Michelle Trent Joins Podcaster Training

The old adage that says, “There’s always room for more” comes to mind as I welcome Michelle Trent to the Podcaster Training Segment Hosts lineup. Each week, we present different segments to allow for some variety and along with our current segment hosts, Jeff Chandler with his Wordpress Weekly News, Josh Budde, with his Budde Podcasting Network news and Patti Serrano with the Business of Podcasting, Michelle will bring us updates from the World of New Media. She will begin her segment this coming Friday Night, October 3rd, 2008.

We will be discussing Using Twitter and Other Microblogging Platforms in this episode and Michelle may have some insights for us during our Main Topic for using Twitter for Business.

Join me in welcoming Michelle to the Podcaster Training Show and be sure to tune in Friday Night at 8:00pm EST at http://www.talkshoe.com/tc/16829

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Podcaster Training Chat Log September 26th, 2008

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Podcaster Training: Monetizing Your Blog or Podcast

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This is a subject that is talked about quite often in the New Media World and we are going to go over a few ways that you can monetize or make a little money with your blog or podcast. This discussion is by no means a complete list. I will cover some highlights that will enable you to have a starting point to your monetization.

Now, there are many ways to monetize, such as advertising, sponsorships, donations and affiliate programs. The easiest of these aforementioned methods is donations. You don’t have to do much of anything except to put a Donation Button on your blog or web site and if someone is inclined to help you out, they can easily click this and give you some money! Sounds easy, right?

Setting up a Donation Button will require you to have a merchant account (to accept credit cards) or a PayPal Account. There are other “PayPal type” places around that may offer this feature as well. Make sure to place your Donation Button in a prominent place so that it can be seen (and hopefully used) and then make sure to tell your listeners (of your show or podcast) or readers of your blog, that this button is there and then ASK them to make a donation! That’s all you need to do for this type of monetization structure.

The next type of monetization is sponsorships. These are a little harder to obtain, but well worth getting. To get a sponsor for your blog or podcast, you will need to approach several companies that you would like to “push their wares” in exchange for an advertising spot on your blog or podcast. There are places that will help you get sponsorships, such as BluBrry, a Rawvoice Company, that you can signup with, it’s free to do this, fill out an advertising survey and complete their requirements and then they will match you with advertisers (sometimes more than one) that you can place on your sites, blogs and use as host read ads in your podcasts. One such example of this is the GoToMyPC ad I read at the beginning of every show and have a banner ad on my blog for. Of course, once you get a sponsor, it is important that you do your part by reading the ad and/or placing the advertising your site or blog to insure that you will get paid!

Speaking of advertising, our next structure is actually two fold. Advertising can be from businesses or companies that you approach and signup with yourself or you can sign up with an affiliate program and place ads from different companies easily on your sites or blogs and use these advertisers as possible sponsors of your podcasts. You can go to places like Commission Junction, ShareASale or LinkShare to signup for a free affiliate account and start placing ads today! Affiliate sales usually get you anywhere from 5 to 75 percent commission on each sale. This is also an easy way to place ads for companies you like to shop with on your sites or blogs too.

The last way we will discuss in our monetization structure is selling your own product or service. You may be involved in a Network Marketing or MLM company and have such a product or service already, or you may have developed an eBook or piece of software that you can sell, however, which ever case it is, you can begin to use this as a sponsor of your podcast and run your own ads on your site or blog and you would have a built in sponsor. Now, keep in mind when doing this method, that you keep within the guidelines of the MLM company for advertising their products and services in this fashion. Some MLM companies do not like Web 2.0 strategies and may drop you as a representative, so be sure to double check with your MLM company before doing this.

If the product or service is your own, meaning you own the copyright, rights, etc. then by all means, this is a great method to promoting your product and your self!

Here’s one more idea that isn’t real popular, however, it does work for most people. Joint Ventures or JV Affiliate Opportunities, are a way to make commissions by selling someone else’s products on your site or blog. In most cases, you can even sell them on your podcast as a sponsored deal and direct them to your site or blog to click on the affiliate link (so you will make the commission and not someone else!). You can find JV opportunities in most eBook and software sales. Sometimes these opportunities are presented as Master Resell Rights or Resell Rights and you buy the product one time and have the opportunity to resell it as many times as you like and keep 100% of the sales as your commission. There are lots of these type of eBooks and software out there and you can find more than 200 products right now at The Personal Publisher for only $2.00 each! That’s a small price to pay to be able to resell these products for whatever price you like!

