David Spark Videos

Paul Colligan, CEO of Premiumcast.com This interview is part of my series “Making Money from Podcasting” where I interview podcasters who are actually generating revenue from their podcasts. There are many techniques, and here’s one person’s tale of how he’s making money from podcasting. Build an audience and sell premium podcasts Paul Colligan is the CEO of Premiumcast.com, a company that builds and sells an RSS-subscriber management technology. It s different than traditional podcasting in that Premiumcast creates personalized RSS feeds. With traditional podcasting, the podcaster sends out a single RSS feed that everyone subscribes to. The publisher has no control over that relationship with that listener. The listener is in complete control, choosing when to turn you on and off. With a personalized Premiumcast RSS feed podcast publishers can control the relationship with every single listener. And one of the primary things you can do with that controlled relationship is charge for the podcast. Since it s personalized, you know the status of every single subscriber. For example, if subscriber #423 is up for renewal and they don t pay, you can turn off their specific feed, but keep #424 going since they did renew. Publishers also have control of how podcasts are delivered for new subscribers.  With traditional podcasting, when a person subscribes, the first program they get is the one that s most recently published. With a Premiumcast, when you get a new subscriber, you can begin their podcast feed at episode #1 and deliver it sequentially over time once a week, once every day, whatever. There s a whole host of other personalized control mechanisms you can deliver or impose in terms of types of content (e.g. audio, video, PDF) and timing of the content. It s essentially up to the publisher how they want to manage their service for their customers. Premiumcast does not manage the publisher s payment nor take a percentage of what the publisher charges. Premiumcasts are simply a flat fee. The cost is $97 a month for the standard version and $147 a month for the unbranded version. The unbranded version means you can erase all mentions of Premiumcast on your feed and on your site, and make it appear 100 percent your own. How to create a podcast that people are willing to pay for Most of the people who take advantage of Colligan s Premiumcast are offering up how to shows and training programs. His advice for others who want to achieve success selling their podcasts is to simply understand their audience s needs. For example, if someone is preparing for a certification in some type of business, having a preparatory podcast is highly valuable and people will pay for it. Just take a look at what happens as people are walking out of bookstores, said Colligan. He s seen cases of podcasters who used to offer up a show for free and then started charging for it. That doesn t work, said Colligan, especially when there are tons of similar competitive podcasts that are available for free. Colligan s top advice is to have an audience first before you try to sell a podcast. If you don t have one, don t try to sell a podcast. Gathering an audience can be done in multiple ways. You can build an audience by running a free podcast and use it to promote your paid podcast, or you could spend the money on search advertising and build an audience that sees your paid podcast. Here are Paul Colligan s top three tips on how to successfully sell a premium/paid for podcast: Know exactly what you re delivering and what its value is. Know exactly who you re delivering it to. Paint a message of the value of the content, not the technology that s delivering it. (e.g. call it a training program and not a podcast ) For more, listen to my interview with Paul Colligan as he describes all the different ways you can manage and monetize a Premiumcast. Plus he offers up some more great advice on how to make the most money offering up a paid podcast. Download audio file (Making_Money_From_Podcasting-Premiumcast.mp3) Download MP3 More episodes of “Making Money from Podcasting” Never Not Funny (Technique: “Partial show for free – full show paid”) Personal Life Media (Technique: “Build your own media network of programming and sell advertising against it”) Pregtastic (Technique: “Get your own sponsors”) Elsie’s Yoga Class (Technique: “Sell an iPhone application along with your podcast”) Mac OS Ken (Technique: “Give away five shows for free, make them pay for the sixth”) Alaska HDTV (Technique: “Get your own sponsors”) ScreenCastsOnline (Technique: “Give away every other episode. Make them pay for the rest.”) Izzy Video (Technique: “Give away every other episode. Make them pay for the rest.”) Slate Gabfests (Technique: Integrating sponsorship with the show’s editorial ) David Spark helps businesses grow by developing thought leadership through storytelling and covering live events at Spark Media Solutions. He blogs at The Spark Minute and can be heard and seen regularly on ABC Radio, Cranky Geeks with John C. Dvorak, and KQED in San Francisco. See his business profile, contact David, or leave a comment below. Tweet It! Buzz This Post Delicious Digg This Post Facebook Reddit Stumble This Post This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 Unported.

