How to Become a Podcaster a.k.a Audio Blogger

Podcasts are also known as audio blogging. Meng (2005) defined pod casting as “the process of capturing an audio event, song, speech, or mix of sounds and then posting that digital sound object to a Web site or “blog” in a data structure called an RSS (Real Simple Syndication) envelope (or feed)”.

Many of the marketers, trainers and consultants are now a days using podcasts for providing tutorials to their subscribers clients and students. There are four good reasons why companies should podcasts:

• To gain first mover advantage,
• To develop customer loyalty,
• To give the company a more human voice,
• To exploit the PR value of a new technology.

These audio files automatically gets downloaded onto the users’ computers, who are subscribed with the feeds of the service provider, which directly goes into the management programs onto the users’ computer such as Music Match, iTunes or Windows Media Player. These programs further transfer these audio files to the subscribers audio devices as they are synchronized with the computers and could be listened anywhere anytime as desired.

After uploading the content, it requires to be tagged via XML in a format known as RSS 2.0 so that it could be delivered to the people subscribed to editor’s RSS newsreader. As the content is delivered to the subscribed people it automatically, download to their portable audio devices as they synchronize it and will be able to listen it anywhere any time they intend to.

Curious about creating a Podcast of yours, just follow the steps given in the image below:


If you are having any difficulties in viewing the image try clicking on it.

Contemporary Social Media Marketing Tips for Small Businesses

Technology has blessed small businesses to market themselves online in very effective manner through social networking to blogs to search engine optimization and plenty of new and useful marketing tactics.

Most probably these new ways to market small business online will not be effective for every business but if you know the options available to you it can help putting your business on the fast track to achieve success through online marketing.

So here are the three most expeditious and intense ways to market your small business online:

Marketing Maneuver #1: Usage of Blog

Chum relationship with customers is the key to success for small businesses. The matter of fact is that the personal element is what makes a small business work better than a big business. This gives competitive advantage to small businesses by adding value to a product or service that big businesses cannot do. A blogs is the most effective way of identifying and getting connected with the potential customers for a small business owner. Blog writing and commenting on other blogs helps you in creating clients rather than the customers. One lifetime client is worthy than ten customers.

Marketing Maneuver #2: Usage of Social Media

Internet provides numerous ways of getting connected with other people all over the globe. People get connected with each other through chat rooms, forums and other social networking mediums. New tools of social media marketing such as Twitter took this marketing approach to a new level, where it has given an immense contingency to market small business online. It gives you an opportunity of connecting with people where as blogging helps you in making that connection personal. It was not possible to get connected with your clients by using traditional marketing techniques, thanks to social media!

Marketing Maneuver #3: Usage of Search Engine

The most common way of marketing your small business online is creating and populating your blog or a web site with a good content on it so as one types in the keyword your site appears in the search engine results. However, search engine marketing combines few tactics and rely on natural (organic) or (white hat) techniques to market your site. Now a day search engine’s algorithm is entirely different of what it was five years ago. An entire new audience could be brought by mastering in the latest search engine marketing techniques.

Small businesses could be marketed online with many more ways but some degree of success could be found by using these three maneuvers.

A Brief Introduction to Blogging

Most of us are obliviously familiar with blog, podcasts vodcasts but still there are a lot of people who are not familiar with these terms. I would like to give a brief introduction about these terms to my readers before I get started with the ways of getting benifits out of it as a marketer or an entrepreneur.

According to Meeker, Pitz and Fitzgerald (2006), ‘the word “blog” is an abbreviation of “Web log.” A blog is a Web site where users can post their thoughts, typically about specific topics. New postings are at the top, while old postings appear below. Users can set up free blogs at sites like Blogger.com (owned by Google), MovableType.com, and TypePad.com’. Whereas Weber(2007), explains that blogs are online journals where people can post ideas, images, and links to other web pages or sites. It allows non-technical people to post information about their life, hobbies, politics, believes, business, interest etc. it is frequently updated and links to articles posted on other websites too. It is a place where visitors actually give comments on one’s blogs too.

