in about a month and a half, so stay tuned for that). Along the way, I’ve figured out the easiest way to come up with a lot of blog post ideas, and that’s to come up with recurring features. These are categories of things that you talk about on a regular and recurring basis.

Let’s say you blog about rock climbing. Your recurring features could be climbing areas, favorite climbs, gear reviews, climbing tips, and climbing videos. That’s five different topics or categories. Can you come up with a dozen things to talk about under each one of those? Like a dozen climbing areas, favorite climbs, or climbing tips? If so, you’ve just come up with three months worth of blog posts of blogging five times a week. If you only want to blog twice a week, have six different categories of things to write about, and can brainstorm only a dozen things to write about for each of those, you’ve got enough blog post ideas for 36 weeks. That’s more than 8 months of blog fodder, and it probably only took you 5 minutes of brainstorming.

So again, first come up with ideas for recurring features or categories. As many or few as you want. Then make a list of more specific ideas for each category. Then rotate your posting schedule. Write one post from one category on one day, another from another category the next day you want to publish, and so on. In addition to that, you can add or remove categories as you get or use up more ideas. Keep rotating your way through the different categories and keep adding new ideas to the categories, and you’ll never run out of stuff to blog about.

A lot of bloggers do do this. A lot of travel bloggers, for example, have a video of the week or photo of the week. Popular travel blogger Johnny Jet has a product of the week. Other sites have quotes of the week or tips of the week. Even if you don’t want to have your whole blog and all of your posts be on a rotating topic schedule, just having a weekly feature like the weekly quote or weekly review will make it easier and less stressful to come up with blog post ideas.

Featured podcast and tool

And now it’s time for this week’s featured podcast and featured digital publishing tool. My pick for featured podcast is called Smart People Podcast [link]. There are two hosts to the podcast and they interview smart people about their respective areas of expertise. There’s no real thread that connects the interviewees other than that they’re smart, and that’s what makes this podcast so interesting. You never know who you’re going to get with the next episode. There are about 80 episodes, and you can check out the podcast at smartpeoplepodcast.com.

My pick for featured digital publishing tool of the week is The Noun Project, at thenounproject.org. The goal of the site is to essentially create a visual dictionary of every noun in the English language (and many other languages), but each image is a simple black icon. You can download the icons for free and edit them in a vector graphics program like Adobe Illustrator or Inkscape. The images can be used for free if you credit the designer and The Noun Project, or you can pay $1.99 if you don’t want to credit anyone. I’ve used these icons in the past on ebook covers and in website logos. The Noun Project recently started making you create an account before you can download the images, which is pretty annoying, but still, this is a great resource to know about.

Final words

And that’s all for episode 21 of the Digital Publishing Podcast. Be sure to check out digitalpublishingpodcast.com for complete transcriptions and other blog posts there at the blog.

DPP020: Books As Podcasts, Narrow Niches, Separate Twitter Accounts, and 4 More Ideas

Tristan — Thu, 21 Mar 2013 12:05:23 +0000

In this episode of the Digital Publishing Podcast (which you can find a full transcript of below), I cover 7 topics from using podcasts to sell books to why you should consider having multiple Twitter accounts.

You can also listen to the episode online by clicking the play button on the player right below this. (If you don’t see the player, click here.) It’s about 18 minutes long.

1:00 – 1. eBook Growth
2:46 – 2. Books as podcasts
5:27 – 3. Subscription boxes
7:18 – 4. Digital subscription boxes
8:57 – 5. How niche can you go?
12:17 – 6. Separate Twitter accounts
14:44 – 7. A blog post idea
16:14 – Featured podcast
16:47 – Featured tool

DPP020: Books As Podcasts, Narrow Niches, Separate Twitter Accounts, and 4 More Ideas

Hey everyone, I’m Tristan Higbee, and this show is all about the things I see and would like to see in the world of digital publishing, from blogging to ebooks to membership sites and more, plus things related to internet business and online marketing. At the end of the podcast I’ll mention my picks for this week’s featured podcast and featured tool for digital publishers. You can find a full transcript of each episode of the Digital Publishing Podcast at DigitalPublishingPodcast.com.

