In today’s issue, an upgrade warning to all who host their own WordPress blogs. How to upgrade your blog in a few steps. Easily change your admin username. Back up your blog to your Amazon S3 account. Back up your blog to your host. A scanner to detect how vulnerable your blog is to an attack. And plugins to secure and lock down your WordPress blog to brute force attacks.

- – - Sponsor – - -

50% Off “Done For You” Blog Service

Frustrated setting up your blog? Counting how much time you’ve “invested” (*cough*..wasted..) messing with databases, themes, widgets, and CSS?

Time to hand it over to a pro, yet?

For the next 48 hours, get a pro blog built by a pro for ONLY $500. Valid for the next 5 fortunate clients:

Click: http://shermanlive.com/go/revoblog

Business manager Eric Frans shares…

“…we have seen our daily unique hits increase literally a hundred fold and online product purchase to visit ratios are higher than ever before.

I know that if it is up to me, I will not even look to hire anyone else over Sherman as I have not met his equal in savvy and proficiency..”

Read Eric and other’s testimonials here:

http://shermanlive.com/go/revoblog

- – - /Sponsor – - -

8 Critical WordPress Security Resources

1. Still Using An Older WordPress Version?

It’s not just you, alot of others are still running older versions of WordPress (WP). Recently, many have reported seeing weird stuff in their URLs, all of them running older versions of WP.

Save yourself hours of wasted time and agony by upgrading to the latest version of WP. If you don’t deploy a security update, you’re vulnerable to get hacked, just a matter of when.

Here’s more details to the hack warning at Wordpress:

http://shermanlive.com/go/hackwarning

2. Upgrade Your WP Blog Automatically OR Manually

Automatic or manual upgrade – your choice. But whichever option you choose, backup your database first. (Below, I share a few links to do this)

Personally, I prefer the control of a manual upgrade. Quite simple, really. 3 steps – replace the files, execute the upgrade, and finally… do the happy dance!

More details to upgrading, either way:

http://shermanlive.com/go/upgradewp

3. How To Easily Change Your Admin Username In WP

Why change your admin username? Security. Be default, WP sets up your login name as “admin”. Hackers know this, and it makes their job easy.

But changing it manually by editing your WP database is cruel and unusual punishment! Trust me, I’ve been there, done that, and got the lousy t-shirt.

Enter the “Change Admin Username” plugin…ta-da! Activate it and it adds a new menu item to your Dashboard’s “Users” menu. Input new username, click save, and it’ll do its magic to your database.

http://shermanlive.com/go/wpadminchange

- – - Ad – - -

StomperNet Re-opens Doors For A Steal

Are you ready for a best of class web marketing education taught by some of the top faculty in web marketing?

Familiar with StomperNet.com?

** Best of class faculty and moderators specializing in all aspects of web marketing combined

** Extremely comprehensive library of web marketing training videos & content-rich live conferences

** First class print magazine covering strategies and techniques to succeeding in your business

Plus, we’ve piled on a series of software and tools to help your web business grow and prosper, all for a steal. And we’ve scheduled a series of webinars giving away top-notch biz training here:

=> http://shermanlive.com/go/s999

- – - /Ad – - -

4. Backup Your WP Blog To Your Amazon S3 account

If you have an Amazon S3 account, you know how easy and affordable it is to store data and resources on it.

(If you want more details on Amazon S3, visit: http://shermanlive.com/go/amazons3)

With the “WP S3 Backups” plugin, you can easily and automatically backup important parts of your WP blog to your account.

http://shermanlive.com/go/wps3backup

5. Schedule WP Blog Backups To Your Host Server

If you’d rather backup your WP blog to your host account, instead of Amazon S3, this “DBC Backup” plugin will make easy work of this process for you.

You can select when and where your backup will be generated, including 3 different compression formats.

http://shermanlive.com/go/dbcbackup

6. Scan Your WP Blog For Attack Vulnerabilities

“WP Scanner” is a no-cost online resource to measure your blog security levels.

Their “Activator Plugin” verifies you own your blog, giving them permission to test it.

Plugin & Details:
http://shermanlive.com/go/wpscannerplugin

After activating the plugin, simply launch the WP Scanner to test your security levels:
http://shermanlive.com/go/wpscan

7. Secure Your WordPress Installation

There are certain files in your WP blog installation that could be easy doorways to hackers. This plugin, ”Secure WordPress”, helps to secure your blog with removing and adding select files to tighten your blog’s security.

http://shermanlive.com/go/securewp

8. Lockdown Protection From Brute Force Attacks

WordPress blogs are vulnerable to brute force attacks as there are no limits to how many times a user can use invalid login passwords before using the correct one.

This plugin, “User Locker”, will close this hole with a maximum number of invalid login attempts. Once this number is exceeded, the account is locked.

More details on how User Locker works here:

http://shermanlive.com/go/userlocker

-

-

That’s it for this issue, my friends. Thank you for reading, and you can share your feedback and comments below or via Twitter.

If you liked this first issue, why not forward it to your friends, colleagues, family and anyone else that you think might enjoy it. Thank you for your continued support.

Until the next issue, here’s wishing you much health, happiness, prosperity – and security,

Sherman Hu

In today’s issue, a Firefox addon to help with blog seo. Evergreen strategy to promote blogs. Blog with an iPhone app. 3 tips to create better blog content. Get in tune with your readers needs. 5 ways to make your writing timeless. Finally, 3 ways to figure out how frequent you should publish on your blog.

- – - Sponsor – - -

50% Off “Done For You” Blog Service

Frustrated setting up your blog?

Counting how much time you’ve “invested” (*cough*..wasted..) messing with databases, themes, widgets, and CSS?

Time to hand it over to a pro, yet?

For the next 48 hours, get a pro blog built by a pro for ONLY $500. Valid for the next 5 fortunate clients:

Click: http://shermanlive.com/go/revoblog

Business manager Eric Frans shares…

“…we have seen our daily unique hits increase literally a hundred fold and online product purchase to visit ratios are higher than ever before.

I know that if it is up to me, I will not even look to hire anyone else over Sherman as I have not met his equal in savvy and proficiency..”

Read Eric and other’s testimonials here:
http://shermanlive.com/go/revoblog

- – - /Sponsor – - -

7 Brilliant Blogging Resources That Rock!

1. Blog Post Optimization with SEO Blogger

The folks at Wordtracker (keyword research company) have cooked up a Firefox add-on called ‘SEO Blogger’ in their labs, to supply you with keywords and related phrases (along with recent search volume) in your sidebar, so you can optimize your blog posts while writing it. I’ve tried it and it rocks!

http://shermanlive.com/go/seoblogger

2. An Evergreen Strategy To Promoting Your Blog

Most bloggers have the mindset that blogging is 97% writing and 3% promotion. While writing is important, brilliantly crafted blog posts with effective promotion that gets it spread around the web is way more effective. Discover one evergreen strategy to promoting your blog that will pay super dividends for your efforts.

http://shermanlive.com/go/promovsproduction

3. iPhone Users Blog Easily With PicPosterous App

The popular minimalist blogging service, Posterous, launched its own iPhone app called PicPosterous. Until now, you’d have to email pics to upload your content to your Posterous account. With the new app, you can take photos or video directly from within the app, or choose from your iPhone library. You can easily add your media to an album without starting a new blog post.

http://shermanlive.com/go/picposterous

- – - Ad – - -

Discount Codes for NameCheap Domain Names & Hosting

Aren’t you frustrated with upsells from GoDaddy whenever you try to register a domain? At NameCheap, register your domains at the speed of light, plus save with these discount codes:

New Domains: DREAMTIME

Transfers: SWITCH2NC

CLICK => http://shermanlive.com/go/namecheap

Get savings and support from NameCheap Hosting too:

10% off Any Shared, Business and Reseller Packages: SCHOOLTIME

15% off Any Shared Packages and Business Packages: HOSTSWITCH

10% off Any VPS Packages: USE4VPS

CLICK => http://shermanlive.com/go/namecheap

- – - /Ad – - -

4. 3 Tips To Creating Better Blog Content

Do you want a wider audience, more subscribers, better conversion to paying customers, fanatically loyal readers, and enviable word of mouth? Apply these 3 tips to make your reader’s life better, entice them to eat up your blog posts right away, and give them a pleasurable experience from reading your blog.

http://shermanlive.com/go/3tipscookiecontent

5. How To Get In Tune With Your Readers Needs And Produce Compelling Content

These 6 ways to stay in tune with your readers’ needs will help you create compelling content, over and over again. In addition, the 3 tips and exercise offered will help you easily produce compelling blog content for years to come.

http://shermanlive.com/go/6waysreadersneeds

6. 5 Ways To Make Your Writing Timeless

When you write articles for your blog, is it your intention to make them timeless or “here today, gone tomorrow”? The pain of irrelevant content is losing readers, traffic and credibility as a writer. To create timeless posts, simply follow these 5 guidelines when writing.

http://shermanlive.com/go/5timelesswritingtips

7. 3 Ways To Determine How often To Post To Your Blog

Ever wonder how frequent you should post to your blog? This is a common struggle for most bloggers, and this article shares 3 ways to determine the answer to this question. Once you decide how frequent you are going to blog, you can schedule your routine to fit your plan.

http://shermanlive.com/go/3postfrequencytips

-

-

That’s it for this issue, my friends. Thank you for reading, and you can share your feedback and comments below or via Twitter.

If you liked this first issue, why not forward it to your friends, colleagues, family and anyone else that you think might enjoy it. Thank you for your continued support.

Until the next issue, here’s wishing you much health, wealth, prosperity – and productivity,

Sherman Hu

Wendy Y Bailey of DIY Tech Talk is a colleague and social media buddy on Twitter. She interviewed me about the use of WordPress for business, and expanded on topics ranging from purpose of a blog for business use, plugins – along with my favorite plugins, themes – along with which 3 I recommend, integration with social media, and how to rank well and be visible on Google with blogs.

In this conversation, I shared edu-taining strategies using video to be visible, outrank your competition, and build your brand and expertise – tune in to this part of the conversation! 

As always, I appreciate your feedback and comments on your takeaways, and your thoughts on this video’s content. Cheers!

Show Notes

 01:22 AngelaBaden : Great, great show!

 01:22 shermanlive-1 : Thanks peeps!

 01:22 shermanlive-1 : thanks Angela!

 01:24 AngelaBaden : That really helped, I was feeling rather stymied by what wasn’t going on

 01:24 shermanlive : good! rock and roll now!

 01:26 AngelaBaden : Will do! Will tweet you and andy

 01:55 shermanlive : let me un-password my show peeps – sorry

 01:56 shermanlive : ok, go ahead and refresh the page – there shouldn’t be a password requirement now

 01:56 shermanlive : !moderateon

 01:56 shermanlive : !topic DIY Tech Talk: WordPress with Sherman Hu – Interview Host: Wendy Y Bailey

 03:00 lisamariemary : Hi Sherman!

 03:02 shermanlive : HEY HEY LISA MARIE!!!

 03:02 shermanlive : let your peeps know we’re gonna party about … now

 03:03 lisamariemary : Will do!

 03:03 lisamariemary : Yes

 03:03 DaveMarshall : good here

 03:03 lisamariemary : Volume just right to me

 03:09 shermanlive : wazzup peeps!

 03:10 lisamariemary : Hey Tony! Man, I need to visit your forum!

 03:11 WendyYBailey : http://snipurl.com/diy-wp-wendyy

 03:11 WendyYBailey : that’s to join the webinar!!

 03:12 TonyBlake : Yes you do Lisa… LOL!

 03:13 TonyBlake : SHOUT!

 03:14 lisamariemary : Eeks – I know, I’ve neglected you

 03:15 lisamariemary : eeks, sound gone

 03:15 lisamariemary : what happened to the audio? is it just me?

 03:16 LifeCoachMary : I love the pictures of food!! Yummo.

 03:16 shermanlive : do u hear us now?

 03:16 AndreaC : I hear fine

 03:16 shermanlive : HEY LIFECOACHMARY!!!

 03:16 lisamariemary : No, maybe I need to log in and out…hmm…

 03:16 LifeCoachMary : sound isn’t synced to the phone…

 03:16 shermanlive : refresh?

 03:17 lisamariemary : All better! Ahh!

 03:17 LifeCoachMary : do you know what the link is for Wendyy’s snip.url?

 03:17 shermanlive : yes there’s a delay

 03:17 shermanlive : http://snipurl.com/diy-wp-wendyy

 03:17 AndreaC : No better to make a choice with the audio, either or

 03:18 lisamariemary : Audio’s all fixed for me

 03:18 AndreaC : lol

 03:18 AndreaC : whats “for” dinner?

 03:21 LifeCoachMary : Thanks…all this technology is very cool.

 03:22 WendyYBailey : I love SEO, especially the All In One SEO Plugin for WordPress!

 03:23 WendyYBailey : What questions do you have about SEO and WordPress?

 03:24 AndreaC : Besides using the SEO plugin what else do you recommend doing?

 03:26 WendyYBailey : What’s a trackback?

 03:26 LisaVanAllen : Thanks for asking that WendyY

 03:27 lisamariemary : LOL!!!

 03:27 LisaVanAllen : I was getting scared

 03:27 WendyYBailey : LOL

 03:29 AndreaC : would you only do one or the other – comment or trackback?

 03:34 LisaVanAllen : When my prospects google “LisaVanAllen” these days, they find pg 1 filled with info on a woman involved in a notorious lawsuit (NOT ME). Any way to knock her off and regain page 1??

 03:36 LisaVanAllen : Is that QAlias?

 03:36 shermanlive : http://www.qalias.com/

 03:37 WendyYBailey : http://qalias.com/af/wb01

 03:37 LisaVanAllen : Got any contacts for me??

 03:37 shermanlive : i’ll send U “TONY”

 03:37 lisamariemary : LOL!

 03:37 LisaVanAllen : heehee

 03:38 lisamariemary : lol

 03:38 LisaVanAllen : It was NASTY!

 03:38 lisamariemary : Squidoo!

 03:39 LisaVanAllen : Not yet… will now!!

 03:39 LisaVanAllen : Just getting started with video

 03:39 lisamariemary : And use blogspot and youtube, too – they seem to get in the SERPS fairly quickly

 03:39 LisaVanAllen : How FUN!!!!

 03:39 AndreaC : brilliant!!

 03:40 lisamariemary : Oooh, yeah!!! That’d be cool!

 03:40 WendyYBailey : You got the right one, baby!!

