As an Internet Marketer, I have developed audio recordings of business tips, and many training videos.  So I began to think about another way to re-purpose that content.  Such as turning them into transcripts and re-purposing them as an ebook, a seven-step series on “how to” do whatever I was discussing, or a free tips sheet for my opt-in box.

I had used a virtual assistant in the past to to listen to the audio and transcribe it for me. Which took several hours to complete and was very costly.  I needed something quick and easy (and free would be great too!).  After some research, I found VoiceBase.  This free web-based program allows you to upload files manually into VoiceBase or automatically through their API.  They support many different file types and accept files up to 750MB.  You can also record audio or video directly from your computer using your microphone and webcam and upload it to VoiceBase.

VoiceBase has a unique feature in that you can “search” your uploaded files by typing in your keywords.  Also, there is a public search feature where you can find public radio and podcasters who have content on VoiceBase.

The free version allows you to store your files for one year.  Any time during that one year period you can choose to permanently store your files for around $1 per hour of audio.  Also available for an additional cost is human transcribing, which takes approximately three days to complete.

I uploaded a couple of webinars that I had previously done.  They were 45 minutes to 1 hour in length.  Both files uploaded quickly and in less than two hours, the transcripts were complete.  I didn’t see an easy way to save a file, so I just copied and pasted it into a Word document.  The transcribed content is not usable and will have to be reviewed extensively in order for it to be re-purposed.  However, they did state that the clearer your audio is, the better the transcript will be.  So I’m not giving up on this program as a great resource.  Keeping in mind that I should speak clearly and slower, I believe the next audio that I upload will produce a much better transcript.

VoiceBase also has a free iPhone App so that you can record from your phone.  Overall, I like it and will continue to use it for now.  What program are you currently using for audio to text conversions?

I LOVE Comment Luv!  How about you?  That almost sounds like a cheer doesn’t it? 

But I do really love the plugin, CommentLuv and there is a hot new WordPress plugin coming soon! Cathy Stucker is giving away a free copy at her book marketing site, SellingBooks. Learn how you can enter and win by visiting Cathy’s CommentLuv Premium giveaway page.

If you are not familiar with this plugin, it builds backlinks, increases traffic to your blog, makes it easier for your readers to share your posts on Facebook, Twitter and others social networking sites and leaves a link for your last post on any other blog you comment on that has the plugin installed.

I highly suggest you take a look at this plugin and install it on your WordPress site.  You’ll LUV it!

Just when you think it’s safe to read your news feed on Facebook…they have changed it again.  But it has strange similarities to the original news feed of long, long ago. 

Basically, they have done away with the Most Recent tab and have combined those updates with the Top Stories.  But, so we don’t miss anything while we are away from our beloved Facebook, the  Top Stories are being highlighted that Facebook believes might be important to us.  These appear at the top of your page and are marked with a Blue corner in the upper left.

The criteria for pulling Top Stories is based on the relationship you have to the person, how many people are commenting on the post, how many “likes” it received and what kind of story it is.  If you find stories that you really don’t care to read as Top Stories, you can hover over the right side of the post and click the down arrow to remove it from your Top Stories.

So basically you might see Recent Stories, then Top Stories and more Recent Stories while viewing your News Feed.  But when you log in after being away for a while, the Top Stories should pop to the top of the News Feed.

Also, you can once again view updates based on your Friends List.  To do this, from your Home page, click “More” on the left side bar at LISTS, and select which friends list you would like to view. 

I’m happy about the news feed changes, because it makes it easier to keep up with those friends and pages that are most important to me and my business. 

What about you?  Do you like the changes?

Using traditional offline marketing techniques to market your online blog seems like it could be a daunting task, rife with frustration and needless papers and phone calls. However, by doing all of your marketing online, you leave out a huge number of potential readers. If you are blogging for fun or for money, the point is you want people to read what you write. Without readers, all of your work and fantastic writing is for nothing.

You don’t have to worry; though…integrating tried-and-true offline marketing methods with more modern techniques is not as hard as it sounds. There are 3 easy ways you can get started advertising your blog offline. Each of them is unique and helpful on its own, and they work well together. All of them are low-cost, and have proven effective time and time again.

