Mind Readings: 2007 Podcast Marketing Video Reaction Part 3/4

Welcome back. This is part three of my podcast marketing talk from PodCamp Toronto 2007. We're looking back at this talk 17 years later to see what's changed, what's the same, uh why my hair is the color it is now. But uh let's go ahead and dig right back in where we left off. If you if you any of you ever used iTunes and played a uh an MP3 in there, there's things called ID3 tags.

We'll try this again. ID3 tags are what is in this little info box here. Right? So you have name field and stuff like that, and you can specify all these things. If I pull up, let's see if we have this is where it if someone's gonna share this MP3 file just as it is, this all this data goes with it.

So it make sure that you have your email address, your dial-in number, your incident messenger address, all this goes in the ID3 tags. Tag it, make sure that if you've got a tagline for your show, it goes in there. Another advantage that a lot of podcasts don't know about with ID3 tags is if you do them properly, you get picked up in things like Last FM and and the uh the Google Talk music plugin. Um if you don't put these in, those things don't pick you up. So all those things are are things that that automatically create profiles and branding and extra tracking things.

You can go to those things and enter a URL, and it's one more place that people can find you than some of these other services. So it the the upshot is there's there's lots of good reasons to do this, and and and more than you might be aware of. Are you editing your ID3 tags? So ID3 tags, they do still exist. They are still part of MP3 files, but again, most of the time your services should just do this automatically.

So if we uh pop back over here to Libson, uh this is an episode, recent episode of uh in air insights. I specify the episode title, I put the description in, stuff like that, make those nice clickable links. And then down at the bottom now, I just say update ID3 tags when I publish the show, and it does it for me. Uh so you don't have to manually do this anymore. You haven't had to manually do ID3 tags in a really long time.

That said, a lot of people back then were not doing them, and you heard Jay Muna talking there that very much is the case where yeah, if you don't do those things, you you do miss out on that extra metadata. Uh but these days, just let the software do it for you. You know, iTunes before you upload. Yes, I am. If you have a show logo, this is a great place to put it.

Like it shows up as the album art when you're playing on an iPod, so it's a good chance for you to establish some more branding. You might say, I'm a podcaster, and if I'm not a music podcaster, you're like, Jay, what in the world do I do with the lyrics tab? That's a great place to put all your show notes so that somebody who takes this file and looks into it, they have all this stuff. It's the it's a self-contained show. It is easy for them to find stuff to read about what's going on.

This also, because it's metadata, gets indexed and things. So make sure it is uh just as high quality as the stuff you post on your blog. Um so let's talk about some tools. Let's talk about five tools that I like to use. Number one is a friend adder for MySpace.

I am a huge proponent of marketing on MySpace because well, there's 150 million people on there. Somebody's gotta listen to my show. Um trick is finding them. You can't just add people randomly. I mean, you can, but you'll get very, very low returns.

So if we go into uh into MySpace here. The funny thing about friend adder is um friend adder was a piece of software that basically just mass added people as friends to your MySpace profile. And uh these days that's kind of frowned upon. Right? These days that's that's something that people prefer that you not do.

This looks really awful. Alright, skip past it. Little green circle in the upper left of your browser. Thank you. You think I would know that being a technology person.

Looking make sure your MySpace profile is robust that's got your show in it, that's got your same calls to action that are on your um blog and your web page if you have such things. Make sure you have a flash play. This one's by uh feedplayer.com. They will give it to you for free, and it allows people to have your MP3s right on the page. If you have videos on YouTube, this is a great place to put them.

When it comes to looking for friends though on MySpace, that gets a little bit trickier. So there's a piece of software I really like um called friendadder.com. And what it does is it lets you do demographic searches on MySpace for you know what kind of people you're interested in. If there's a band that you like, you want and you want to recruit their friends, you can go after them that way. If there's a person on MySpace who is uh say maybe a competitor, uh if you're in uh doing a business podcast, recruit all their friends and and add them as friends to you.