Since 2003 the growth of blogs gets doubled every six months according to Technorati from March, 2003 till March, 2007 over 70 million weblogs were tracked and almost 120k blogs are being created everyday.

Now a days after understanding the power of blogs and blogging, even organizations started use of it in their businesses. As according to Sifry (2006), the number of personal and organizational blogs has increased dramatically in recent years, e.g. General Motor has a website for their corporate blogs. “Blogs allows people to have conversation and give rapid feedback not only on the same blog but also in other blogs. Newspaper and journals are not able to print the comments from the readers rapidly and reply instantaneously” (Mercado 2006). According to Leonsis (2007), “empowering a generation to believe that what they have to say, what they see with their own eyes, how they interpret that, is very, very important”. ‘“Information needs to be free” said by a distant education librarian named Meredith in her blog at Norwich University’ Katherine Holvoet (2006). Through blogs, bloggers got the ability to associate anywhere everywhere throughout the world. Blog combines the functions of an editor and author.

The new blogs mostly can be found through the links in comments, as well the benefit of commenting is to generate back links to your own blogs.

“Most blog platforms will propose an auto-ping option. Ping is when our blog sends a mail to feed providers to alert them about our new post. With this option enabled, our blog platform will alert blog services, like Technorati or Google blog search, to send a spider to our blog so they can update their content and link to us. A useful service for pinging is Ping-O-Matic (www.pingomatic.com), a service that pings freely to other blog services” (Gyger, 2007). Blogs are in text form, containing the company or product’s name and that makes search engines easy to index.

Blogs are updated frequently and search engines put those websites on top ranking, which are recently updated. This gives a chance to the company to bring their websites on top rankings so that their customers can easily find them. Blogs are cheap and even free to create it does not requires any installation of software for producing it. Producing a blog does not require to be specialist in computer skills as well the content can be disseminated as well as updated very easily and the readers will be sent an instantaneous alert of update through RSS (Real Simple Syndication).

From marketer’s point of view, blogs are one of the good ways of marketing. As always blogs are linked to some other blogs, (the more blogs are linked to a blog, the higher the page rank will be). The cream of the crop in blogosphere (Blogosphere is a collective term encompassing all blogs and their interconnections), Wikipedia, when writes regarding the products or services, they produce large amount of visitors. It is good for marketers as the visitors read the blogs about the products and leaves their comments about it, which is marketing for them as well as sort of feedbacks. For the consumers it is good in the way that the other consumers share their experiences about the usage of the product.

What's New Media?

New media is an abstract concept with a general meaning. According to Martin Lister (2003), new media is defined as media established with a sense of interactive communication, whereas the conventional media refers to established institutions and organizations such as the press, broadcasting, publishing, and so forth. In late 1980s when the media and communications looked quiet, different the idea of new media has been emerged. New media refers to the techno-culture, which is entailed of technological, cultural and social change. It is called new media as the term “new” in it carries the ideological implication of “the most recent” or “the cutting edge,” derived from a modernist belief in social progress arising through technology. New media is classified as websites, blogs, vod-casts, social networking, rich multimedia, virtual reality such as virtual shopping malls, video conferencing, mobile TV, podcast, and so on (Lister, Dovery, Giddings, Grant, & Kelly, 2003, p. 9-13).

The characteristic of new media employs technology based on interactivity, hyper-textuality, digitalism, dispersal and virtuality. New media makes the communication interactive and the information more accessible in the digital age. The traditional media tools use to be only one-way communication, which includes TV, radio, and newspapers. Traditional media walls have been broken down by the new technology; it provides the interactive communication tools. The convergence of new and old media is an emerging phenomenon in the whole world, with an accelerated movement toward the use of new media among businesses.

Lister, Martin, Dovery, Jon, Giddings, Seth, Grant, Iain, & Kelly, Kieran. (2003).
New Media: A Critical Introduction. London: Routledge.