If you’d like to see this podcast keep going, please rate it in iTunes. Go to itunes.digitalpublishingpodcast.com and then click the blue “Rate in iTunes” button in the left sidebar to pull up the podcast in iTunes so you can rate and review it, and it’ll only take a minute or two. Ok! I’ve got 7 topics to talk about today, so let’s get started.

1. eBook growth

People ask me fairly regularly about the ebook market as a whole. Is it worth writing ebooks? Is the market saturated? Are ebooks a fad? Those are the underlying questions that people are wondering about.

And I often read articles about how much and how fast the ebook market is growing, but I never remember the exact details to tell people. Well, I just came across an article this morning that said that the US ebook market grew 44% last year and 46% the year before that. And the vast majority of people I know in the US still do not read ebooks, so that should be an indicator of still how much room for growth there is.

If it’s growing that much in the US, I’d expect that it’s growing even more in other countries where the notion of ebooks is even newer than in the US. For example, TechCrunch reported a couple weeks ago that Thai ebook provider Ookbee adds 6,000 new users every day.

Ebooks aren’t going away. This isn’t a fad that we’re seeing; it’s a fundamental paradigm shift. I’ve said before and I’ll say again that I believe at no point in the future will there be more paper books being read than right now. That number will only decline, and number of ebooks being read will only increase.

2. Books as podcasts

One interesting way to promote anything is to create a podcast version of a book. I know that the authors of Yesterday’s Gone, which is a super popular sci-fi series and who co-host the Self Publishing Podcast, are currently working on turning the first book of the series into a podcast. The idea is that people run across the podcast in iTunes, listen to the book, get hooked, and then buy the rest of the books in the series. The iTunes store is where most people find podcasts, and it’s like the Kindle store in that there is built-in traffic there. People will naturally find your podcast. It’s passive marketing that you won’t have to touch too much.

You don’t have to necessarily be an author with an extensive back catalog to do something like this. You could write a new ebook or compile a series of blog posts, read and record them, turn them into a 10-part or 20-part or however-many-part podcast, and then use that to promote your business, your product, services, your website or blog, or whatever else you want to promote. If you already have an ebook, maybe you could even make the first half or quarter of it free as a podcast and then charge for the full book. I don’t know if anyone is currently doing that, but I think it’s a really interesting idea. I know that there are free books on Amazon that are the first few chapters of a larger book.

There is a site called Podiobooks (which is a fantastic name), and that’s at podiobooks.com. The site’s tagline is “Free audio books in serialized form,” and I’d actually never heard about it until earlier today when I was doing some research for this podcast. But it’s an awesome site. It lists a ton of audiobooks that you can listen to for free, and these aren’t public domain audiobooks like from Librivox. These are new, original books. There are nearly 400 books on the site, so it’s a great resource to know about as a listener, but also one that I’d love to investigate more as an author. You can submit your own book to the site once it’s recorded.

3. Subscription boxes

I don’t fish, but Mystery Tackle Box is a great concept.

Have you noticed the trend of monthly subscription boxes or things sent to you? Some of these services will send you new underwear or socks. Others will send a box of sample items. Others are things geared toward kids. There’s a service called Mystery Tackle Box, and they send you an assorted handful of fishing lures to try every month.

There are tons and tons of these types of services now. I recently came across another one called Trail Box. It’s for trail runners. The description on their site says,

Are you a trail runner? Do your thoughts drift off to running in the mountains during the workday? Do you want to try new products that cater to trail running? If the answer is YES, Trail Box is for you. Trail Box is a monthly service that delivers a curated selection of products right to your door. It’s not a box of bars and gels – it’s a lifestyle-driven selection of the latest tools and tastes to enhance your time on and off the trails.

I love this. It’s only $10 a month, and a lot of these subscription services are under $30 a month. That’s not a whole lot to people who are really into their hobbies and interests. I think this is one of the most interesting online business models out there right now, and it could be done for just about every hobby, niche, and interest I can think of. I found a nice site called Subscription Boxes that lists a whole bunch of these types of monthly services that you can browse and get ideas from.