Business Cards

One of the best ways to get the word out about your blog is with the use of good, old fashioned business cards. Keeping these handy in your wallet, glove box, and jacket pockets (don’t wash them!) will enable you to network everywhere you go. They are relatively inexpensive to print – you could even do them yourself, if you really wanted to save money. Here are 3 tips to help you with your amazing business cards:

•  Don’t print too many. Your contact information, address, job title, or logo may change. It is recommended that you print no more than 1000 cards at a time for the heavy distributor; 500 should be sufficient for the average at-home self-promoter.

• Don’t be too flashy. The goal of a business card is for people to be able to contact you at a later date. Unless you can do it tastefully, try to avoid a multitude of sparkles, glitter, graphics, and logos. Utilize the free space on both sides of the card. Remember: people will contact you and have a better chance of visiting your blog if your business cards are neat, clean, and easy to read.

• Do treat them like candy. Give them to everyone you know. Post them on community bulletin boards. Check out local businesses and schools; a lot of them have cork boards available for community and business-related information.

Fliers

Fliers can be an invaluable resource when you are thinking about reviving your blog with some updated offline marketing techniques. With virtually any option available in size, color, cost, and quantity, using and creating fliers is easier than ever. A number of popular office services companies are available to help you design a flier, or you can hire a graphic designer. Just like with business cards, you can post them everywhere. Be sure to do a little research with your city or county to make sure you are only posting fliers in appropriate areas.

Conventions and Lectures

Depending on your prime reading target, there may be conventions or lectures held in your area – or even outside of your immediate area if you are willing to travel relevant to your blog topic. Purchasing space – or getting it free – at a convention is a great way to draw potential readers to your blog. If you choose the right place, you are guaranteed to have patrons that are already interested in what you have to say. They did come to the convention, after all.

Regardless of the method you choose, remembering the many options available to you via offline marketing will be helpful in increasing your overall reader base. When you blog, you want people to read your blog. Taking advantage of some offline techniques will help to ensure people find you…even when they are away from the internet.

Jen Silva is a writer for Choosewhat.com. ChooseWhat is a company that provides product reviews and test data for business services and products such as business cards and PBX services. Their goal is to help small companies make informed buying decisions on business solutions that help their business.

Enjoy this guest post by Ben ~

Social media has become an essential part of web promotion. Not only is it effective and helpful for increasing the popularity of your business or website, but it is absolutely necessary! Proper use of social media such as Twitter and Facebook will not only help your site gain exposure, but it will act as a catalyst for making your content more prominent and even viral.

The easiest and most important step to take when stepping into the “social” scene is adding buttons to your site to help visitors share your content. In other words, make your website “shareable” because the last thing you want to do is inhibit their ability to advertise your business for you. People love to communicate and we also love to share. Social media is the Internet’s analogy for word-of-mouth advertising. Neglecting to add buttons on your site for visitors to share your content is a lot like stripping them of their voice – let them talk!

TweetMeme is a fantastic tool for making your content very shareable. It adds a simple button at the top (or bottom) of all of your posts that people can use to tweet your content with literally 2-clicks. A common trend you will notice when observing popular sites in almost every niche is the overwhelming amount of tweets in comparison to “likes” on Facebook. Tweeting is easier and faster, and in an online world where we skim almost everything we read, we need to have quick sharing options for our visitors.

A common and effective layout for making your site easy to share is to include a button at the top of every post for Twitter and/or Facebook, a set of buttons at the bottom for a few popular social sites, and also the presence of similar sharing buttons consistently displayed on your sidebar. For the sidebar, the most important inclusions are Twitter, Facebook, and your RSS Feed. You might have other sites like LinkedIn that you like to use or a series of videos on YouTube – these would be good additions for your sharing buttons.

To further emphasize the importance of properly using social media, lets cover a scenario:

1. Someone visits your site and reads an article. They really like it, but they don’t see any sharing buttons and so it may not even cross their mind to tweet it or like it, so they move on with their day.
2. This same visitor comes to your site and reads the same article. However, this time there are social sharing buttons featured prominently on the page. This visitor tweets the post and it is quickly exposed to all of this user’s followers (dozens, hundreds, even thousands of people).

