In a moved designed to help commercial radio understand and implement Podcasting LoyalEars launches what they call Loyal Podcasts on Demand. They are helping mainstream radio broadcast media understand what you as an independent publisher, solo entrepreneur, or small business should start understanding right now...time shifted, on-demand information by consumers requires special attention to podcast audio channels. If you aren't paying attention to this you are overlooking a new revenue channel.

LoyalEars specializes in broadcast audience metrics and they consults in the area of building listener loyalty for radio stations.

Quote:

Loyal Ears President Jimmy Risk remarked, "Clear Channel's entry last week into podcasting underscores the urgency for radio to connect beyond the dial.

according this article via Steve Rubel o Micropersuasion. But that's radio. Some in mainstream broadcast radio are starting to get it. LoyalEars has a ...   more »

There is no doubt Blogs, RSS and Podcasting are the dynamic trio of online content publishing and distribution. But more than just "publishing" tools, they allow you to engage your audience actively in ways that can really create a greater connecting between you or your business and your target audience.

Check out this great article by MarketProfs entitled Move Over Blogs: Here Come Podcasts.

Needs some ideas on how to to use a Podcast for marketing? Here's an excerpt:

1. Interview various authors and thought leaders in your industry, then publish these interviews regularly to your podcast on your site. You could even transcribe these podcasts to post on the site as well. It's good search engine fodder if the interview contains the right keywords.

2. Provide a thought-provoking idea or tip of the day. Just a short bit of practical advice published on a frequent regular basis coming from one of the thought leaders within your own company helps establish their credibility in the listener's mind over time, assuming the podcasts are really good.

3. Offer late-breaking podcast industry news compiled from sources across the Web that you monitor on a daily basis. This is really no different from many of the blogs out there that focus on news. The difference is that someone doesn't have to sit in front of the screen to get the latest happenings. People can subscribe to your podcast, download it and take it with them as they go out jogging or commute to the office.

4. Get your listener subscribers to participate in a kind of a talkback show where they can ask thought-provoking questions and make comments, which can then be addressed and elaborated on by your in-house experts or even a panel of experts.

5. Sponsor existing, high-quality podcasts. This allows you to associate your organization with a reputable podcast, and it gives you an instant audience. For example, sponsors of IT Conversations reach an audience of 14,000-15,000 listeners. Sponsoring others' podcasts can be a viable alternative to producing your own podcasts and building up the listener base from scratch, for potentially less expense and better ROI. Sponsor slots shouldn't sound like commercial interruptions; they should be relevant to the listener and add value.

Here are some reasons why you should start Podcasting according the same article:

1. You will be seen as an innovator on the cutting edge of things. You will most likely be the first mover in your market to use podcasting as a marketing tool.

2. Loyal listeners will come to rely on you for the latest thinking, news or trends in your field of expertise and interest. As their thought leader, you can influence the listeners' buying behaviors through a soft-sell approach.

3. People will regard you as a human being they can relate to. The personal voice of your podcast is more real than the "voice" of your company's Web site. It is more disarming and makes your company seem more approachable if done right.

4. Because podcasting is novel at this point in time, there is some PR value to be milked when dealing with the trade press.

Read More Here...

Good article posted today by Darren Rowse of Problogger. Darren is one of my favorite bloggers and he also knows blog revenue. Darren publishes 17 blogs AND generates a six figure income from his blogs

Check out Darren's entry for today about Google Adsense revenue and blogs.

» Making Your Adsense Earnings Grow - Exponential Blogging: ProBlogger

Okay, I had a particularly bad day of both comment spam and Trackback spam. Some idiot also decided to favor this blog with an executable called "I-blog.exe" set in one of the links. Lovely.

So as of now I'm going to switch to registration mode for comments instead of anonymous to help prevent a field day of spamming my blog. Got a few folks going willy-nilly on my blog with spam here lately. Time costs have been getting rather high with cleaning up spam. Sure, allowing anonymous comments makes me especially open to attack but registration can be viewed as a layer of effort that may discourage others from commenting simply because of time, convenience or anonymity issues.

Well from this point on anyone who truly desires to comment will take the few moments or seconds to register and contribute. I do the same on other blogs myself when I want to truly contribute...   more »

Here's a great article about business blogging fundamentals. In the E-commerce Guide the articled entitled Tell Me About It: How Blogs Can Work for You covers the "buzz" benefits of a business blog.

Why You Should Start A Business Blog
Quoting Susannah Gardner who is a web designer and expert blogger :

"You have the ability to communicate one-on-one with customers in a casual way, and you can respond to timely events and maintain that community interaction on a weekly, or even daily basis. You can't do that with an established ad campaign."

