I have been meaning to go on a Money Magnet Seminar, with Marie Claire Carlyle for ages- and finally I did on Saturday. She is the real deal- with a hugely successful background in the corporate/sales world, now a seminar leader, author and speaker for Hay House.

I really had a good time there, it is so good to be in a similar environmant with people who have studied the same kind of stuff as you. There were Law of Attraction, Rich Dad Poor Dad afficionados, as well as philanthropists, and a TM teacher. I did some TM a while ago, and would love to brush up- if you look at the benefits of it, I cant think of any reason NOT to do it!

I will blog every day on some of the concepts I learned there over the next few days- and it is valuable stuff believe me.

Hi to Keith who I met there http://www.cambridgestrings.co.uk/, we had a good chat- he knows the Pop/R and B Star Omar (“there’s nothing like this…- remember)

Thanks Keith for being my curry lunch partner, and great to meet you.

Then back to do a gig at the Holiday Inn for the 26.2 Runners Club, which was a great gig, and thankyou to Peter and also the staff at the Holiday Inn including Nitin for the great hospitality. What a set- such a good crowd!

Now Sunday, planning my week, and meeting the daughter tonight for a meal, and if I can persuade her a movie as well, there are so many I want to see right now, including Mel Gibsons new one, American Pie, Dark Shadows and the new Irvine Welsh one “Ecstacy”, that seems not to be on general release.

I don’t know if you have heard of “Kickstart” – one of the best internet marketing newsletters online, in this issue author Martin Avis, discusses the 80/20 rule, which I would guess that a lot of us have heard of but not used- he poignantly highlights it here- here is an excerpt from the newsletter- and you can sign up here if you want (I recommend it) www.kickstartdaily.com

From the newsletter:

When Delia fell ill, over 6 months ago now, I realized that my
ability to work would be severely limited. What with all the
hospital visits and the sheer emotional weight on our minds, our
expectation was that, inevitably, our income would fall
drastically. We were prepared for that and had braced ourselves
to be living on our savings for a while until things could get
back to something like normal.

But, thank goodness, things turned out rather differently.

More by luck than planned intent, the mainstays of our business
are Kickstart Newsletter and the various membership sites that we
have built up over the last few years. Sure, we had lots of
affiliate websites and blogs, but keeping them updated was out of
the question and so almost all those other things have gone by
the wayside since before Christmas.

My input into my business has dropped to just a few hours a week
and Delia’s even lower. But, through it all, we have steadfastly
maintained the membership sites and I have continued to write
Kickstart, albeit rather sporadically.

So it has come as a huge surprise to find that with a fraction of
the normal input, our earnings over the last 6 months have
actually gone up.

It has been a very real demonstration of the 80:20 rule. By
stripping away the 80% of my efforts that produced 20% of my
income I have had more focus on the 20% that brought in the real
money.

And Delia, can I wish you a fast and speedy recovery, and much love.

And Martin, keep on a writin’!

More soon

Neil

I would really appreciate your feedback- please leave a comment below, and “like” as well!

To see more please check us out online here

And on Facebook here

Actor, voiceover artist and intrnet marketer http://www.adventuresininternetmarketing.net/

Would you like to make money from home?

Matt Duggan wanted to find a way to make money from home, so quit as a full time magician, and looked into opportunities on the internet.

We listen to his story here – and get more great insights into the world of internet marketing- a compelling listen if you too want to make money from home.

Matt is also an actor and voiceover artist, which will be obvious when you hear him, he has IMHO a great confident manner. Again, we all have our own path to success, and here is his. He did challenge me to upload a video of doing a magic trick, which I may well do. In fact thinking about it to mystify you more, I will do an AUDIO magic trick, which I have posted below.

Matt offers a quick start guide on www.adventuresininternetmarketing.net, and writes a great, content filled blog there as well.

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Sugar Sugar

Did anyone see in the week that sugar is suspected to be a poison, and dangerous, i don’t know quite wher I sit on this.

One one hand I get it, as diabetes does seem to be on the rise, yet is it the full story?

Have you heard of Stevia? It is a herb that is 100 times sweeter than sugar, and healthier apparantly. I have not done a lot of research into this, but I got the info from a good source not a bloke down the pub! Can’t really imagine the average geezer down the pub discussing the benefits of stevia! Nothing to sell here, I do not have an affiliate link for Stevia.

