Two announcements today, both about other blogs I’m involved with. I feel like I really have been going blogging crazy!
Firstly, I have created a new blog and I feel ready to unleash it on the unsuspecting world (well, you guys anyway). I have been thinking for a long time that I should have a blog separate to Audible Marketing for my more Internet Marketing oriented blog posts, as well as to develop more personal posts and topics that do not relate to the world of audio marketing.
The result is IM Geek Girl.
If you want to learn more about why I set up the IM Geek Girl blog and my plans for it, please head over there and read the first few posts, starting with IM Geek Girl is Go! I should warn you that this is definitely more personal and tells you more about my life and some of the obstacles I have faced this year (and explains why my voice hasn’t been blasting out at your quite so much as usual).
My other blogging first involves a series of posts I have written for Alice Seba’s Internet Marketing Sweetie blog. She is currently taking it easier after the birth of her 3rd child (although I’m not sure taking it easy is an appropriate term) and asked for people to apply to be guest bloggers. I was one of those accepted and have written a series of 8 blog posts about getting started with creating online audio. The first of those posts was published this weekend – Online Audio 101.
Blogging for someone else’s blog was a whole new experience for me and one that was much harder than I ever expected. Each blog post took at least 3 times as long as my own blog posts do to write and involved much more editing and re-reading. But I think it was an excellent exercise and helped me to become more focused in planning my blog posts.
One of the best things about having been a part of a number of Internet Marketing communities (in particular the Immediate Edge and Thirty Day Challenge) and making some talented friends and acquaintances along the way, is that I have the opportunity occasionally to Beta test cool new tools.
Recently I have been a Beta tester for 2 tools that have got me really excited. The first is Market Samurai, which I was able to Beta test as part of the Immediate Edge and is now being used within the Thirty Day Challenge. If you aren’t a part of either of those communities then you will get the chance to buy it soon and I will explain more about it then (incidentally, when it’s released it looks like they are majorly undercharging for it – this tool is outstanding for keyword and market research).
The second tool I have been Beta testing is called Traffic Android. This has been created by a talented young guy called Nathan Ridley to make the process of social bookmarking a whole lot easier.
One of the problems with social bookmarking is the time it takes to manually bookmark a web page to a multitude of sites AND make it appear natural and organic. The temptation is to go crazy with the bookmarking and post to every site in a short space of time because otherwise you forget to return to it, or you lose track of where you have and haven’t posted.
Social bookmarking is a useful method for getting search engines to notice your blog posts and web sites (and in some cases attract referral traffic) but the sites need to be used in a natural way in order to avoid being labeled as spam.
Traffic Android has a number of things going for it that I haven’t seen elsewhere:
Creates a timeline for posting to each social bookmarking site based on your preferred time delay (you can spread it over a whole week if you want)
Shows you which sites you will need to manually post to (due to their anti-spamming measures) and enable you to do this by bringing the security captcha to you
Saves all your information in project and campaign files so you know what and where you have posted (this alone is a gem for me, as it avoids having to keep pages of notes or create spreadsheets)
Posts to each site while you are happily getting on with other tasks
Enables different account profiles so you can spread your bookmarking among a number of accounts
Offers a choice of which sites you bookmark to, with information on each one, such as which have follow and no-follow links.
All you need to do is fill in a little basic information on your web page, as well as a short description.
At the moment you do need to create your own profiles with each of the bookmarking sites, but Nathan is working on automating that for you too. In fact, the best is yet to come. More features and bookmarking sites are being added all the time and buyers receive all future updates.
Now for some technical info.
Traffic Android works on a .net framework so it does require running a Windows program (which is possible on some Macs). The interface is very clear and easy to use (being a technical dummy myself I asked Nathan to make sure the instructions was extremely clear).
I’ll warn you now that this is priced at $197, but there is a free trial in order for you to assess its usefulness. I think you have to weigh the price against what you would normally spend on your bookmarking. Not just the financial cost (if you outsource this, it will cost you upwards of $10 a time for one user account to approx. 30 sites so you’ll be breaking even pretty quickly) but also the cost of your time.
