Transcript continued from the Episode 062 Show notes
Late Night Listener Feedback
The first piece of listener feedback I wanted to clear up something I had said in a previous episode. Ray of RaytheVideoGuy.com commented and said, “You were talking about Cliff Ravenscraft’s free podcasting course and I couldn’t find it. Where is it?”
I just wanted to let you know that I think I probably said that was at HowtoPodcast – if you type in LearnHowtoPodcast.com you’ll find that. The easiest way to find it is just type in Learn How to Podcast Cliff and it will come right up to the top of your browser in Google.
If you’re interested in podcasting and learning how to do that, there’s no need to go pay any amount of money for any course. Cliff gives you all of the information for free that you can use to go get started podcasting and really get a feel for what’s involved. Then once you do that, if you want to take it to the next level he has lots of options for that, lots of paid material. His free stuff that he throws out there at LearnHowtoPodcast.com is better than most paid courses.
Ray, hopefully you were able to find that. I think I cleared that up on the Facebook fan page, but for the rest of you that had trouble finding that that’s the deal there.
Second piece of feedback I wanted to get to was an excellent voice mail from Brian. Let me go ahead and play that for you now and let’s talk about what Brian wants to talk about.
Hi, I’m Brian, and I’m a new listener. I just listened to all your podcasts in one week’s time. I wanted to know why your podcasts that are available to me start at number 32. It looks like there might be a lot of great content I haven’t heard yet.
I found you on the Pat Flynn podcast and he’s too high for my current level, I don’t have an ebook and it’s kind of confusing to have a different guru interviewed or method discussed in every episode. Your method seems easy and understandable. Like you, I have a job and a family, and I can’t do this full time.
For the first listen-through of all your episodes, I understood maybe 10%, but I wanted to immerse myself. Maybe next time through them I’ll understand more. The audio format is the best for me to digest because I can listen to podcasts at work all the time. When I’m at home I’d rather build my business than read articles, so most of my article reading is on my iPhone screen while I ride the bus.
In one week’s time I have a site up and three articles of great content, and I still have a ton to learn. My needs are going to change as I grow, right now I really need Kindergarten level stuff. Your Farnoosh interview was way too advanced for me, but in a year or two’s time it might be perfect for where I’m at.
I just wanted to say thank you for the inspiration and I wish you much success.
Okay. So taking the easy issue first, why only 32 episodes on iTunes? Actually, thanks for pointing that out, Brian. I had limited the number of episodes going to iTunes to troubleshoot a problem that I was having.
This gets a little technical, but basically when I started blogging the best thing that you could do, and what all bloggers and podcasters did, was run their RSS feeds through Feedburner. You’ll know if you’ve been around blogs much, RSS feeds are the things that you click on to subscribe to a blog. A lot of times if you’re going to subscribe to a feed in a feed reader you need RSS to do that. What you may not know is that that also powers podcasting. In fact, iTunes is depending on the RSS feed in order to show you the things that are available to download.
The problem is, or at least the challenge is that Feedburner has a limit, for historical reasons, on how big the feed can be. What’s in these feeds? The show notes sometimes are in there, depending on how you set up your show, pointers to the MP3 file, pointers to the graphics, and a bunch of other stuff. So if you have hundreds of episodes, or even tens of episodes in this feed, and quite a bit of show notes, that can get over this maximum limit that it allows.
It’s not completely clear to me why that limit is needed anymore, but it’s still in place. Feedburner is kind of a dead product; Google owns it, but they’re not doing anything with it and they haven’t for years.
So when I hit this limit, rather than thinking about it too hard, I just adjusted my WordPress installation to reduce the number of shows in the feed, and that fixed the feed at the moment. I had planned to go back and look at this some more and try to fix it, but I forgot about it.
It’s my intention that every episode be available in iTunes, because I know that some people want to go back and listen at the beginning, and there some interviews of really interesting people back there and I know people want to get to that content, so I will fix that. I’m not sure exactly what I’m going to do to fix it, but hopefully by the time you listen to this there will be more, if not all shows, showing up in iTunes. Thank you for pointing that out.