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Desires and Dreams

I am writing this from my workplace (I am not working today!), and get to hear interesting banter from the folks in the office.

One of my collagues Richard Midsen, is learning to fly, and it got me thinking “Wow I want to do that”.

The closest thing I will do soon is parachute for charity I have wanted to do that for ages, but never got round to it!

I will be raising more money for Changez Charity, the alternative mental health charity in SW London, providing help for those who most need it.

Call 0208 404 5374

I practise NLP there as a volunteer therapist, (Neuro Linguistic Programming), NLP is useful not only in a therapeutic context, but also in sales, marketing, pretty much in any area of life actually!

I have a free e-mail course on it, to teach you the basics, which you can find on www.becomefree.co.uk

How many therapists does it take to change a light bulb? One. But the lighbulb has to really WANT to change:)

Speaking of alternative therapies, my teacher Christopher Paul Jones has a friend who travelled near and far, researching alternative healing techniques, and has documented it in a movie. We call it the “Eat, Pray, Love moment”. I will find out more and give it a plug in the future, if that’s your kind of thing. And no, I am not a jostick consuming hippie. Not during the week anyway!

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The next blog post will be all about “Rich Thinkers and Poor Thinkers”, and the mindset of both of them. It will be an interesting read, make sure you don’t miss that one, if you are wanting to make money from home.

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If you have not done so yet, do download the free £97 worth of internet marketing gifts here, it is a great free package including

• A set of videos “how to build an internet business for years to come”
• An audio with Nicola Cairncross on how to market your business locally
• An audio with a social media master
• A podcast I made at an internet marketing seminar

It’s a nice package, and free which makes it nicer! Many ideas on how to make money from home.

*******************************************************************************************

OK, here’s the audio trick, as always please leave your comments below, anything you want to ask me about how to make money from home, just holler.

Until next time

Neil Long -X-

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Huge profits from a tiny list www.hugeprofitstinylist.com

Connie Regan Green

Presenting more ways to make money from home

Is it really possible to be ranked 12th in an affiliate contest, when the others you are up against have lists of 100,000, and you have a list of 671?

Could this be another great one of the ways to make money from home?

Really?

Um, Yes….

And to go from there to becoming a super affiliate, a book author then a mentor to others….to being involved with an organisation contributing to the eradication of a disease that has been on the planet forever?

Needless to say this lady is an inspiration, and that’s why I wanted her for an interview.

Listen and enjoy to several tips, tricks, tools and strategies, of ways to make money from home

I am always interested in peoples stories, I think it is interesting to hear how people got started, how they overcame their struggles, and triumphed.

At the seminar I want to recently where Chris Farrell was speaking- (he is a master of ways to make money from home!), he talked about how he got started, and I think it is impotant to realize that we all start somewhere! And that’s ok!

In other words, enjoy the learning curve, make it an enjoyable climb, not an impossible mountain.

It was Mark Anastasis Seminar, and he talked about the difference between “Rich” thinkers and “poor” thinkers, which I think it a post in and of itself, and I will do that one in a seperate post, as I don’t want to keep you reading all day!

****************************************************************************************************

Funny moment with my daughter the other day, I did a charity stunt, involving me wearing a rather embarassing bit of clobber-we did raise £200 for Changez charity- a local charity based in South West London, that help for those most in need.

Now for those of us who are parents to teenagers, we know that breathing is enough to embarass them, so dresssing in this way, is virtually (another) disownable offence! I threatened to put it on her Facebook wall- her words- “if you do, I will kill you and block you in that order”

That’s my  girl!

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Do leave a comment on Facebook, let me know what you think of the content here, and if I can answer

any question, do not hesitate to holler!

Until next time

Neil x

Or not.

Or partly possibly.

Promotional stunt, yes, Mankiki, no. Probably.

As far as podcasting how to goes, here is how it all ties in.

This was a win/win/win/win situation.

Call 0208 404 5374

First, a colleague at work dared me to dance the Zumba Class in a Mankini.

So I said yes, as long as I could raise money for a local mental health charity, that provides alternative treatments for those most in need- Changez Charity

So here’s how it played out.

We did the stunt, some great foks at my Workplace- Radio Jackie got behind it, namely

Lucy Mayer, Jan Ashley, George Alderman and Jane Sims. Lucy’s Dad came as well, as well

as Darren Graham, the official Radio Jackie photographer.

