The Digital Publishing Podcast: Digital Publishing | Internet Business | Self Publishing

In this episode of the Digital Publishing Podcast (which you can find a full transcript of below), I cover 10 different topics from a newsletter business model to the year in review and my plans and goals for 2013. The podcast is on iTunes here. It ...

In this episode of the Digital Publishing Podcast (which you can find a full transcript of below), I cover 11 different topics from how to make it work in crowded niches to a great website business model that you should definitely steal. The podcast...

In this episode of the Digital Publishing Podcast (of which there is a full transcript below, as usual), I cover 11 different topics from the biggest blogging fallacy to a couple different business and product ideas. The podcast is on iTunes here. I...

In this episode of the Digital Publishing Podcast (of which there is a full transcript below, as usual), I cover 12 different topics from mistakes ebook authors make to how to make money with interviews and a whole lot more! The podcast is on iTunes here. It would be awesome if you rated and reviewed the podcast in iTunes. Pretty please. If you’re using something other than iTunes, the podcast’s feed is http://thebacklight.com/feed/podcast/. You can also listen to the episode online by clicking the play button on the player right below this. (If you don’t see the player, click here.) It’s about 21 minutes long. Note that the podcast contains my pick for featured podcast and and digital publishing tool of the week, but I don’t include them in the transcript below. ---------- DPP005: Kindle and PDF Publishing Mistakes, Selling Interviews, and 10 More Ideas Welcome to episode 5 of the Digital Publishing Podcast, which you can find online at DigitalPublishingPodcast.com. I'm Tristan Higbee, recording today in sunny, warm, and pleasantly humid Cancun, Mexico. This show is all about things I see and would like to see in the world of digital publishing, from blogging and ebooks to membership sites and apps. Also covered are things related to internet business and online marketing. Stick around till the end of the podcast and I'll mention my picks for featured podcast and featured digital publishing tool of the week. This podcast is brand new in its current form and I'd really appreciate it if you went into iTunes and left a review. I've got 12 topics to talk about today, so let's get started. Topic #1: Niche app review blogs I think that a great idea for a blog is to talk about apps for a particular niche. Earlier today I tried looking for a blog all about business apps for iPhones but couldn't find one. I found lots of blog posts that regurgitated the same 15 apps over and over again, but I didn't see a blog dedicated wholly to the idea. And business is just one niche that I think an app-centric blog would be great for. A blog about travel apps would be great. So would a blog about apps for university students or doctors. Or maybe you could even have a blog about apps just for certain geographical areas, like San Francisco, New York, or London. You could monetize the site by being an affiliate for the iTunes store, though I don't think you'd make much that way. You could be an Amazon affiliate and sell accessories for iOS or Android devices. You could create and sell an ebook along the lines of "The 50 iPhone Apps Every Entrepreneur Needs." And if you have a blog that's all about apps for lawyers, for example, you could get advertisers who also have products or services that lawyers would be interested in. If you like blogging and like mobile apps, I think building a niche app review blog is a great idea. Topic #2: A newsletter rating and review site So I go to your website or blog. I like what I see and I notice that you have a newsletter opt-in form. You're tempting me with a free ebook that I'd like to read. But I don't have enough time to read the ebooks I already have, plus I don't want to get spammed by you three times a week and have my email address sold to Nigerian scammers. I decide it's not worth it end up closing the tab and checking Facebook instead. This is a scenario that has been played out millions of times online, but there is something that could lead to a happier, mutually-beneficial ending. Someone needs to create a newsletter rating and review site. Let's say I go to JohnsAwesomeBlog.com and see his newsletter signup form. I want to see if his ebook or course or whatever signup incentive he has is any good. And I want to know how often he sends out an email. So I go to, say, NewsletterReviews.net and search for John's Awesome Blog. I find it and see that people say that his ebook is great and he only sends out an email once a month, and he never sends affiliate links.