Traffic Android definitely has my seal of approval and I have used it to bookmark a number of different web pages now with great success.
On a recent Thirty Day Challenge TV show, this question was asked: “Can you recommend any good Internet Marketing books to read before the Thirty Day Challenge?”
The answer, which might have been surprising for some viewers, was “no!”
The main reason for this is that in the world of the Internet things change very quickly and by the time any book can be written and published through a traditional [read: long] process, the information is usually out of date. Even self-publishing can take far too long for the latest Internet Marketing tips and tricks. There are some Internet Marketers who have published traditional books (Joel Comm, Rosalind Gardner, Perry Marshall) and, while the books do offer good general marketing advice alongside their techniques (whether Adsense, Adwords etc.), they’re designed to establish the marketer as an expert in their field and act as another avenue for attracting prospects (IMHO).
The books that were recommended are not Internet related – they are simply good marketing, psychology and writing books:
Something that struck me, that wasn’t mentioned, was that even online material – ebooks, training courses etc. - were not recommended and I think there are 2 good reasons for that.
1. People who want to learn about Internet Marketing believe it is something different from real-world business. They think there is some special “voodoo” involved and as soon as they learn this they will be successful online. The truth is that Internet Marketing is simply marketing but on the Internet (who would have guessed?). Good marketing skills are as relevant online as they are offline, and the same rules of building a profitable business apply. Yes, there are some tools and techniques you need to learn in order to work online but strong marketing foundations will serve you better than anything else.
2. What you do learn about Internet Marketing can be subjective. The Thirty Day Challenge will teach a particular approach to researching and creating an online business. The method they teach will be grounded in good research and tried-and-tested techniques, but it will be specific to Ed Dale and Dan Raine (and their team). Other marketers will teach in a different way and possibly completely different techniques. Is one right and the other wrong? NO. It’s simply that there are many training approaches, methods, techniques, tips and tricks and each marketer is going to be slightly different. There is no point starting to learn from one marketer for 10 days and then switching to the Thirty Day Challenge – you could end up with conflicting ideas and a lot of confusion. Personally, I believe what works best is to learn everything you can of one approach and put it into practice. If it works for you then you can seek out the teaching that will improve you business further (for example, you may want to learn more about Adwords or SEO techniques or blogging). If it doesn’t work for you, you try to discover where things went wrong and change them or you move on (but only once you are certain you have followed the process through to the letter).
Some other books that I would recommend or that Ed and Dan have mentioned are:
And finally, and probably more important than most of the books mentioned, is The Gary Halbert Letter which is the ultimate (free) online resource for learning copywriting.
Wow! With less than 7 days to go, that’s a lot of reading. You might want to save some of them for after August and get plenty of sleep and family time before the challenge instead.
All the probloggers say not to apologize if you haven’t blogged for a little while, so I’m not going to say sorry. Instead I’ll just tell you what else I have been doing recently. First of all I have been writing pretty much all the content for the new Fresh Air Studios website. Fresh Air Studios is the professional audio production studio where I am based as a voiceover. The website hasn’t been fully launched yet but feel free to check it out, especially if you have a business that could benefit from a variety of audio solutions.
I have also been making use of Jason Moffatt’s Easy Video Sales, that I won recently. This is excellent stuff and I promise to create a proper review of it very soon, but in the meantime you can see his superb Mass Control presentation for absolutely nothing (you do need to give your name and email address). Mass Control was Frank Kern’s high priced event earlier this year and Jason gave away many of his video hijacker tips during his presentation (and then Ed Dale backed him up with a brilliant but simple YouTube trick near the end).
As part of the Immediate Edge I have been beta testing some new software called Market Samurai. This is not available at the moment but again I promise you a more detailed review. Apologies if you are following me on Twitter and fed-up of me raving about Market Samurai, but this is the best keyword/niche finding software I have ever used and they have already incorporated the extra information that Google is now revealing (as mentioned in my last post).
