Learn About Podcasting

Guess who is a Guest Sweetie Saturday Report Writer? It’s me!

I have written the Profiting from Podcasting guide for Alice Seba’s Sweetie Saturday Report Club and you can grab it right now for a measely two bucks when you use this coupon code: 28CC4

Now is a great time to launch a new podcast.  Do you know how many people in your target market just got a new iPod or some other mp3 player for Christmas?  Tons!!  They’ll be hunting for great audio content to fill it with :)

Why Pay Monthly For Software?

There was a time in my business – the early days – where I would have turned my nose up on paying a monthly fee for any web based software. How little I knew inexperienced I was then. Sadly, it took me a big loss, a full day of anxiety to appreciate the value of using hosted third party applications.

What happened?

My web host shut my account down and deleted all my web sites. It felt like being thrown out of my own home. The reason, a script I had installed the day before had gone wrong – very wrong – it flooded the web hosts’ email servers to the point it almost crashed the server. Not only did it hurt, I was absolutely embarrassed. Here I was, thinking I was so smart and could install a script or two plus save money.

It’s been many years and many lessons learned since but that memory is as fresh and raw at certain periods today as it was back then.

Today, I use several hosted web based software and yes I pay monthly for them. It did not come easy of course. When I started using Aweber, I didn’t have that much money coming in but I knew the importance of sacrificing early profits.

The best part? I don’t have to worry about them.

• I don’t have to spend valuable time upgrading the software
• I don’t have to worry about people hacking it
• I don’t have to think about the software being compatible with the server or crashing it
• When the system goes down, I have someone to ask and demand for answers
• When the system goes down, I don’t have to upset my schedule and delay my projects further to fix it. I know that they have the properly qualified expert developers to work on their system. People whom I am not able to afford on my own.

If you’re struggling with a decision about money and paying monthly for software. Allow me to help make the decision easy. The first and most absolute basic, spend it on an email newsletter / autoresponder system.

What’s Your Content Resolution for 2009?

I’d like to take a short hiatus from the repurposing your content series to talk very briefly about New Year’s Resolutions.  Perhaps you’re like me and you don’t make resolutions, then consider this a content plan for the upcoming year (and unlike those resolutions, stick to it)

So what do you want to include in your content plan/resolution?

First determine what your goals are for the year.  Set the bar high, but not so high that it’s unattainable.

For example, what about a report a month?  Depending on your business, a report a month may be a valuable asset for your audience AND each report could generate 10-12 additional articles for article marketing and SEO purposes.

At the end of the year you would also have 12 reports which could be combined into one fantastic digital product to give away for free (think viral marketing here) or to sell for a profit.

What about tacking a quarterly interview onto your 2009 content resolution?

So now you have 12 reports and 4 interviews.  Each interview could be packaged as a product or freebie. It could also be transcribed and spun into articles for article marketing and SEO purposes.  A workbook or online course could be created from the transcription and you could bundle it with your 12 reports at the end of the year as a bonus.

The quarterly interview would generate at least 4 articles.  Combined with your monthly report and you’ll have approximately 12 articles a month – that’s a great goal.  Hire a great article spinner and those 12 articles could be spun into 24 or 36 monthly articles – all from one report each month and one interview each quarter.

Now, if you really set the bar high for yourself you could also add an original blog post a week to your 2009 content resolution.  (or you can simply pull one of those articles from your report and/or interview and use those for your posts)

Create A Plan To Follow Through and Accomplish Your Content Resolution

Once you’ve determined your goals for 2009 and how to achieve those goals with your content, then it’s time to create a plan.

Here are some questions to ask yourself.

• What report topics would your audience benefit from?
• What experts can you connect with to interview and what beneficial information can they offer your audience?
• How many pages do you want your reports to be?  (10 pages is a good round number that is easy to achieve)
• Are you going to create the reports, and subsequent articles, yourself or outsource the project?
• Are you going to transcribe the interviews yourself or outsource the project?
• How are you going to distribute the content created from your reports and interviews?

If you don’t choose the reports and interviews concept for your content strategy then what content works best to market your business?  Articles?  Blog posts?  Case Studies?  How will you structure your year to maximize your content?

For example, you could plan for 10 articles and 10 blog posts/month.  How will you create the content?  Will you outsource it or write it yourself?

Remember to set the bar high here. If you wrote 10 articles a month last year and had good results, then up the ante and write 15 a month – create a plan to get it done.  Don’t forget to use your content for maximum value – spin it, repackage, and repurpose it.  Content is still Queen online and off.  People are still searching for valuable nuggets of information – be the one who consistently provides it and you’ll have a loyal visitor, and customer, for life.

Happy New Year!

10 Secrets To Repurposing Your Content – Part Two

Last week I began a 5 part series on repurposing your content.  Having a repurposing strategy in place before you have the content created will save you valuable time and money (two things we can all benefit from).