4. Digital subscription boxes

So could you take this concept of monthly subscription boxes and apply it to the digital world? Well, yeah. That’s essentially what a lot of membership sites are, right? But could you do it for just something like ebooks or audio content? I think so, and there are probably examples out there of people doing that that I don’t know of. If you write an ebook a month, you could include that and some extras every month for a fee, like shorter content every week and then the one ebook a month. Maybe the membership includes a forum or a private Facebook group where people can interact with you more directly, too.

This would also work for more than just ebooks. I was thinking this morning about how someone should take the Wikipedia articles about histories of places like New York, Paris, and Beijing, edit them and add in information from other sources and delete the boring stuff, and then record them as short audiobooks. You could offer a different city or country every week, and you could bundle that together with PDF, epub, and Kindle versions.

5. How niche can you go?

I read a blog post today on a travel blog about a statue of American musician Frank Zappa that is in Vilnius, Lithuania. That’s pretty random, right? But in Mexico City I saw a statue of the former communist leader of Azerbaijan (though I understand it has since been removed due to public outcry). In the small town of Chernivtsi, Ukraine, there is a statue of a Mormon pioneer girl playing a game. Thinking about all of those got me wondering about whether you could create a travel blog that’s just pictures of statues in various parts of the world and brief biographies of the people the statues are of.

At first glance, this seems like way too narrow of a niche, especially when you compare it to most other travel blogs that have articles like “The Top 10 Beach Resorts in Mozambique” or “My Favorite Sights in Prague.” But the more I thought about it, the more I liked the idea of the statue blog. It’s different from all the other travel blogs out there, and that’s actually really good because it’s hard to stand out in any super crowded niche like travel, but being different is a great way to stand out.

And each individual blog post would be interesting in and of itself. It’s fun and interesting to learn about interesting people, but I don’t give two craps about beach resorts in a place I will likely never ever visit. It’s especially bad when travel blogs talk about a particular hotel or restaurant in some far-flung city. The odds of me ever needing that information are infinitesimal, and it’s not interesting enough to stand on its own without context. Even if you don’t mind looking at the pictures of the nice hotel room in Bangkok, is that really the kind of blog post you would share? No.

But even though you might not ever go to Mexico City or have the desire to see the statue of that guy from Azerbaijan, that’s the kind of thing that could stand on its own just because it’s inherently interesting. It makes you say, “Huh.” I think that’s the kind of thing most travelers and even many non-travelers—like people who like history, for example—would love to read about. The niche is narrow in scope but broad in appeal.

I think that right there is the key to a successful niche blog. Narrow in scope, broad in appeal. That’s why those crazy narrow-niche Tumblr blogs like Rich Kids of Instagram or Kim Jong Il Looking At Things can become so wildly popular. I wouldn’t want to make a blog about statues of people in Seattle. That’s too narrow and people outside of Seattle would immediately dismiss the site. The appeal there isn’t broad enough. But a blog about weird and interesting statues around the world? I do think that’s actually a pretty good idea for a niche blog.

6. Separate Twitter accounts

I’ve mentioned previously in a podcast or blog post somewhere that website owners might want to have multiple Twitter accounts: one just for updates from the site, and another for sharing relavent and interesting content that people in your niche might be interested in, plus all site updates. With the recent announced demise of Google Reader, I think that this is something worth revisiting.

A lot of people are saying that Twitter is a viable alternative to Google Reader. They say to just follow the Twitter accounts of blogs and websites you used to subscribe to via RSS. The problem here is twofold. First, a lot of the bloggers I follow via RSS tweet a TON of stuff, like multiple things every hour. That does not interest me. I just want to see the new updates from the blog. And that brings us to the second problem, which is that some bloggers don’t even tweet about new updates on their blog! They only tweet about other stuff. Either one of these problems makes Twitter a sub-par Google Reader replacement.