The Zumba teacher, bless her has no idea what was about to infiltrate her class!

But she had a great sense of humour- Michelle Kelsall Singleton her name is, a fully

qualified Zumba , Belly Dancer and Aerobics Teacher.

Needless to say she is obscenely flexible and mega fit!

Loads of Facebook activity, a good awareness raising stunt for the radio station,

good publicity for Michelle from Zumba Fitness, profile building for (ahem) , me!

and of course, money – £200 raised for Changez Charity.

A win/win/win/win really!

Have a listen to the audio below!

Grant Connollys Z Point For Peace www.zpointforpeace.com

Would you like peace of mind?

Had the pleasure of talking to Grant Connolly today, creator of the Z-Point Process- peace of mind on demand!

What if there were a way of letting go of the stress we all experience on a daily basis- and experience peace of mind.

Peace of mind on demand! Lovely! And simple? Yep.

If you are a student of the Law of Attraction, this is in alignment with the teachings of it, as in making peace with where you are- ie Non resistance, or allowing – in other words, a quiet mind, or peace of mind!

Not directly connected to Internet Marketing, but a relaxed mindset would benefit us all I am sure! I am sure more peace of mind would be more valuable to us all nowadays!

Well worth a listen- for more about Grant’s work, please see here

ONE STOP SHOP TOOL FOR ALL YOUR MARKETING NEEDS- AND HE’S VIRTUALLY GIVING IT AWAY!

PRESENTING THE MARKETING DASHBOARD

Memo from Online Profits Radio Show:

I have snagged this one, Marlon Sanders a long time in the business I don’t think could bring out a naff product if he tried.

Marketing Dashboard? Well, it does what it says on the tin, but I don’t want to underrate it. Marketing dashboard is a bit of Marlon genius!

When doing our internet marketing, it can be hard to remember the next bit in the sequence, first this, then that, then…

But what if there was a way of being walked through step by step, with no space for error, or forgetting anything at all.

In fact, it is all explained to you bit by bit stage by stage, in an easy to follow weekly plan, without information overload- a big problem as we all know in this business. If you would like a virtual secretary/reminder/hand holder- marketing dashboard is for you.

I honestlydon’t knoe how much longer he can offer this at a discount like this, and it is an extraordinary discount for the quality of what you get.

CLICK HERE TO READ MORE

Do check out our interview with Chris and Susan Beesley that we did last week- multiple income streams?? Best go listen.

The info here is a must for those on a shoestring budget.

To hear the complete episode on Blog Talk Radio CLICK HERE

To explore the myriad of useful resources and gifts, visit out main site on www.onlineprofitsradioshow.com

This is Neil and welcome to your Online Profits Radio Show. 

Now I do believe that we are going to be talking to the lovely Nicola Cairncross today. 

Nicola Cairncross is an author, a mentor and she is running the Money Gym, she is an entrepreneur. 

She has left corporate world is now a  complete success as a public speaker… entepreneur and author.

 We are going to be talking to her on the show today on the subject ‘how to market yourself basically from scratch with nothing’.

 Loads of us have heard about internet marketing.  Loads of us have probably seen the sales letters, they promise you people have this $47 product, press a couple of buttons and money will flood into your bank account like a tsunami.  Well, I haven’t seen that many tsunamis to be honest with you but I have seen lots of people complaining on the forums about the lack of cash coming into their accounts.

   So we are going to be talking about talking some of those problems, all about information overload, I mean how can we solve that, what do you study first of all and then how do you schedule your time – what strategies can you do to make the most of your time?  Otherwise, you’ll find yourself overloaded, sitting in front of the computer screen, failing like you are banging your head against the brick wall and perhaps it’s just a nightmare if you don’t do it right

Now we have Nicola on the phone – hello.

Nicola:     Hello Neil, how are you doing?

Neil:         It’s working.  It’s working – marvelous.  The technology is working and we are live to the world.  I have been telling a bit about the information overload.  Once you’ve got the information how do you know it was good information and then how do you know which bit of information to use and then this technical understanding – I was once in an internet marketing seminar and they showed this kind of a spider map called mind-map, I wonder what that was, but all the things you had to do with their business, it was absolutely overwhelming.  We like to try to run like an international corporation all by yourself.  People don’t realize there’s an awful lot to it and just because it’s online it isn’t something make you any different from the task you have to do when you run an offline business and some people learn that, including me, the hard way.