 03:40 lisamariemary : Awesome!

 03:40 shermanlive : TubeMogul.com

 03:40 LisaVanAllen : That is a fabulous idea!!

 03:40 lisamariemary : I love it! And it’d make a cute Squidoo lens!

 03:41 LisaVanAllen : THANK YOU!!!

 03:41 LisaVanAllen : Yup with R Kelly

 03:41 LisaVanAllen : NOT ME!

 03:41 LisaVanAllen : Yes… very white!

 03:41 lisamariemary : lol

 03:41 lisamariemary : lmao!!!

 03:42 AndreaC : So when I search Lisa Van Allen next month, hope to see this video

 03:42 lisamariemary : No problems with new version? I’m scared to upgrade

 03:43 TonyBlake : No probs so far Lisa… upgrade was easy and no probs

 03:44 lisamariemary : Groovy!

 03:44 TonyBlake : I’ve upgraded all my blogs to 2.7 and have yet to have a prob — and I have like 35 blogs

 03:44 lisamariemary : OMG, Tony – wow!

 03:44 LisaVanAllen : 35?!?!?!? Where do you find the time?

 03:44 WendyYBailey : WOOHOO!

 03:45 lisamariemary : Tony is super groovy!

 03:45 LisaVanAllen : Tony – can we be friends?

 03:45 AndreaC : http://www.ablakeforum.com

 03:45 TonyBlake :

 03:45 TonyBlake : @tonyblakelive

 03:46 WendyYBailey : What plug-ins do you suggest?

 03:47 TonyBlake : I love sharethis… makes life so easy

 03:47 WendyYBailey : plug-ins: sharethis

 03:47 WendyYBailey : plug-ins: twittertools

 03:49 WendyYBailey : post a digest of your tweets on your blog

 03:49 WendyYBailey : kewlio!

 03:49 LisaVanAllen : Loving this!

 03:49 WendyYBailey : Me too, Lisa!

 03:49 SelfMadeCelo : Another great plugin is “Lifestream” reads RSS feeds from a ton of different social sites (Digg, FaceBook, Twitter, Flickr, etc) and posts it on one page

 03:49 LifeCoachMary : Where do we find that twitter to blog tool? Very cool!

 03:49 shermanlive : “Share This”

 03:49 WendyYBailey : plug-ins:  podpress

 03:50 shermanlive : “Twitter Tools

 03:50 TonyBlake : lifestream is another cool plugin — it posts your twitter or a twitter digest directly to your blog as a post

 03:50 shermanlive : “Podpress” http://MightySeek.com

 03:50 SelfMadeCelo : @Tony, great minds think alike eh? lol

 03:51 TonyBlake : LOL!… didn’t see your comment

 03:51 shermanlive : http://WishlistPlugin.com

 03:51 SelfMadeCelo : I’m actually setting up Lifestream right now =)

 03:55 WendyYBailey : http://snipurl.com/diy-wp-wendyy

 03:55 LifeCoachMary : Are plugins easy to install, or is it best to delegate to VA?

 03:56 LisaVanAllen : Give me a call Wendy!

 03:57 LisaVanAllen : Answer Mary’s question about whether we should hire a VA for our plugins??

 03:57 WendyYBailey : Plug-ins are easy but do delegate to a VA so you can focus on doing what you truly love — coaching!

 03:58 LifeCoachMary : Thank you!! Now I know how my peeps feel not understanding all this language. Thanks for doing this!

 03:58 WendyYBailey : You’re quite welcome!

 04:02 WendyYBailey : http://tutorialu.com

 04:03 WendyYBailey : http://wordpresstutorials.com

 04:03 WendyYBailey : http://diytechtalk.com  

 04:03 WendyYBailey : GENIUS!!

 04:04 WendyYBailey : You might also have a web dev/project manager to handle that stuff too.

 04:04 LifeCoachMary : You make it sound not so scary…but I’ll probably still delegate.

 04:05 shermanlive : lol – good for you!

 04:05 LifeCoachMary : If we’re a newbie with plugins, what’s the one or two we should add first?

 04:05 WendyYBailey : http://elance.com

 04:05 shermanlive : odesk.com

 04:05 WendyYBailey : http://guru.com

 04:05 WendyYBailey : http://odefk.com

 04:05 WendyYBailey : lol  http://odesk.com

 04:06 WendyYBailey : Do you know joselin mane?

 04:06 LisaVanAllen : Joselin Mane is awesome!

 04:06 LisaVanAllen : So, so helpful!

 04:07 WendyYBailey : http://groupcoachingmastery.com is a Semiologic pro/WP blog.

 04:09 WendyYBailey : That’s way kewl!

You may be familiar with blogging and its benefits. But are you familiar with the power of RSS mashup technology as a marketing tool for your online start-up or established online businesses? Would you want to discover a technology that is so understated but so powerful that even Google involves it in one of their company acquisitions?

This blog entry is addresssed to established web marketers, entrepreneurs, or virtual start-ups. I’ll be sharing with you a document to create a greater awareness of the advantages of leveraging innovative RSS technologies for higher visibility on the Internet and the traffic that results from such visibility.

As an evangelist and trainer for blogging and other social media, I’m very familiar with the strengths of blogging and RSS. But when my friend and colleague, David Ridge speaks about RSS Mashup Technology (that gives him speedy but stable search results and revenue from Google), I drop everything and listen intently.

David Ridge is the founder and CEO of Fwicki.com, an RSS mashup platform and one of the most powerful and innovative RSS applications on the internet today. If you have no clue about Fwicki, let me give you some context to the rare air around Fwicki.

Are you familiar with Feedburner? Yes, the leading provider of media distribution and audience engagement services for blogs and RSS feeds. And the largest feed and blog advertising network, with members like Wall Street Journal Online, Wired News, Ziff Davis, and more. Yes, that Feedburner that Google owns.

Located within the FeedBurner application is a list of integrated components from carefully selected, related RSS applications and services. The services offered within the FeedBurner user area are a “who’s who” of the top 25 RSS applications in the world such as Google Reader, My Yahoo!, Newsgator, and Pageflakes. Fwicki is one of these 25 applications. Google (Feedburner) digs Fwicki, do you?

I pray you’ll allocate mind-space to Fwicki. David Ridge is a mover and shaker (but a very private guy), and he’s granted me exclusive permission to share a RSS Training document with you that will make a difference to your business if you take advantage of it. And more importantly to me, David’s shown strength of character and integrity over the years that I’ve known him, so I trust him.

This document, “RSS Technology Training: Syndication Concepts for Business“, will help you understand the role of RSS technology and advanced syndication concepts for entrepreneurs and online businesses.

Here’s the table of contents in this document:

1. RSS Associates

2. Introduction

3. The Advantages of RSS

4. RSS & Business – The Perfect Merger

5. Planning The Syndicated Data Stream

6. Leveraging RSS For Placement In The SERPs

7. Innovative RSS Applications

8. Applying Mashup Application Technologies

9. Viral Syndication Concepts

10. Social Syndication Concepts

11. Custom, Dynamic, Social Data Portals

12. The Advantages of Rich Media Feeds

13. Monetizing The Data Stream

14. Adequate Support, Coaching and Training

David gave me express permission to share this document with my audience – you – to shed light on the power of RSS for business.

Here’s your next steps:

Step 01. Download and read “RSS Technology Training: Syndication Concepts for Business”

Step 02. Holla at David Ridge at http://www.fwicki.net/support . Give him thanks & props for this free document

Step 03.  Use http://www.fwicki.net/support to ask him questions about what you read, or how his mashup technology will make a difference to your online business and web marketing. David’s also available for private RSS consulting to those who qualify. “Only” my “posse” has been offered the opportunity to engage his time for consulting, so let him know Sherman sent you, ok?

Will Newman, Managing Editor of “Copywriting Insider” (AWAI) interviewed me this morning. Frankly, this ranks as one of my all time favorite interview sessions. I believe alot had to do with how much of a pro Will is with his pre-interview research. He had invested hours of research into my previous blog entries, podcasts and videos before conducting his interview with intelligent questions that inspired lengthy, in-depth answers from me. Almost felt like an “Inside The Actors Studio” session

HIs audience are copywriting students, novice professional writers and folks who are generally tech-unsavvy. The questions Will asked of me really opened up answers targeting mindset and practices with respects to blogging, podcasting, video and social media / networking.

I’m confident you’ll receive tremendous value from this interview. It would really thrill me to receive your feedback, thoughts and comments on this interview and your takeaways that you’ll take action on.

(sidenote: To prevent audio feedback with Will, this interview seems 1-sided with me talking. As much as I could, I rephrased Will’s question/s before my answers. Just a heads up.)

Nancy Marmolejo, of VivaVisibility.com and Twitter buddy “NancyMarmolejo” shares with her audience about Twitter, what it is and how to learn the ropes by modeling influencers who use it effectively. Thanks Nancy, U ROCK!

Check it, and appreciate your feedback.

Question from a WordPressTutorials.com Member: How do I ensure that all my folders and files are on the server after I upload it? What do I do if not all of them are uploaded?

This short video shows you how.

Sidebar: This is an experiment in creating, recording, saving and embedding video from Ustream.tv into my blog. If this works well, it cuts out a few steps and saves time As always, I appreciate your feedback and comments.

Question from a WordPressTutorials.com Member: How do you activate a new WordPress blog theme after you upload the theme folder to your host account?

Here’s a short video that explains how.

Sidebar: This is an experiment in creating, recording, saving and embedding video from Ustream.tv into my blog. If this works well, it cuts out a few steps and  saves time

As always, I appreciate your feedback and comments.

Cynthia Kasper is a Facebook friend. Here she is with her son and you can tell they have a great relationhip, and that he’s a joker

She shared with me that he is participating in a contest organized by StoryTubes for their 2008 National Contest which rewards winning contestants with $500 prize money for books, and their sponsoring organization (school, library or designated organization for home-schooled youth) will also receive $1,000 in books. I like this contest already

In addition, she enquired if I would share methods to get this message to the masses to vote for her 12 year old son’s video – and fast.

As a homeschooled student, he created his own book report video and entered it in the "Heroes/Heroines Category" with a video titled: Star Wars: The Last Of The Jedi: Death On Naboo (his video is located in the 2nd last row of videos).

The good news is he was chosen as a finalist and the voting begins tomorrow, May 19th.

Cynthia shared her discovery that previous winners have mobilized large social networks to get in excess of 15,000 votes. WOW!

Feeling especially generous and wanting to encourage her son’s efforts, I detailed my "off the top of my head" game plan for her to deploy right away. After you read my game plan below, I would appreciate your feedback, and especially a strategy or two to help Cynthia and her son get quick exposure and votes. And I’m confident Cynthia would be very grateful for your vote also

So here’s the game plan I shared with Cynthia:

Her Son’s Video:

Cynthia, good on your son for creating the video. This is what I would do, off the top of my head…

Facts:
- He created a video in the "heroes/heroines" topic/category
- He created a video about "Death On Naboo" (Star Wars The Last Of The Jedi)
- The winner wins $ in books and also for institution of choice
- Voting commences May 19 (12 noon EDT) – May 25, 2008
- Past winners have leveraged social networks for votes

Here are my ideas:

1. Video Broadcast:
- I would setup an account at TubeMogul.com, which will broadcast your video to 14 video sharing sites (eg. youtube, google video, blip, etc).
- You would have to register for free accounts at those 14 sites.
- Upload the video to TubeMogul and it’ll broadcast to all of them. This will give more exposure to the video.
- Title the video like how you’ve done it at YouTube. eg. "For StoryTubes Vote: Heroes & Heroines: Star Wars – Death On Naboo"
- Describe the video well. If you can, hyperlink to the category and describe how folks can locate your son’s video to view it. Then link to the voting page and provide details to make it easy for folks to use the data to vote.
***  It wouldn’t hurt to have a page setup on Squidoo.com or HubPages.com that embeds your son’s video, explaining the cause, the prize, what institution your son’s hoping to win books for, plus links to the necessary page for voting – this way you direct everybody there, they get the info they need, get motivated, then click the links to vote.

2. Press Release:
- Write a release sharing the purpose of the event, the cause, the prizes. Then write your point of view, and your son’s point of view (like you’re being interviewed) in it. Then include a link in the release to your Squidoo.com or HubPages.com page. Send your release to PR.com (free) or PRWeb.com (paid).

3. Use Social Media Groups:
- Go to MySpace. Search for "Star Wars" in MySpace Groups. Join them. Then share the details of the program, the cause, the prize, who your son’s trying to win for, and link to the Squidoo/HubPages page for more details and votes.
- Repeat the above process for Facebook Groups.

4. Google "Star Wars fan sites", "Star Wars forums" or related phrases
- Hunt down fan sites or forums, join them, add value and comments, and share what your son is doing with the Star Wars video. If you can email/call the webmaster or admin to feature his cause, with relevance to Star Wars, then that’ll provide a large fan base that will vote for your son just because you’re all Star Wars fans.

5. Homeschool Groups/Organizations
- Email your admins of your homeschool group/org and also other homeschool groups/orgs, detailing the same proposal. Send them to your Squidoo/HubPages page and get them voting for your son.

6. Leverage Sponsor Blogs
- Visit StoryTubes.info, visit all the associated sponsoring organizations and libraries, and hunt down their blogs. Since they are sponsoring the event, they would probably have some type of mention of it on their blogs (hopefully).
- Add comments on their blogs, sharing your excitement and your son’s commitment to winning the prize for his chosen institution. Share a link to your Squidoo/HubPages page, requesting folks to view his video and vote.

7. Other Social Media & Social Bookmarking Sites
- There are a host of Web 2.0 sites you can feature content about your son’s contest journey/experience. Here are some of them: Hubpages, Squidoo, Wetpaint, Faves, Bumpzee, WordPress.com, ClearBlogs, Quizilla, Propeller, Wists, Kaboodle, Digg and many more…

8. Ping
- Use your Squidoo.com/HubPages.com RSS feed URL and get it pinged at Pingoat.com and OnlyWire.com

9. Twitter - Hopefully you already have a good following of friends on Twitter. Broadcast to your friends to vote too!

What do you think? Can you get some momentum from these strategies?

Cheers, Sherman H.

There you have it – my quick-off-the-top-of-head game plan. I’m confident there are a ton of strategies that are free / inexpensive, deliver quick exposure and in turn, leading to votes for her son.