In this episode of the Digital Publishing Podcast (which you can also find a transcript of below if audio isn't your thing), I cover 13 different topics and ideas from a tip on how to keep yourself from creating hideous ebook covers to a great membership site idea for any niche. The podcast is on iTunes here. It would be awesome if you rated and reviewed the podcast in iTunes. Pretty please. If you’re using something other than iTunes, the podcast’s feed is http://thebacklight.com/feed/podcast/. You can also listen to the episode online by clicking the play button on the player right below this. (If you don’t see the player, click here.) It’s about 23 minutes long. Note that the podcast contains my pick for featured podcast and and digital publishing tool of the week, but I don't include them in the transcript below. ---------- DPP004: Hideous eBook Covers, A Membership Site Idea for Any Niche, and 11 More Ideas Welcome to episode 4 of the Digital Publishing Podcast, which you can find online at DigitalPublishingPodcast.com. I'm Tristan Higbee, recording today in beautiful San Miguel de Allende, Mexico. This show is all about things I see and would like to see in the world of digital publishing, from blogging and ebooks to membership sites and apps. Also covered are things related to internet business and online marketing. Stick around till the end of the podcast and I'll mention my picks for featured podcast and featured digital publishing tool of the week. This podcast is brand new in its current form and I'd really appreciate it if you went into iTunes and left a review. I've got 13 topics to talk about today, so let's get started. Topic #1: This is why Alexa ranks don't matter Alexa is a service that attempts to rank every website in the world according to how much traffic they get. The higher the site's Alexa rank, the more traffic it gets. Site #1 is Google, #2 is Facebook, and so it goes down into the many millions. It's not uncommon to come across blog posts and articles with instructions on how to lower your Alexa rank. The thing is, Alexa is pretty worthless when you try to compare your site to others. Here's an example why. The Alexa rank for one of my websites is currently around 280,000. The rank for The Backlight, which is the blog that the Digital Publishing Podcast is part of, is currently around 180,000. But according to the Google Analytics that I have installed on both sites, the one with an Alexa rank of 280,000 actually gets almost twice as much traffic as The Backlight, with its rank of 180,000. The reason for this lies in how Alexa calculates the rankings. It only tracks visits by people who have the Alexa toolbar installed in their browser. Relatively few internet users have the toolbar installed, but a disproportionate percentage of those who do have it installed are into SEO or internet marketing. Those people obviously tend to visit sites related to SEO and internet marketing fairly often, so the Alexa rank of those websites is disproportionately high. That's why my site that is not related to SEO or marketing has a significantly worse Alexa rank than my site that that's more related to marketing, even though the first site gets significantly more traffic than the second. The real value in Alexa for website owners is to simply track your own progress. If you were ranked at #2,000,000 last month and now you're at #1,700,000, that's great. You know that the general trend for your website's traffic is a good one. Topic #2: Getting people to share your website with others I've been blogging for more than 9 years now, and I started my first website back in 1996 or 1997. And I think I've FINALLY pinned down the single best way to get other people to share your website or blog. The key is to make something, for lack of a better phrase, jaw-dropping. I realize that that's kind of a stupid phrase but before you roll your eyes and say "Duh," just hear me out.

Some might recall that I started a podcast back in January. I recorded only one episode. It kind of sucked. Then I recorded another episode last week. It also kind of sucked. This is the third episode of the newly renamed Digital Publishing Podcast (DPP), and I think I've finally hit on a great format. The podcast is me talking about a bunch of different ideas related to digital publishing, internet business, social media, and online marketing. They're things that I see and things that I'd like to see. Ignore the previous two episodes of the podcast, which were just me reading blog posts. This is the first REAL episode of the podcast, and you can expect one a week (either on Thursdays or Fridays; I haven't decided which). The podcast is on iTunes here. It would be awesome if you rated the podcast in iTunes. Pretty please. If you’re using something other than iTunes, the podcast’s feed is http://thebacklight.com/feed/podcast/. You can also listen to the episode online by clicking the play button on the player right below this. (If you don't see the player, click here.) It's a little over 23 minutes long. Below is the transcription of the podcast. It's nearly 4,000 words in length, so I highly recommend listening to the podcast. ---------- DPP003: Story Podcasting, Facebook Page SEO, A Unique Product Idea, and 15 More Topics Welcome to the Digital Publishing Podcast, which you can find online at digitalpublishingpodcast.com. I'm Tristan Higbee, recording today in beautiful San Miguel de Allende, Mexico. This show is all about things I see and would like to see in the world of digital publishing, from blogging to ebook creation to software development. Also covered are things related to Internet business and online marketing. I've got 18 topics to talk about today, so let's get started. Topic #1: Story podcasting I listen to a lot of podcasts and am always on the lookout for more good ones. I recently found one called Jim Harold's Campire. It's a show that consists of "chilling stories of everyday people who have encountered paranormal phenomena of all types." That sounded pretty darn interesting, so I subscribed to the podcast and listened to a couple episodes. I immediately noticed how different the podcast's format was from the other podcasts I listen to. So the way it works is that people email their stories to Jim and he selects the best ones. He then talks to them on the phone or over Skype and records the people telling their stories to him. I think that this could work great for so many different niches. For example, I'm an avid rock climber and think that a great podcast could be climbers calling in with stories of epic adventures they've had in the mountains. So it's essentially audio guest posting. I do think that recording the conversation between the host and the storyteller is more interesting than having the storyteller record him- or herself telling the story and then sending it in. Topic #2: Apparently people still email links The other day I was reading an article on the AdSense Flippers blog at AdSenseFlippers.com (it was their October 2012 income report) and saw that at the bottom of the blog post is the usual array of social media sharing buttons. But then I noticed that there was an "Email This" button down there, too. And even more surprising was that the article had been emailed over 170 times. That's amazing to me. I never email links to anyone anymore; all of my link sharing is done either on Twitter or Facebook. But I definitely think that this is something worth trying out if you have a blog. Topic #3: A way to share audio content socially One downside to podcasting as a publishing platform is that there are no social sharing options for the audio. You can't tweet about or like a podcast episode in iTunes. Something I heard on an episode of Social Media Examiner's Social Media Marketing Podcast takes a step toward overcoming this problem.

