Podcasting and the steps needed to set up a podcast came up in a recent conversation.

I’ve been working with a friend/client on the promotion of a book he wrote. Recently I was advising him to start a weekly podcast that incorporates portions of his book and then directs people to his website (were he sells the book, of course!)

He has already posted MP3 audio excerpts from the book (www.AllenPaulWeaverIII.com) and wanted to know what the difference is between these recordings and a podcast. I thought the answer would be a good addition to this site.

So, What is The Difference Between an MP3 and a Podcast?

Short answer, not much!

The audio file in a podcast is just a plain old MP3 - nothing fancy. But, the content of the audio file will be different.

The content of the file will probably have an opening segment to the show, maybe some commercial breaks, and a closing segment - like a radio show.

The resulting MP3 file is loaded onto your server, like any other file.

What distinguishes a Podcast from other MP3 files is the way in which it is promoted and distributed.

Podcasts use the RSS technology built into blogging software to create a ‘feed’ for people to subscribe to. This feed gets promoted at places like Apple’s iTunes store, iPodder.com, Odeo.com, and other places dedicated to tracking and promoting podcasts.

When a subscriber adds the RSS link to your podcast into a program like iTunes, the software will automatically download your podcast MP3s when a new one is posted and synchronize it with the subscribers iPod or media player.

There is one special distinction between a regular RSS feed and the RSS feed required for a podcast. The podcast feed must include enclosure tags around the link to the MP3 file. These tags tell the feed reader that a link to media is present.

Some blog software adds enclosure tags automatically and some does not. Wordpress handles it automatically. For those blogs that don’t do this automatically, take the feed from the podcast category and use feedburner.com to ‘burn’ a new feed. Feedburner will add the enclosure tags and then you can submit their feed link to the podcast directories. (Bonus - Feedburner will also give you lots of great statistical traffic data about your feed subscribers, so you might want to go this route anyway!)

Here is a sample method for distributing a podcast using WordPress:

1. Record and Upload your audio files
2. Create a new Category on your blog for the podcast
3. Post a new entry into this category that has a link to the audio file
4. Submit the RSS feed from your category page to the podcast directories (run it through Feedburner.com if you want the added stats)
5. Brag to all your friends about your cool new podcast
6. Record and Upload More Episodes

To create a link to the RSS feed on a specific page on a Wordpress blog, you just need to copy the address of the page from your browser and add “/rss” to the end. Here is a non-podcast example of a feed from my website as an illustration:

http://www.andrewseltz.com/category/bookbinding/rss

The hardest part of the whole process is coming up with great content for your podcast. The tech isn’t as complex as it may appear at first glance.

Did I leave something out or give an answer as confusing as the question? Just add a comment to this thread and I’ll do my best to clarify.

I haven’t set Allen’s podcast up yet, so I may discover a few new issues along the way. If I do, I’ll update this post.

The Go-To Guy!

For any first time non-fiction book author there are two enormous hurdles to overcome in order to succeed in publishing their book. You must face the blank page and get started and then you must get through the first draft.

These hurdles are not as high as they first appear and with the two strategies you are about to learn, they will shrink even further.

Staring down the blank page is like deciding to go on a cross country trip. Say you are in New York and decide to go to California. If you you just hop in the car and start driving west, every turn will be difficult because you really don’t know enough about where you are going to make a good choice. The wise traveler pulls out a map first and picks a few major stopping points on the trip. Then the specific roads to take to each point are selected. Once the trip is planned out, the driving begins.

The Road Map to a First Draft of Your Book

Most first time non-fiction authors don’t start out by looking at the map. There is a map for creating non-fiction books. The book map includes major way stops and the roads in between. When the writer consults the map, it becomes much easier to plan the journey. So, what is this map?

The map is other successful books. Spend a little time at the bookstore looking at similar books to the one you want to create and it becomes easy to see that there is a basic structure to all of them. Author and product creation consultant Fred Gleeck calls it the 24/4/2 system.

Books in the non-fiction world can be roughly broken down to 24 main topics (the chapters), 4 sub-topics inside each topic, and 2 paragraphs of actual content for each sub-topic. Organize your information around this road map and write the content and you will have a text that will work out to be approximately 120-150 pages in paperback format. This is a respectable length for a non-fiction book.

Creating the outline of these points is the “planning your trip” portion of the writing journey. The topics and sub-topics outline where you want to go. Writing the paragraphs for those sub-topics is the actual trip to your first draft.

So, step one is to create your 24/4/2 outline for your book.

Choosing the Fastest Way To Write

Once you know where you are going, it is time to choose the fastest vehicle to get you there. For me, dictation is the key to speed.

