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.)

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.

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 …

"Are there differences between Podcasts and Social Media?"

This is her answer…

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

"What is one of the quickest ways to make money with a podcast?"

This is her answer…

David Bullock (DavidBullock.com), a good friend and Taguchi Testing & Marketing specialist and I were having an impromptu phone conversation that we recorded on the fly using GrandCentral, speaking about GrandCentral.com (owned by Google).

In addition, we were discussing our strategies for combining multiple video, podcasting and transcription services and technologies together to serve our business interests.

I’m confident you’ll gain tremendous value from eavesdropping on this conversation. Enjoy!

This blog post is in response to Ray Prince’s question when he commented on my "Video Rankings, Transcription & Mobile Blogging" entry.

VS

Hi Ray, thanks for your greetings!

I hear TrafficGeyser is a great product, and the creators one (Frank, Michael & Rocket) are good people.

TrafficGeyser does more than broadcast video to 35 video-sharing sites from what I understand. Its a comprehensive service that offers slidecasting, bonus royalty-free music packs, toll-free numbers to record podcasts or testimonials, video-to-audio conversion, broadcasting to podcast directories and social bookmarking sites. For anyone who wants these features from one service for a 97/m subscription, then TrafficGeyser is for them.

TubeMogul broadcasts and tracks metrics of your videos across a dozen video sharing sites from one screen (which is super convenient). It does what it does very well, plus its free.

For those who do not mind using multiple services to accomplish what TrafficGeyser does (in one paid membership), and would prefer free services or pay-to-own-once products/services, then they can accomplish similar or better results using:

1. TubeMogul.com (free) – broadcasts & tracks metrics to 12 video-sharing sites

2. Slideshare.net (free) – creates slidecasts by mashing up your images/slides with your voice or music audio

3. MusicBakery.com (15/song or 60+/album) – pay-per-piece royalty-free music or buy albums; there are also many other royalty-free music sites on the net.

4. Google for ‘free toll free numbers’ to find a service that can provide you with this, and have it forwarded to your destination of choice for recording whatever you want.

Or if you don’t care for the toll-free, then use:
- GrandCentral.com (free, owned by Google),
- Vonage.com (paid subscription VOIP service) or
- AudioAcrobat.com (19.95/m) – podcast, video & teleseminar recording or
- Hipcast.com (small monthly subscription) – podcast, video & teleseminar recording
or the many other services available.

5. Blip.tv (free or 8/m) – for video-sharing and hosting, but it also offers cross-posting to other popular sites and services. Plus it encodes your video to MP4, FLV and MP3 too.

6. OnlyWire.com (free), Pingoat.com (free) & RSS Submit software (100+ one-time purchase to own) – these free ping services and paid software helps you to update blog and search engine directories of your new content on your blog or at video sharing sites. Plus RSS Submit will ping podcast directories with the Podcast Plugin.
 
If you or anyone else would like to share with us their experiences using both, I’d welcome it here. Cheers!

As always, I welcome your thoughts, feedback and comments…

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.

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! Sherman Hu, from ShermanLive.com. Breaking news!

Facebook has launched Facebook Ads and Facebook Pages. Well, Ads isn’t that new but Facebook Pages that allows you to create an entire new page on Facebook for your product or service or initiative or offering.

I am driving right now. So I want to share with you, if you are a Facebook user, to go the bottom of your Facebook profile, click on advertisers and find out more information about Facebook Pages and the several new offerings that they are offering right now.

It is combination of social ads and polls, beacons. There is about six different offerings that you will want to research and understand and apply to your not-for-profit or for-profit project, as soon as you can. I mean it is a wonderful way to attract what they call not friends, but fans, off your Facebook page.

I just wanted to give you a heads-up. Check it out, Facebook Pages. I believe that will be an incredible benefit for you moving forward for your project.

Transcript

Sherman Hu: Hey folks! Sherman Hu, from ShermanLive.com, with another tip for you today!

If you are asking the question, "How can I create my own topical social network?" We’re not talking about creating or jumping into another network right now, like Facebook or MySpace, for example. But, how do you create your own white label topical social network?