What are your thoughts on what I shared with her? Do you agree? Differ? What would you suggest? Cynthia & I are all ears…

David Kyte cornered me at the last StomperNet Live event, and requested I share with his audience about the real benefits of using WordPress and Video. Watch this video as I share how a lawyer friend boosted his bottom line by an additional 6 figures in client billings. Appreciate your feedback as always

Alejandro Reyes (SuccessFool.com) interviewed me about Twitter - a social networking, microblogging web-based service utilising instant messaging, SMS or a web interface to stay connected in real time. You can communicate and stay connected through the exchange of short status messages of less than 140 characters.

We discuss who should use it, why to use it, how to use it and more. During the interview, I littered a host of tips and resources to use Twitter effectively, eg. connecting it to Facebook, your blog and the many applications that work with Twitter. Keep an eye out for those.

Check this video out and I appreciate your feedback and comments.

Bill Vick (XtremeRecruiting.tv) interviewed me about how headhunters and recruiters can leverage blogging, video and social media to extend their brand, subject matter expertise and reach, which in turns enhances their business and profits.

View this video and consider how it can apply to your professional service. Do you see angles that you can transfer concepts, strategies, techniques and skills?

How can you leverage blogging, podcasting, video and social media to extend YOUR brand, subject matter expertise and reach, which in turns enhances YOUR business and profits.

Care to share what you gleaned from this video? What are your takeaways? Would love your feedback here.

  I provide honest feedback to a good friend, Jerry West (www.WebMarketingNow.com), who asks 10 important blogging questions, compiled by his members and himself.

Listen to this interview now to discover all the answers to these questions:

• What is your choice of blogging software?

• In your opinion, what are the most important features for blogs?

• Can the average person conduct an upgrade for WordPress without losing their entire blog, ie. accidentally overwriting the files on the server?

• Besides having the XML subscribe button posted, what are the other ways to get a blog noticed? What are your "must have" subscribe chicklets?

• What are some great marketing tips on getting a new blog in front of the right audience?

• What are your favorite resources for blogging information?

• Which blog directories are best to submit to? Are there good country specific blog directories? Or is it best to just concentrate on US-based blog directories if your blog is outside of the US?

• Does blog and ping still work? What is the best method of getting Google back to your site? (I did a test and found that if you blog at least three times a week and don’t go more than three days of no postings, Google will come back at least a week to reindex the blog. If you blog everyday, Google comes everyday. Your thoughts?)

• If a site like Feedburner distributes my content to all the other blog sites, do I really need to submit the content to all the blog directories?

• What is the "Sherman Method" to obtaining "greatness in blogging" ?

Transcription

Voice Over: ShermanLive.com. Simplifying and demystifying technology so you can profit from it. Welcome to ShermanLive.com presenting time saving tips, short-cuts, how tos, leading edge techniques and money generating strategies. Here’s Sherman Hu…

[music]

Sherman Hu: Hey, hey, hey, Sherman Hu here. I just wanted to let you know that a good friend of mine, Jerry West from WebMarketingNow.com, asked me 10 questions about blogging and here are my answers. I believe they’ll be of tremendous value to you. Enjoy.

What is your choice of blogging software?

As a creator of WordPressTutorials.com, I’m definitely biased with using WordPress as my choice of blogging software, and I have nine different benefits that I want to share with you about why to use WordPress.

Number one is the “cost”. It’s free because it’s open source and you can definitely use it right away today without ever having to pay anything to use it.

Number two is “control” because once you download it from WordPress.org, you own it. So the control is there. You’re not being held hostage by a blogging service that will host your blog with them, but then you’re held hostage with all your content that you’ve published on their platform.

Three, there is an incredible “community” of developers and users of WordPress. So with the developer’s side, there are many people that will develop themes – or if you think of themes as design skins, that’s also another way to think of themes – they will develop themes and plug-ins. Plug-ins are functionalities or features that you can add to your blog almost like an a la carte basis. So you have developers of themes and plug-ins which really help to extend your blog.

Then you have this large community of users that will use it and they will report bugs. If things break, then the core team of developers of WordPress will take that and build patches to make sure that WordPress is solid and stable. So that’s definitely a good reason to use WordPress.

Point four is “customizable”. You can customize your themes, your creative, colors, the features, the plug-ins. If you are not code-friendly and you don’t want to wade in code, then you can definitely find developers out there that will help you tweak the code or customize it to your liking because WordPress is developed with a language called PHP. So if there are developers out there that know PHP, they can help you with that.

Of course, we covered cost, control, community, customizable.

Number five is “comments and collaboration” because a blog like WordPress offers a feature where your audience, your visitors can comment on your blog. You can then collaborate and interact and dialogue with your visitors and your audience. In this new phase of Web 2.0, it’s all not about who you are and what you do with your website. It’s all about extending yourself to the community out there, letting your visitors have a voice to connect with you and that is a wonderful feature to have.

Then, of course, one, two, three, four, five, six. Point six is you can keep “current and cool” with WordPress being that you can push fresh content to it very, very easily. They have a "what you see is what you get" type of editor when you go backstage to your WordPress Admin section, your dashboard, and it’s easy to publish content very fast. You can be very current with your blog because everything sort of looks like you’re publishing something on a Word document.

Now, you also have another benefit which is the ability to “connect” to different social media sites, for example, Facebook and MySpace. You can extend your blog to connect to those places and even to Twitter, which is a micro-blogging tool.

And, of course, you can combine your blog to videos and podcasts and making your blog into a podcast blog or a video blog which is incredible because you really then engage multiple senses of your audience to beyond just text. And that’s a wonderful way to engage your audience and have them understand who you are, look in your eyes, hear your voice, like you, trust you, respect you and really embrace your personality.

Of course, last but not least, you have the ability to “pre-schedule or postdate” your entries. Let’s say, you spent a weekend and you create 52 different tips that will address the market’s needs and your topic on niche market. You go ahead and publish these tips once a week, every Monday, let’s say.

While with 52 tips, you can pre-schedule one entry to publish automatically on its own into the right category, associate it with the appropriate category every Monday so that for the rest of the year, you’ll have a tip coming out every Monday. That will not only help your audience come back for new content from your blog but also train their engines to come back to your blog to index your content on a regular basis.

[music]

What are the most important features for blogs in your view?

Well, I believe there are two: One is “comments” where you can allow your audience to collaborate, to dialogue, to interact with you. I find this to be a very, very important feature that, of course, websites don’t offer.

This dialogue has really offered me an insight into what my readers or my listeners or viewers want to see, find gaps in the marketplace, for them to get to know me better which, of course, is translated into them partaking of my product and service offerings. So that’s a very important feature.

The other important feature really has to do with you as the blogger because I believe that as a blogger-owner, you want to publish fresh, and not only just fresh content but fresh and “value-added content” so that you can speak to your audience’s needs, you can build your subject-matter expertise. Then you can attract your audience to like you, trust you, respect you. That is time. That takes time to build that relationship, but you’ll be shocked at how fast you can build that.

And so, I believe that having the ability to have the audience dialogue with you through commenting on your blog, and for you to publish fresh and value-added content will be a wonderful way for you to extend yourself and your business using blogs.

Can the average person conduct an upgrade for WordPress without losing their entire blog? That is, accidentally overwriting the files on the server.

The short answer is yes. The data is actually on the database on the host server, so what you see on the front end of the blog is just the creative. And so, you can upgrade it by uploading the core set of WordPress files, the updated version to the appropriate folder on your whole server. For example, if you are having your blog installed on the root domain, meaning the root folder, meaning that if you go to your blog at domain.com, you see a blog there. Then your blog is installed in the root folder.

If your blog is installed in a subfolder, then that would mean you would upload it to domain.com/blog, where the blog, of course, is located in the blog subfolder.

Now, if you upgrade your blog, and let’s say your blog is on a subfolder, then you upload the core set of files to the blog subfolder, and then what you want to do is execute the upgrade by going to domain.com, or whatever your domain is, /wp-admin/upgrade.php and that will execute the upgrade and you’ll be set to go with an upgraded version of WordPress.

Besides having the XML Subscribe button posted, what are other ways to get a blog noticed? What are your most have subscribe chicklets?

That’s a great question. Some of the ideas I’m going to share with you right now have to do with extending yourself beyond just what’s happening on your blog. But here goes.

The first feature that I really enjoy is a "Share This" plug-in by Alex King. If you just Google for "Share This Alex King" you’ll find his blog that has a download of this plug-in that you can upload to your blog. It will provide a simple icon that will show up below your blog entry, where somebody can click on that and basically share your entry in a variety of different places. That’s one.

The other thing to get your blog noticed is to promote your blog. And so, I would look for third party bloggers out there, other bloggers in them, in your space that have a lot of authority, and then participating in a conversation there. So, I would go to someplace like Technorati.com, specifically Search.Technorati.com. I would type in your topic, or where you think your audience will congregate. Type it in.

Let’s say you’re dealing with red apples. So, you type in red apples in the search box at Search.Technorati.com and you’ll also be given a drop down table option for authority, and I would select a lot of authority, and hit enter. There you’ll be delivered a set of results where you can see bloggers that have authority in your space.

Then you can jump in there, really kind of read what they’re talking about, participate in a conversation, and add value to those blogs. That way you’ll build relationships and their audience will get to know you as somebody who’s a subject matter expert in that same topic, and they’ll flow over to your blog and hopefully become a follower of your blog, too.

The other way to do it is trackbacking. Trackbacking allows you the ability to comment on somebody else’s blog, but do it from within your blog. So there’s typically a trackback website address, or blog address, or URL that you can copy and paste from the other person’s blog, and as you write a new entry referencing what you want to comment, there is an entry. You scroll down in the page that you are writing on. You scroll down, you’ll be able to see this entry where you can paste that trackback URL.

So, when you publish it, the blog owner will be notified of your trackback, approve it, and it will show up in their comments. This way serves both parties. It serves the blog owner because you’re adding to the conversation. You’re adding value. You’re adding content. Their audience will, of course, read your comments, and if they find what you’ve shared to be a great value, then they’ll flow over to your blog and follow what you’re talking about.

In addition, your audience on your end will know about this conversation going on, and will appreciate you for opening up their sites to somebody else who is also talking about this topic, which actually builds your credibility as somebody who is at the hub of what’s cool and what’s hot and what’s going on. OK?

Now, there’s another way that you can get your blog noticed, which is through social media. Whether it’s Facebook or MySpace, I would put on your party hat, jump in there, and search out groups that are relevant to your topic, or where your audience hangs out, and just join the conversation there. Build your subject matter expertise. Attract them to you by adding value.

So, they like you, they trust you, they respect you, and then they’ll partake of your offerings. That is one of the ways to get your blog noticed, because if you are on Facebook, and you are in a particular group, and you’re adding value, they’ll flow through to your profile, and from your profile they can click over to your blog to find out more about what’s going on with you.

Now, the other two ways to get your blog noticed are through video and audio. If you use video, then you can broadcast your videos to different video sharing sites and video directory sites, which will, of course, if you title it or describe it accurately or effectively, you can have your viewers or new audiences click on the link to come back to your blog to find out more about you.

The same thing with audio. If you’re promoting your podcast, you can submit it to podcast directory sites which will also link back to your blog. The good news is: the video sharing sites and the podcast directory sites will also rank well on all search engines for, however, you’re titling it and that will also boost the number of listings you have in the search engines for what you’re trying to publish. OK? So, those are some of the ways in which you can get your blog noticed.

"What are some great marketing tips on getting a new blog in front of the right audience?"

First, you have to know your audience. I would research your market. I would go to different groups and social media sites like Facebook groups or MySpace groups, discussion boards, even research keywords maybe in WordTracker. Get to know your audience; put yourself in their shoes and discover what their wants are, their needs, their desires, what they’re hungering for. Keep that in mind because that’s the way you would create your content, basically answering questions that they are looking for.

Secondly, I would then create your blog.

Third, I would publish fresh value-added content to your blog. Of course, this is going to be easy because you have the answers to the questions you’ve researched from your marketplace. You can publish this content, whether in text or audio or video and then push the free line and when folks are participating in your content that you offered, and they realize that it’s really good, juicy content, then they’ll want more of what you have to offer whether it’s services or whether it’s additional products.

And fourth, I would put on your party hat, go hang out where your marketplace hangs out and join in the conversation. Don’t be a dork, enjoy the party like you would at a cocktail party, right? So, at a cocktail party you’d be respectful, you’d be relevant, you’d be helpful, you’d add value and you wouldn’t pitch like a dork when you first arrive at the party, because it’s easy to get booted out of the party and not be invited back again.

So, that’s what I would recommend: I would recommend you establish your brand, your subject-matter expertise, so that people like you, they trust you, they respect you, and then they’ll check out your profile and your blog and potentially partake of your offerings.

"Which blog directories are best to submit to? Are there good country-specific blog directories, or is it best just to concentrate on US-based blog directories if your blog is outside of the US?"

Honestly, I can’t answer this intelligently. I don’t pay much attention to this but in your "Options" tab, "Writing" sub-tab in your WordPress dashboard, you’ll scroll down and find a link that reads "Update services". Now, click on it, it’ll bring you to the "Codex" at WordPress.org in the "Update services" section and you’ll find that you can copy and paste a comprehensive list of English blog-ping services that you can then paste into your "Update services" box.

Then of course, you’ll save it and now when you publish a blog entry it’ll automatically ping all those directories on the fly without you having to do any additional work.

"Does blogging ping still work? What is the best method of getting Google back to your site? I did a test and found out that if you blog at least three times a week and don’t go more than three days of no postings, Google will come back at least once a week to re-index your blog. If you blog every day, Google comes every day. Your thoughts."

If you subscribe to the process of copying and pasting a comprehensive list of English blog pinging services to your "Options" tab, "Writing" sub-tab section of your dashboard in the "Update services" box, then that’s all you have to do. When you write a blog entry it’ll ping all the engines automatically. In addition, sometimes I’ll only use onlywire.com and pingoat.com to broadcast my entries.

Now the main point here is to publish content that’s not only fresh but that’s value-added and that comes back to knowing your market and their wants. Of course, publishing regularly takes time and practice but also if you would do a batch of entries on a weekend you can then pre-schedule your entries to show up maybe once every two days, once every three days and that will work well for you to do that so that you can work smart and not hard.

"If a site like FeedBurner distributes my content to all the other blog sites, why do I really need to submit the content to all the blog directories?"