Rather than sitting down with a pen and paper, or at your computer keyboard, have a friend sit down with you and interview you based on your 24/4/2 outline. Your friend will ask you to explain each sub-topic and your responses will be the paragraphs in the first draft. Momentum is vital, so don’t stop to look up information or verify facts. Leave what I call a breadcrumb note for yourself and move on. A breadcrumb can be as simple as saying, “find statistics to back this up.”

After everything is recorded, hire a typist to transcribe your recording. That transcript is your very rough - but completed - first draft.

Now it is time to go through the text, cleaning up your breadcrumbs and smoothing out the language. After this first pass, you will be ready to share the first draft with some reviewers and get feedback for your second draft.

Finishing Your Book

There is still a lot of work to be done to move from the first draft to a completed book. But completing this draft is a major milestone and creates a momentum for the project that greatly increases the likelihood that your book will get finished.

Many first time writers start plowing into the writing without a plan and get lost in the content. Frustration builds until they abandon the project. But, when you have a first draft to show, the project becomes ‘real’ to you and other people can react to what you have created.

Plan your trip by consulting the road map and then get yourself a fast car!

The Go-To Guy!

P.S. Have you written a book in this way? Do you have an even better method? Don’t let me have the last word, leave a comment and share your story!

Associate Content approved my recent articles today and made me offers. That is the fastest turnaround I have had with them so far. Up until now it has always taken me at least a week to get offers for anything (but I was also submitting more articles. They might deal with them in batches and the ‘bulk’ submissions are slowing them down???)

The speed of approval was the good news. The actual offers weren’t that great. My article titled “Speed Write Your NonFiction Book Using Dictation” got a whopping $5.10 offer and my article titled “How to Fly Without Getting Sick” got a truly underwhelming $4.61 - and that one was an exclusive submission.  Since it ended up taking me about and hour to write and submit each, I’m way off my target goal of earning $20/hour.

On the slightly brighter side, I’m $9.71 closer to my new monitor. That is better than last week, but I’ve got a lot more writing to do!

Since I didn’t see much benefit to submitting an exclusive article, I think I will submit most as non-exclusives so I can use them again and squeeze some more money out of them (but that money will not be counted toward the new monitor purchase.) The writing article will be going up on this blog immediately - I might get some Adsense income from that one.

So here is the running tally:

2 Articles Sold - $9.71
Balance Required to Buy Monitor - $590.29 - $790.29
Remaining Number of Articles to be Written at Current Average Price ($4.85/each) - 122-163

Looks like I have a ways to go. I had better find some more profitable subjects if I want to get this done before my 14 week old daughter graduates college.

Back to the article mines,

The Go-To Guy! 

In my last post on this project I mentioned that I had cranked out 11 article outlines on a cross-country airplane flight and just needed to flesh them out before uploading them to Associated Content to sell.

My hope was that I could spend a few hours one afternoon or evening to crank out the finished articles and submit them, but life hasn’t quite worked out like that. Living with a 15 week old daughter in a studio apartment is challenging and the ups and downs of her day have a huge impact on the time and energy I have to work on this project.

Starting today, I’m trying to get the process moving again by writing one article on my subway ride to work. From the time I sit down on the train to when I arrive at my stop, there is about 20 minutes for me to work. This is just about right for the time I allotted for drafting each article.

Today I wrote an article titled “Speed Write Your Non-Fiction Book Using Dictation.” The total article length was just under 700 words. I typed it up over lunch and submitted it to Associated Content.

One of the drawbacks to working this way is that I hand write each article and then go back and type the hand written text before submitting it. I’m not a very fast typist, so this added another 20 minutes to the process. Including about 10 minutes to log in and upload the article, I have spent about an hour creating and submitting this article. That is going to reduce my overall hourly rate for writing - but I’m getting closer to my monitor and taking advantage of time that is usually not profitable to get the work done.

I also decided to submit this article as a non-exclusive article. The subject matter is relevant to a couple of projects I am working on, so I want to have the freedom to re-use the text (although I will probably rework it before using it anywhere else.) I will submit future articles as exclusives to see if the payments offered are better. If the difference is small, I’ll just keep doing non-exclusives to keep my options open.

If you would like to see the types of content I have been paid to write, visit my user profile at Associated Content.

Who knows, if I can get a seat on the subway going home tonight, I might knock out another article!

**UPDATE**

I wrote 1 1/2 articles on the train ride home. I typed up and submitted “How To Fly Without Getting Sick” as an exclusive submission. It took about the same amount of time as the earlier article to complete and submit. That’s 2 down and 8 1/2 articles to go in this first batch.

The Go-To Guy!

It is time for an update on my writing challenge.

This past weekend I traveled cross country for a conference (New York to Los Angeles.) I decided to devote a portion of my westbound flight to writing articles for this challenge.