Then what I’d like to share with you, is to go visit Gina’s Social Network app at Ning.com. Ning.com is the social network application I’ve referred to, and if you are kind of planning a non-profit organization — sorry, a not-for-profit social network — whether it’s charitable or religious, or you’re thinking a for-profit social network in business, marketing, if you have a product or service, then Ning will help you get up to speed today. And depending on features you want, whether it’s domain mapping or ads or whatever the case may be, then maybe a small charge is there.

But today, you can go create an account and set up your own social network in a hurry and be able to offer other folks, who are enthusiasts or evangelists in that topic, to join as members, have their own space to blog, to build a following, to add photos, add video. That right there allows you to get up to speed, time to market, in a hurry with very, very low cost of entry and a powerful way to put your foot forward in a social network space.

Hope you enjoy this tip!

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: Hello, folks. This is me, Sherman Hu from ShermanLive.com uttering again to give you a tip on how to use Utterz if you are international or in Canada, not in the U.S.

If you have a Vonage phone service, which is what I have, let me show you what I’ve done.

First, I have a Canadian virtual number and a U.S. virtual number from Vonage. I forwarded my Canadian virtual number to the U.S. virtual number, and then forwarded it from the U.S. virtual number to the Utterz number, which is 712-432-6666.

So, I don’t have to make a long distance international call. I have just a local call to my Canadian Vonage virtual number which routes to the U.S. virtual number which routes to the Utterz U.S. number.

This way, all you have to do is make a local call. Utterz recognizes your cell phone number, associates that to your account like what I’m doing right now, and that’s all you do. Save yourself from having to make a long distance to the U.S.

Cheers.

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.

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.

Click To Play

Episode 17 of this ShermanLive.com podcast showcases the technology and applications of slidecasting. Slidecasting is simply a mash up of slides (or images) and audio (spoken word or music), and this technology can be used to showcase both personal and business presentations very effectively.

In this ‘Half Hour Huddle’ webinar-webcast, I share two free online applications that can be used for slidecasting.

In addition, I created a Halloween slidecast that combines images, text, and music, publishing it to these two web services to compare the results. Screen captures and the slidecast videos are published at ShermanLive.com too.

Sample Slidecast "Halloween PPT Slidecast" Using Slideshare.net

| View | Upload your own

Screen Capture: 9 Hour Results

Sample Slidecast "Halloween PPT Slidecast" Using Slide.com

Download or stream this video, and I’m confident you’ll enjoy it.

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)

Feature: Episode #10 features "Facebook Etiquette Faux Pas" and I reveal my biggest pet peeve to date in using Facebook. Hint: It has to do with Adding Friends on Facebook and introductions.

Check out my Flickr album for better resolution pictures featured in this Enhanced Podcast.

Download and enjoy this podcast episode today.

Transcript

[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 ten of ShermanLive.com. This is your host, Sherman Hu, and today I have an episode revealing Facebook etiquette pet peeves. Then I’ll reveal my biggest pet peeve to date. Stay tuned for today’s episode!

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

Sherman: For today’s episode, I’m going to review my biggest pet peeve about using Facebook, and it’s specifically in regards to connections and acquaintances who are trying to add me to their network of friends or are trying to join my network of friends, and failing to tell me who they are.

So, not only am I going to share with you my pet peeve, but I’m going to help those who listen to this podcast, how to not commit this Facebook etiquette faux pas by showing you how to make a difference.

So, first of all, when you go into Facebook and when you add a friend, you want to let them know how you know them, especially if the person you’re adding is somebody of influence, has leadership, or is a thought leader in a space where they are bombarded with a lot of different requests to be added as a friend on people’s networks. So, let me show you an example here. This is my Facebook account, and that you can see — now pardon these folks as they don’t know any better.

I’m just going to show you what is happening right now, and what can happen that could be different. All right? So, for example, we have three different profiles here, and you can see in this screenshot, and I have absolutely no clue who these people are until I dig into their friend network.

But, you know, with the little time I have in my day to commit to all the different projects, let alone Facebook, it would be a real treat to have somebody let me know ahead of time how they know me. So, as you can see right here, there are no indications or hints of how they know me. Now let me go ahead and show you the solution.

Let’s say, for example, I want to seek out Leonardo DiCaprio. So, I type in this search box, on the left-hand side column, and I type in his name, and I see his profile right over here on the right-hand results. Now, in the case that I want to add him to my friends, if I know Leonardo or I want to connect with him, I will click on this link on the right-hand side that says "Add to Friends." And it will then pop up with a box with the capabilities for me to add him to my network.