So last month I sold one of my blogs for four figures. This was the first big-ish sale of a blog that I've made, and I came away from the experience a little wiser. Here's what I learned. (And 4 figures might not be earth-shattering, but it's the most I've ever sold a blog for.) 1. Transferring most things was easy, but... ... not everything went smoothly. Here are the things we were able to transfer easily and without a hitch: The Feedburner feed The Twitter account The YouTube account The Gmail account (I create a new Gmail account for each new blog I create.) The Facebook page The email newsletter (I was using AWeber and the person I transfered the blog to is using MailChimp. I exported the list as a CSV document and the other person was able to upload it easily.) For many of those it was as easy as changing the password and giving the password to the site's new owner, who I assume has changed the password since. The domain name transfer wasn't too terribly difficult but was made more so by the antiquated documentation by the relics that are domain registrars. Things that we couldn't transfer? The Google Analytics profile for that blog. The blog's Google Analytics profile was on my personal Google account and not on the new one I made when I started the blog. My mistake. The Amazon Associates tracking IDs for the blog. You can't transfer Amazon affiliate IDs, though there's apparently a way to change all of them on your WordPress blog. 2. Migrating a blog sucks, but... ...I found a plugin that makes it a LOT easier. Before I sold the blog, I knew that migrating a blog sucked because I've switched web hosts before and had to migrate all of my blogs then. And it still sucked this time, but the WordPress plugin Backup Buddy (not an affiliate link because I'm too lazy to join their affiliate program) made it a lot easier. I saw it mentioned in a Zen Habits blog post, and I bought it right then. It's a blog backup and migration plugin. You install the plugin and then can backup everything—posts, images, databases, WordPress files, plugins—with one click. You can also have it automatically backup your site and send the backup file to Dropbox. You don't even need to have WordPress installed on the new host that you're migrating it to. Backup Buddy backs up EV. RY. THING. Pretty slick. It's not a cheap plugin—a licence for two blogs costs $75 and the developer licence, which I bought, is $150—but it was definitely worth it. Plus I did a Google search for a coupon code before I purchased the plugin and was able to get an additional 30% off. There are a few plugins that are free that are supposed to do something similar, but I've never had very good experiences with those. I've a very satisfied Backup Buddy customer, and I recommend it for anyone migrating a blog to a different host or different hosting account. 3. Selling a blog isn't easy, but... ...it's a lot easier if it's making money. In this case, the blog sold for about 10x the current monthly revenue. The person approached me and asked how much I wanted for the site. I asked the purchaser to make an offer. It was 10x the revenue amount and I thought it was fare, so I accepted. I remember seeing a particular Flippa auction about six or so months ago. (For those who don't know, Flippa is an online marketplace for websites.) The auction was for a website that made zero money, but the person was asking for $500. Come on. That's like trying to sell an old car that doesn't run for $5,000. If your blog is making money, someone will buy it if your asking price isn't ridiculous. 4. I could have gotten more money if... ...I'd been paying more attention to the site over the previous 6 months or so. I had done zero promotion for the site and updated it only grudgingly. The blog was only a year old and I had been a largely negligent father for half of its life. If I'd sold it at its peak, I could have gotten probably 2.

In this episode I go over 5 different ways you can use the microblogging service Tumblr to grow your Internet business. I talk about how I use Tumblr in my Internet business, and mention some quirky Tumblr blogs you should check out. This is my first podcast and I'm having some technical difficulties with the feed in iTunes, so please bear with me here. Thanks for listening, and I hope you enjoy it.