In the previous post I talked about repurposing Interviews and How To articles .  This time around we’re talking about repurposing forum posts and digital information products.

Forum Posts

If you an active social networker and marketer then you’ve likely participated in a few hand picked forums devoted to your industry or niche.  For example, if you sell pet related products or services then you may be a devoted visitor to one or two forums devoted to the pet industry or pet lovers.  You may even have a forum on your own website.

These forum posts are excellent sources for content – particularly if you’re a long winded writer :-)

So…grab those posts, cut and paste them or download them if it’s possible, and take a look at what you have.  You may have a wealth of content practically ready to go or you may need to polish them, combine them and work em over to create valuable content.

Sounds like a lot of work, right?  This is a perfect job for a virtual assistant or a freelance writer.

Digital Information Products

Do you have eBooks, reports, and workbooks you’ve written?  Perhaps you’ve given them away for free or perhaps you’ve charged for them – either way, they make ideal projects for repurposing.  eBooks and reports are easily reworked into ten, twenty, even thirty articles and blog posts and articles.  You can also repurpose a large eBook into several smaller reports.  AND each article you create from your eBooks and reports can be spun at least once or twice to create new articles.

When you have an eBook or report available to repurpose, you can literally create hundreds of articles.  Quick note:  When you spin an article, it’s important to make sure it is different enough from your original so search engines do not penalize you for duplicate content.  There are free online tools to help you check including dupecop.com.

Again, a good virtual assistant and/or a freelance writer can be very helpful for content repurposing projects.

Between your forum posts and your digital products there is likely enough material to keep you, or a valued contractor or employee, fruitfully busy for a long, long time.

Happy writing and repurposing!

How Much Do You Invest in Your Education?

This week, I offered a 12-week course for $2000 to learn how to make $50,000 to $100,000 a day.

I thought it was a no brainer decision for those who are technical and have the money to invest in education that will allow them to work at home.

After all, you don’t learn how to make money in school, that’s not its purpose. You have to learn how to make money from someone who knows how to do it.

And good luck finding someone in the top 1% of the country’s truly financially free who will teach you what they do.

The only way to become financially free is to invest in your education (not necessarily college) and diligently apply what you learn.

So how much should you invest?

Well, that depends on who you are, what you want to learn and how you think.

I personally spend about $25,000 a year to attend about 10 professional events of different kinds and buy home study courses and software of all kinds.

(I hesitate to reveal that because most of my Internet friends spend way more than that.)

How can a home school mom afford that?

I budget for it.

I also create the income to pay for it, along with ballet, fiddle and art lessons plus two family vacations a year.

And I’m not the only homeschooler who does this.

One of my best friends that I often see at professional events is Zach McCullough. He is a homeschool dad who created the popular AskDatabase software that many Internet marketers use to create intuitive searchable databases.

Zach and I recently went to dinner together with our oldest sons. He took Wesley; I took Drew. Between the two of us, we’ve had 20 children. (A few are in heaven.)

Most home educators tend to have more than the usual number of kids and therefore more expenses, plus we operate on one-income.

Yet because Zach and I have both invested a lot of time and money in our Internet education, our lives are no longer “normal.”

Zach’s technical partner is Frank Deardurff, webmaster and technical adviser to the Internet millionaires. His marketing partner is the highly successful Internet marketing adviser Alex Mandossian.

Zach and I both live very humble lives, are completely dedicated to our families, yet also understand how to make money with a computer in different ways.

We are not normal. He is truly a genius… and a real nice guy.

If we had not made the investments we’ve made, neither one of us would be where we are.

Success doesn’t happen to you by accident; you have to position yourself for it.

One way to do that is to purchase home study courses and attend live training events.

So the next time you are offered a course you “think” is expensive, ask yourself where it could take you.

The only truly financially free people in the world don’t get there are by accident. They make it happen.

If you really want to become financially free, you might want to try changing the way you think. If you don’t, you’re destined to stay where you are.

If you don’t do something different from what you’re doing now, you’ll always get what you’re getting now.

I want to help YOU be able to afford investing $25,000 a year on YOUR professional education. Let’s start with making $1.

So many books, so little time…

Rhea! who wants to help you become financially free

It all starts in your mind.

10 Secrets to Repurposing Your Content – A 5 Part Series

When it comes to content, many business owners exhaust themselves, their resources, and their budget trying to come up with original content on a consistent basis.  Others seem to write the same content over and over again re-purposing the same five articles ad nauseam. Over the next 5 posts, I will share several clever ways to create unique content from your stockpile of already wonderful and original content.  (This is particularly helpful at the end of the year when you’re planning your content strategy for the upcoming year!)

#1  Interviews.