To solve this, you can have two separate Twitter accounts: the one that only tweets when new articles are posted to the blog, and the other that is for whatever else you want to tweet about that’s related to what you blog about. So Osmosio is my blog and website that the Digital Publishing Podcast is part of. I recently created the @Osmosio Twitter account that sends out a tweet only when a new blog post on Osmosio.com or a new episode of the Digital Publishing Podcast goes live. This is for those people who use Twitter as an RSS reader replacement. But I also tweet from my personal account, which is @TristanHigbee. That’s where I tweet about all sorts of neat stuff related to traveling, internet business, and digital publishing. If I didn’t want to do that kind of thing from my personal Twitter account, I could have two Osmosio accounts: one would be @OsmosioFeed (and that would be just the new updates from the blog and podcast), and the other would be @Osmosio, which would include a lot more links to articles relating to digital publishing. You’ve then got the best of both worlds.

7. A blog post idea

I’m a fan of the blog Gizmodo. It’s ostensibly about gadgets and technology but mostly I see it as just a fun collection of cool and strange things that may or may not be somehow tangentially related to gadgets. Occasionally they have a photography challenge, and a recent one had the theme of “Tools of the trade.” The idea is that you take a photo of all the tools you have or use for a certain hobby.

I love stuff like this, maybe because I’m also a fan of blogs like Things Organized Neatly (which is exactly what it sounds like) and The Burning House, which is a blog of photos of things that people would grab from their houses if they were burning down. There’s something about seeing stuff all laid out and organized and visible at once that really appeals to me.

But I think that this is a great idea for any niche, really. If your niche involves “stuff,” take a picture of your stuff laid out and organized and post it to your blog.

Featured podcast and tool

And now it’s time for this week’s featured podcast and featured digital publishing tool. My pick for featured podcast is called Evening Edition [link]. Evening Edition first started out as a website, where every evening is a posted a roundup of the top 5 or so news items for that day. The podcast is the same thing. Each daily episode is about 5 minutes long, and it provides a nice and quick roundup of some of that day’s biggest news items. It’s a great way to get caught up on what’s been happening in the world.

My pick for featured digital publishing tool is a free WordPress plugin called MCE Table Buttons [link]. You know how in Word or Google Docs it’s really easy to insert a table? You just say how many rows and columns you want and then the table appears. For years it’s bothered me that there was nothing like that built in to WordPress, but then I found this plugin. It makes adding tables to blog posts or pages as easy as it is in Word, and you can still edit the properties of individual rows, columns, and cells.

Final words

And that’ll do it for episode 20 of the Digital Publishing Podcast. Be sure to check out digitalpublishingpodcast.com for complete transcriptions and other blog posts there at the blog. This week’s blog post was titled The Free, Web-Based RSS Reader I’m Now Using Instead of Google Reader.

The Free, Web-Based RSS Reader I’m Now Using Instead of Google Reader

Tristan — Mon, 18 Mar 2013 12:56:02 +0000

You’ve probably heard by now that Google is sunsetting Google Reader, the service that many lovers of blogs and news sites used to subscribe to those blogs and news sites. I tried a few different potential Google Reader replacements over the weekend and found one that I like a lot.

Even though Google Reader will still be around until July 1, I figured I might as well start getting used to the replacement now. That replacement is Feedly, and here’s what it looks like:

Feedly. Click for the larger version.

You can see that it pretty much just looks like a fancier version of Google Reader. (Note: By default, Feedly displays new items not in a list as shown in the screenshot above, but as tiles in a magazine-style layout. You can change how the articles are displayed by clicking the gear icon in the top-right corner.)

You log in to Feedly with your Google account, and your Google Reader feeds will automatically be there in Feedly when you open it up. What good does that do if Google Reader is not long for this world? According to the Feedly blog,

“We have been working on a project called Normandy which is a feedly clone of the Google Reader API – running on Google App Engine. When Google Reader shuts down, feedly will seamlessly transition to the Normandy back end.”

Assuming Google App Engine stays around, this sounds like a good solution.

I also tried The Old Reader and NewsBlur, but Feedly is my personal favorite so far. It’s not perfect, though. I wish the text of the folders and feeds on the left side of the screen there were a bit larger, and I wish I could change the color of that text (from light gray to white) so that there’s more contrast. But apart from that, I’m a fan. I especially like how you can have it show only the unread items. I like that a lot.

So what do you think? Are you bummed about Google Reader shutting down? Have you tried any other alternatives? Do you subscribe to RSS feeds?