 So we are here to really help solve people’s common problems, recommend stuff – products and services that are going to help you out, save you time and hopefully make you more money.  That’s why it’s called your Online Profits Radio Show.

   We’ve got about 25 minutes and I want to get as much content in as I possibly can to give as much value as I can.  So I want to throw this over to you Nicola – the woman that does everything – entrepreneur, public speaker – ans a mum, mentor, I mean you’ve been in this game for a very, very long time.  You escaped the corporate world, broke out on your own, we know fantastic success and you know, looking at the way you’ve done it, it’s all pretty impressive I have to say.

 So I am going to shut up now and just really get you to spill…how to use internet marketing to launch anything from scratch.  So using that as the premise, as our starting point, go for it.

Okay, well first of all I called in on Skype and I think that Skype button if anyone wants to join us and it was really easy.  I just pressed the Skype button and it did the rest for me.  So that was really good.

So yes, welcome questions on this one and I’d like to step out starting to use internet marketing for any…because I came from a marketing record label background on the internet marketing.  I didn’t come from the background of building a list, selling your list stuff through an affiliate link.  I used the internet marketing techniques to market our record label first and then my coaching business.  So I am used to marketing real businesses online from scratch.

Recently I was having a bit of a challenge because I got a singer sister, who I know you talked to Neil, I heard a bit of, and she is a classical opera and contemporary singer.  She sings, travels the world singing in, in the best places really with people like Steve Reich who is just celebrating his 75^th birthday this year.

So she has got up to the level of soloist Steve Reich and people like that, and she has found with Pat Metheney and Dizzy Gillespie and all sorts of really cool people, but she still is subject to the vagaries of the classical singing world. …..

…..In that there are three or four fixes who fix all the big sessions, they fix all the big TV sessions, they fix all the big film sessions and film and adverts really have classical singers make their living because they certainly don’t earn enough from the classical performances to pay a good living, that’s for sure.

So she was saying, “I am really worried about next year.  I am getting older and kept a low voice, so I am in bond with the Sopranos and there’s more of them.  So I am in a bit better position, but still big gaps in my diary that connects these”, so I said, “Well what would you like to be doing”, and she started turning out what all things she could do to make money in between. 

She only does a bit property investing and teaching but she said, “What I really want and like to be doing is promoting and singing my own stuff and touring with my own staff”, and so I said to her, “Why can’t you do that”, and she said, I don’t have an album”, and I said, “Why, but you’ve got an album”, she said, “I don’t have any money to put an album together”, because you always get signs Neil, as you know, buy a big record live, then they take about 3x a year, each of them, and oh, you have to self-fund everything and Heather just wasn’t in a position to do that.

    So I said, “Well okay, so why don’t we just act as if…why don’t we just start mind mapping what it would take to put together a debut solo album?”  And she tells the story actually of how it all came about on her blog at www.heathercairncross.com

 Because that was one of the first things I said to her is I said, “Even if you had an album Heather, you’ve got nobody to sell it to.  You’ve got hardly any friends, you know, you’ve got your friends on Facebook but you haven’t got a big following on Facebook.  You haven’t got mailing list”, she told me, “Yes I have”. 

  I said, “Well what was your mailing list”, and she told about 159 of people who’ve come to gigs, the jazz gigs, and I said, “Well that isn’t really a mailing list, is it?”  I said, “You haven’t really got … your website’s okay but it’s not doing anything useful like collecting names and emails or selling anything”.  I said, “If we could just get an album made and you could just sell one or two albums a week, or four albums a week, that would be a really nice supplementary income, and the best thing about that part of income is it’s steady.  It’s not subject to the vagaries of a fix.

  So I thought okay, search into this to get let’s swap you your website which was a static html website over on to WordPress because that in part is more search engine friendly, and I said I know the people…she tells such fabulous stories – .  She told me three or four of Susan Boyle sessions and I am sure that people want to know about that.  She has sung in a major film- Harry Potter film.  She has done only glue-to-the-rings films.  She does poems.  She wrote three poems this year and they tell great stories about what happens in the poems and I always said, “I am sure if you blogged a diary of your life of as you travel around the world, doing this stuff, people would want to read it and that would bring traffic to your website and having it on a WordPress platform would make it very search engine friendly”.