Finally, I have been gearing up for the Thirty Day Challenge which officially begins on 1st August. All the entries are in for the podcast intro competition and I’m almost sure I have found the winner (it’s a tough one, and I may need to make more than one intro). So, the next week will have to include me creating the intro in time for the challenge launch. I hope to video some of the process so you can see what’s involved.
There have been some changes over at Google with their free keyword tool that could make a huge difference to your keyword research. Take a look at this “Incredible Google News” video Ed Dale has just released - he is practically wetting himself with excitement due to the implications of these changes (sorry, can’t include it on the blog as Wordpress aren’t letting me embed a seesmic video).
This is going to save you a lot of guesswork and research, and is exactly the reason I recommend the Thirty Day Challenge (free) and the Immediate Edge. Ed and his team jump on this stuff straight away and test everything, using proven keywords (a luxury many of us, especially those just starting out on the Internet, don’t have).
Jennie asked a couple of questions in the last post about my blog that I can answer quite easily. Firstly, she liked the audio player bars and wondered how I integrated them to match the rest of the blog.
This was simple. I used the 1 Pixel Out Audio Player Wordpress plugin. Once you have plugged it into your wordpress site and activated it, you can change the colours of different aspects of the player. So I just checked my theme for the main colour codes and played with the audio player options until I liked what I saw.
As for the comments box, this just comes as part and parcel of the Wordpress theme I use from Copyblogger. There’s lots of changes I could make to the blog, especially if I downloaded the Organic theme, but I’m happy with this for now.
Finally, where do I find time to do it? That one’s not so easy to answer. I just make time when I can. I should blog more often than I do - I’d like to blog here at least once a day - but I do as much as I can and try not to sweat it too much if I miss a day or two (or more)!
Please feel free to add your own questions or make comments below.
For the past 2 years I have created an intro for Ed Dale’s Thirty Day Challenge podcasts (actually the first one I created was for his Smackdown comp with Frank Kern in UltraUnderachievers, but it was used later for the 30DC).
This year I thought we should do it differently. This is partly because the pressure is on to be more creative than last year – eek! – but also because I thought it would be great to harness some of your creativity.
So, the plan is that we open it up as a competition and ask you to come up with your most creative scripts for this year’s Thirty Day Challenge podcast introduction.
If you feel up to the challenge, get your creativity flowing and write a script for me. The best one will be turned into an audio “masterpiece” and will have the honour of being heard by Thirty Day Challengers throughout the world (I’ll even send you a copy for posterity).
Now, because this is also to help you experience the reality of creating online audio, there are going to be some restrictions. Much as I would love you to be able to use any music, any voice actor and any creative concept you would like, this is not going to be possible due to costs and copyright laws.
So, this is the framework you need to work within:
Script to record should be between 30 and 90 seconds – any longer and it gets a bit tiresome (in fact, a minute of tightly written copy is preferable to 90secs with unnecessary padding)
You can use either a male or female voiceover or both but you are restricted to Jon Iles and/or Sally Williams (click on their names to listen to their showreels). This is simply because I work with them and know they will be happy to participate in the project. Jon is able to do some character voices and that fantastic deep movie trailer voice. If you don’t know whether something is possible with those voiceovers, include it anyway and I’ll see what I can do.
You cannot specify a particular music track as this is likely to cost a fortune in royalties, but you can say that music should be in the style of, for example, Lord of the Rings, Star Wars, Titanic etc. Or, you can simply specify that you would like it to have romantic music or sci-fi music. And, yes, you can have more than one piece of music on the podcast.
You can use sound effects (but please don’t make them too tricky to find or create – the sound of a specific Ferrari engine while travelling at 100 mph may be beyond my capabilities )
You can’t completely rip-off someone else’s work. For example, much as Ed would like a Kung-Fu Panda theme this year, it will probably breach copyright and have Dreamworks suing our a*ses quicker than you can say “Prepare for Awesomeness” Writing a script that completely mimics a film or tv script is a no-no (as well as being uncreative) but the occasional quote or referencing a film or tv show should be OK.
Once you have your ideas, please write them down in a script. Start with a brief paragraph explaining your overall concept, and then write your script, making it clear what is said by the voiceover, where the music comes in and where any sound effects are required.