Interviews, whether they’re audio interviews, video interviews, or even print interviews, offer an abundance of opportunity.  An interview can be transcribed and turned into a free product.  From this transcription you can create:

Several articles and/or blog post. One interview often provides several nuggets of key information. An article can be written highlighting each nugget of information.  Often these articles simply require an introduction and a conclusion and you can pull the body of your content verbatim, right from the interview.  You can also create list type articles with bullet points to highlight key bits of information under a common theme.

Workbooks. Interviews are a fantastic resource to create workbooks for your prospects and customers. You can pull out those key points of information and then invite the reader to take action, answer questions, take a survey or quiz and so on.

Reports. Like articles, creating reports from an interview are a pretty straightforward process.  You, or your writer, can pull those key points of information from the interview and expand on them.  You can even quote the person/expert interviewed to add credibility and authority to the report.

Digital Products. Collect your interviews over the past year and package them as a book, or pull out those particularly valuable nuggets of information and create reports.

#2  How To Articles

How many how to articles do you have in your archives?  Ever consider putting them together to create a workshop, class, or online lesson?  Take a look at your collection of how to articles, sort them by theme, and explore where their might be gaps.  Do you have enough to create a course?  What’s missing to make it complete?  Fill in the gaps and package it nicely and you have another valuable piece to offer your customers and prospects.

You can also make a fabulous product by gathering your how to articles together into a bundle and making them available.

Finally, you can use the good old fashioned article spinning process to re-work those particularly popular how to articles you published last year.  Explore combining a few how to articles to create an original article or blog post.

Re-purposing your content most often takes looking at it from another angle.  Remember, you know your audience best.  Explore what pieces from your archives offer the most value and what received the best response.  Those are the pieces to begin with.

Happy writing!

Joint Venturing with your Kids

One of the coolest experiences of my life has been entering into serious joint ventures with some of my children. I have 7 living children, 3 in heaven, 5 grandkids, and one on the way.

I’m getting ready to leave this afternoon to host a live 3-day event in Huntsville, Alabama with my oldest son who is my second child. He has discovered a mind-boggling system for selling houses in 7 days on eBay that no one else has figured out.

He understands real estate and has been investing since he was 18. He understands eBay and has sold most of the junk that was in the basement. Now he combines the two and can sell just about any property in one 7 day auction.

This weekend, he is going to walk a small group of homeowners through the process in real time. They are coming from all over the country, laptops in hand, to learn how to sell their properties on eBay. When they leave on Sunday, their auctions should be online. We’ll let you know.

I never thought this child would ever become a professional speaker and workshop teacher. We struggled through years of him not understanding long division and asking why he had to learn to spell (which he never did).  All that time, I had no vision for what his future would hold. Yet I knew it was my responsibility as a home educator to prepare him to be financially stable in life.

So I took him to real estate workshops. I took him to Internet marketing events galore. I took him to eBay workshops. I invested more money in his professional education than I would have spent on a college degree (like he’d really sit still in class long enough to earn that)!

Then one day, he listed one of our rental houses in Alabama that had been empty for 10 months on eBay. In just 7 days, the new owner sent money to his PayPal account overnight. The buyer was from the UK. He never saw the house. That was 4 years ago. He still has never seen the house.

That’s when we realized we were onto something very powerful.

He created a course to teach others his system. I’ve let him speak as a presenter and as our after-dinner entertainment at most of our annual family business conferences. He’s shared the stage with Troy McClain, Mark Victor Hansen, the late Charlie “Tremendous” Jones, Sharon Lechter, John Taylor Gatto, Richard Paul Evans, Lou Brown, Armand Morin and countless others.

Now he is hosting his first ever live 3-day workshop.

He’s also speaking at the Madison County real estate investment group tonight to let them know about the weekend event.

I never in a million years imagined that this skinny little redneck country boy would turn out so well! I never envisioned him being a leader in the Internet world. Yet because of the direction his education has taken us, he’s been privileged to learn from the best.

And it’s paid off. Not only have we grown closer together, but the income he created with investment real estate brought his dad home from corporate America.

It’s truly amazing what you can do when you work together on a project, like the education of one very special young person – your child.

I’m off on a whirlwind adventure today on this very blustery autumn day. Grocery shopping with the kids, ballet, guitar lessons, art class, then off to speak at the REA and on to the hotel to host what will be a life-changing event for the homeowners who are joining us – Drew Perry’s very first SellingHousesOnlineWorkshop.com.

If you want to see a miracle, join us in Huntsville this weekend. I will be amazed.

So many books, so little time…

Rhea!
who can’t wait to see what the next JV will produce!

Submit Your Audio Articles to LadyPens

I partnered with Nicole Dean this year on revamping the LadyPens Women’s Article Directory and I want to draw your attention to a new feature there that you should be tapping into one way or another.