  So instead of moaning about an empty diary and going out for the coffees and doing the gardening, which is what she used to do, bit of painting, desk writing, she started creating a WordPress website and she started blogging about the stories.  She don’t know again what to read and what not to, and she was always so terrified about what her peers would say because in the creative industries, when you are an artist or singer or musician or whatever, it’s not done to be too self-promotive ……

Nicola:     Well, because they feel that if you put yourself forward in a marketing and promotions way you are implicitly saying ‘you are better than everyone else’.

Neil:         But then we got to promote ourselves.

Nicola:     Well you and I know that obviously and I think radio stars are a bit better at it because they become celebrities too, don’t they?  But…

Neil:         It sounds like a real sort of pseudo humility – do you know what I mean?

Nicola:     Yeah, but it’s real.  It’s not pseudo.  They will feel humble about their skills because they are surrounded by brilliant people all the time so they don’t…I mean Heather sings with the best singers in the world.  So to say that she…she started promoted herself heavily, it’s almost saying, “Well I am better than you guys”, or “I deserve more attention than you guys”.  It’s interesting, isn’t that?

 So I talked a lot of that in about five minutes.!

Neil:         And I was just laughing. 

Nicola:     No, it’s taken a lot longer I am sure.  I have had to use quite a few coaching skills on that one but the thing is I said to her, “Okay, you can either care what everyone thinks and worry about whether your peers are thinking you are thinking above them or you can get on and make a living.  You could get on and create something that would be a legacy of your film.  You could get in those wonderful stories off your head and then on to a blog and perhaps even into a book one day”.

  So she liked the idea and so she started blogging and we we did about three weeks – the Susan Boyle Fan Club had picked up on one of her blogs about singing to Susan Boyle and she got probably about 900 visitors to her blog overnight because they posted all this stuff in the forum and she got emails, abusive emails and nice emails and she got phone calls from radio stations around the world wanting to interview her about being on the new Susan Boyle session.

Now this terrified Heather because one of the emails said, “We don’t believe that you’ll sing on the Susan Boyle session.  We don’t like what you said about Susan and we are going to ring Sony Music and get Simon Cowell to take you off the session”.  So she didn’t even know when she turned up at Abbey Road the next day whether she was going to be allowed in the building.  But any attention is better than no attention in my opinion.  So we ploughed on and she only have nice things about people but she does write honestly and so there is quite a room for debate and discussion.

 So then summing up, she was saying, “Well let’s not do that an album, I’ll make some franchise for the album cover”.  So again, she just said to one of her friends Wayne, who is starting out as a photographer, Wayne McConnell who is a local Jazzer at Brighton, he said, “I want to take some pictures of people, fill out for photo”, she said, “Okay, well I am thinking of doing an album so I’ll make the pictures”.

 So we went out down the street from the studio in front of a bunch of beach huts and got some pictures done, and then literally, I think it must have been the following week, she was singing at standing Jazz club and one of her biggest fans Tom Chapman, came up to her and he said, “Did you realize that in that gig you said that the drummer had an album available to sell it back”, the pi anist h

ad an album available to sell at the back, only a bass player had a drummer a CD available at the back, where is yours Heather?  And she said, “Well probably you should say that  because all I have been thinking about doing one but it’s cost, you know, you have to go to a recording studio, you have to pa they musician”, and he says, “Well, if that’s all it is then I’ll help you”.

So it was almost like the Kevin Costner film, ‘If you build it they will come’, and she said, “As soon as I decided that I wanted to do an album, everything started clicking into place”, and so now Tom is putting up the money and he is saying ‘whatever you need to do it’, and she knew already.  She wanted to work with one of two pianists.

So she went to David Newton who is her other preferred choice and whom she has worked with many times before and he not only was available but he found two days in an amazing house in I don’t know, outside London somewhere and it’s owned by a chap called Ronnie Smith. 

Now Ronnie Smith who is a very Jazz pianist and he has got the most amazing piano.  I can’t remember the name Neil, just my head, but they went up there and over two days on this vintage piano owned by this amazing Jazz pianist who used to work at the Dorchester.

 They recorded 18 songs – just David and Heather, and she had taken up 23 films.  They recorded 18.  They did about five takes of each one and she came back, I am not joking, with some absolute gold and it was just awesome to sit and listen to it all.