The more detail the better, but don’t go overboard and write a screenplay! You’ve got 10 days to get your entry in (I’ll stop taking entries at midnight on Saturday 12th July), which should allow time to create the intro in time for the main challenge starting on August 1st. And if I really get my stuff together I will film some of the creation process too so you can see what’s involved.
Paste your script into an email and send it to lisa.hartwell@gmail.com. Include your real name, your forum name and a contact email address.
Oh, and if you aren’t already a Thirty Day Challenge participant, please sign up so you can get to grips with the concept of the Challenge before your write your script.
I think that’s everything but feel free to ask questions here on the blog or over at the relevant thread on the Thirty Day Challenge forum.
If this is your first year of the challenge and think I am speaking another language when I mention podcast intros, then take a listen to these previous ones for some ideas.
This was the intro in 2006 (remember it was originally created for the Smackdown battle between Ed Dale and Frank Kern in their UltraUnderachievers program):
Lots of stuff has been going on recently, so I’ll get right on and tell you about it.
Firstly, just over a week ago John Cow announced the results of his Cowpetition, and guess what? I won first prize! Woo Hoo! A copy of David Cavanagh’s 52 Week “Getting Started On The Internet” Program - including 52 weeks of live conference calls, 1 on 1 coaching and membership site. Also includes 4 day live workshop in Pattaya Beach Thailand ($9,997 Value). I got started in the Internet quite a while ago now, but I’m really looking forward to David’s coaching as there is always something new to learn and different perspectives to see.
About 7 hours after this was announced I logged into Twitter and saw Jason Moffatt (http://twitter.com/jasonmoffatt) make a Tweet offering a free subscription to Easy Video Sales to the first person who Twittered back. I sent a Tweet and, low and behold, I won! Thanks Jason. Again looking forward to this as Jason is doing great stuff with video online.
Well, deciding I was on a roll, I bought a Euro Millions ticket that day (a very rare occurrence for me as I don’t usually go in for lotteries) and guess what? Yes, I won again! OK, it wasn’t the £34 million jackpot, but £22.50 isn’t to be sniffed at (that’s about half a tank of petrol at the moment).
I started a new Twitter survey (if you aren’t following me on Twitter yet, you can find me at http://twitter.com/audiomarketing) to find out what people would most like to know about creating and using audio online. PollDaddy.com offer a free service to create polls on Twitter and you can also add that poll to your website/blog. If you haven’t taken the survey yet, please add your preference to the right of this post. At the moment, most people seem to want to know more about the technical stuff, so I will definitely be dealing with that in future posts (I feel some videos coming on).
I’ve left this a bit late, but Yanik Silver has released the latest Underground Online Seminar DVDs. You only have until tomorrow to get your hands on them (sorry for the late notice). I have attended 2 of Yanik’s seminars and bought the DVDs/CDs for all of them because he manages to find some of the best and most successful people in the Internet world (and usually people who do not speak at conferences as a rule). Much of the information divulged at these conferences is groundbreaking and stuff you can run with straight away (not just lofty ideals but concrete methods). Yanik is an excellent copywriter too, so check out what he has done with the sales pages for this launch (and when Yanik says that something is limited, he means it).
And finally, we are well into Pre-Season over at the Thirty Day Challenge but there is still time to get onboard. The pre-season videos so far have covered loads of flocking good advice on using the Flock browser and how to use Google Reader to save a huge amount of time out of your day. The actual challenge starts August 1st so there is plenty of time to get involved and catch up with the pre-season training, but it is best to do it NOW while it’s fresh in your mind. I’ve already used the word groundbreaking in this post but I am going to use it again – the (free) teaching over at the Thirty Day Challenge is almost always groundbreaking and worth checking out even if you’ve been working online for a long time, or you have an offline business and want to see how the power of the Internet can be harnessed to improve business.
Don’t forget you can add any thoughts and comments here on the blog or feel free to Twitter me (just add @audiomarketing to your Tweet and I will see it).