Concluding this topic, I know that there are plenty of other ways to monetize your blogs and podcasts. I have only presented just a few to get you started. If you would like to leave a comment to this post with other ways that you know of, I know my readers and listeners would like to hear from you!

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Podcast: Play in new window | Download

BPN Segment for September 26th

• Wiki of the Week - iPhone Wiki, The iPhone wiki has information on unlocking, jailbreaking and activating your iPhone or iPod Touch. This wiki also has news, tips, tricks, wallpapers and more for your iPhone!

• Google Chrome - Google Chrome is not supported by Wetpaint. Since it uses the same infrastructure as Safari. Since, currently, Safari’s infrastructure doesn’t support Wetpaint - You can only use a select few editor features.

If you have any questions or comments about using Wetpaint or its features, feel free to contact me at podcast [at] buddes [dot] net. Don’t forget to check out Wetpaint Nation live every other week, next week will be the next episode - live at 7 PM EST on October 3rd, 2008.

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WordPress News For The Week Of September 26th 2008

IntenseDebate Acquired By Automattic – The third party commenting service IntenseDebate has been acquired by Automattic, the company who brings you WordPress.com for an undisclosed amount. IntenseDebate allows users to have threaded comments, OpenID support, comment rating, reply by email and much more. Self hosted WordPress users will most likely see a full featured plugin which taps into IntenseDebate so that you can use their services on your blog. Keep in mind that no one will be FORCED to use IntenseDebate. - http://ma.tt/2008/09/intense-debate-goes-automattic/

WordPress.com Does A Woopsy – Those of you who use WordPress.com know that you can not upload any custom themes to use for your blog. On September 23^rd, WordPress.com announced that they had made changes to a popular theme called The Journalist. Just one problem, the theme over rode the original journalist theme forcing users to use the new one. Thankfully, Noel Jackson notified everyone that the new version is now a new selectable theme allowing for end users to switch back to the original journalist theme. I think WordPress.com may have learned that updating a theme that so many people are using without the users consent can lead to quite a backlash let alone an inconvenience. - http://en.blog.wordpress.com/2008/09/23/the-journalist-revised/

Top Entrepreneurs – Inc.com which is a magazine squarely focused on business individuals announced their list of the top 30 entrepreneurs who are under 30 years of age. Matt Mullenweg made the list at number 18. While WordPress began in 2003, Matt founded Automattic in 2005. Matt is 24 years old, just like me.

Plugin Of The Week - MTR Podcast Recorder - MTR Podcast Recorder offers real-time recording that is saved on the same server where WordPress is installed. All recordings will be saved into the MP3 format using the LAME encoder. In addition to all this, you can manage your playlists and recordings from the WordPress administration panel. You can easily add a Podcast Player widget to any of your sidebars, posts, or pages if you want to promote a specific recording to your readers.- http://mtr-design.com/en/projects/mtr-podcast-recorder/

If you would like to know more about what is going on within the world of WordPress, visit www.weblogtoolscollection.com

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Newsletter to become an e-course

A few months ago, I started a newsletter to allow me to get even more information out to you easily. As with most good things, this is a time consuming process to keep this going each month, so instead, I am changing the newsletter into a weekly e-course instead. For some, you have already seen this change, for others that may have just subscribed, don’t worry, it’s coming!

I have the last newsletter still online and will leave it there for now. The new e-courses will continue on a weekly basis and I will offer a variety of different courses over the next several weeks. The current e-course is on web site promotion.

Running a weekly e-course will also allow me more control over the content that I present as well as allow me to get updates out to the newsletter subscribers quicker.

If you want to subscribe, click on Newsletters at the top of the page and submit your Name and E-Mail Address. Also, be assured that I will not spam you, only send you quality content.

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All Time Record for Podcaster Training Audience Attendance

Last night’s episode of Podcaster Training (September 19th, 2008) had an all time record turnout of 41 Live Listeners! Our Special Guest Speaker was Jason Van Orden, author of Promoting Your Podcast, and thanks to him and many of the listeners sending out “tweets” via Twitter, this helped to get people to the live show. I expect a record download of this episode as well as Jason was on with us for almost an hour talking about his newest project, Community Magnet, and answering questions from the chat room.

You can listen to this special episode in the player below. The show notes have been posted in a previous post.

Popularity: 63% [?]

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Podcaster Training: Chat Log for September 19th, 2008

Here is the chat log for last night’s Podcaster Training (minus the After Show chats).