But one of the conditions that Tom lending Heather the money to do the album was that I get involved in the marketing because he knew that she wasn’t really A, didn’t have time and B, out to the job.  So I took it on as a product launch and I was working literally from scratch because 150 emails, a website that wasn’t getting any traffic until the Susan Boyle incident, and nothing.  She had hardly any video recordings of herself.  It was pretty tragic.

So I was working from scratch.  So I started going to a Jazz jam where she is singing, recording stuff with my I-Phone.She started blogging.  Westarted getting some attention.  I  set…I set a Twitter account for her, hooked that out to the blog and used a tool called ‘Tweet Adder’.  Now I know that you don’t know about Tweet Adder, do you Neil?  So this is something I am sharing that’s a secret.

Neil:         Please tell.

Nicole:     Yeah, it’s a really nice bit of software that runs on your computer and you can actually set it to go and find people and follow them who’ve got certain key phrases in their profile.  So I set Heather’s up to go and look for and follow anyone who had the word ‘Jazz’ in their profile, or ‘Jazz Singer’ or ‘Jazz Music’ or anything like that.

So Tweet Adder runs in the background while you are working away and it goes and follows these people and after five days if those people haven’t followed you back it unfollows them, and that’s important because you’ve almost got to keep the ratio of people that you are following ideally within a 1:2 ratio of people who are following you.

So every ten people following you, you will have to be following 12 people and the idea is eventually that you get it down so that you are always following less people than following you.  But what it started to do is build up a pool of people who have the word ‘Jazz’ in their profile that Heather could interact with and this swiftly grew and it swiftly grew and every time she wrote any blog post about singing, say for example the London Symphony Orchestra, they would retweet her tweets because her blog post was hooked up to her Twitter.  So every time, you know we talked about this for your website Neil, every time she wrote a blog post it got tweeted and then other people would retweet it. 

She went to singing Cork in Ireland and the Cork Opera House retweeted her tweets and all of this had this cumulative effect of bringing more traffic to her website, and then just recently she sent me an email saying, “Look, Michael Buble’s Christmas album is out.  Look what he is doing on YouTube”, and what we found was he created a sub-audio track with 5 or 6 songs in his new Christmas album and as you were looking at the video on YouTube you were able to click different parts of the picture and it would take you to different songs, and she said, “Could we do that?”  I said, “Well, I don’t know how to do it but I’ll find someone who does”.

So we did find someone who knew how to do it and we had it up by the end of the day and as of this morning she has had 1500 views on that in about six days.  So you can see words really spreading.  She is on Facebook, I am on Facebook.  We are on Twitter.  We are on YouTube.  The YouTube video is getting most abused and it’s really starting to spread now, and we are also using social media to get to people in media stations.

Now we are going to talk about that more in just a moment actually.  It just shows what is possible on this grassroots level and…literally from a standing start, I mean I think the famous story of ‘Arctic monkeys’, isn’t it, because they are pounding so they can get the big guest signing but the big signing, but they didn’t.  All they did all from grassroots.  They did offer to social media.  The MySpace, yeah the YouTube, the Twitter and obviously it’s a very common strategy now.  It must be, because only a very, very few like you said at the beginning of this, you know, get in the big signing.

To hear the complete episode on Blog Talk Radio CLICK HERE

ALERT: Podcasting How To- sound like an authority in your niche, and market like a pro

In this episode I interview Jack Humphrey some more of Blog Success, all about podcasting how to….

Here is the next bit! It is in several short, bitesize parts for you. Enjoy! is part 2.

Neil: Before we get onto the nitty grity of podcasting how to, first a little history, and an accolade!

Your greatest success by far was the Authority Blackbook, wasn’t it? I mean that was just incredible that launched you as quite literally as an authority on the scene, I mean it was huge, wasn’t it?

Jack: Yeah, but we weren’t able to take advantage of Twitter and Facebook at the time because there weren’t all the tools so you could put right on your site. Now you can have an html plugin for landing pages where they would download the Authority Blackbook and people can comment on it.