I planned to write on subjects I was familiar with which would limit the amount of research required. I also chose topics that would not require quoting lots of facts and figures. The topics were writing and home improvement.

There was one home improvement topic I needed to do a little research on, so I had about 25 pages of printouts from a quick Google search on Thursday night. I relied on personal experience for the rest of the articles. When I got started writing, I fell into an interesting pattern.

As I started to write, I found myself outlining the articles with just enough detail to capture the idea and provide an outline of the complete article. Because I wasn’t laboring over details, I got on a roll and moved through the articles quickly.

In less than 2 hours, I outlined 11 separate articles - 9 on my original topics and 2 that just popped into my mind when I got in the groove. (That works out to 11 minutes per article.)

This process reminded me of when I worked on an automotive assembly line building cars (this is just one of the many interesting jobs I’ve held!) When you break a project down into the primary steps of production, and then complete one step for multiple products at the same time, you move much faster than if you complete every step for one product before starting the next product. You get into a rhythm and you stop thinking about the process and just do the work.

The outlines still need to be expanded into full articles, but I think that can be done quickly since they are already clearly outlined - I’m just expanding the thoughts into complete statements.

I should have the first batch ready to submit for payment within a few days.

The Go-To Guy!

“Just a quick thank you for illuminating the basics of Photoshop to me so that I could complete my project. I can say without hesitation that every conversation with you is an education! (and a delight!) You’re the best! Thanks!”

Suzanne Toro

“…a big thank you to Andrew Seltz: The Go-To Guy!, who gave me some simple but brilliant advice, and I took it by the horns and ran with it. Now, well, I feel I have a purpose once again.”

Jezee - Member of the BarbaraSher.com forum

Read Jezee’s Full Forum Post at BarbaraSher.com

“Andrew Seltz you are simply AMAZING! There has been nothing that I have come to you for that you weren’t the perfect answer for the job. Well versed in any task creative or technical, once again you’ve given me an education just by explaining how you’ve answered problems along the way. Though you are often beyond my capacity technologically you are able to help me understand in your thorough explanations. From one artist to another you’ve done it again - shear creative GENIUS.”

Alicia M. DeFrange - Artist

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Website Traffic: You can either pay for it or cast a wide net to pull it in.

Paying is pretty simple (well, technically it’s an art unto itself) but you join up with a PPC program, select your keyword groups, write some ads and start paying.

You can also find websites where your potential visitors hang out and buy some links or ads on those sites.

To cast a net you will invest time rather than money. I have two basic strategies.

The first strategy is to write a batch of 300-500 word marketing articles with links back to my target site in the author’s resource box and post them to directories like www.ezinearticles.com and www.goarticles.com. (I wrote an article about how to write effective marketing articles on my blog.)

It will take some time before the articles start getting picked up by other publishers and reprinted, but once they are out there, you’ll keep getting traffic. I have articles that were published over a year ago that still bring me regular hits to my sites.

The second strategy takes advantage of the work done in the first. I will pull apart the articles I wrote and format them as blog entries laced with links back to my target site. Then, I’ll take advantage of the many free blogging sites out there like www.blogger.com, www.wordpress.com, www.myspace.com, www.livejournal.com, www.friendster.com, and www.squidoo.com and make a bunch of new blogs and post the revised article content.

Almost instantly you will find sites like Technorati linking back to your main site. Within a few days you should start seeing visitors and find yourself geting indexed in the search engines - just don’t use the exact some content on every blog. It will count against you in the search engine rankings.

The last time I did this, I got my first visitor and earned my first dollar in under 48 hours.

Keep adding new content to the blogs and article directories for a few months (once ore twice a week after the first week.) If you’ve targeted a good niche, chosen good keyword targets, and written good articles, you will see a steady flow of traffic drawn into your site through this network of pages linking in.

One warning: Don’t forget to actively promote a newsletter or some other device on your main site to capture visitor’s email address. The next time you want to talk to them you don’t have to wait for them to wander by, you can send something straight to them!

The Go-To Guy!

P.S. Using an approach like Jonathan Leger’s $7 Secrets to promote a simple report you’ve written can quickly build a mailing list without all of the blogs and article writing. That’s my next project!

Article marketing is a low cost strategy to direct traffic to a website and begin to develop one-way backlinks to its pages. For new online ventures it offers a great way to build traffic to a site and to establish its authority in a particular niche.

Article Marketing is also an excellent strategy to quickly get a new site listed in search engines like Google and Yahoo!