It’s a category for Audio Articles.

The same great article content that publishers can grab for a newsletter or website, publishers can now grab for a podcast or internet radio show.  That is IF the author has taken the time to provide an audio version of their article.

These are not computer voice read articles – these are articles read by the author in her own voice – ready for insertion into your audio project.  You use them and give credit for them the same way that you would use the text version.

If you have written articles to promote your business, I want to encourage you to create an audio version of your best articles for LadyPens.  I for one am hungry for some great audio content to supplement my podcasts ;)

A Few End of the Year Organizing Tips

Can you believe it? Just a few more weeks and we will be entering into a New Year. Now that the end of the year is upon us, it may be a great time to spend the last few weeks of this year getting some areas of your life in order for the next year.

Here are a few easy suggestions that you can work on little by little, day by day, so that you’ll be able to start the year fresh in 2009.

1. Pick One A Day – Make a game out of it. From the day you read this message, count how many days are left in the year. Then, simply make a list of the things that you’ve been meaning to do but haven’t done. Simply list one task for each day remaining in the year 2008 and do a task each day until they are all completed.

2. Start a new calendar – If the calendar you used in 2008 didn’t work for you be sure to research and find a new calendar for 2009. Purchase a new calendar and get a jump start on filling in special dates or events you already know about.

3. Make a donation box – One way to organize your home is to take inventory of the items that you are no longer using and donate them. Grab a large plastic bag, a box or a bin and place the items that you no longer use but are in good condition into them for the purpose of donation. Donate the items to your favorite charitable organization. This is a great way to help organize your home and help those in need.

4. Organize your goals – If you haven’t already done it, now is the perfect time to create a list of what you would like to accomplish in 2009. Write down your goals in any order and be sure to keep them in a place that is secure. Once January 1st rolls around, begin working on your goals, one by one and keep track of how you are doing with them.

Following any of these steps can help you enter into the new year with a more fresh start. The important thing to remember is that you should never give up. If you slip up in your organizing quest, don’t quit. Just get back to it and/or enlist help.

Business is shifting from offline to online

Another industry is feeling the pressure of a struggling economy – book publishing.

This usually recession-proof industry has recently started laying off, excuse me “down-sizing”, some of its leaders.

Here’s an article with the latest news:

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20081203/ap_en_ot/books_random_house_6

So what does that mean?

Well, quite simply, it means that business as we have known it for the past few decades is changing. Some might say it is sinking or biting the dust.

But have you ever known this great capitalistic society of ours to fail?

The problem here is vision. Look at this situation from another standpoint.

Yes, the economy is not doing well. Yes, big companies are struggling right along with hard-working consumers. But all is not lost.

Things are changing but they are not ending. That is not the nature of business in general. Instead, I believe things are shifting.

The shift business is making is from the traditional offline model where a company has a nice big building with lots of employees to the online world. There, business is conducted with no buildings, assistants working virtually from home and everyone making MORE money because expenses and overhead are less and the potential is unlimited.

How do I know this? I’ve had an online business for years and our team is spread out all over the country.

We produce ebooks, membership sites, online training courses and conferences.

We have a coaching program for families who are all over the world – Saudi Arabia, Chile, Australia, Canada and most of the 50 states.

Where is our home office?

My bedroom in Tennessee.

Where is my Office Manager?

At her house in California.

Where is our webmaster?

At her house in Wisconsin, that is, if she’s home. She’s still a teenager.

Other members of our team are scattered all over the the country along with many contractors who work for us when we need them.

Some work around home educating their children, some work after regular work hours. Some even work at night and sleep all day.

Face it, that’s the new look of business.

If you are in despair about your job or your business, realize that business in this country is not ending, it is moving. Get a better vantage point and realize where it is moving to.

Those who will be financially successful in this decade will have an online business of some kind. If you wait until you are FORCED to do something out of desperation, you may make some pretty bad mistakes. You may also spend way too much money trying to solve the problem. It’s a lot safer and easier to start preparing for a change BEFORE you need to.

Having a business on the Internet is not hard; but there is a learning curve. And there is a lot to know.

People spend 4 years in college and never expect to make a dime the whole time they’re there. And even after they graduate, it still may take a few months before they find the right job or even A job.

So don’t think you can hop onto the Internet and learn everything you need to know in one month. It’s not possible. The thing changes about every three months, and sometimes faster than that. You have to keep up with it.

So if you are worried about your job situation, decide now that you WILL do something on the Internet in 2009.

Don’t wait until a pink slip forces you to decide.

There is hope for this economy. There is hope for your financial situation. You’re looking at it.

So many books, so little time…

Rhea!
who is dedicated to helping you not only survive but prosper in this unstable economy

Need help starting that online business? Drop in and see
if our community can help: http://www.EducatingforSuccess.com

 

 

 

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