John Jantsch of Duct Tape Marketing This interview is part of my series “Making Money from Podcasting” where I interview podcasters who are actually generating revenue from their podcasts. There are many techniques, and here’s one person’s tale of how he’s making money from podcasting. Build your brand to sell your services John Jantsch is a marketing and digital technology coach and author of Duct Tape Marketing , which is also the name of his podcast and his company. He started the Duct Tape Marketing brand, a template for small business marketing, about seven years ago and two years after that, launched his podcast. Jantsch is amazed how just having a show, even though completely unknown at the time and with very few listeners, gave him tremendous access to well known people and authors. It was a great way to make an introduction. He simply sent an email that said, Interview request. Not knowing who Jantsch was at the time, many well known people, including social media luminaries such as Seth Godin and Guy Kawasaki, agreed to be on his podcast. Those interviews initiated relationships that resulted in both Godin and Kawasaki contributing to Jantsch s book. Interviewing major industry heavyweights increased his recognition and built his brand and cache within the industry. It s unclear where the brand building really came from the book, the blog, the speeches, the podcast. Jantsch says it s all part of one giant soup that s been a very exciting journey for him. Not only has he generated revenue for his business with an increased brand recognition, but the audience he s built with the sponsorship has resulted in several six-figure podcast sponsorships, says Jantsch. The Duct Tape Marketing brand has exploded in the past five years. Since starting the podcast, things have changed dramatically. Jantsch estimates that his business has grown more than 500 percent and he works a lot less. How did he do it? By first working really hard. Listen to our interview. (Time: 9:51) Download audio file (Making_Money_From_Podcasting-Duct_Tape_Marketing.mp3) Download MP3 More episodes of “Making Money from Podcasting” Never Not Funny (Technique: “Partial show for free – full show paid”) Personal Life Media (Technique: “Build your own media network of programming and sell advertising against it”) Pregtastic (Technique: “Get your own sponsors”) Elsie’s Yoga Class (Technique: “Sell an iPhone application along with your podcast”) Mac OS Ken (Technique: “Give away five shows for free, make them pay for the sixth”) Alaska HDTV (Technique: “Get your own sponsors”) David Spark helps businesses grow by developing thought leadership through storytelling and covering live events at Spark Media Solutions. He blogs at The Spark Minute and can be heard and seen regularly on ABC Radio, Cranky Geeks with John C. Dvorak, and KQED in San Francisco. See his business profile, contact David, or leave a comment below. Tweet It! Buzz This Post Delicious Digg This Post Facebook Reddit Stumble This Post

Royce Hidreth, producer of the Pregtastic podcast This interview is part of a series “Making Money from Podcasting” where I interview podcasters who are actually generating revenue from their podcasts. There are many techniques, and here s one person s tale of how they re making money from podcasting. Get your own sponsors Royce Hildreth is the producer of the Pregtastic podcast, the weekly audio podcast by pregnant women, for pregnant women. While he works with Wizzard Media, a podcasting ad network, which can sell advertising for his show, he primarily seeks out his own sponsorships. Hildreth and I talked about how he goes about landing advertisers and what techniques work the best. In general, advertisers want exclusivity on the podcast, and they want more presence than just a pre-roll ad or an in-show insert ad. Podcasting s interactivity is often what attracts advertisers to the medium. The format allows for some give-and-take play with the hosts, and that adds dynamic value for the sponsor. It s unlike other streaming media such as radio or TV, which are still often stuck on just selling interstitial advertisements. Hildreth says he s looking to build long term partnerships, ideally as long as a year. He wants to move beyond the simple CPM (cost per thousand) model and offer more value to advertisers such as putting employees on the podcast, and possibly produce videos of the sponsor s products that would live alongside the podcast. Beyond seeking sponsors, Hildreth also uses the begware model, which used to generate $150 a month in revenue. Unfortunately, and possibly because of the economy, that s dropped to a much lower level. In an effort to bring those dollars back up, hosts have stopped saying the show is free and they re now saying that the show costs a donation. Hildreth doesn t make much money from the podcast. The sponsorships and donations are only offsetting costs, such as Web hosting and hiring a baby sitter for when he and his wife need to go to the studio to produce the podcast. Listen to my interview with Hildreth as he talks about maintaining the credibility of the content of Pregtastic while also seeking out sponsorships. (Time: 12:44) Download audio file (Making_Money_From_Podcasting-Pregtastic.mp3) Download the MP3 More episodes of Making Money from Podcasting Never Not Funny (Technique: “Partial show for free full show paid”) Personal Life Media (Technique: “Build your own media network of programming and sell advertising against it”) David Spark helps businesses grow by developing thought leadership through storytelling and covering live events at Spark Media Solutions. He blogs at The Spark Minute and can be heard and seen regularly on ABC Radio, Cranky Geeks with John C. Dvorak, and KQED in San Francisco. See his business profile, contact David, or leave a comment below. Tweet It! Buzz This Post Delicious Digg This Post Facebook Reddit Stumble This Post