Jack: What we did back then was we setup a blog where people had an autoresponder message after they downloaded the book, it says, “Hey, tell us what you think on the blog”, and we got a massive amount of comments doing that but it would have been so much bigger and better if the Facebook commenting was right under there. If anybody listening has seen that it basically looks just like Facebook. It’s a Facebook comment area and if you are logged into Facebook your little face, icon, whatever your profile picture is already there and when you type a comment out for what you think of that, say the Authority Blackbook, also goes on your Facebook wall, which then takes it viral.

I mean we got viral the old-fashion way. I can only imagine what Authority Blackbook comments would have been like had we had the ‘Tweet’ buttons and everything that we do today. It just would have been unheard of. In the end, so we got well over 100,000 downloads of that book and we still get about 50-70 downloads a day of that book without any…it hit critical mass. There’s so many links out there about it

now.

And then the Twitter and the Facebook stuff did pick up. We don’t do anything with that anymore; people just still find it everywhere. All the places we wrote about it, all the places that other people wrote about it on their blogs, people did reviews – lots and lots and lots of reviews came out of it and I tell you it wasn’t as much as us pushing it as putting up a really, really excellent product, and most of those things were people being moved by the product itself to do it and we didn’t have to go around and the weight of the world was not on our shoulders to get all the links that you’d see to the Authority Blackbook.

Neil: It was a fact that it was just so damn good, and you use that as a free give away to start with and then you start things on the backend of that rather than setting that individually, which is a very good strategy I thought.
Jack: Well and it is just podcasting how to. I mean you’ve got a monetization idea but you are not charging people for like my weekly radio show is free, and again which we work really hard to make it attractive and get people talking about it and that starts with taking it off of, I’d use BlogTalkRadio, taking that immediately off there and putting it on FridayTrafficReport.com and that’s my clientele right now.
The last two things I got published there that weren’t podcasts were two guest articles and I used to publish and you should when you are starting out. You should publish every day. If you are in the right kind of niche with a lot of topics, a lot of questions being asked out there by people, where you need to be providing the answers and providing link posts, things like that where you have just got a list of resources like ‘the top 10 places to do this’ or ‘top 10 tips for ______’, in the dog training thing how to get your dog stop jumping up on people when they come in the house or whatever.
Neil: So yeah, you are kind of answering the questions to get along on, thank you. It’s odd of but the original question I thought, I have this terrible tendency to go for tangents, which was how do you monetize audio content? We have established, you are a Web 2 master, we have established the tools much better than they actually were and that’s basically what you are doing, you are posting every day doing a radio show and then putting that on the post as well. You are obviously not charging for the radio content but you are finding out what people want and then creating appropriate radio content to answer the questions, would that be right?
Jack: Yeah, and I mean people will ask questions. When you start picking up a little gravity and people are starting to comment and things and you do things like you invite them to ask anything. Ask me anything about dog training, anything you want and if I choose your question I will use your name and if you want, or I’ll even link to your site if you own a website and I’ll answer it on the blog and then all of a sudden you’ve got content coming in that you can’t even handle all of it because there’s so many people are like, “Well, what do you do in this instance; what do you do in that instance?”
That’s a good niche because you can put up a post or you can do a show that answers the questions that way you think they need to be answered but if you are in a really rich niche, like dog training you’ve got millions of different breeds of dogs, you know, and just all kinds of different things. So you can only do so much in your podcast to answer questions. You want your podcast to bring up more questions. Thats a good key to podcasting how to/
In fact there was a trick that Andy Beal uses at MarketingPilgrim.com which is really a good one and it’s ‘don’t answer every question’, like know the answer to the overall question, give four or five different tips and purposely leave out one of the big tips that someone is going to go ‘Wait a minute, he didn’t say anything about this’ and they will make a comment and they’ll say, ‘What about that’ and that usually is a starter and that gets spread around because on your blog you should have a Facebook ‘like’ button and there’s a plugin for that, and you should have a ‘Twitter’ button – there’s a plugin for that, and those being separate are much more important than using the plugin called ‘ShareThis’ which is sort of overwhelming. When you click on that it’s a little green thing with two little nodules on the end. It opens up into this window that says, “You can share to all thes