And it doesn’t stop there. The people who see that tweet might tweet it too, they might look through your site and tweet another post, or they might follow you on Twitter and become exposed to all of your new tweets. Simple processes like this can quickly multiply and expand upon your daily traffic, and all of this happens simply because you have made your website shareable.

Supplement your social media strategies with SEO. Check out our FREE SEO Course or download our FREE OnlyWire Account Creator to make social bookmarking effortless.

I love friends!  I love meeting new friends and getting to know them and how I might be able to help them in some way.  I really do.  But I wouldn’t just walk up to a stranger and say, “Hey, I want to be your friend! I don’t know you or really anyone else you know personally, but you look like someone that I would want to connect with!”   Seriously!

So why do people do that online?  I get friend requests daily from people I don’t know and they NEVER indicated why they want to be connected with me.  At least a small message saying, I’m a friend of Joe’s and he thought we might be able to help each other in business.  Or something!

Many of my online friends feel the same way and basically “ignore” those requests.  If we don’t know you personally or you don’t write a small note telling us why you want to be friends, then chances are….it won’t happen.

I don’t think people really get the concept yet of Facebook.  Your personal profile (where you have friends) is intended for people you personally know and your family.  Thus the name…Personal Profile!  The Fan Page is intended to have people who you might not know personally, but have an interest in your business or the products and services you sell.  I would love to have more folks join me on my Fan Page (psst, here’s the link Online and Social Media Training)  I would never turn you way, unless you were being rude or obnoxious.

It’s just common courtesy as my friend Kathleen Gage said on my Facebook wall during a recent discussion. When you are requesting to be someone’s friend on Facebook there is a little section in the lower left corner to Add a personal message.

As Nike says, Just Do It!  Remember online social networking is first and always about building a relationship.  You can’t build a relationship with people you don’t know.

How To Determine What Kind of Online Business Suits You

Starting an online business is simultaneously simple and challenging. Working on the internet eliminates many of the problems that sink businesses, like overhead costs, employee insurance and location selection. But at the same time, it provides its own set of obstacles.

At the beginning, of course!!  

Seriously, nearly everyone starts at the same place – the beginning. So, why is it that some people get to the finish line faster than others?

There’s several reasons, but one is that they get really good help from really experienced instructors from the beginning. But finding those really experienced instructors that you can trust is always tough and a little risky.

Until now!  GREAT instructors – ones you can trust – will be gathered in one room in Atlanta, GA and they will be working with you to build your affiliate marketing empire.

The Niche Affiliate Marketing System workshop is like no other out there.

For three days, two dozen of the top Internet Marketers will teach nuts and bolts results – no theory! This is a teaching workshop where students implement what they learn on the spot by following the leadership of instructors who have been through the internet marketing trials before you. Each instructor will deliver 60 to 90 minutes of instruction about their area of expertise. And the best part is that they are available to you after the session is over.  You can have lunch or dinner with them and pick their brains even more.  Plus you make lasting connections and great friendships.

You can select which experience level track you enroll in. There are four:

• Beginner 1 – starting from scratch
• Beginner 2 – maybe you’ve got a blog already, but not making money
• Intermediate – making money, but not enough
• Advanced – making plenty of money, but want more time and a sustainable business

Their goal at NAMS is that you accomplish your goals. By joining the forum and working with accountability groups, you should have firm goals established and partner teams aligned by the time you to come to the workshop.

Brainstorming and some Chick-Fil-A

I have first-hand experience because I was lucky enough to attend two of the NAMS workshops in 2010.  I went not really knowing anyone or anything about affiliate marketing, but left with a binder full notes and a ton of new ideas on how to make more money online and the contacts to help me make it happen!

So, yes – you should bring a computer, lots of notepads, your smart phone and your contact list.  Then be ready to roll up your sleeves and get to work.

No matter what your experience level is, this workshop is created specifically to help build your businesses. And the price is definitely right at only $397.  But Wait! (isn’t that what they say on the TV infomercials?)  LOL 

You can get a $100 discount during the month of May by simply using this code: 100special.