But, before I do that, there’s a link there that you can click on, and this ‘Send a message’ link is the key, right here. If you send him a message by clicking his link, you can then let Leonardo know how you know each other, whether it’s through maybe mutual acquaintances in the acting field, or whether it’s through his latest project, "11th Hour Action." So, this would be great to give him a head’s up and to save him time trying to hunt down how he knows you.

This is, of course, for people who want to add a little bit more security in adding people to their network, not referring to people who are adding people to the network without a care in the world. Because Facebook allows you to have 5,000 friends in your network, and that’s a cap at this present time. So, for those that are adding, without a care in the world, this doesn’t really apply to them. But for the rest of your business connections, at least give them a head’s up, so you not only save them time, you have a proper introduction, and it’s just going to be a win-win situation all around.

So, that is my biggest pet peeve in using Facebook. I hope you don’t commit this faux pas, and moving forward, adding friends to your network, I pray that you actually give an introduction to the person you’re connecting with.

Well, this is Sherman Hu, thanking you for staying tuned to this episode of ShermanLive.com. Next episode we’ll cover more juicy stuff about new media, and how you can profit from it.

[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 #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.

Feature: Episode #4 continues with our 7 part series titled ’7 Misconceptions of Blogging’, and reveals Misconception #3: "I don’t know what to write about!!".

Sherman exposes this misconception and provides ideas and tips to help you begin writing great blog posts.

As he’s in Santa Monica and LA for 2 weeks, Sherman’s broadcasting this episode in his hotel room at the end of his business trip. Now he’s going to chill back and enjoy a 3 week vacation with his family.

Download and enjoy this podcast episode right now.

Feature: Episode #3 continues with our 7 part series titled ’7 Misconceptions of Blogging’, and reveals Misconception #2: "I’m totally inept at this geeky stuff!".

Sherman exposes this misconception and provides reasons why you may not need to be a geek to enjoy the benefits of blogging . With anything new, there’s a time for learning and then you’re on your way. If you want ease-of-publishing, a platform to establish your ‘subject matter expertise’ (SME), a boost in human and search engine traffic, increased exposure, leads, sales, and profits, then learning a little of this thing you call ‘Geek’ is a small bump on the road.

This episode expands on the simple setup and publishing process of your blog as mentioned in "Misconception #2". Listen to this podcast as Sherman reveals how you can setup your blog in 5 minutes with a click of a button. In addition, he covers how easy it is to publish an entry to your blog, as simple as 1-2-3.

Tips: Sherman’s tip reveals the simple process of converting a .m4a audio podcast (the format used at ShermanLive.com) to .mp3 audio format.

Sherman encourages the consumption of .m4a in iTunes to benefit from ‘enhanced podcasts’ that provide rich visuals and clickable links in the podcasts itself.

Download and enjoy this podcast today

Feature: Episode #2 introduces a 7 part series titled ’7 Misconceptions of Blogging’, and reveals Misconception #1: "Aren’t blogs just diaries?".

Sherman exposes this misconception and provides examples of sectors and organizations that have embraced blogging to connect with their audience, extend their reach, forward their causes, deploy guerilla marketing, attract the search engines for findability, increase subscribers, sales and profits.

Tips: Sherman’s tips from this episode expand on publishing multimedia on blogs as mentioned in "Misconception #1". Listen to this podcast as 5 companies are showcased as services to use for hosting your audio and video, either for free or rather inexpensively.

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, bleeding-edge techniques and money generating strategies. Here’s Sherman Hu.

[Music]
Sherman Hu:  Hello and welcome to episode number two of ShermanLive.com. This is your host, Sherman Hu, and we have a seven part episode coming up for you on ShermanLive.com podcasts. It’s titled "The Seven Misconceptions About Blogging".

Here are the seven misconceptions, and then we’ll drill down into misconception number one for this episode.

Misconception number one  "Isn’t that just a diary?"

Misconception number two  "I’m totally inept at that geeky stuff."

Misconception number three  "I don’t know what to blog about."

Misconception number four  "I’m running X business. How can blogging help? Can blogging really help?"

Misconception number five  "Don’t I have to blog all the time to get results?"