Um Needless to say, these types of software do not work anymore. Uh in fact most social networks are really good at detecting them and then permanently banning your account. Uh there are a bunch of companies that do offer uh packages like this, particularly on LinkedIn. Uh there's one called LinkedIn uh LinkedIn Scraper or Linked Helper or something along those lines. Um I can tell you with absolute certainty uh they will get you banned.

I set up a uh uh burner profile probably about six months ago and deployed one of them just because I wanted to see if anything had changed. And it ran for about an hour. It managed to uh send out about 250 connection requests, and then 30 minutes later, that whole account was permanently banned. Um so in general, this process and this habit of going out and and using automation on social media profiles, not really effective in some cases. In most cases, a violation of the terms of service, in some cases possibly illegal, depending on on where you live and stuff.

So this is good for a laugh now. Uh it was allowed back then, but no, not anymore. And this is a very handy way of automating the process. You can request up to 400 people a day on MySpace uh to be added as friends. I do not advocate sending messages like uh sending messages or leaving comments without someone being a friend first, because to me that's kind of going over the line.

You have to spam friend requests is kind of gray list in my book. Yes, sir. When you put up with your little list of things, long so the this whole deck is on the wiki. Oh, for the yeah, it's it's on the wiki. So um again, if you feel like it's going by too fast, it probably is.

That's I apologize, but it is on the wiki. Okay. So how do you find people to add on to MySpace? This is a very good question because you want to find people who are going to be interactive with your show. Previously, I used to do just sort of uh general demographic search.

Like I'm looking for uh men and women between the ages of eighteen and twenty-one in the United States. That's college age, but most of them were not interested in what I had to say. I ended up with a lot of bands, 29,000 friends, but very few of them were valuable. So there's two services, Technorati, which you may or may not use as a blog search tool, and um Google blog search. So let's go.

If you're doing a podcast and you have a topic matter, you need to think about what terms, what words that you use in your vertical that nobody else uses in light conversation. Like, for example, in financial aid. Um, for those of you who are Canadian, uh, American financial aid for is is required because our government does not subsidize higher education to any great degree, which is unfortunate. Um let's look for the word FAFSA, which is the free application for federal student aid in America. This is not a term that you would use casually.

This is not a term that you you know, when you're hanging out with your friends drinking Saturday night. You don't use this word, you only use this word in relation to financial aid, which means it is ideal for my market. Techno Body will give you people who are blogging using that term. You can see that. And here's one a look on MySpace blog.

Right? Here's the MySpace URL. Neither Technorati nor uh Google blog search exist anymore. So again, this is kind of a fun historical artifact. However, using intelligent show titles, using intelligent descriptions, using intelligent uh jargon within your content, that still works today in fact, that works better today than it ever has because of the artificial intelligence, generative AI in particular.

Uh, when you invoke very specific terms that are jargon in your field uh those tools will have a much better understanding what context you're talking about and as a result will yield better results so if you're writing content about uh financial aid you know and you want you reference the FAFSA yeah it'll perform much better so you even though conceptually we don't do this stuff anymore because these these blog directories don't exist anymore you absolutely should still be doing this with tools like Yoast or rank math within your uh your blog does work um because Google syntax is similar across all of its sites however there's one flaw with Google blog search that the main engine doesn't have they don't give you the URL on the page right uh not with the ones with friend IDs if you want to be really really evil about it take the entire page and find all the text that has the friend ID you can script this process obviously and it gives you a list of all the friend IDs plug the whole list in to your friend adder and you're all set. The process of using search results to scrape idea identities out of uh search listings and feed them into an automation tool very very not allowed anymore uh there are any number of consumer privacy laws now that uh again back then did not exist now very much exist don't do this that's just your PSA. You sell that script? I don't sell it but it um we actually will be giving it away so that is oh yeah I know how to use this so that's Google Techno Roddy and Google blog search. It's a great way to pull down the people on MySpace who um are interested in you.