I hope you can make it to NAMS in August. If you have any questions, post them in the comment section below. I’ll be happy to tell you what I know or find the answers for you.  And be sure to register in May to get the discount!

Second article in a three-part series on Social Media ROI

Social media has become a driving force in American society, and the greater human society as a whole. Almost everyone under the age of 30 is aware of Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and a variety of other social media outlets. As people increasingly turn away from face to face engagements and toward online networking, businesses are trying to adapt their practices to take advantage of the opportunities provided by social media and online networking sites.

Businesses always think in terms of money; how much money is going out and how much money is coming in? When economic times get tough businesses always look first at where their money is going out before worrying about where money is coming in from. Return on Investment, or ROI, is a very big term in business. With the evolution of social media, businesses are increasingly turning to this new media outlet for marketing. As such, many businesses are trying to determine the ROI of their social media practices.

Determining how social media initiatives impact a business’s ROI is difficult because the results will not jump out on a spreadsheet revealing their impact in plain sight. Instead, businesses looking for social media’s impact on ROI need to go beyond cash flow, costs, and stats on paper. A better approach to measure ROI from social media should include the following:

• Providing a face for your business
• Get input from customers
• Join the discussion
• Encourage involvement
• Build business relationships

Most employees at any given company have passions related to their company, and passions that are unrelated to the business. Keying in on a passion an employee has that relates to your business, and then allowing that individual to run a social media program puts a human face on your company’s online profile. For example, if a moving companies’ provider has an employee who considers themselves an amateur photographer they should be encouraged to create an online presence where employees and customers can share photos from their travels.

Social media’s biggest impact might be in providing customers with a louder voice for the company to hear. Allowing marketing and sales departments to run social media programs will allow them a direct link to the customer base. This not only allows them to focus in on exact customer bases, but also receive feedback from those customers.

Word of mouth has taken on a greater impact in our social media age than it ever could have before. The internet allows information about your business to reach every corner of the world. Engaging in discussion and discourse with customers in a positive manner creates good word of mouth about your company that can reach much farther than just around the block or in the next town.

Lastly, the ROI of a company’s social media efforts can be seen by encouraging involvement and building business relationships. Companies from different industries can come together through social media connections to support projects that benefit the greater good, and even encourage their customers to get involved as well. Travel insurance companies, for instance, can encourage their customers to support community development projects in a region they routinely visit. It can be as simple as a donation, or as involved as volunteering time to the cause.

Social media’s impact on a company’s ROI is definitely there, but it won’t jump off the page of a spreadsheet. Rather, businesses need to dig deep for ways to make social media work for them.

In years gone by, direct mailers were the premier form of business to business and business to consumer advertising. Direct mail consists of flyers, newsletters featuring advertisements, and coupons mailed directly to the consumer’s home. This required businesses to investigate all kinds of shipping services, gather quotes, and compare shipping companies. While this is still a valuable resource for targeted markets, people seem far more interested in exploring online technology and viral marketing and advertising options.

With the advancement of technology, the Internet has given small and large businesses alike a nearly equal playing field. Though not completely dead and forgotten, direct mailers as advertisement has taken a backseat to the more popular and effective advertisement forms the Internet has made available.

Businesses today all have the opportunity to use the web and social media to promote their services. High tech or ecommerce businesses, for example, would benefit more from using the Internet opposed to using direct mail due to its global potential of customers. Blog articles, appealing websites offering online discounts, Internet printable coupons, and savings offered on social media sites have allowed businesses to reach out to a broader base of consumers.

Due to the rapid advertising the Internet provides, businesses no longer have to wait for consumers to receive direct mailers and then wait for them to respond. The Internet has given businesses a prime opportunity to reach out to customers through social media sites and email advertisements the same day the company is having a special sale or savings offer.

Business owners additionally have a chance to email, share, or tweet to thousands of potential customers and essentially recruit new customers or encourage them to look at and contact your company.

Long term success for any business in today’s world generally means participating in some sort of Internet advertisement and campaigning. Inexpensive advertisement can be readily had through the Internet and creative and optimized websites. A company that is diligent about advertising on the Internet as well as knowing when to use direct mailers will have far more success than a company who relies on only one method for their primary form of marketing and advertising to the public.