Misconception number six  "Can I actually use a blog as a website?"

And number seven  "You can’t get good search engine rankings with a blog."

And there you are – the seven misconceptions. And let’s drill down to misconception number one.

Announcer:  You’re tuned in to ShermanLive.com. It’s simple for you.

Sherman:  So, misconception number one  I’m not sure if you’ve received this comment before, if you’re in a cocktail party or a family gathering, where you’re talking about blogging and some family member or friend says, "Isn’t that just a diary?"

Well [laughs] that’s how it started, and still to this day you’ll have bloggers and publishers who wax poetic on their blogs, and they write about anything and everything under the sun, which is fine. They treat it as a journal, which is great.

Now today, however, blogging has exploded. It has matured; people have taken it to the next level, where you have publishers from all sorts of companies and organizations, and people from all walks of life, who have really embraced blogging for business. So if you look at Fortune 500 companies, all the way to educational institutions, medical organizations, religious sectors, not-for-profit organizations, sports teams, even small business and entrepreneurs, and the list goes on and on.

You’ll find that a lot of people are publishing, doing blogs from these type of companies. Because they know the power of the published word. In fact they’re actually publishing multimedia now to the blogs, so you can add audio and video very easily.

The power also comes in the speed at which you can actually publish your thoughts to your blog. So for example, you can take a concept that you have,  an idea, a brainstorm that you might have and market it.

For example, you have a brainstorm right now; you can take it to market in seconds by simply pushing your thoughts to your blog. It’s ready for your readership and for the World Wide Web to read, and to feedback on, and to begin a dialogue about what you just published.

Let me give you an example. I mentioned several companies just a moment ago. Let me share with you some of how they’re using blogging to advance their vision or their purposes.

Take the Fortune 500 Company, for example. They’re blogging to reach their customers and prospects, and some of them actually are using a personal voice, which is very good. Blogs are typically written with a very personal voice. But some bigger companies are forced to take a personal voice, and it allows them to drop the corporate speak or the big business facade, if you will, and to listen and dialogue with their audience about the customers’ wants, the customers’ needs and how best to serve them.

Let’s take teachers and professors in educational institutions. They are blogging to advance the distance learning process, and also to further homebased education by using blogs and webinars, and even podcasting.

Now, let’s move on to the religious sectors. They are publishing their messages as Godcasts, which is a slang for podcasting a religious message. And they are publishing to their blogs for existing members and visitors to listen and share.

One such example I’ve helped in the past is a church in the Langley, British Columbia, Canada region called CreeksideOnline.org. They have a blog; the entire site is a blog. They have messages that date back a couple of years where the pastor would have the message recorded, and it would be pushed to the blog. And I had set up an iTunes feed for them so they actually have a channel in the religious category at iTunes, which is really hot.

The other church that I helped out with is AbbyFree.com. Now, we’re just starting the foundation right now to get the messages consistently up on the blog, and in time I’ll set up an iTunes feed for them too. So as you can tell that this is also a way for religious organizations to move their messages forward.

Now, let’s talk about not-for-profit organizations. They are using blogs to keep their donors and members up to date with their vision, their mission critical objectives, their values, accomplishments and case studies of victories. And as a result, membership increases and donors continue giving to their causes. So as you can tell, it’s been a wonderful benefit for not-for-profit organizations to blog.

Now let’s talk about sports teams. If you own a sports team, you can publish your calendars, your scores of past games, your upcoming games in advance, even highlight key players. And of course, highlight your sponsors, feature them on the blog.

Small business owners and entrepreneurs… I have an affinity with this group. They’ve really embraced blogging as a platform for easy content publishing, along with attracting the search engines to their blogs. This is something we’ll cover in deeper context in future episodes, in regards to blogging for the search engines.

But, blogging can be deployed for next to nothing.

And, it’s also a great way for a small business owner, an entrepreneur, solopreneur, to deploy blogging as a guerilla marketing approach, or strategy, to increasing the business’ exposure, traffic, awareness of their product and service offerings to the general public.

So, a comment today, like at a cocktail party, or at a family gathering, a comment like: "Isn’t a blog a diary, or, aren’t blogs just diaries?" is like calling Tiger Woods just another golf player.

It’s not that any more. The bar has been raised. Blogging and bloggers have taken it to the next level.