And additionally as quoted from Susannah Gardner,


"Blogs are niche publications, so whether writing about sea life or home decorating, people in the media recognize you as an 'expert' and suddenly you're getting a lot of mentions in the press," he said. "It opens up opportunities you wouldn't ...   more »

The blogosphere is a big place to the uninitiated but quickly grows small with great new discoveries that make blogging a dynamic place to participate and thrive in. There is always new brilliance to discover and link to and seasoned veteran know-how to highlight.

On that note I'd like to highlight Andy Wibbles of Easy Bake Weblogs. I don't know Andy personally but I do know his content and expertise since I've been following his blog for several months now and I've attended a teleseminar or two hosted by Andy.

Andy is a blogging evangelist, coach and trainer to entrepreneurs. Andy is a quality guy and offers a lot in the way of coaching and teaching others about what it takes to create blog success and get a blog up and running effectively for their business.

I wanted to alert you to Andy and his blog because of the value I believe he provides to his readers and clients. Andy has also published his own series of blogging manuals and videos and conducts blogging seminars on a regular basis.

I encourage to check out Andy's free Easy Bake Weblogs preview CD to get the heads up on the work that Andy does. You get to sample a full length recording of one of his seminars, 2 flash demo videos to get you started with blogging (I've seen his videos, they are quality and easy to follow), and a book excerpt from his Easy Bake Weblogs manual. Pick up your free CD by clicking here

He's a great resource. Highly recommended.

This is a book about how to wake up!. It is a call to heightened awareness of blogs and blogging and bloggers. It is about how not to be left behind in the "reformation of the information reformation" as Hugh says. Here is a must have book on blogs that every business should read and every consultant must have.

Hugh gets it and he really gets it when it comes to bloggers and the power of new media publishing. In his latest book Blog:Understanding the Information Reformation That's Changing Your World Hugh lays out with powerful clarity the imperatives for businesses to start blogging and to start NOW.

Hugh Hewitt is an established and best-selling author, radio host and influential blogger. He started blogging in 2002 and has since had over 10 million visits to his blog. He knows blogging well. In this book Hugh gives a detailed and very compelling case for "why" you cannot ignore blogs and the perils for ignoring the new media publishers.   more »

Let me introduce to you Fred Gratzon who calls himself a provocateur, raconteur, entrepreneur and impresario...plus an all around great guy. I met Fred online late last year as he looked for someone to help him with getting his blog going. I finally got the meet Fred in person at the January session of a marketers conference where I delivered a presentation on blogs and RSS.

I love heralding the virtues of blogging for many reasons and of course business blogging is one important use for blogging and is of great and growing interest for many these days. When it comes to coaching or consulting others on how to create blog success I take the long term view.

Beware of the Gimmicks
By long term view I mean that one must consider and seriously understand what it means to blog and build ...   more »

Your online business needs to be doing these two things right now:

1. Thinking in the open

2. Speaking in the open

In a digital culture where open source media provides a conduit to free market ideas and where perception is reality, your business needs the means to establish a context for these muliple realities. Your business should embrace the open source media revolution because you are a stakeholder in how this "blog" thing eventually falls out.

It is important to realize that opinion is reality that can make a difference to your business. Ideas are the economic drivers of success now. Ideas that are rightly or wrongly formed about your business are still formed. And there are many ideas forming.

Now you cannot be concerned with every opinion of every Tom, Dick or Harry. But perception is reality. You ...   more »

Okay, another for the off topic category. Evil? Genius? or Evil Genius?

Let me introduce you to Toby. I nice cute bunny rabbit that was found injured under the stairs of someone's home. Apparently Toby barely escaped a cat attack. It was thought that Toby would not survive his injuries.

However Toby does recover quite nicely from his injuries. Now Toby is in full health and as cute as ever. BUT...the owner has a proposition for you.

You pay him $50,000 or he takes the rabbit to the butcher and eats him on June 30, 2005. SaveToby.com tells the story and showcases the rabbit.

To encourage your donations the owner has graciously included gallery of nice glamour shots of Toby posing in a pot (see below) as well as shots of Toby on a cutting board with a knife and Toby on a plate garnished with lettuce. He wants to make sure you fully visualize Toby's fate. Nothing like visual motivation to get people in action.

Here's the tag line from SaveToby.com

only YOU have the power to SAVE TOBY

Figure 1 Toby Poses In A Pot


There is also a section for recipes that the owner is considering for Toby. Hmmmm....how do I prepare the meal? Nice. How clever. [sarcasm]

But wait! There's more...you can visit the store and buy Save Toby merchandise.

Now, is the owner really going to eat Toby if he doesn't get the $50K? I'm not sure...but the site is real and the merchandise is real and SaveToby.com has already raised $18,000.00. Amazing. Whatever the case is, SaveToby.com sure figured out a way to make some money with very little effort.

I found this via the Bob Parson - Godaddy.com blog as Bob took some heat for allowing the site to be hosted at his company. Bob gives you his take on the whole deal.

What do you think?