The basic process for article marketing is this:

• Write a series of short 350-700 word articles related to the content of your website
• Add an author’s resource box to each article that contains links back to one or more pages on your website
• Upload the articles to various article directories like www.EZineArticles.com or www.GoArticles.com
• Wait for other publishers to reprint your articles and resource links
• Wait for search engines to index your articles (and the links back to your site) from the article directories and also from the websites that reprint them giving you relevant inbound links and new visitor traffic

The process works. I wrote my first small batch of articles over a year ago and continue to see traffic from them today. I even make a dollar or two every now and then from ads on the pages that the resource links are pointing to. If I had more articles out there, the overall traffic would rise. But those first articles were a test to see if the process worked and were not well written for the task of making me money (or even getting me good search engine ranking.)

Once I proved to myself that the basic system worked, I next had to learn how to write articles that compel people to click on the resource links and how to optimize those links to improve my search engine rankings. The best SEO in the world won’t help if your content isn’t compelling and the most compelling articles are pointless if they don’t improve your business.

Optimizing the links was easy. I just had to include the primary keywords for the page I was directing traffic to in the anchor text in the link. Like this: Energy Efficient Home Construction information. Every article gets unique words based on the page that is being linked to. When multiple articles link to the same page I make subtle alterations to the link on each article so that the search engines don’t always see the exact same text and devalue it as duplicate content.

Making the articles compelling so that readers want to follow the links and come to my site is more challenging. The most effective articles for this marketing method give readers a taste of the topic and lead them to deeper subjects they need to explore to really be satisfied. The resource box should promise them this next level of information and the links will lead them to the new information.

I realize that this explanation might not be clear enough, so I’ll give a quick illustration:

Say you are selling camera equipment for product photography - cameras, lights, display stands, backdrops, etc.

You write an article about how adding a photo to your eBay auctions can radically improve your profits. Your readers will be eBay sellers who want to make more money and your article leads them to realize that good product photos will improve their income.

In the article you make a special point of the importance of professional quality images to set yourself apart from the crowd. You further explain that with a modest investment in the right tools and some basic training anyone can learn to take the kinds of images that will make big money. If you write this well, the reader will now want to know how to take a good product photo and what equipment is needed to get professional results.

In your resource box you promise them free tutorials for taking product photos they can use in their auctions. These links will land them on pages where they will learn techniques and discover the basic tools they need to take good photos (with ads for the gear highlighted in the tutorials, a newsletter sign-up form, and maybe an offer for an e-book guide to taking professional product photos.) The link text might be something like “Learn 5 Simple Steps to Professional Quality Product Photos.”

Another article pointing to the exact same set of tutorials could focus on showing aspiring catalog photographers how to build their portfolios. Still another would entice model building hobbyists into taking professional quality photos of the models they build to show off their skills, etc. You can find dozens of different ways to approach potential audiences for your products.

The article introduces a need and builds the desire for a solution, then the resource box promises to satisfy this new desire.

Model building websites, photography websites, and auction business websites will all begin to reprint your articles and steer their visitors toward your site. The search engines will also start to recognize your site’s pages as authoritative because of the growing number of inbound links. Over time your search engine placement will also improve.

Creating articles that work at this level takes effort. If your main goal is to simply to gain backlinks to improve search engine rankings, this is overkill. But if you are trying to warm up a new customer for a sale, you have to make the effort.

If you would like to see some of the marketing articles I have published visit my EZineArticles profile. (While you are there, please rate my articles - every little bit of promotion helps.) Hopefully you will be able to see the improvement in my articles over the past year.

Now, get out there and start writing.

The Go-To Guy!

P.S. Don’t let me have the last word. Leave a comment and let us know what you think.

How would you like to uncover all the best deals available on Amazon.com?

I have uncovered a secret method of searching through the Amazon.com product database and showing only items that are on sale. You can pick the product category and exact discount range you want to search and Amazon will do the rest.

The information I found involved a fairly messy process of copying and pasting codes together to create a special search string and then pasting that into your browser. I decided to make the process easier so that anyone could find these great deals.

Here is the result of my labor:

Give it a try and see what you find! You can download a Windows version of this tool here:

AmazonDealFinder.exe

Make sure and bookmark this page and tell your friends.

Happy Bargain Hunting,

The Go-To Guy!

P.S. Do you use bookmarking sites like Delicious or Digg? Or, how about StumbleUpon.com? Recommend this page and give it a good review. Thanks!

I was looking through the stats for this site today and saw that someone had followed a Google search for “The Go To Guy” and arrived at my homepage.

Being the curious type, I clicked on the referring link to see what came up on a Google search for that phrase and where www.AndrewSeltz.com placed in the search results.

This site is number 11 (top of the second page) for the phrase “The Go To Guy.” Not bad considering that I have made no specific effort to rank well for that phrase and there were 295,000 results.

The results that placed higher than this site were mostly big news sites and/or referring to well know people, so I’m in good company.

Maybe someday this whole Go-To Guy! thing will stick in a big way?

Andrew Seltz, The Go-To Guy!