It’s exploding on the scene, on the business side, and also on the personal side. Publishers in all sectors, all different organizations have embraced in taking the science and art of blogging to the next level.

So, that misconception is wiped out, and blogging is here to stay. And that is a good reason for you to embrace blogging if you’re not yet. And if you are, to feel confident, in knowing that you’re on the right track, a lot of organizations are taking it, kicking it to the next level, and there you be!

Announcer:  You’re tuned in, to ShermanLive.com. Keepin’ it simple for you!

Sherman:  OK. Here are some tips for you.

As I had referenced in Misconception #1 how bloggers are now adding multimedia, be it audio or video, to their blog post to support their message, I want to share with you how you can do this inexpensively, and at the same time, move forward your exposure to your blog.

So, for example, let’s take audio, to start.

There’s a company called OurMedia.org: OURMEDIA.org. It’s a free hosting website for your audio, your video, and your different pictures. It’s a grassroots movement that basically; they promise that they’ll be free forever. So, you can actually host your audio there. You would simply set up your account, upload your audio, take the code provided, embed it into your blog post, and you’re done.

Now, this link, this code that you put in your blog, will provide your readers with a link to download your MP3 file. But, they don’t provide you with a Play button for your readers to click on to listen to it. So, if you want to have this Audio Play button, and if you’re using a WordPress blog, then you’ll want to find a plugin.

Google for "1 Pixel Out", or Google for "WordPress Pod casting Plugin", and you’ll find a web site called "1PixelOut.net" that provides a plugin, it’s free, that you can download, and unzip it, and upload it to your WordPress blog on your host account. Activate the plugin, and it will provide you with a way to showcase this audio in your blog, with a Play Button, that when you when click "Play", it will start streaming on your blog. It’s really slick, it’s free. Check out not only the website OurMedia.org to host your audio, but also, for this plugin to make your audio stream from your blog.

Now, if we’re going to talk about video, then consider YouTube.com. They provide you with a way to host your videos there for free, and, it also, will boost your exposure, because there are a lot of people that check out the videos on YouTube, and you can actually on your YouTube account, or profile, or, on that specific video, link back to your blog, and you will get additional ‘eyeballs’, or traffic exposure, to your blog.

Now, all you would do is you set up an account, upload your video to it, take the code provided, embed it into your blog post, and there you have your video on your blog. Now you just have to click "Play", and it will actually stream the video on your blog, but the source of it comes from YouTube.

So, that’s another tip for you in regards to adding video to your blog.

Now, the other company that you’re going to consider is FreeIQ.com (FREEIQ.com).It’s a free service, kind of like a YouTube for consultants and intellectual property business owners, coaches, and business professionals of that sort, where you can set up an account, you can upload your audio and video files there, and of course, it’s free hosting, and, of course, increased exposure, and a great platform for you to build your subject matter expertise.

Two other companies to consider, and these are now paid services, and one is AudioAcrobat.com. Why do I recommend AudioAcrobat.com as one of them? It’s because it’s an all in one service. This is a service I would recommend to my clients or to contacts that inquire about a service that they can use. If they are a beginner, this is one I recommend them use, because not only can you upload your media files, in both audio and video, they also provide you with play buttons for that specific media piece, and it also offers you stats tracking, on how many visitors have clicked on the play button, how many of them have listened, or viewed your media in its entirety. It’s a great service. I believe it’s $19.95 a month for that service.

The other company that you want to consider is LibSyn.org. LibSyn is LIBSYN. Its short for liberated syndication and they offer a really unique model where you pay for storage space of your media, but not for the bandwidth. It’s incredible. I would recommend you check it out, and read up more about them. It’s inexpensive. They also offer tracking of your stats, and many top pod casters use LibSyn to host their audio pod casts.

So, there you have it. You have audio that can be hosted at OurMedia.org, and you could also host your video at YouTube.com, or even Google Video. And the other service to add your audio and video, that’s free, is FreeIQ.com.

And the two paid services are AudioAcrobat.com and LibSyn.org, and those are some incredible tips for you, and stuff that you can apply to your blog right away, today.

Well, that brings us to the end of this pod cast. Catch you in our next episode, where we reveal Misconception #2: "I’m totally inept at that geeky stuff."

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