Welcome to the Bloggers Advantage Podcast. Today's podcast is a special one. This past Friday, Michael Pollock of Small Business Branding Blog and the SavvySoloCast interviewed me about the blogs for content distribution and revenue generation.

Podcast Feed URL: http://feeds.feedburner.com/CreateBlogSuccessPodcast

Listen to Michael and I discuss how blogs are powerful tools for driving greater value from your blog to boost your business communications, distribute content and create revenue. Michael and I have a series of discussions planned for the future since we could only scratch the surface of this exciting publishing and communications media.

I've spliced Micheals interview into this edition of my podcast. This discussion is a bit long so I encourage to listen to the whole the show when you aren't under time limitations.

Show Running Time: ~54 minutes
Filesize: ~44MB

Michael has some additional powerful podcasts where he has interviewed experts and the result is content rich podcasting. You must especially check out his podcast interview with Bob Bly. This podcast is simply content rich stuff that everyone should listen to.

Show Notes:

Create Your Own Podcast. Your easy to use step-by-step system to creating your very own podcast and getting it up and running today. 80 page manual and over 2 hours of video instruction. Click Here for more information

About the Brands of Michael Pollock


About This Site: Part website/part blog, smallbusinessbranding is here to help small business folks realize and deal with the death of traditional marketing.


Welcome to SavvySoloCAST, The Official Podcast for Savvy Solopreneurs. Tune in each week as I speak with successful, savvy solopreneurs and recognized experts who know what it takes to build a thriving business. Learn from their success. Be inspired by their stories. And most of all, use what you hear to become more savvy and successful in your own business.


Infopreneuring. It's a great way to build your brand and generate additional revenue at the same time. One great information product is downloadable audio programs - teleclasses, interviews with experts, books-on-audio, etc. Anything that can be recorded and has value to your audience.


Doc Searls

Seth Godin

Debbie Weil




Resources not mentioned in this episode:

sponsored link
Mike the Internet Audio Guy
Simply one of the best guys with the best equipment and information to help you with your podcasts!

Podcast Articles from How To Blog for Fun and Profit
Here's the rundown on several articles that I've written that mention Podcast or Podcasting or directly talks about it. Check them out and see if there is anything in here that can help you. :-)

Audio C4
Create explosive audio marketing messages with Content, Connection and Confidence to generate revenue!

==========================
How To Listen To This Podcast

Podcast Feed URL: http://feeds.feedburner.com/CreateBlogSuccessPodcast
Add this URL to your RSS reader/aggregator.

If you don't have a media aggregator or FeedDemon to use to subscribe to this podcast with, no worries. Just click the attachment, more>>> link or the permalink link in this post and you will see the text link for this mp3 podcast. You can click that and the podcast will play right there in your browser. How's that for easy listening? :-)
==========================

Last month I did a video series with Jim Edwards of the I Gotta Tell You blog.

Jim is an accomplished marketer, comedian and syndicated columnist. He asked if we could do a tutorial about Trackbacks to help his readers and so using the magic of Internet technology we recorded this trackback video and audio session across state lines early one morning in February.

Trackbacks are often misunderstood and so seldom used by new bloggers. Trackback is a powerful way to get content recognition from search bots crawling the rich blog link structures, it is a great way to alert others to your content as well as receive notice when other bloggers are referencing you. Trackbacks are a good way to get inbound links and generate FREE traffic. Trackbacks are definitely a powerful content promotion and distribution strategy. When used properly, Trackbacks can get you noticed and get you traffic.

There are 3 short videos in this series that provide you with a quick review of Trackback links. You can visit and view the series here: Trackback Video Tutorial

Moblogging 1, 2, 3...   more »

Interesting article I found via my colleague Steve Rubel of Micropersuasion.

In article by Yahoo Buzz index, Steve Rubel picks up on the a quote from that article that says,

"If there's a subject without a blog devoted to it by now, maybe it just isn't worth covering."

The Yahoo article was discussing the latest trend and blog searching and seemed to suggest that there were so many subject-based blogs that if there wasn't a blog devoted to a topic perhaps it wasn't worth covering.

Steve's rebuttal of the article (Steve is a PR Blogging evangelist and influencer) started and very educational series of replies. First, the Editor of Yahoo Buzz replied to Steve's article to clarify his position and to state that it was a joke that rather fell flat.

Steves take is that no saturation exists anywhere. If ...   more »

The real business of blogging isn't about how much revenue your blog can generate or how competitive you can become in the search engines ranking game, pagerank or RSS marketing. These are important pieces to the overall puzzle but business bloggings isn't any of these things.

These things are important components as you endeavor to create your blog success as these items help drive, follow on and build an effective blog as a result of something more important...

The real business of blogging is customer-centric publishing. Customer-centric content communicates transparency for your business intentions and visibility for the individual(s) driving the business. We are thriving in a digital economy where consumers are demanding greater accessibility, distribution and personalization from business.

The real win in the business of blogging is creating a content channel that is highly accessible and ...   more »