Learn how to podcast and blog to establish thought leadership, extend your brand and engage your target market

Sometimes a simple, visual explanation of podcasting comes in handy. I extracted the most successful explanations from my speaking engagements and created a short video (8m11s) that can be freely used under the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. Feel free to share it with colleagues, friends or even your grandma. Post it to your site or blog if it will come in handy. You can get it from YouTube here or from Revver here.

• There seems to be a natural audience level for each show. The listenership races up to a plateau and then sees a gradual growth that is similar across the network.
• Your transcripts can be a product that is sold or licensed.
• Making money is more than advertising in your podcast. For example, her book is a form of moneizing the podcast.
• She has a set format for the network: one host, scripted, short. People know what to expect.
• She owns the brand. Quick and Dirty Tips is the brand.
• Podcasters are paid. In general she pays a base rate plus additional compensation based on the success of the show.
• Each show promotes another show on the network at the end of the episode. The network cross-promotes itself.
• The network offers resources such as sound production and script editing. The host records the raw content, the rest is taken care of.
• Building a brand has opened doors for her to make money speaking, consulting and writing books.
• 100,000 downloads a month is a good level for running a profitable business.

Paul Colligan points out that PodShow is gearing up to put their content on Tivo. I’ve been luke warm about PodShow in the past, but this is definitely an impressive coup for PodShow’s content creators as well as podcasting in general.

For podcasting to bust into the next growth spurt in adoption, consumption needs to be as easy as dialing up the radio or selecting a channel on TV. Well, I’d say this give us more of that which is always a good thing.

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Monday evening I will be participating in a free teleseminar with Bob Baker (one of my indie music promotion mentors) and Dave Jackson of School of Podcasting. The topic is how to promote yourself as an independent musician through podcasting. I imagine any creative types will get valuable info by listening in. In fact, I imagine any podcaster will pick up helpful tips.

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Earlier this week I talked about how numerous podcasters were having trouble with their listing in the iTunes podcast directory not updating with the latest episodes. I’ve verified the source of the problem and found a fix.

Previously I presented a theory that the problem traced back to the FeedBurner FeedSmith plugin. That theory appears to be verified. The Internet Business Mastery listing in iTunes is now up to date.

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UPDATE: I’ve posted a fix for this problem here.

Your listing in the iTunes podcast directory may not be up to date. You might want to quickly check and then come back to this post.

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I’m finally completing a goal that I’ve had for over two years. It’s something that I set out to do when I got into podcasting in early 2005. My foray into podcasting began when I first saw the word “podcast” in Bob Baker’s indie music tips newsletter, The Buzz Factor.

I googled the word podcasting right away. It quickly became apparent to me that podcasting was going to seriously shake up media, communication and online marketing. I had to be in the center of it. I began researching everything I could about the medium.

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Below you can download PDF files containing the slides for all six of the presentations I did last weekend in Las Vegas at the National Association of Broadcasting Podcasting Summit. They aren’t the most dynamic slides, so they will have more meaning to those who attended. But you can probably glean some other interesting tidbits of information from them.

Podcasting Metrics

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One of my sessions at PodCamp was on Blogging, Podcasting and RSS Basics. I promised the attendees that I would post the presentation to my blog.

Download the MP3 Audio Here

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During one of my PodCamp NYC sessions I was asked how often you should update your podcast. I gave what I thought was my usual answer, but from what I’ve seen quoted in a couple blogs I either miscommunicated or was misunderstood. So I’d like to clarify my point of view.

It’s no mystery that podcasting takes time. Posting a new episode multiple times a week (or even just every week) can be tough. Many of the most dedicated podcasters who posted 3-5 episodes a week in the early days have since dropped to once or twice a week.

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