e different places”, and most people don’t belong to the vast majority of them. It gets confusing and they end up not sharing as much and we have tested that.
Neil: Yeah, yeah, that did confuse. That’s an aspect that confused me. There’s so much information.
Jack: That you end up doing nothing.
Neil: Yeah, coming in all directions. I love one of your phrases, I have read one of the things you wrote, ‘it’s becoming information overlord rather than the information overload’, which I thought was brilliant and perhaps if we could talk a little bit about tools that help you head down, that laser light focus that is obviously necessary. So it’s interesting you brought out and you talked about sharing because you are right, you don’t want to confuse people. Not that people are stupid, far from it but people are easily confused. You come to the website and say, “Well, what am I going to do here?”
Jack: Right, and that you need to give them very…everything on your site is designed for desirable actions that you want people to take, like opting into your lists or clicking on a link to go to your product page or an affiliate link – I mean you have all of these desirable actions you want people to take and you’ve got to get them to take those actions with the least resistance and friction as possible. They cannot be expected to figure things out in any way; it needs to be handed to them.
Neil: Yes.
Jack: So it makes you pare things down. So the ‘ShareThis’ plugin, if anybody is using that and they are wondering why they are not getting shared a lot, it’s because it’s too complicated. It’s really, really geeky. You have to go back and remember what it was like when you started surfing the web, and you will remember that you didn’t know what all of these buttons meant and ‘ShareThis’ gives you a million buttons to click on.
Most people don’t belong to any of those services and if you are going to share on the web you are going to do it on Twitter or Facebook, that’s just where everybody is. I mean plain and simple, there’s 500 million on Facebook, there’s a 145-150 million on Twitter and those are the places where you are going to want to go to get the most buzz for yourself. So you want those buttons individually at the bottom of each post.
Neil: Right.
Jack: And if you want to throw one more in there you throw in Google Buzz and there is a plugin for that. So you have three buttons and three chances. So if somebody is really loving more than any other, they love Google Buzz then that’s what they are going to push. They are not going to probably come back and push the Twitter button or the Facebook button. You are going to get people to do one thing if anything and so when you are publishing your content just sings to them, is their muse and if they really like it, they like the tune, they are going to spread it around and that’s how you leverage your following – the traffic you are getting from the search engines and the traffic you are getting from the search engines again, to your podcast page. If you use like BlogTalkRadio or you are just podcasting on your own, you are recording stuff and putting it right on the blog, you build up a following and that following needs to know at all times that you would like them to ‘like’ ‘tweet’ or put it on Google Buzz or otherwise blog about it. You’ve got to get people blogging about your stuff too.
If you surf around in any niche you have these little movers and shakers and you are either one or you are going to be one, and what they will do to come up with content is start with a quote from someone else. Somebody came out with a blog post about an interesting dog training trick and you quote them in your podcast and in the notes for your podcast on that same blog post. You might even link to them. You are doing to them what you want them doing for you and what did they do to get you to do that? They said something interesting and very relevant to your audience, something that your audience you thought really needed to know.
So it all originates with the content. You can’t polish a turd, as we say, and so if you are just slapping up stuff and you are doing it from the sake of it, because you heard podcasting was a great way to, and it is, get a bunch of links, get out in areas that most people don’t th ink to market

in and add really quality different kind of content and especially different mode of delivery to your site, then you can do that. You can’t just go through the motions; there’s got to be good stuff and if it’s good stuff then that’s what gets passed around and getting it passed around, you have to make it very, very easy for people to do that.
Neil: Let’s just destroy the myth that you can just put aside that, put a few plugins on to something and little too much to go far and to make you a millionaire of the night because that’s the impression you would get from some of the websites out there. I mean like you say, it’s got to be good quality stuff, the tools. Of course the tools are secondary to the good quality content. But if you want to make your own podcast it certainly can’t help you.
Jack: And don’t confuse good quality with you’ve got to be able to produce a podcast like Neil does with all the bells and…that’s not the quality, when you create your own podcasting how to – The quality is the information and it’s more specifically answering questions that desperately need answers, that people have already been out there going I wish somebody would just break this issue down for me or keep me up to date on the latest information in a certain area and do it in a way that…you know the way that you do it is not as important as that you are doing it and that you know where to find the content that people really want, the ideas for content that people really want to know about. This is the key to podcasting how to.
Neil: And how would you find that if you were researching on these? I mean so we have established beginning user with the podcasting as our mode of delivery, we’ve got some good tools in place to do it, we’ve set ourselves up on BlogTalkRadio, we’ve got the right plugins but then how do we go and find good old niche finding in the very beginning – how do we get that there?