No, you don’t. Aside from the initial ping and FeedBurner picking up your new content you don’t have to do much more with that. Just start connecting with other bloggers and your marketplace via joining conversations in social media sites and services. That’s all you really need to do.

Now one other thing you could do is to participate in other social media sites where you re-purpose your content and push the good value out there. That will help to give you additional exposure to new audiences, giving you additional reach to new audiences. Then they will, of course, come back to your blog.

And the final question which I think is really funny is:

"What is the Sherman method to obtaining greatness in blogging?"

I would say, first of all keep it real. You know, be who you are and have fun with it. You want to build your brand. You want to build your expertise, your credibility, by putting on your party hat, joining in the conversation and adding value to others. Push the free line. Don’t be afraid to share good information out there with your audience.

I would also say that you might want to, and I highly recommend, that you start looking to podcasting and videocasting because you can engage your audiences in multiple ways that you can’t with text. And extend your "-ness", like in the movie "You, Me and Dupree" when Owen Wilson like in Anthony Robin’s style shouts out to the crowd to embrace their "-ness". If your name is Joe, then your Joe-ness, or your Michelle-ness.

So, really kind of extend who you are and your personality and keep it real. And I believe that that will pay dividends for you in having people like you, trust you, respect you, embrace your offerings, whether it’s a service offering or a product offering, and you’ll be on your way!

Announcer: Keep it tuned in to Sherman, on ShermanLive.com. Want to call Sherman, or send him some love? Go to ShermanLive.com today!

When Michael Campbell (InternetMarketingSecrets.com) interviewed me for 1 traffic secret that I use, yet few people know about, or don’t realize how powerful it is, this is what I shared. In this video, I share how to achieve top search engine ranks publishing text, podcasts & video to blogs.

Michael Campbell (InternetMarketingSecrets.com) enquired about my strategy when I title and describe my blog and podcast entries. Do I optimize for the search engines or do I optimize for my readers. View this short video to find out what I do and why.

Michael Campbell (InternetMarketingSecrets.com) interviewed me about my 3 favorite traffic generation strategies and the reasons why. Naturally its blogging, videocasting & social media, but why? View this short video to find out.

Publishing quality content is one of the core pieces of the puzzle in running your online business. But where do we start? And how do we go about generating quality content? And how do we translate this content to profits for our business?

This article, titled “Re-Purpose Content 2.0” will show you how.

What’s In It For You?

Here are 3 benefits you’ll receive from implementing the strategies revealed in this article:

1. Subject Matter Expertise: You’ll leverage content to build your brand and expertise

2. Visitors & Customers: You’ll attract visitors and customers who like, trust and respect you

3. Conversions: If your prospects and visitors like you, trust you and respect you, this naturally leads to easier conversions. This could mean subscriptions to your newsletter, calling you to retain your services, purchasing your product offerings or whatever you choose to be your intended call-to-actions.

To keep it simple, I’ll share these strategies in only 2 steps:

Generate Content and Leverage Content.

Let’s start with the first step, Generate Content.

Step 1: Generate Content

You can generate content in 1 of 2 ways, or both.

You can O.P.W. which is an acronym for “Other People’s Writing”.

Or you can O.O.W., and acronym for “Our Own Content”.

O.P.W. – Other People’s Writing

Let’s explore O.P.W. (Other People’s Writing).

Why is this important and effective? It’s because you save hundreds of hours having to write it yourself, which translates to productivity in other areas that really matter. Plus, its easier to edit someone’s work, than it is to create from scratch – do you find this to be the case? I do too.

How can you implement O.P.W.?

Here are some examples of OPW. You have options such as:
- Private Label Resale rights ebooks, newsletters, salesletters, audio, video and more
- Public Domain ebooks, articles, journals, audio, video, software and much more, plus
- Engaging the writing services of a VA or a ghostwriter, to write content for your topic

Let’s look at option 2, which is to write your own content.

O.O.W. – Our Own Writing

Let’s explore OOW (Our Own Writing).

Why is this important and effective? Your topics may require context-sensitive data and information that only your in-house team or you know, eg. medical and legal sectors. In addition, writing your own content also provides you with consistency of voice, personality and brand.

How can you implement O.O.W.?

If you have an in-house team, you can assign them to begin outlining a series of content pieces that follow the ideas I’ll share in a moment. The content can be interchanged between text, audio and video formats.

If you require the services of a virtual assistant or ghostwriter, you can seek out
freelance talent at online service marketplace websites like guru.com, elance.com or rentacoder.com.

OK, let’s recap what we’ve learnt so far, before diving into the many varieties of content that you will begin to leverage.

You’ve learnt that there are 2 ways to generate content:

OPW - which is “Other People’s Writing”, and
OOW – which is to write your own content.

Let’s begin with the second step – Leverage Content.

Step 2: Leverage Content

Here’s a long but not exhaustive list of resources you can begin to gather research and to generate ideas of where to locate relevant content for your topic.

RESEARCH

affiliate material
article directories
ask campaigns
autoresponders
blogs
books
case studies
coaching + mentoring
discussion groups
ebooks
expert interviews
ezines
forums
i.m. chats
industry news
info product
mastermind
membership content
mini-courses
news alerts
newsletters
podcast
podcast transcriptions
press releases
private label resale
public domain
reports
research
salesletters
seminars
social media
speech
opt-in pages
transcriptions
teleseminars
tips
tutorials
videos
video podcast
video tutorials
websites
white papers
workbooks
workshops
etc etc etc

How you assemble your research is dependent if you’re going to OPW or OOW your research content to your output formats. Once you decide if you’re going to OPW or OOW, then these next steps fall in place quite easily.

Here are additional words that can also help you trigger ideas for the type of content you can generate:

brainstorm
benefits
facts
history
how to
ideas
problems
questions
quotes
thoughts
tips
topics

Once you gather your research content, you can begin to decide how your content will take shape. Here’s a long but not exhaustive list of content types you can choose to create. Note that it may be similar to the Research list, but the key is that all your research can be developed into interchangeable text, audio and video content.

OUTPUT

advertising
affiliate content
articles
ask campaigns
autoresponders
blogs
books
case studies
coaching + mentoring
discussion groups
ebooks
expert interviews
ezines
forums
industry news
info product
mastermind
membership content
mini-courses
news alerts
newsletters
opt-in pages
podcast
podcast transcriptions
press releases
private label resale
public domain
reports
salesletters
seminars
speech
social media
transcriptions
teleseminars
tips
tutorials
videos
video podcast
video tutorials
websites
white papers
workbooks
workshops
etc etc etc

For starters, print these lists and tack it up on a wall close by your computer. Scan the “RESEARCH” list for ideas, keeping your 1 business topic in mind, with the intention that you want to repurpose your research into a variety of formats listed in “OUTPUT”. Then get started in developing your content.

May I suggest that you consider how you can leverage your content for your blog, the social community websites you participate at, and for video. These are platforms that deliver strong return-on-your-time-investment for a large percentage of topics. Naturally, you want to consider your customers’ buying and research patterns so you can add value wherever they congregate.

Imagine the convenience and ease of looking at this list, and moving forward with confidence in generating an endless supply of content for your business topics.

Imagine publishing and promoting your content, building your subject matter expertise, developing your base of subscribers and customers, and boosting your conversions and profits because you generate quality content easily.

This is a strategy that you can take action on today. Go for it!

Would love your feedback on this article – thanks!

On our Feb 1 Huddle, I asked Leesa Barnes, host of SocialMediaTelesummit.net and LeesaBarnes.com) for her advice about …

"What’s the 1 thing that’s working really well for you and your clients right now?
And what are the top benefits you’re experiencing from this strategy?"

This is her answer…

Lasse Rouhiainen, author of Web 2.0 Marketing Tips, Video Marketing and an Online Personal Coach, interviews me late November 2007 about Facebook, Blogging & Video for business. View this 16 minute video as I share how your time-to-market can be shortened with this technology, the power of video and how business owners can leverage this technology for business exposure and profits.

Transcript

Sherman Hu: Hey, hey, hey! Sherman Hu here from ShermanLive.com, listening to Christmas music on the road. Thank goodness for XM Radio.

Do you know that XM Radio actually has five dedicated channels to Christmas music of different genres, different styles? I really, really like that.

However, I wanted to share with you about a Facebook tip, especially Facebook Mobile and what I do when I have a little bit of time to kill when I’m on the road, or waiting for family while they’re shopping, or whatever the case might be, I take my BlackBerry and surf Facebook Mobile. I have a BlackBerry app for Facebook. Or you can surf Facebook Mobile when you’re on your PDA or phone that has access to Facebook.

You can actually check out the status updates of your friends – the ones that have recently updated their status updates – and then you can go ahead and respond and ask questions about what they’ve been updating about. And that’s a great way to connect, and dialog, and build relationships with either new acquaintances or old friends on Facebook.

So that’s a heads-up tip for you that can help you maximize and leverage your time while you’re away from your computer or when you’re on the road.

I would love to get your feedback on what you do with your Facebook Mobile app on your phones, what your favorite features are, and what you use it for.

Cheers.

Just received a package from Randy Corke, President of Utterz.com for a value-added video contribution.

A couple of cow key fobs, a notepad with his personal writing of thanks (great touch!), his business card, a blowup beach ball, and an Utterz t-shirt (he had previously asked me for my size) is what arrived.

Many companies view a sale as an event. However, its just the start of a relationship, a journey with a client to convert them to an evangelist of your company, product or service.

How can you learn from this example for your product or service or company? What are some of the ways you’ve extended this idea to create evangelists for your offerings? Appreciate your thoughts and feedback…

It’s 1 hour to my 34th birthday, and I’m feeling especially thankful for what I’ve experienced and have been blessed with this year. Here’s 3 powerful video & blogging tips that I’d like to gift you.

I share about achieving multiple listings on Google using video, how to mobile blog (moblog) and how to easily get your videos transcribed. Enjoy!

ps. Oh yeah, would love your feedback and comments too

Transcription

Sherman Hu:     Hey, folks, how are you doing? This is Sherman Hu coming to you live from ShermanLive.com. I want to share with you that tomorrow is my birthday. I’m excited about it. There’s a lot that’s happened since the last birthday till tomorrow’s birthday.

Feeling the spirit of gratitude and thankfulness, I want to share with you three tips related to video and blogging that I believe will help your business move forward. I wrote down three different tips here and, if you can hear in the background, I have Christmas carols already in the spirit of Christmas while I share this with you.

All right, so first of all, our first tip is in regards to being able to achieve multiple listings on page one of Google with the use of video. So the key here is this, you get multiple listings on Google for your videos.

I’ve done this. I’ve accomplished this, even just up to recently when I went to BlogWorldExpo. I was there speaking, so I recorded some videos of the speakers and — let me turn down this music a little bit so I can pay attention to myself. OK, so basically I recorded some video of some of the speakers there, Jim Krukal, Debbie Weil, Wade Tonkin, and I posted some of that on the broadcast sites and video-sharing sites on a Wednesday night.

On Thursday, I showed up multiple times when I did a phrase search like "BlogWorldExpo Jim Krukal" or "BlogWorldExpo Debbie Weil," or "BlogWorldExpo Wade Tonkin." Just to let you know, BlogWorldExpo was spelt together. There are no spaces because that’s the way to spell their event’s name.

So anyway, I just want to share that with you, that you can do that. The service that I used is at TubeMogul. If you check out TubeMogul.com, it’s a service that’s free that allows you to upload your video tube in and then they will broadcast it to about a dozen different video-sharing video sites.

We’re talking about Google Video, Yahoo! Video and MySpaceTV, blip.tv, Revver, just a whole list of them and a lot of popular, popular video-sharing sites.

What’s also cool is they’re offering you metrics and statistics on how you can actually track the views of those videos on those video-sharing sites. So this is the tip right here. Set up an account with TubeMogul and then go ahead and find out which video-sharing sites they are associated with.

Then go ahead and set up individual accounts with your account that those different sites at Yahoo! Video, YouTube Video, blip.tv. Set up your accounts there, grab all the usernames and passwords, bring it into TubeMogul and get it all set up.

Then when you have a video done, you just upload it to TubeMogul and then you’ll have it just launch of these different video-sharing sites. It will take a few minutes, maybe a little longer, to get it broadcasted to all the different video-sharing sites.

You can update and refresh your status to show how they’re doing, whether they’ve been broadcasted. Once it is broadcasted it will show you or give links to those specific videos at those specific video-sharing sites. And also it will give you the embed code, which is really cool.

So if you can upload your video to TubeMogul or broadcast it to the different video-sharing sites and just check back on Google for the title of your video, and you’ll see a bunch of them show up on Google. Google is all over video and video-sharing sites. Maybe that’s the reason they bought YouTube.

So check it out, a very good strategy and the key to appear is to make sure that you are sprinkling your important search phrases in the title of video and also the description of the video. This is a sub-tip here is that if you have your description of your video and you want people to see…

For example, on YouTube, on the right hand side of video, you can see a description of that video but there’s only a two-line snippet of your description. If you want people to go see the link to your website, make sure you feature that hyperlink off your website or the hyperlink of a certain key phrase early on in your description, in the first line, in the first sentence. That’s the sub-tip right there. OK?

Anyway, check it out, I believe that will be a tremendous boast to your business or your not-for-profit charity or your charitable project if you use that. That’s a great tip right there.

Number two, I want to share with you about being able to blog while you are away from your computer on the road with your cell phone. The service I am going to recommend you check out is jott.com.

It allows you to call the Jott number and leave a voice message to yourself. It will ask you who you want to Jott. You say, "Myself." Then you Jott yourself by talking, and it will take your voice and it will transcribe it for you. It’s incredible the transcription quality.

It will transcribe it for you, and it will then be able to convert it into text. You can actually receive that as a reminder to yourself. Now, what is key here is you can set up links to Jott your blog.

For example, I have my ShermanLive blog. I can set up a Jott link to my blog, give the username and password. So I call Jott, and they’ll say, "Who do you want to Jott?" And I’ll say, "ShermanLive blog". And they’ll say, "OK". Then it’ll give me a beep, and I start talking.

I’ll say something like, "I want to wish myself a happy birthday," [laughs] and it’ll transcribe that and post it as a new entry to my blog. That’s a wonderful way for you to go ahead and blog while you are away from your computer. It saves you a lot of time and, at the same time, gets pretty effective if you want to continually update your blog.

The other tip I have for you is, along the same lines of this Jott service. You’ve been around shermanlive.com. You know the services I have been using recently.