Now, with Facebook, Facebook is a different game entirely. Facebook, see MySpace is nice because MySpace is indexed by Google like crazy. So you can leave comments on people's pages. There's a tool for that, by the way. And if you were talking listening to Julian's inbound links talk, um, leaving comments on MySpace pages is a great way to build lots and lots of inbound links very quickly.

Um with the key it's so funny because we talk about commenting strategy these days on social media, particularly on LinkedIn, uh, but also on Instagram. Not for building inbound links, because most, if not all, social networks uh no longer count as as valuable links uh for search engine optimization purposes, but for building thought leadership for building uh your network on social media, that strategy of just going around and commenting on things still works today. Arguably if you're as long as you're doing it as uh human, it works better. Uh I did a piece not too long ago with Ashley Foss and uh Hanasabo about uh their commenting strategy on LinkedIn and building relationships with people just through commenting, and it works really, really, really well as long as you do it and you're not using one of those AI bots that leaves exactly the same style of comment that uh you yeah, anyway, that's a topic for another time. Uh but yeah, leaving comments uh as a way to uh catch people's attention, highly effective still years later.

Word of your choice. Facebook is different because everything is behind the login screen. So Google can't see it. Um, what it is good for is finding people who are already your friends. If you use a service like LinkedIn, you can export all your contacts out of it, just the email addresses, go over to Facebook, say import my contacts, and now suddenly anyone who on LinkedIn is your friend, now they can become friends on Facebook.

They can then help you process uh LinkedIn stopped doing that a few years after this. Uh I believe they closed that door. I want to say in the early 2010s. Now, when you export your LinkedIn profile, you will only get a very, very few um email addresses. You people can still choose to have their link email uh address exported in in their contacts, but you have to opt into that rather than opt out of it.

Uh and so if you were to export your LinkedIn contacts today, you'll get like five email addresses out of like a thousand people. Uh it's it's not worth doing. If you're talking about basic website search engine optimization, a program I really like is called Web CEO. And what Web CEO does is you point it at a it's PC only, by the way, so if you're on a Mac, you have to uh you have to run something virtually. You point it at any web page, it's free for up to three websites, and it'll tell you what you need to do to make your site rank better in major search engines.

Google, Yahoo, MSN. This is Julian's page for uh in over your head.net. You can see he doesn't have the title tag in the header of the page with uh those terms. In over your head, the hip hop podcast is not as close to the title as it should be. It gives you a recipe, a whole laundry list of how to improve your website, how to make it rank better.

This is good. This is basic stuff that um doesn't take a whole lot of work, and the rewards pay off because chances are if you are in a competitive space, uh just by doing these things alone, you will increase your convert you will increase your competitive edge by about 90%. So I think Web CEO still exists. Um it is definitely not the premier program for SEO uh anymore. These days it's sort of a triumvirate, right?

So it is SEMrush, it is Hrefs and Spyfu, and well, I guess quad quad. Um, and um Moz. Uh sort of the four big uh SEO tools that most people are familiar with. The concept is exactly the same, which is here's your content, here's your website. Uh let's tune it as best as we can to attract attention.

But those specifics that specific software package, I haven't I can't think I'd have to go Google and see if it if it still exists or not. Um Google Analytics, if you don't use that already, I won't demo that because it's a pain in the butt to get running. But it is just website statistics on crack. You can what a surprise. In 2024, it's still a pain in the butt to get set up, even more so now than it ever used to be.

It's been four years since Universal Analytics uh was retired, which didn't even exist back then. Um back then it was uh 2007. It would still would have basically been urchin analytics, just with the Google Analytics skin on it. The other tool mentioned there, Crazy Egg is user interface testing software uh to do things like heat maps and things. Today, uh the best tool for that is Microsoft Clarity.

It is free. Uh you install it on your website and you can do things like heat maps and and click tracking and understand the user experience on your website. Drill down. That is the end of part three of our uh podcast marketing talk. Uh we're gonna pick up with the last and final part tomorrow.

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