I think the second part of Brian’s voicemail is a lot more important. He makes this comment about Pat’s showing being too high, that he likes my show because Pat’s show is too advanced for where he is. That makes complete and perfect sense to me and it’s actually a problem that Pat and I both face.
Here’s the deal. Pat’s show and his blog in general have been since the very beginning, since before anyone was even reading Pat’s blog, since back in 2008 when Pat was really starting this activity, that has always been about his journey. One of the magical things about Pat is that his journey has been enormously successful. That’s one of the things that make it incredibly interesting to follow, because this is a guy that started out at income level zero and now is reporting incomes over the $50,000 per month mark each and every month with gusts of wind up to $100,000 a month.
Now, he’s not sustaining $100,000 a month yet, but for those of you doing the math at home, that’s a $1,000,000 a year business – that’s what we call a seven figure business if he’s able to get to that level of sustaining that kind of income. That’s craziness. That’s what makes it exciting and interesting, and that’s why thousands of people listen to the show.
Because he is reporting his journey and as he’s growing and his business is evolving, he’s constantly in this situation where he’s having to balance between things that make sense to new listeners and people that are new to internet marketing and things that make sense to people that have been listening to him since the very beginning, since Episode 2. In fact, I appeared on Episode 2 of the Smart Passive Income Podcast.
He has that tension between new people and people who have been around longer, and he’s constantly working to solve that. This is a problem that I have as well, because I can’t just talk about how to do keyword research and register domain names every episode, otherwise people who want to listen to me every week would get bored. That’s kind of a tough problem, that’s where that’s coming from, and I’m sure you understand that. I know Pat works hard to balance that and I definitely recommend that you go back and check out some of Pat’s earlier episodes and some of the outstanding content on his blog to get the full feel of him and get caught up.
The one thing I like about Brian’s voicemail, I love Brian’s attitude. Those of you that are listening that are thinking about trying to figure why you’re not making the progress that you want to or you haven’t achieved the things you want to achieve, you should, in my opinion, take a listen to Brian’s voicemail again, listen to this guy’s attitude. He has this positive can-do attitude. He articulates the fact that he understands that these things take time and hard work. It’s just really impressive to understand that mindset.
I have said this many times, mindset is a big chunk of all of this. If you can get into a mindset like Brian where you’re patient and you’re willing to invest, that’s going to take you a long way.
Brian, I compliment you on that. I also compliment you on the fact that after a week you’re able to get a site up with three articles and you’re digging along. I think that’s just awesome. Congratulations to you on that.
Finally, you make the comment that the Farnoosh interview was a little advanced for you now, you’re not in a position where it’s time for you to leave your day job, but you recognized that sometime in the future that might be valuable to you.
What that reminds me of is something that I learned from Jeremy Frandsen over at Internet Business Mastery. Jeremy talks about this idea of just in time learning, where he recognizes that it’s very easy to get distracted by things that aren’t important to you right now. What he does is he has a system for setting those things aside and being able to call them up later.
The system that I recommend for that, of course, is Evernote. What I would do on something like that is take the show notes on the web and I would hit the Evernote clipper and that would jam the show notes into Evernote, and I would file them in some reference folder so that later when I needed to find that information again it would be right there in Evernote and I could search easily. Probably I’d tag it when I filed it away, maybe something about leaving my day job or maybe tag it with Farnoosh’s name and a couple of other things, and then it would be at my fingertips.
So that’s my recommendation, highly recommend Evernote. There’s a really good ebook out there called Evernote Essentials. If you’re interested in really getting everything you possibly can out of Evernote, I recommend that strongly. You can find that at LateNightIM.com/evernotebook. That’s a really good book that I highly recommend, I bought it myself many years ago. It’s just recently been updated and one of the cool things about the author is he sends everyone updates for free.
Thanks for the feedback, Brian, really appreciate the call.
Google Encrypted Search Makes Life More Complicated
I guess the crazy thing in search engine marketing and search engine optimization that everyone is talking about over the last couple weeks is this Google encryption of keyword results. For those of you that aren’t familiar with this, this is a big impact to guys like me and you, it has to do with the information that Google sends when they send traffic to your site.