One of them is utterz.com. For my Canadian buddies, it’s u-t-t-e-r-zed.com. You can actually call the Utterz number. It will actually record your voice as an audio clip, audio file. It will post it to your blog automatically if you want it set up that way. Then that way you have the audio on your blog, like a podcast, really.

So that’s really cool. But the really cool feature I want to share with you is the third tip. The first tip was TubeMogul. Second was Jott. The third one was about being able to combine the video and audio clips on your blog but also to have the text transcription there so that the engine when it comes will grab your text. You can have double duty and double power of not only media but also text.

What I recommend you do is check out castingwords.com. Castingwords.com is a transcription service for podcasts. The cool thing is it will be able to grab your RSS feed and transcribe it basically on a schedule whenever you post something to a new blog. They will transcribe it and send it to you via email with text, and you can just copy and paste into your blog below your video / audio.

I’ve done this quite well with being able to… When I create an Utterz, I post an audio file to my blog. The audio is recognized. Castingwords recognizes the audio, transcribes it for me and send it to me via email. I copy and paste the text into that specific blog post. So not only do I have audio, I have video, too.

Now, with the video portion it won’t wrap the audio from the video, but what I do is this. Because I use blip.tv as my main video hosting service, it will actually transcode it to MP3 for me also. So not only do I have video, but I will also have an MP3 file. I add those MP3 links to my blog post.

Now, CastingWords will recognize that MP3 link and file and transcribe that for me. So I have a transcription of my videos because blip.tv provides me with an MP3 file and link.

So, those are the three tips.

One, I showed you how to get multiple listings using video.

Two, I showed you how to mobile blog, moblog for short using Jott, and also the way to have double duty with double power with your blog, with not only video and audio media but also a transcription into text by using the video service of blip.tv to transcode it to MP3 and also Utterz, which provides you with an audio file.

There you go — three wonderful tips for you to take away and apply today for your business.

I am in a sharing mood. It’s my birthday is tomorrow. And I want to thank you for viewing this video on ShermanLive. I appreciate your time, and I’ll catch you soon on the next video.

Peace.

Here’s an article I’ve written for a Vancouver-based tech writer who’s asked me to share my experiences with Facebook, how it has benefited my business, and what tips I can offer other folks in using Facebook to promote their businesses. I’m confident you’ll gain insights that you can use – today.

1. How has Facebook helped me to grow my business?

When I first started out with my Facebook Profile, it was with the intention to connect with current and old friends and colleagues. It wasn’t till I tracked my Q3/Q4 statistics on my blog, did I realize that Facebook accounted for a decent and growing percentage of new visits to my ShermanLive.com blog, where I help business owners simplify and demystify technology so they can profit from it.

That was when I approached Facebook with more intentionality. This involved creating a Facebook Group as a beginner’s guide to help technophobes master the basics of the web. This group, with more than 350 members today, showcases more than 60 videos, teaching the basics like domain registration, hosting, creating web pages and blogs etc. In addition, I created a Facebook Group for members of my WordPressTutorials.com training site.

In being proactive in these groups and my profile, and engaging in dialogue with key contacts in my friend network, I’ve attracted hundreds of new visitors to my blog and my other web properties, attracting them to engage in my product and service offerings.

In addition, the conversations I’ve engaged in with new acquaintances and friends have sparked new business opportunities. These new opportunities have added to my bottom line in new alliances, new projects, new consulting and speaking gigs and new profits.

The networking opportunities are incredible on Facebook, as the platform offers you a sneak peek into the personal and business life of a Facebook ‘Friend’. At a glance, I can get a feel about a Facebook friend’s preferences, likes, dislikes and conversational style. These offer me very effective ice-breakers to engage in conversation with them. These conversations grow into stronger relationships, which may benefit both parties for business or personal interests.

In summary, Facebook has helped to enhance my business and personal life with new, enriching relationships and profits.

2. What recommendations do I have for other businesses in using Facebook to promote their products or services?

Put On Your Party Hat & Join The Party!

Quote from Wikipedia (Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facebook)
- – -
As of late November 2007, the website has the largest number of registered users among college-focused sites, with 55 million active members (including non-collegiate members) worldwide, with membership expected to surpass 60 million users by the end of the year. From September 2006 to September 2007 the site’s traffic ranking increased from 60th to 7th, according to Alexa. It is the number one site for photos in the United States, ahead of public sites such as Flickr, with over 60 million photos uploaded weekly.
- – -

Its a party with close to 60 million users, and 200,000 new users joining everyday – what’s not to like?

Facebook users proactively use Facebook to connect with their current friends and find old friends, share picture and video galleries and communicate openly on their ‘Walls’ and private messages. There are also many business applications that add features to your profile. Facebook also offers Facebook Groups (interest groups that have grown to the thousands) and Facebook Ads, a very powerful demographically-targeted promotional service being offered to Facebook users. You can read more about other services that Facebook offers here.

With 1 million new post-college users joining every week, it should catch the attention of all businesses to dive into and research this phenomenon.

The least a business should do is to research interest groups (Facebook Groups) related to their product or service line or their ideal audience, and feel the pulse of the community. I would strongly suggest that new users put on their party hats, join several interest groups, add value to the ‘party’ with tips, advice, photos, videos and other helpful insights. As you gain trust, respect, influence and subject matter expertise, the users in those Facebook Groups will then seek out your Facebook Profile or your web properties to engage in your offerings.

Don’t Be A Social Dork!

There’s a reason why it’s called Social Media.

Keep it Social. Keep it Relational. Keep it Community-Centric.

Like in blogging, infuse your ‘speak’ and ‘conversations’ with your personal voice.

Don’t be a social dork by blatantly pitching your products and services – it’ll get you nowhere fast.

Create Your Own Party!

After you get your feet wet, you may want to consider creating your own Facebook Group or Facebook Page. It doesn’t have to be a topic that’s super-niched to your product or service, as it can be one that’s loosely related to your offerings.

For example, Dove could setup a Facebook Page about ‘Real Beauty’ – showing pictures, videos and posting notes about the power of ‘real beauty’. They don’t have to blatantly pitch their Dove products. Get it?

It’s Not A One Night Stand!

Keep in mind that you’re building a positive brand, a positive reputation, a positive community around your company, your products or your services.

This is relational, social, and about community.

Not a one-night stand. Not bam-bam-thank-you-ma’am.

It’s courtship. It’s dating. And it takes time. But its all worthwhile.

Where else can you find a party with 60 million users, offering you demographics, geographics, pyschographics and their conversations, pictures, videos and their likes/dislikes to begin a conversation, a relationship?

Where else can you setup a group around a relevant topic, attract Facebook users to participate in the conversation, and enjoy the benefits of knowing what your audience likes or dislikes.

In closing, be smart about Facebook. Throw on your party hat and join the party. Don’t be a social dork. Create your own party. And remember, it’s not a one night stand.

Would love your feedback and comments – simply click the ‘Comments’ link below. Thanks!

Very impressed with Utterz support team, and speed of service. Here’s a feature request, add the number of listens next to the ‘Replies’ field on one’s blog – that would show visitors to one’s blog how popular an Utter has been. Thanks Sim!

Mobile post sent by shermanlive using Utterz. Replies. mp3

Transcript

Sherman Hu: This is Sherman Hu from ShermanLive.Com.

I wanted to share with you just how impressed I am by Utterz.com. The service has been incredible. I’ve been working with the support staff getting some tech issues ironed out. They’ve just been really responsive, which is really good.

The point I want to make is when it posts to your blog, it shows on the blog that you have a certain number of replies. It will say "Mobile post sent by, " in my case, "Sherman Live using Utterz." It might be two replies or three replies. The replies are comments by other folks in the Utterz service.

I think what would be really, really cool would be if the Utterz team could add the number of listens to the Utterz. It’s kind of like the number of plays. That would be really cool to showcase on one’s blog. Maybe next to the "Replies" field so that new visitors or visitors to one’s blog can see that your Utterz has been pretty receptive or gaining a lot of traction with listeners. Even if the listens come from Utterz.

It would be great if it’s a combination of listens from Utterz and the blog, when somebody clicks the play button on the blog.

So, anyway, this is a feature request that would make Utterz just one step better in regards to what they showcase on a blog entry.

Over and out.

Transcript

Sherman Hu: Hey, Hey, Hey, Sherman Hu from ShermanLive.com I wanted to give a shout out that I’m enroute to go visit a friend that is a renowned music producer and I’m not going to mention his name, but a lot of top music artists know him and have him write their music and produce. He wants to discuss, brainstorm, and organize and have me come over and help him out with his online community project. I’m not sure exactly what it is, but by the end of the night I know I’ll find out.

If you have friends or associates or clients or whoever that is looking to launch their own online community project in the arts, whether its music, film, movies, modeling, whatever the case might be, then definitely consider Ning.com as a social networking application to be the piggy back, a platform for your online social network. Then you definitely want to piggyback on MySpace, create a profile for that project and upload the media pieces. When you’re talking about music, the music content is incredible media that you can publish to MySpace or Ning or to a host of media sites. You can post music videos, interviews with the artist, that kind of stuff.

Just a heads up on an application that I’ve used quite well that I really like is TubeMogul.com, and it’s a free web-based application that broadcasts your video to a whole list of video sharing sites. So instead of having to upload your video one at a time to eight to 10 video sharing sites, you just have to upload your video once to TubeMogul and it will broadcast it to the ten video sharing sites for you. And not only that, it will track the views and the stats of how well those videos are doing at the different video sharing sites.

One of the video sharing sites that it posts to is Blip.tv which is where all of my video media is hosted right now. And the cool thing about Blip.tv is they will also cross post to a variety of different places, one of them being "Internet Archives". Google loves "Internet Archives" like Blip. These video sharing sites are doing very well when you post your media to it and you use good titles to title your videos.

Right there I dropped four apps for you to consider; Ning, MySpace, TubeMogul, and of course Blip.tv. Check it out, right now we are in such a video craze that when you use it well you can really show up well in the search engines for Google’s Universal Search where they showcase pictures and YouTube videos and different things like this. Anyway, that’s my tip, enjoy, use it, benefit from it, and we’ll talk to you soon.

Transcript

Sherman Hu: Hey, hey. Sherman Hu here, from ShermanLive.com. I want to share with you a question I received today. I believe the answer will help you if you are considering the same thing.

There are many different topics and niche markets online that you can participate in. Hopefully that the areas you are passionate about or have interest in is also a profitable one. However you may have passions in areas that are totally unprofitable online, in which case you may be searching for a market place in which you would like to be an influencer or thought-leader or subject matter expert but really don’t know enough to play ball. I know what kind of question I have today. I thought I would share with you how you can start moving forward in the right direction.

What I will do, you want to go where the thought-leaders and the subject matter experts and influencers are and come to the party and put on your party hat – this is something of a visual analogy I adopted from Chris Brogan in his talk at BlogWorldExpo – "Jump into the party, be part of the conversation" – participate in the conversation when you have something of value to add. If you are new to the market place this where you study. This is your research ground. This is where you go into student mode for any offline resources.

There are many online resources that you can check out.

One of the places I would first go to would be Technorati.com. I would go to search.technorati.com. At search.technorati.com you will find a search box. Go ahead and type in it the search phrase, maybe the macro search phrase that pertains to the new topic that you are interested in and hit enter. You will be presented with a listing of all the different blogs on that topic. I believe, in the top right-hand corner, there is a web link to filter that search. You want to filter that search with blogs that have a lot of authority. After you filter that search, your listing is filtered down to blogs that are playing serious ball in that space that you are interested in. I would visit those blogs and bookmark them and really study what they have to share because more often that not they will be blogging about what really – the cutting edge, bleeding edge, current news about your topic – you want to be familiar with. Really take note.

Then the next place I would go to is Google News. I believe that is google.com\news or news.google.com – whatever the case may be. Type in your macro-related  phrases there. On the left column you will be presented with Google Alerts. You will be notified via email or, if you are friendly with RSS and have a blog reader, you can copy the link to the RSS feed of that news page that shows you the results of that topic that you searched for. Put it into your blog reader and you will be notified, every day, of the hottest news topic in that niche market that you are interested in. I would study them.

This is the cutting edge stuff. This is the way for you to put on your party hat, put on your student cap, study and in a short period of time – if you are intentional about your study – in the next seven to fourteen days you will be able to gather enough information to be able then, with your party hat on, participate in conversations at these blogs – the ones that you have filtered – add value, get to know the blog authors, whether via commenting on the blog of emailing them or picking up the phone and calling them. I am assuming that you are moving forward with your own blog anyway in that space.

If you are familiar with "trackbacks" at all, you can start posting trackback linking to the next author’s blog entry. Your trackback on your blog will be showcased in their blog as a comment. This will, if your comment is of value – I am not talking about stuff like "Great post, buddy" or "Wow! Nice tip." I am talking about adding a paragraph or a few lines of good content that add to the conversation. In no time you will find that people that visit these authority bloggers’ blogs will start to click over to find out what you have to add to the conversation.

You will start building up likeability, trust, respect, credibility and influence. This is the way that you build up your "rock star status". This can be applied to social networking or social media sites like FaceBook.

This is the killer strategy right here.

Facebook Groups allows you to type in the search phrase topic. Facebook Groups does a search. You will find a multitude of groups there that are related to your topic. You will find some with a lot of members. You will find some that pertain to your topic. You want to visit the group, join the group, put on your party hat, be part of the conversation, be social, don’t pitch, go up there, participate, add value, add pictures, add videos, add Slidecast, add text, add questions and answers in a discussion board and be a player.

You can do the same thing for MySpace.

What I am sharing with you here is, in a short period of time, definitely within a month, being able to intentionally study, put on your party hat and be in the conversation, gain knowledge, share your knowledge that you are learning and start becoming a rock star in that space. That’s my tip for you. If you are wondering how to enter a new space, right there I have given you the gems of how to do that effectively and efficiently in a short period of time. Enjoy!

Click To Play

Though this was posted by Utterz in a previous blog entry, I wanted to share with you the full size version – simply download it and you’ll see it in 640×480. Enjoy.

This video shows you how to add connections in your Utterz account (free Mobile Blogging service) to your blog, Twitter (a free Microblogging service) and Facebook (a social media platform) profiles. 

Transcript

Sherman Hu: Hey, hey, hey! This is Sherman Hu coming to you live, uttering on ShermanLive.com.