ENOUGH IS ENOUGH. This post is something I’ve wanted to express for a long time. So grab some popcorn and your beverage of choice. You’re in for a long one.I was recently called out and attacked by Mark Hopkins over at the blog Mashable with his latest post, Is Twitter Vulnerable To Marketer Attack?Mark apparently got his motivation to make such a post after reading blogger Duncan Riley’s recent post (also directed at me and showing a recent email I sent to my list) Pending Sign Of The Twitter Apocalypse: It’s Being Talked About By Internet Marketers.
If there is one thing guaranteed to get people to read and comment on your blog it’s to write something absolutely flaming about someone or something other people respect. That happened over at Mashable today with established Internet Marketers (in particular John Reese) being “called out” for their (mis)use of Twitter.
Interestingly, it was a Twitter post by Mashable that ensured readers saw the blog post quickly and Twitter that enabled the buzz surrounding it to spread quickly.
I’m not going to go into great detail about the Mashable blog post or John Reese’s response (please read them for yourselves), except to say that I’m glad John did respond. Many times the big names in Internet Marketing get slammed online and they choose not to respond because it stirs up a hornets’ nest, raises the profile of the person who called them out, and leaves a distinctly bad taste in readers’ mouths (not to mention that life is too short to constantly battle the dissenters). But in this case it was a strong personal attack written on a well-read blog, and by targeting John Reese they were also slating a whole lot of other people who make their money online (themselves included).
Apart from the unnecessary, unprovoked and un-researched attack on John, my own feelings after reading the Mashable post are:
what right has anyone (apart from the owners of Twitter) to say whether someone is using Twitter in the right or wrong way? If people feel like someone they are following is hard-selling them they simply STOP following them. It’s as easy as that.
what makes what Mashable do on Twitter any different from me, John Reese or anyone else who has an online business? They build a relationship with followers by posting some personal stuff, some useful stuff, some links to interesting sites and some links to their own blog/website (where they make money). Interestingly I stopped following Mashable because I felt bombarded by them…but I still follow John Reese.
what is wrong with being an ebook seller? The Mashable post made it sound unethical and so many people act like selling ebooks is ripping people off. I sell ebooks and know many others who sell them too. When done right, they are well-written, informative and helpful. They enable people to find help on topics that are time sensitive or not profitable enough to warrant a physical book. One of my ebooks has less than a 2% refund rate so the buyers at least believe they got value for money.
I suppose my point is that I feel a little miffed (a weak way of saying p**sed off) that someone believes they have taken the high ground on something when they have no right to take it (especially as they did it poorly on popular blog). Writing a blog and making money on it from advertising and affiliate products is no different from promoting voiceover or writing services online, or selling ebooks on growing tomatoes, or making money on ebay, or… It makes us all Internet Marketers. It’s time to get over thinking that Internet Marketing is solely about ripping people off.
OK, I think I’m done. I need some chamomile tea now to calm me down (and I hate chamomile tea)!
Like others who have commented on this on their blogs I am simply contributing to Mashable’s traffic by mentioning it here, but if you want to find out where this originated then by all means go check it out, but also have a look at John Reese’s blog reply Wake Up Call and I enjoyed reading Alice Seba’s blog post on this too: Marketing Blogs: Hollywood Tabloid Style (Alice is always the voice of reason).
Lisa
P.S. To follow me on Twitter go to http://twitter.com/audiomarketing
I blogged previously about the ways you can use PLR creatively to promote your websites, gather leads and create products. In my Creative PLR post I mentioned how much I love the All Private Label content provided by Alice Seba and Mila Sidman. Well, they have just emailed me with a special offer for 2 new mini memberships: Craft PLR and Travel PLR.
Prsonally I am not in the craft niche but I am always on the look-out for quality travel plr, so I signed up for the All Travel Content Mini Membership straight away
At the moment, you can claim a $5 trial of each of the memberships by entering coupon code:
89684
Each membership includes 10 articles and 5 product profiles/reviews (great for monetizing your site). To test the content for just $5 go to:
All you need to do is fill in a little basic information on your web page, as well as a short description.