Right now, particularly if you’re running a WordPress installation with some kind of stats, or you’re using AWstats on your cPanel installation, or if you have JetPack installed and you’re using the WordPress Stats tool, or you’re using Google Analytics, or something like that, you can get information that tells you what keywords people are using to find your sites. You can look at that sometimes, depending on the tool that you’re using, on a page by page basis. This is awesome, because it’s a goldmine of data. It tells you what is happening, how people are reaching you, how this free traffic is coming to you. Since Google has the lion’s share of search, most of these results are things that people are typing into Google.
Since 2011, if you look back through your stats you’ll find that more and more of these search engine terms that used to show up in your stats are showing up as unidentified, or unreported, or unavailable, depending on what software you’re using. There will be some term there that indicates that this visitor came from search, but we don’t know what the search terms were.
The reason that’s happening is because back, I think it was 2011, Google started encrypting the URLs for users for search, using https: instead of http:. So if you’re logged into Google and you go to Google.com, what you’ll notice is that the URL, instead of being http:// it’s https://. That “s” means secure, it’s the kind of URL that you use for banking and online transactions. But what it means is the contents of that URL when they’re sent back to the server can’t be read in the clear, they’re encrypted. That means that your website that used to be able to read the keywords that were used out of the URL can no longer read those and store them away in your stats.
They started doing that for users that were logged into Google and slowly this has been increasing. What they’ve said recently is they’re going to do that for all users coming from Google.com, whether they’re logged in or not. This means that the Firefox browser with Google default, there’s going to be encryption there, cell phone users that just fire up Google, they’re going to be encrypted there. This data is going to go to zero.
I’ve talked about on the show that has been a really great resource for keyword research in the past. If you have a big site, what you would find is that you had lots of long tail keywords in your stats that you could use for post ideas for what to write about. You could find cases where a few people were reaching your site because you were ranking 8th, 9th, or 10th in Google and if you did some work you could take that same content where you were already ranking and optimize it and boost it up to where you were ranking number one. So you could find opportunities to go do SEO and you really work this and create more traffic. The problem is that’s going away.
I guess the first question is; why in the world is Google doing this?
Well, they’re not saying. They say things like, “We’re encrypting URLs for user security.” Okay, fine. I don’t really completely understand that, but that’s what they’re saying. I’m not sure what that really means. I don’t think people have the expectation that their search terms are encrypted, so I’m not sure what that is.
There is some discussion about this being pushback on the NSA because the NSA has been pressuring Google and Yahoo for information, claiming national security. And there have been some cases that Google is not even allowed to talk about where data has been demanded of them. I guess if the data is encrypted and even Google doesn’t know it then there’s nothing for them to surrender.
Conspiracy theorists, which may be right in this case, are thinking that maybe this is Google’s attempt to increase the value of paid search, because with paid search you do know what keywords are working and what keywords aren’t working, unlike with organic search where pretty soon you’re not going to be able to tell that at all because all of the data will be “unavailable.”
So there are lots of reasons why they may possibly be doing this, but the fact of the matter is that it’s happening. What I’m having a little trouble understanding, and maybe this will get resolved eventually, it’s fine that it’s encrypted, but it’s not clear to me why there couldn’t be some hook with Google Analytics where they said, “We’re going to encrypt this and make it secure, but we’re going to reveal the statistics to you inside the secure environment of Google Analytics so you can see what’s going on.” I don’t quite understand how their arguments hold up against that, unless it’s the NSA one, because if they have the data and the NSA demands it then they have to give it up. So possibly that’s a real thing there.
So what are the workarounds? That’s the question.
The answer is there aren’t, to my knowledge, any direct workarounds for this. You will still, at least for the moment, have data that’s coming in from other search engines, including Bing and Yahoo, until they decide to follow suit. So you’ll still have that data. That data, while it’s a small sample of the total data, is in some ways still representative.
Let’s say Bing is sending you 10% of your traffic. As an engineer, if you told me that I could look at only 10% of the data, depending on what kind of data we’re talking about, I would tell you that I can make an estimate about the total population of data from only 10%. These are well understood ideas in statistics.