Utterz is a new service at Utterz.com; where you can mobile blog or in short, "moblog", at anytime, by calling a number. You can send your videos, your pictures, your text and your voice via cell phone and automatically send it to your blog with this service. You can also have it automatically connect it to your social network service whether it may be Facebook, MySpace or whatever the case may be.

It’s great! You can actually have a widget up in your blog with a collection of your moblog. What a great way to be able to be away from the laptop, the computer and still be able to update web properties whether it be blog or your social network.

Check it out, www.Utterz.com! Catch you later. Bye.

There are already 50+ training videos at WordpresTutorials.com – but with all the multimedia and social media trends and web apps available to us, you can really pimp out your blog – and even publish content to it away from your computer. Stay tuned for more videos coming soon to a browser near you…

Transcript

Sherman Hu: Hey, folks. Sherman Hu from ShermanLive.Com.

Today I was actually crafting out an entire schedule of curriculum to really beef up the video training I already have at WordPressTutorials.com and it’s because there’s so much that I have worked through, experienced, tested, experimented with regards to what you can do to pimp out your WordPress blog.

I’m going to be busy deploying many different topics along the lines of what you can do with your WordPress blog. I mean, it’s everything from the basics of setting and deploying it and tweaking it with the themes, the plug ins. That’s just the beginning.

We can really go full out and showcase how to podcast on your blog, how to videocast on your blog, how to connect social media to it, analytics. What else is there? There’s mobile blogging. What I’m doing right now with Utterz.

There’s so much that is possible away from your computer that it’s amazing, the development. So, I’m looking forward to develop a more comprehensive suite of video training at WordPressTutorials.com. Look for it. It’s coming out very soon.

Take care.

Transcript

Sherman Hu: Hey, hey, hey! This is Sherman Hu coming to you live, uttering on ShermanLive.com.

Utterz is a new service at Utterz.com; where you can mobile blog or in short, "moblog", at anytime, by calling a number. You can send your videos, your pictures, your text and your voice via cell phone and automatically send it to your blog with this service. You can also have it automatically connect it to your social network service whether it may be Facebook, MySpace or whatever the case may be.

It’s great! You can actually have a widget up in your blog with a collection of your moblog. What a great way to be able to be away from the laptop, the computer and still be able to update web properties whether it be blog or your social network.

Check it out, www.Utterz.com! Catch you later. Bye.

Transcript

Sherman Hu: Hey, hey, hey! This is Sherman Hu coming to you live, uttering on www.ShermanLive.com.

Utterz is a new service at www.Utterz.com; where you can mobile blog or in short, moblog, at anytime, by calling a number. You can send your videos, your pictures, your text and your voice via cell phone and automatically send it to your blog with this service. You can also have it automatically connect to your social network service whether it may be Facebook, MySpace or whatever the case may be.

It’s great! You can actually have a widget up in your blog with all this collection of your moblog. What a great way to be able to be away from the laptop, the computer and still be able to update web properties whether it be blog or your social network.

Check it out, www.Utterz.com! Catch you later. Bye.

Click To Play

Debbie Weil (of TheCorporateBloggingBook.com and DebbieWeil.com fame) is a Mac, a blog evangelist, vlogs with The Flip, has her blogging book translated to Mandarin, invited to speak in China about blogging – what’s not to like about Debbie – she rocks!

Transcript

Debbie Weil: Can you tell?

Sherman Hu: Yeah. [laughs] This is Debbie Weil, and I’m walking with the rest of the speaker crew after a wonderful dinner at Hamada’s, with some Japanese chef entertainment. Good food!

We’re doing the Las Vegas walking marathon to Hard Rock Cafe for the PJ party.

Debbie: But we don’t have on our pajamas. We’re not wearing our pajamas.

Sherman: Yeah, but they probably wouldn’t want to see my pajamas anyway.

Debbie: We’ll try to look for them.

Sherman: It’d be a different type of party.

Debbie: We’re trying to look like we’re not chewing gum, but we are chewing gum.

Sherman: Chewing gum is cool. After hours.

Debbie: Good.

Sherman: That’s cool. Debbie, where can people find out more about your wonderful stuff?

Debbie: That’s a great question. www.DebbieWeil.com.

Sherman: www.DebbieWeil.Com.

Debbie: Or just go to Amazon and type in "The Corporate Blogging Book".

Sherman: Excellent.

Debbie: That’s the name of my book. You can find my book there.

Debbie: They always have sales and stuff.

Sherman: Yeah, that’s true.

Debbie: You go to www.DebbieWeil.Com, you get to the blog and everything else.

Sherman: Let me ask you one question. What is the one blogging strategy that is working really well for you or your clients right now?

Debbie: Blogging consistently. It doesn’t mean every day. It doesn’t mean three times a day. At least once a week.

It seems very straightforward. It’s really simple but you’ve got to keep doing it. Your big corporate clients, they get so busy but keep doing it. Try and make every entry pretty good. They add up over time.

Sherman: That’s true.

Debbie: Then you really have really created something.

Sherman: Yeah. Check out www.DebbieWeil.Com or Amazon. Look up her blogging book. Thank you so much, Debbie.

Debbie: Thank you.

As an early adopter of emerging media, and creator of WordPressTutorials.com, I oftentimes take for granted what I have my hands on.

We who live this ‘techy stuff’ (as friends would call it) like blogging, podcasting, video blogging, and social media – wield this bleeding-edge sword that’s powerful for business exposure, traffic, buzz, search engine positioning – and find it ‘normal’ or ‘fun’ or ‘simple’ – but to many others around us, its a whole new world.

After crafting a lengthy email to a potentially new consulting client tonight about the power of blogging, I decided to share a portion of it with you, my reader. Share with me your thoughts, would love your feedback, and appreciate any additional points you would add to this list.

A blog is…

- an interactive website

- written in a more personal and conversational tone

- a 2-way communication channel, that invites user feedback in the form of comments

- written with frequency, with new posts written either daily or weekly
 

Blogging can be used to..

- keep up to date on industry trends, developments, topics and issues; ie. market research or competitive intel

- stay current and conversant on anything and everything related to one’s industry

- build community, networking with new contacts, influencers and press

- serve as a staging phase for new material – to gather feedback, and then republishing in mainstream media or in books

- develop or establish yourself as a subject matter expert, having timely and informed opinions about a particular area

- listen to unfiltered feedback from consumers – getting immediate, free feedback without the cost and delays of focus groups

- engage your customers or marketplace with value

- become part of the discussion, to discover what the market is interested in

- generate a host of fans, evangelists and web links to boost your web property’s exposure, traffic, visitors, conversions & sales

- humanize a corporation/company; it infuses personality and ‘a voice’ into the company

- create buzz because your readers will feel like they know you, and people like to do business with people they know

- achieve high rankings on Google and other major search and blog engines

… and you say?

Podcasting and Videocasting are no longer in the early adoption phase. With the ease of creating video, and the popularity of video sharing websites like YouTube.com, many entrepreneurs and business owners are eager to embrace video to market their product or service offerings.

However, a large population still shy from deploying podcasts and vidcasts. Why is this? This blog post seeks to showcase a few reasons why this is so, and how slidecasting offers business owners tremendous benefits just like video does.

Top 3 reasons why entrepreneurs and business owners shy from creating podcasts or videocasts:

1. Fear of technology

There are a host of hardware, software and technology options in creating podcasts and videocasts. Adding to this confusion is the differences of hardware, software and technology for the Windows and Mac operating systems.

Hardware:
If you have ever shopped for a video camcorder at your local ‘Big Box’ store like Best Buy, you may have experienced ‘feature overwhelm’ from sales clerks spouting off acronyms and technical features of the different camcorders and product lines. Software: Then there is the issue of researching, selecting and testing the myriad of software options to do the job. And if you’ve come this far, then you come to the challenging issues of the post-production phase.

Process:
After creating your raw audio or video, then comes the editing, encoding, publishing and promoting phase. Each step of the process has its own ‘rabbit trails’ and best practices.

The good news is in recent times, there are many web-based applications on the web that offer you superior recording capabilities for both audio and video. This helps you bypass a massive learning curve with hardware, software and processes. In addition, many of these services either offer their web-based applications for free or for a small fee.

2. Fear of Costs

There is the assumption that the gear and applications needed to create podcasts and videocasts will rack up to the thousands of dollars.

The axiom "You get what you pay for" is true in most cases, however, if you’re publishing to the web, a moderately decent mic and webcam or camcorder will do just fine.

Regardless, there still is the fear of having to spend alot of money before being able to produce podcasts and video.

The good news is with online services and applications that replace the need to have thousands of dollars of equipment and manpower, you can now save your money for other business marketing expenditures.

All one would need these days is a moderately decent camcorder or webcam (for creating video), and mic (for creating audio).

3. Fear of Not Knowing How

In the past, you would need to know the processes and best practices of pre-production, production, post-production, publishing and promotions to creating a good videocast or podcast. All these steps would take much time, money and patience to finesse your skills in creating a good quality production.

The good news is with knowing a few best practices of good lighting, good audio and good video, along with a good storyline, you could be creating videos and podcasts today in just minutes or within an hour.

What’s Possible Today?

A new technique called "slidecasting", taken from two words: ‘slides’ and ‘broadcasting’ could be the solution to business owners who want to bridge the gap to video.

Slidecasting is simply the mashup of slides (powerpoint slides or images) and audio (your spoken word or music or both), and the combination of the two presents itself just like video.

Slidecasting provides you an easy entry to video, where you do not need expensive equipment or show your ‘talking head’ on video. It simply requires you to combine slides (or images) and audio.

The beauty of this technology is that it affords you to easily create engaging media for your customers, prospects, and vendors. It can be used for presentations, product launches, Q&As, or customer service updates.

Slideshare.net is one such company that offers you a free registration to their slidecast application. At Slideshare.net, you would simply upload your powerpoint slides, and link an audio that’s on the web (eg. a music file on the web, or on your host account), and the combination of the two would make up your slidecast video.

Mac users can upload your Keynote slides in PDF format or Powerpoint format to their service.

This service also offers you editing control so you can setup certain slides to appear at designated points in your audio file. After saving your slidecast, Slideshare.net offers you the capabilities of sharing your slidecast video to a variety of websites eg. your blog, MySpace, Typepad, Friendster, Blogger, WordPress – via embedding the code they provide, or you can send the direct link to a friend via email too.

Here at ShermanLive.com, I created a short Halloween slidecast video, uploaded it to both Slideshare.net and Slide.com, and showcased my review of the two slidecasting services.

What action should you take now?

View episode 17: "Slidecasting with Slideshare.net and Slide.com", where I showcase a video review of two services – Slideshare.net and Slide.com. And on episode 18 "Sterlings Southern Cafe Slidecast – Bob Barrie Interview", I showcase an interview with a business consultant who has attracted hundreds of emails and press attention with a slidecast video he created for a restaurant in his neighborhood.

Then visit Slideshare.net, setup a free account, and begin combining your images or slides and an audio file. I challenge you to create a short 30 second slidecast video that will seek to educate, inspire or evoke emotions (either funny or emotional).

Lastly, I welcome you to share with me your first slidecast video creation.

Ed Dale, of Dominiche fame, writes on his tubbynerd.com blog, asking for his readers’ advice on small business web marketing tips they would share with local business owners in the Adelaide, South Australia region. He’s speaking with the Minister for Small Business in South Australia,  federal candidates , local mayors and small businesses – with a talk on "Internet and Small Business".

Here are some of my thoughts. If I come up with more ideas, I’ll add to this post…

"Hey Ed, if a local small business has the savvy to get a website for their business, they’re ahead of the game – many are still questioning why they even need one.

Keep it simple…

A. Start up a blog – whether its a blogging platform (that’s hosted, for convenience – eg. WordPress.com, Typepad.com, Blogger.com) or a blogging software (that’s self-installed, eg. WordPress.org, Movable Type, etc) – get it up and running. This will give them full control of publishing to their own web property, instead of being held hostage by their webmaster.

B. Publish & Promote

1. Name of Company, slogan, creative (logos, pictures etc.)

2. Services or products offered – this is important, as it lets visitors and the search engines know what their offerings are, and these will naturally include some relevant search terms.

3. A Picture is Worth 1000 Words – Use product photography, happy customer pictures, owner + happy customer photos etc.

4. Directions – Embed Google Maps right into the page, so a visitor can search directions to the location from their home/office.

5. Slidecasting – Deploy ‘slidecasting’ – where they upload their photos to Slideshare.net, combine it with a soundtrack that’s relevant to their business or audience, and make a slideshow/photo movie for their blog – that’s powerful stuff. eg. seasonal specials, special events, happy customers, promotions etc.

6. Email Opt-In – Setup an email opt in capture system online on their blog – using either aweber, or feedburner, or feedblitz. When customers get referred to go to their website to enter their name and email addy, they get a downloadable coupon (immediate gratification + incentive to do this) for future use in the store. This way, whenever the owner blogs, all customers automatically get notified of the new entry.

Worst case scenario, have the owner enter in the data by hand after collecting email addies in the store – which is a pain.

Better if they could set up a laptop in the store, and incentivizing customers to fill it in right there, to get an immediate % discount off whatever they’re buying in the store today.

7. Add Value – share tips, styles, guides, tricks, techniques, how-to’s, etc on the blog, being the ‘solution provider’ – establish your influence as the authority and subject matter expert in your field. Your customers will come to regard you as the expert, and eventually more business will roll in from word-of-mouth and referrals.

8. News – being regional, there’s always local news you can read, and comment on your blog, or spin it to reflect what your store can offer. Make your blog the ‘virtual townhall meeting space’ for all locals. If locals can comment on the blog, this could really turn into something – where it might even attract local media to pay attention to it.

9. Leverage Local Media – through writings on the blog, or even have them cover an advertorial story about the store owner who has embraced and leveraged technology to help their customers.

10. Virtually Network – with other local store owners’ websites, local Chamber of Commerce websites, local community websites etc. by creating a resource page to these other services in town.

Link to them – describing what they are and what they offer, and add some personality eg.

"You would be wise to visit Jane at "Adelaide’s Best Coffee Shop" on Tuesdays for ‘Jane’s Jumpin’ Java’ – as its the best cuppa java with a smile in town! Tell her Ed from "Ed’s Guitars" sent you and she’ll give you a bigger serving!;-) "

Then email these website owners –
(a) letting them know you have linked to them, showing them your personable listing and endorsement of their service, and
(b) requesting a link back to your store, giving them the exact details of what you want them linking to you with.