New study doesn t distinguish between flaws and healthy behavior I ve long believed that the Internet exists solely because of our ego. Everything we do publicly online is an effort to be acknowledged. This week, two stories pointed out the frighteningly obvious: That students who use social networks are narcissistic and that a center for Internet addiction has opened up in Washington. Please researchers, enough with the leading questions The first story should be filed under the category of Trees are made of wood and other stuff we already knew that didn t require the expense of a university s resources. Regardless, bringing up the issue of what motivates students to use social networks makes us all realize why we re using the Internet. And that s to be acknowledged and to get recognized. The problem is the study lumped in divergent traits narcissism, self-promotion, and attention-seeking as being synonymous. Self-promotion and narcissism are two very different things. Nobody seeks or admires someone who is narcissistic, but we admire people who effectively and non-offensively self-promote. The study created many leading questions which has been a chronic irritation I ve had with organizations such as Forrester and IDC that conduct social media research (Read Social media research is chock full of leading questions ). In my critique, IDC asked leading questions as to what advertising people would be willing to see online and Forrester asked leading questions about trusting corporate blogs. No one wants to see ads and the brand of corporate blogs is like that of a used car salesman. No one wants either, but we use both. We have stereotypes, and in the cases I pointed out, research firms are just confirming existing stereotypes. They re not revealing how one goes around the stereotype or what formed the stereotype. In the case of the students that social network are narcissistic study, it s not revealing. We all knew the results before the study was even conducted. What would have been more interesting is asking people to dig further. Why do you feel the need to self-promote using social networks? Would you self-promote if you didn t have a social network at your disposal? Do you consider yourself as attention-seeking or narcissistic? What about your friends? Do you feel that some are truly narcissistic or are they just healthy self-promoters? That s the story we really need to know. Don t give us the lazy leading question answer we already know, but investigate. Take what we know and reveal to us something we don t know. What s truly a flaw and what s actually healthy behavior? How do you manage your Internet Addiction Disorder? Then there s the story this week of the Internet Addiction Disorder center, reSTART, that opened up here in the U.S. Upon reading the story, many of us laughed, mocking the people who are diagnosed as Internet addicted. But once you actually start reading the nine questions to determine if you are truly Internet addicted, you realize that many of those statements pertain to you. Just look at the first two: Have a strong desire or impulse to use the Internet. Decreasing or stopping of the Internet leads to withdrawal symptoms. I can t think of one person those two statements don t apply to. If that s the case, we re all Internet addicted. But then again, I think we re also addicted to our phones, television, and reading. These studies were so popular this week because they all made us question our own behaviors. Don t you feel a little self-centered or maybe even narcissistic when you re on a social network? And have you ever been on a vacation yet were still eager to check your email? Did you question your own behavior when you saw these stories? Did you question the research and the results of the social networking/narcissism story? Discussing Internet addiction and social networking narcissism with Curtis Sliwa on WABC Radio Curtis Sliwa on WABC Radio Last night I discussed these topics with radio personality and Guardian Angels founder Curtis Sliwa, host of a very popular late night radio program on WABC Radio. He joked that his phone screener, Goldbrick, was heavily addicted to the Internet and was shotgunning Redbulls just to stay awake so he could stay online longer. Listen to or download the funny and engaging 13-minute conversation. Download audio file (curtis_sliwa_082509_post.mp3) David Spark helps businesses grow by developing thought leadership through storytelling and covering live events at Spark Media Solutions. He blogs at The Spark Minute and can be heard and seen regularly on ABC Radio, Cranky Geeks with John C. Dvorak, and KQED in San Francisco. See his business profile, contact David, or leave a comment below.

Welcome to the show it is April 1st and this is our 140th show. Today will be an interview with David Spark of the Communications Insider Podcast from Sprint. Please visit this podcast at http://podcast.sprint.com/

Welcome to the show it is April 1st and this is our 140th show. Today will be an interview with David Spark of the Communications Insider Podcast from Sprint. Please visit this podcast at http://podcast.sprint.com/