The only caveat to that is I would say that my feeling is that people who use Bing are different than people who use Google. People that listen to this podcast and are involved in internet marketing and who are sophisticated computer users, almost all of them that I know use Google, for whatever reason. I’m not making a value judgment, I’m just saying that all the computer geeks who I know use Google. The people that I know that use Bing are the kind of people, in general, that are using it because that was the default that was installed on the computer that they bought from Best Buy and they just never changed it.
I think there is a little bit of a difference in the market that uses Bing and the market that uses Google. I don’t have really good data to support that, I know people have studied this. That’s my impression is that the demographics of those two sets are a little different. I would cautious about saying that Bing data is representative of Google data, but certainly there are still good ideas there. You’ll be able to use that for awhile, as long as it exists.
I think the other thing that people are talking about is you could choose to do paid keyword experiments to get a sense of what keywords are hitting. But I know most niche marketers won’t do that. We do that sometimes when we’re testing new websites, where we’ll send all the keywords we can imagine into a website for paid search, and then we’ll look at the ones that people are actually clicking on, then we’ll know what people are searching for. That’s kind of a way to test some of these organic websites quickly so you can tell whether or not you’ve got a winner on your hands. You can do the same thing and mine that data for keyword information.
Those are ideas of ways to work around this. I think there’s also the idea at some point, unless it’s the NSA that Google is fighting here, that at some point there will be an option and they’ll reveal the data. But right now you’re just not going to be able to look in your stats and get the kind of data you used to get.
That’s also going to impact some of these tools that rely on that kind of data for data mining, some of the tools we’ve talked about in the past that watch your stats and recommend, for example, post ideas from your Google data that’s coming into your website by reading your logs. A lot of that is going to have to go away as well, at least in my opinion. I’m sure the people that write those tools are working frantically to try and figure out how to work around that, but I think it’s going to be hard without the data there.
So that’s what’s going on in the area of SEO and search engine marketing. Not so much to do there, but to be aware of it and kind of keep an eye on that and make sure that you know what’s going on.
Mark Around the Web…
A couple of announcements for you before we sign off for today, as we try very hard to get back on our weekly schedule.
I wanted to let you know that I appeared on Podcast Answer Man Episode 325 and I will be appearing again on Thursday, October 10th in Episode 329. In those episodes I talk about the seven things that podcasters need to know about affiliate marketing in PAM325, and then in PAM329 I’ll talk about seven ways for podcasters to market affiliate products.
Now, here’s the secret that we won’t tell the people over there that listen to Podcast Answer Man. Most of those 14 tips apply to all affiliate marketers. I’ve tweaked them a little bit to make them specific for podcasting, but those tips apply in general to all affiliate marketers. I recommend that you go over and check out Cliff’s show and those episodes – 325 and 329.
With regard to content that’s out there, one of the exciting that I have coming up is I’ll be at Podcamp Dallas here in the Dallas area over at PodcampDallas.com. I’m really looking forward to doing that and that’s going to be a lot of fun as well.
The last thing that I wanted to tell you is that my buddy Jared Easley, I think a lot of you listen to his podcast, he interviewed me a month or two ago on Episode 37 of his Starve the Doubts Podcast. It’s an awesome podcast, I felt incredibly fortunate to have even been asked to be part of it. He has interviewed some amazing guys; Seth Godin, Pat Flynn. The list is just enormous of all the incredible people. I tell him during the interview that I feel like the cheapest house in a really expensive neighborhood. If you’re interested in getting some more insight into what makes me go, I recommend that you go and check out the Starve the Doubts Podcast Episode 37.
The Starve the Doubts interview was a fun one. If you haven’t heard that podcast, Jared has the most off the hook interview style I’ve ever heard. He asks these random questions and I just really had fun on that interview. I invite you to check that out.
You can find all of these interviews that I do elsewhere at LateNightIM.com/interviews.
Wrapping Things Up…
That’s going to do it for this week. I’m going to try to get back on the weekly train, we’re going to try to hit about 30 minutes of podcast, we’re going do this thing.
Next week I’m going to talk about mastermind groups, because I had some listener feedback about masterminds. One of the reasons that I got the podcast back on the air was because of one of my mastermind groups and I want to talk about that. I look forward to that.
We’ll have lots more exciting stuff, some interviews coming up in the coming weeks. Stay tuned. We’ll see you soon.