11. ‘Face to Face’ – set up a Facebook account, and hunt down your local regional network to connect with, along with Facebook groups that are regional-based.

These are excellent groups that you can grab fabulous intel! Imagine locating local groups on Facebook, where you can pinpoint demographincs, pyschographics, geographics etc.

Then add value there like you do on your blog, and offer specials/discounts/daily promos etc – whatever applies to these members of these groups.

12. Leverage Offline-to-Online-to-Offline
- Publish your new blog’s web address on all your business stationary, and pass it out like a mad-person
- Publish specials / discounts / coupons on your blog, informing your customers to print off the coupons before coming into the store, and redeeming it in your store. This way, you’re educatiing your customers to connect with you both online and offline.

13. Spread The Word
If a small business owner can install a ‘Tell A Friend’ software script on their blog, in conjunction with a ‘Spread The Word’ promotion with incentives, this could prove to be a wonderful contest that brings buzz, exposure and new customers to the blog and to the store too.

14. Contest
Contests are fabulous for all businesses and for all seasons of the year. Research, invent and deploy different creative contests that can leverage buzz marketing and fun!

There you go, Ed! I’m confident the above tips will be useful to any small business owner in Adelaide, and I hope this brings them more business. Have a great meeting with the Adelaide folks – cheers mate!

ps. For my readers, I would love your feedback, and your opinions on what strategies or tactics you feel would benefit a small business owner if they could leverage online and offline marketing together. Thanks!

(Added 10/20/07) 15. Video
If the store owner is savvy and confident moving forward with video, here are a few ideas to try out with using a camcorder, or a digital camera with a video option:

a. 360 degree view of store: I did this once with a local coffee shop. Stand in the middle of the store, start your camera, and slowly and smoothly spin yourself (slowly) around 360 degrees, capturing what your store’s interior looks like. Of course, for better video, use a camera tripod and pan 360 degrees. For folks who drive by back and forth work everyday, they oftentimes remind themselves they have to pop in, or wonder what your store’s like – now they don’t have to wonder anymore. If you post your website address on the store’s windows, they can go online, in the privacy of their home, and have a virtual visit. And if you shoot this footage when your store is hopping, it adds to the ‘social proof’ that you’re busy, and they would more likely to visit your store soon.

b. Establish a bond: With Point #7 above, and with the other points that I’ve provided that speak on adding value, you can use video to showcase your subject matter expertise, your influence and your personality. If your visitors are familiar with seeing your wonderful personality on video on your blog, consider how much of a bond you’re establishing even before they visit your store in person!

c. Video testimonials or endorsements: Capture footage of yourself speaking to happy customers (get approval to use this footage on your blog), or of happy customers giving you and your store their stamp of approval – this works like a charm, and the ‘raw and natural’ feel of your videos will have a great appeal to your audience.

d. Leverage your videos: You can repurpose these videos by uploading them to YouTube and other video sharing sites. These videos and your store will gain exposure, which may lend to additional business for your local store.

This Half Hour Huddle (H3) video podcast features my personal blueprint for achieving top natural search results in the major search engines for your blog or website.

Also download this strategic mindmap document
that was created live during this video podcast to
follow along this podcast.
Flickr | Mindmap

In the first half of this session, I reveal a case study of how I delivered $3+ million dollars in Life Time Value to a client in as short as 4-6 weeks using a small portion of the entire blueprint.

Check it out now, and would love your feedback!

(Sidenote: 26’09 minute video : 12.5MB : Download 640×480 video : Viewing in popup shows 320×240 – let it buffer)

This Half Hour Huddle (H3) video podcast features my personal blueprint for achieving top natural search results in the major search engines for your blog or website. This strategic mindmap document was created live during this video podcast, and is available for download in Part 2 of this session’s blog entry.

In the first half of this session, I reveal a case study of how I delivered $3+ million dollars in Life Time Value to a client in as short as 4-6 weeks using a small portion of the entire blueprint.

Check it out now, and would love your feedback!

(Sidenote: 29’42 minute video : 13.7MB : Download 640×480 video : Viewing in popup shows 320×240 – let it buffer)

"Half Hour Huddle (H3)" is a 30 minute web conference I initiated using bleeding edge Web 2.0 applications like Facebook, Jaiku, Twitter, YouTube, Flickr, Glance, Video-broadcast and other cool tools to present on-topic content. Imagine a really cool webinar Join us on the next H3!

Join this Facebook group or subscribe to this podcast to be notified of future episodes.

This first H3 episode features my notes from speaking at StomperNet’s Atlanta Sept 2007 conference. Topics and solutions revolve around blogging (splitting long posts, pre-scheduling blog posts), social media (facebook, facebook groups) and creating videos, screencasts & slideshows (jingproject, muvee, fotomagico).

Check it out now, and would love your feedback!

(Sidenote: 25 minute video : 20.95MB : Download 640×480 video : Viewing in popup shows 320×240 – let it buffer)

Feature: Episode #8 finishes up our 7 part series titled ’7 Misconceptions of Blogging’, and reveals Misconception #7: "You can’t get good search engine rankings with a blog?!" Plus I add one more bonus misconception "I hear it’s difficult to publish audio and video on blogs!"

I expose these 2 misconception and reveal how my blogging strategy boosted a network of 23 dental locations to the top 10 for the region’s desired search phrases, delivering more than $3 million dollars in Lifetime Value to the client in as short as 4 to 6 weeks.

Download and enjoy this podcast episode.

Transcript

[Music]

Announcer: ShermanLive.com. Simplifying and demystifying technology so you can profit from it. Welcome to ShermanLive.com. Presenting time-saving tips, shortcuts, how-tos, leading-edge techniques and money-generating strategies. Here’s Sherman Hu.

Sherman Hu: Hello, and welcome to Episode Number eight of ShermanLive.com. This is your host, Sherman Hu, and I am refreshed and recharged to record this podcast for you, because Sarah and I just returned from a wonderful weekend vacation to our favorite local resort – Harrison Hot Springs. To find out more you can go to HarrisonResort.com.

We were of course greeted by wonderful service, once again, by Crystal who served us in the Lakeside Caf and also in the Copper Room where you have fine dining, dinner and dancing with Jerry J and his gang. Thank you for the wonderful music for those two nights in the Copper Room. And here’s a shout-out to all of the folks who work at Harrison Resort. They make it like "Cheers", where we walk in and everybody knows are name. We have a wonderful time there!

Anyway, back to our regular programming. Today we have an episode, revealing Blogging Misconception Number 7, which I’m excited about because it’s the last of the series. The series is titled "Seven Misconceptions About Blogging", in case you haven’t joined us for our previous episodes.

Today’s episode is Episode Number 7, and it’s titled, "You Can’t Get Good Search Engine Rankings with a Blog!". Plus, I’ll also be adding a bonus episode to this one. It’s a bonus misconception titled, "I Hear it’s Difficult to Publish Audio and Video on Blogs".

Well you are in for a treat today. Stay tuned for thi episode as I reveal eye-opening strategies and techniques.

[Music]
Announcer: You’re listening to ShermanLive.com. Keeping it simple, stupid. Did I say that? Stay tuned for more juicy stuffy from Sherman Hu…

Sherman: So you’re at a party, and you’re talking to your friend, your buddy, about blogging, and he goes, "You can’t get good search engine rankings with a blog!" Now this should your answer: Of course you can!

Now speaking from my experience as a search engine marketing professional servicing clients in competitive sectors like travel, real estate and dentistry, I’ve worked on and experienced first hand the results a blog can achieve for search engine rankings.

Now I have clients to this day who are ranked in the top ten positions in the major search engines, for their important search phrases, using WordPress as a blogging platform. Some of them have been in the top ten since 2002. So I want to let you know that it can happen for you if you’re working on a blog strategy for your business online.

Now real quickly, let me share with you a case study that will blow your mind. A good friend of mine, David Bullock, whom can be found at DavidBullock.com: he’s a pro when it comes to testing, tracking and conversions. And him and I, we’re working on this project with his client who was a dentist, who has a network of 23 different locations.

So what we did was we took the 23 locations and we consulted with the client, and he wanted the locations to show up in top 10 in search engines for the important phrases. We’re not just talking about "cosmetic dentistry", but we want to get it ranked well for "cosmetic dentistry, Portland Oregon", for example. So long-tailed search phrases.

We deployed a strategy where each location would have its own blog. Each location would have pre-written content, pre-scheduled to release into the blog once a day I believe, or once a week; I can’t remember now. But that was the strategy, and we maybe deployed some article marketing strategies on top of that.

What happened was, in a period of four to six weeks every one of those blogs showed up in the top ten for the clients desired phrases for that region.

So here are the results: Each location had ten new clients that visited that dental location. Now each client would deliver to that location an additional $15,000 in lifetime value. Now multiply that by ten clients, that’s $150,000 lifetime value for one location.

You multiply that by 23 locations, and that is more than $3 million in lifetime value that we delivered to this client using blogging as a major strategy, and that was in a period of four to six weeks! So yes, it can get you incredible results!

Now of course I’ve blogged to support my own products and services as well, with great results. Now granted that you should augment your blogging with other search marketing strategies and best practices, but blogging attracts the search engines to your website today, like bees to honey!

Now here’s one reason why I believe it is so powerful: The search engines – let’s use Google as an example – they want to please their customers. People who surf using Google; now those are their customers. And they want to serve them strong, relevant results. Otherwise, the customers will attempt to use the competitor – Yahoo, MSN – to get what they want.

Now what do bloggers often do? They often publish fresh, topical content to the blogs regularly. Now Google loves fresh new content, and bloggers offer fresh new content. It’s a beautiful thing, isn’t it? So the search engines are constantly crawling blogs, quickly and regularly.

Would you like to know one of the other reasons why blogs attract search engines? It’s because they update or notify the search engines of new content being published to the blog. How is this done? In WordPress there’s a feature called "Update Services", which pings or updates a host of blog directories when new content is published to the blog, automatically, without the publisher making any effort to draw the search engines in. And that’s very good news.

So now that you know that you can get good to great search engine rankings with blogs, let’s get blogging!

[Music]
Announcer: You’re tuned in to ShermanLive.com. Keeping it simple for you…

Sherman: All right! So here we go with a bonus misconception that states, "I hear it’s difficult to publish audio and video on blogs." [vocalizes buzzer noise] Wrong again! Who did you hear that from?

Well, publishing audio and video, also called "podcasts", is super easy on blogs like WordPress. With the appropriate plug-ins, like the ones I’m going to list for you in a moment, you can simply and easily add audio and video to your blogs today.

If you Google for these four plug-ins, it will start you off real well. Now these plug-ins are for the WordPress blogging platform only, but there are others for other blogging platforms like Moveable Type, if that’s what you’re using.

Now, the plug-ins and the support of these plug-ins are offered by the developers of these plug-ins, OK?

So, number one, Google for a video plug-in called "WP-FLV". OK, WP is short for WordPress, and FLV is Flash Video. So WP-FLV is by a developer by the name of Roel Meurders.

Now, there’s another audio player plug-in called the "Audio Player WordPress Plugin". It is by a company called one 1 Pixel Out.

Now, there’s another media plug-in out there by AnArchos, and the plug-in’s called "Anarchy Media Plugin". And that one, I believe, allows you to publish both audio and video, so that’s pretty cool.

And if you want to publish your audio and allow that to be easily fed in through to iTunes so that your podcast can be on iTunes, then you might want to look at a company called Mighty Seek, and they have a plug-in called "PodPress". And the podcast on shermanlive.com is powered by this plug-in called PodPress.

All right, now, these plug-ins, you can read how to install them from the developers’ sites, and that will allow you to go ahead and easily publish audio and video to your blog so that your customers can hear it. Now, and of course, if you’d like to save time, money, and your sanity, and want to learn how to add audio and video to your blog easily, then of course, subscribe to WordPressTutorials.com and we’ll help you with that through training videos.

Now, as a side note here, you may want to also look at a service provided by AudioAcrobat.com. They allow you to not only upload your video and audio, but they also allow you to record your video and audio straight to their service. It’s a web-based service, and you pay a small subscription fee every month. But it tracks your statistics, so it can tell you how many people have clicked on your play button, how many people have actually listened to your audio piece or your video piece, and how much they’ve listened to it.

So you can tell that if, let’s say 90 percent of the people are really tuning out and dropping off your audio-video piece halfway through your media segment, then you know that you’ve got to spice it up somewhere in there, halfway through it, so that you’re not putting your people to sleep. So that’s great. It offers statistics. Not only that, they offer you players that you can take the HTML, the code, and plug into your blog, and it will insert that player in there for you. So that’s a real great service to check out.

The one that I use for hosting my audio, my podcast, is at Libsyn.org. Lybsyn has an interesting model. It’s a paid model, so you pay a subscription fee, or a monthly fee, for that. However, they don’t charge you for bandwidth usage. So they don’t charge you by how much you use it over the month, but they charge you by how much space and storage you’re using by hosting your files there, which is actually a great model.

So, no matter if you have a popular or unpopular podcast, you’re not really paying more or less for that. You’re just paying for the size of your files that you host with them. And so, you definitely want to check them out, too.

All right, so now that you’ve heard about how to publish audio and video on your blogs, and you know that it’s easy and a myth of how difficult it is to publish has been broken, let’s get blogging!

[Music]
Announcer: You’re tuned in to ShermanLive.com. Making it simple for you..

Sherman: Well, thanks for staying tuned to this episode of ShermanLive.com. I’ve had a blast producing this for you. Next episode we’ll cover… [laughs] Well, I really don’t know what we’ll cover next episode. I do know it probably will have something to do with Facebook, because I’m having a blast right now engaging with old friends and contacts and, of course, with marketing colleagues and new acquaintances through these friends of mine.

And I’ve set up two groups now. I’ve set up Friends and Fans of Sherman Hu’s WordPressTutorials.com, which is a closed group to, of course, members of WordPressTutorials.com. And I’ve set up another open group. So if you’re listening to this podcast and you want to join this open group, you can.

It’s actually called "The Beginner’s Guide to Mastering Web Basics". And we cover basic topics, stuff that the technophobes on this call would be totally comfortable checking out and learning from, and beginners, too. Really, we cover topics like domain registration, hosting, FTP–which is an acronym for file transfer protocol, which is really the process in which you transfer files from your desktop, your computer, to your hosting account, or vice versa.

And we cover things like sourcing for stock photography and graphics, and how to edit that. All the basic stuff about mastering your way around the web.

Now, if you are pretty savvy yourself, you may have come across friends and family who are bugging you all the time about how to do this and how to do that.

And I’ve experienced that a lot, so this is my way of not experiencing the cruel and unusual punishment of having to repeat myself over and over again every time. So I’ve created these video tutorials, set it up on Facebook so that friends and family can enjoy, and I welcome you and encourage you to send your friends and family there.

Right now, as of this podcast, there are probably about 215 members there right now, which is great, having a fun time and meeting new people and sharing. And I’d love for the group to expand, not only its members, but also having members share their experiences and thoughts for beginners and technophobes to enjoy and to learn from.

So, look forward to seeing you on Facebook. And stay tuned for the next episode, and we’ll discover together how to use Facebook to expand your network–but not only that, to expand the results of your marketing.

Announcer: You’ve been tuned in to Sherman, on ShermanLive.com. Want to call Sherman or send him some love? Go to ShermanLive.com today.

Feature: Episode #7 continues with our 7 part series titled ’7 Misconceptions of Blogging’, and reveals Misconception #6: "Can I actually use a blog as a website?" Sherman exposes this misconception and reveals what he gave up using in exchange for utilizing blogging platforms for powering his websites.

Download and enjoy this podcast episode.

Transcription

[Intro music]

Announcer: ShermanLive.com, simplifying and demystifying technology, so you can profit from it! Welcome to ShermanLive.com. Presenting time-saving tips, short-cuts, how-to’s, bleeding-edge techniques and money-generating strategies. Here’s Sherman Hu!

Sherman Hu: Hello, and welcome to another episode of ShermanLive.com Podcast. This is your host, Sherman Hu. Today’s episode, number seven, we cover blogging misconception number six. And, the misconception is, people ask: "Can I actually use a blog as a website?" Stay tuned for our answer.

Announcer: You are listening to ShermanLive.com. Keeping it simple, stupid. Did I say that? Stay tuned for more juicy stuff, coming from Sherman Hu.

[Music]

Sherman: Well, if you ask me the question "Can I actually use a blog as a website?" Of course you can!

Now, I’ve almost retired my website publisher software – I was using Macromedia Dreamweaver. And I have now stopped using Dreamweaver and have been building professional looking websites using a blogging platform like WordPress since 2004.

Now, honestly, I was using the Blogger platform, the Blogger.com platform, at the beginning. But then after being frustrated with lack of features and slow publishing times, I decided to hunt down to the next best platform and decided on using WordPress.

Now, with WordPress, you can use many different themes and plug-ins, and creative graphics and color schemes. And you can turn your blog into a professional, yet powerful website.

Now, let me back track a little bit. Themes are like design layouts. And to find them, you would just Google for them. You can Google for "WordPress themes", you’ll find a ton of them. Or you can do a Google search for "WordPress plug-ins" and you’ll find a ton of them also.

Plug-ins are modules of code that add functionality to your blog. So if you activate a plug-in, for example, a translator plug-in to your blog, then you will have the capability on your blog to showcase, let’s say, half a dozen different flags as icons and let’s say, one of them is a Germany flag, and somebody clicks on the Germany flag, and your entire blog and postings alter to the German language on the fly. So that’s a very, very powerful plug-in to use if you want to showcase a variety of different languages on your website.

In addition, your blog will offer an easy way for your visitors to offer you feedback, which is very sorely lacking on traditional websites. Plus your blog will also attract the search engines to crawl for it, for its new content, potentially giving you a boost in the search engine results, which then increases your website’s exposure.

Compared to traditional websites, it will take usually a lot longer for the engines to find your site, or your new page. But with the blogging features, there’s an update feature in WordPress that allows you to automatically update the search engines with your new content or your new page as soon as you publish it without you having to do anything extra. So that’s very powerful.

So, now that you can use your blog as a website and let’s get blogging!

[Music]

Sherman: Well, thanks for staying tuned with me. That brings us to the end of this podcast. Today’s podcast revealed misconception number six, which I am excited to let you know that next episode is the final episode of this series titled "The Seven Misconceptions about Blogging".

Now, not only will I reveal misconception number seven next week, which is, "You can’t get good search engine rankings with your blog!" but I’ll also add another bonus misconception. And that one says, "I hear it’s difficult to publishing audio and video on blogs."

Well, so next episode I’ll cover not just one but two misconceptions. And that will bring us the end of this series where I will then reveal what the next podcast episodes would be all about.

Well, thanks once again. I’ll catch you on the next episode.

Announcer: You’ve been tuned in to Sherman on ShermanLive.com. Why not call Sherman? Or send him some love. Go to ShermanLive.com today.

Feature: Episode #6 continues with our 7 part series titled ’7 Misconceptions of Blogging’, and reveals Misconception #5: "Don’t I have to blog all the time to get results?"

Sherman exposes this misconception and reveals an insider secret tip that will take a load off your shoulders, save you a ton of time and help you view blogging as a fun activity instead of a chore. This strategy will assist you to easily publish to your blog on a regular basis to establish your credibility, increase awareness and potentially sales and profits for your business.

Returning from his 3 week vacation with his family, Sherman gives a shout out to friends and colleagues he’s connected during his trip. Check out this episode to see pictures and links to these special friends.

Download and enjoy this podcast episode.If you found this episode to be of value to you, please share this podcast with your friends. As always, send me your feedback on iTunes or on this ShermanLive.com blog. Cheers!

Transcript

[Music]
Announcer: ShermanLive.com. Simplifying and demystifying technology so you can profit from it. Welcome to ShermanLive.com. Presenting time-saving tips, shortcuts, how-tos, leading edge techniques, and money-generating strategies. Here’s Sherman Hu…

Sherman: Hello and welcome to another episode of ShermanLive.com. I’m your host, Sherman Hu, broadcasting to you from my home studio in Vancouver, B.C., Canada. I finally, finally came home after a three-week family vacation throughout California and Missouri’s Lake of the Ozarks. We were traveling to, I don’t know, half a dozen different places, everywhere from Santa Monica to Anaheim to Padero Beach close by Santa Barbara to San Diego, Yuma, Arizona, and finally the Lake of the Ozarks in Missouri.

I want to give a shout out to good friends and colleagues that we made along the way. Let me give you a quick rundown of some of the fabulous people that I met and that we met when we were there:

Guy Cochran from DVeStore and the friends that we teamed up to create a video shoot my first three days in Santa Monica. Pat Hoglund and family, who runs SalmonAndSteelheadJournal.com. He’s a magazine editor of a salmon fishing magazine. Of course, good friends Ann and Anthony. We met up at Padero Beach close by Santa Barbara. Body surfing and having lots of fun. AnnConvery.com and AnthonyMora.com are their websites, both business consultants and PR experts.

Of course, I had a great time with Tina and Ron Lorenz and the guide dog, Rusty. Tina can be found at TinaWrites.com, and that was in Yuma, Arizona that we hung out: Very, very frigging hot there. You can cook an omelette on your head. We had a great time with the guide dog, and also my children had a great time jumping in the backyard pool and hanging out there, just cooling off.

Last, but not least, I hung out with Dave Taylor (AskDaveTaylor.com) and his family in Lake of the Ozarks in Missouri and had a great time jumping into the lake, high dives, trampolines, slides, tubing, and a great way to end off our family vacay. Thanks to you all for making our trip such a wonderful experience, and also for your friendship.

Well, thanks for tuning in to this episode where we will cover Blogging Misconception Number Five, "Don’t I have to blog all the time to get results?" Stay tuned for this episode as I reveal some great strategies.

[Music]
Announcer: You’re tuned in to ShermanLive.com. Making it simple for you…

Sherman: OK, Blogging Misconception Number Five says, "Don’t I have to blog all the time to get results?" Well, this statement would be accurate if you don’t know this insider’s secret I’m about to share with you.

In your blogging software, be it WordPress or Movable Type or any other blogging platform, there’s a feature you can use to edit that lets you postdate or preschedule your post. Do you see the wonder of the strategy yet? I mean, this is amazing.

If you can discipline yourself to compile, to write, to gather, to organize your content once, and to then postdate, or preschedule, your content to publish over the next few days or weeks or months or years, then in essence you don’t have to blog all the time to get the results you’re looking for.

Whether you’re using this strategy to, let’s say, establish your credibility, or to build your subscriber base, or to attract more human visitors, or any other reason you may have, you’ve nothing to lose and everything to gain by training the search engines to spider your blog, which is indexing the blog, on your regularly timed schedule and to reap the rewards by deploying this strategy.

So, now that you’ve learned that you can preschedule or postdate your publishing, this will wipe away this myth or misconception that you have to blog all the time to get results. And now that you don’t have to blog all the time, let’s get blogging!

[Music]
Sherman: Well, thanks for staying tuned to this episode of ShermanLive.com. Next episode we’ll cover Blogging Misconception Number Six, "Can I actually use a blog as a website?" Well, stay tuned for the next episode, and you’ll find out the answer.

[Music]
Announcer: You’ve been tuned in to Sherman on ShermanLive.com. Want to call Sherman or send him some love? Go to ShermanLive.com today.

Feature: Episode #5 continues with our 7 part series titled ’7 Misconceptions of Blogging’, and reveals Misconception #4: "I’m running ‘X’ business. How can blogging help?".

Sherman exposes this misconception and provides 3 reasons to help you understand why blogging will help your business – regardless of your industry.

As he’s ending off his vacation with a week stay at Dave Taylor’s (AskDaveTaylor.com) lake home in the Lake of the Ozarks, Sherman’s broadcasting this episode from the dock. You’ll hear birds chirping, sea-doos and speedboats zooming by in the background too. And tune in till the end of the episode to discover how Sherman ends off this podcast episode in a most refreshing way!

Download and enjoy this podcast episode right now.

Transcript

[intro music]

Announcer: ShermanLive.com: Simplifying and demystifying technology, so you can profit from it. Welcome to Shermanlive.com, presenting time-saving tips, short-cuts, how-to’s, bleeding-edge techniques and money-generating strategies! Here’s Sherman Hu.

Sherman Hu: Hello and welcome to episode number five of ShermanLive.com. This is Sherman Hu, your host, broadcasting to you alive from the Lake of the Ozarks, Missouri, USA, where I’m spending the last leg of my vacation, with my family, and with very good friends, Dave Taylor and his family.

Dave Taylor can be found at AskDaveTaylor.com, an influential blogger and brilliant marketing consultant and speaker.

It is a beautiful Friday morning, post July 4th, by this lake house here. So if you hear any lake or water sounds, it’s because we are just right at the edge of the lake actually. And if you hear any motor sounds, that’s because you have the occasional SeaDoo-er, motor boat or cigarette boat, flying by the lake house.

And we are enjoying bird chirping this morning. This is gorgeous. This is a wonderful way to spend the last leg of my trip, and my family is really enjoying the time away in the vaca and having me not work. [laughs] Except for this podcast.

But I just want to let you know that if you are considering a podcast yourself, it doesn’t have to be just in your office. It can be just anywhere that you believe will work well for your type of podcast.

Anyway, today we’re going to bring you Misconception No. 4, which is, "I’m running ‘X’ business. How can blogging help?" So stay tuned as we present to you, today’s podcast.

[break]

Sherman: All right. So Misconception No. 4. You have a business and you are wondering how blogging can help your business. Well, if you see Misconception No. 1, it covers part of the answer. Now here’s the other part. Imagine blogging or having a blog for your business just like having a website. Really, it’s just a tool.

Anything that you can do with a website, or want to do from a website, can be done on a blog; or a blog can augment your main website very well for all the reasons in previous Misconceptions that we have broadcasted so far. Now blogging can help your business through three very specific solid benefits. And here they are.

Number one – Personality. If you will offer your personal voice to your human visitors, that is a special opportunity and benefit there, that your website cannot offer. Now, typically on a blog, people that write on the blogs share their personality, share their voice. So, you would be wise to share some personality. Keep it real. Let your voice shine through your writing on your blog.

Here’s where you can really show your heart to your readers and draw them closer to you, instead of using corporate-speak. Now, if you draw them closer to you, you can eventually offer your offerings, and that will be embraced a lot more effectively by your readers.

Now John Maxwell, a renowned leadership coach, once shared, "People will buy into the leader first before they’ll buy into the leader’s vision." And I believe that strongly. So, your visitors will read your blog. They get to know you, they will like you, trust you first, before they’ll buy into your offerings. Make sense? OK.

Number two – Average Time On Site. Now let me share with you this case study that was conducted in 2006 by a company, a metrics and statistics company called ClickTracks.com, and the they conducted this case study of their client LuckyOliver.com, a stock photography website.

And this case study shows that there was a significant increase in sales from visitors who read the blog. Now the founder of LuckyOliver, realized a metric called "Average Time On Site", and this metric increased after they began publishing to the blog, and this metric was a real indicator of how interested people are or were in their product or service.

Now his team was very disappointed that they were blogging and nobody was commenting on the blogs, but when this founder discovered that people who read the blog spent 60% more time on a site than people who didn’t, and that people who stayed on the site longer, actually converted to better sales and profits, then they continued blogging regardless of a lack of comments.

Now the result was, a visitor who saw the blog, was 22% more likely to sign up for an account than the one who didn’t. Additionally, the average time on site and number of page views for the newly signed-up blog viewers was double that of the average visitor.

So blogging does improve your readership and average time on site, which leads to conversions of sales and profits. It’s a beautiful thing, isn’t it?

Well, let me bring you benefit number three – Search Engine Marketing power. Now, more of this will be covered in Misconception No. 7, but a short of it is this. Your blog will attract the search engine spiders a lot faster and more regularly than your traditional website can. And that’s a whole lot of power.

OK, now that you have "personality", now that you have "stickiness", and now that you have "power", let’s get blogging.

Well, that brings us to the end of this podcast. Thanks for staying tuned.

In our next podcast Blogging Misconception No. 5, I will reveal a misconception where people say, "Don’t I have to blog all the time to get results?" And I will reveal a strategy on that podcast, that will really make your blogging task a lot easier and more effective. And for those that form a camp of "ambitiously lazy", you will really, really enjoy the next podcast.

Well, thank for staying tuned. This is Sherman Hu signing off. I’m going to jump off the dock into the lake and enjoy the rest of my vacation, and you enjoy the rest of your day. Cheers!

[ending music]

Announcer: You have been tuned into Sherman on ShermanLive.com. Want to call Sherman, or send him some love, go to ShermanLive.com today.