(Transcript continued from the Episode 116 show notes and audio podcast)

Of course, Michael Hyatt is in the middle of a product launch, so what’s happening here is Michael is delivering great free content, you’re going to opt-in to get this LifeScore Assessment, it’s totally worth it, and Michael is going to continue to deliver you fantastic information on the hopes that you will be so impressed with the stuff that he has to offer you that you’ll actually buy his Best Year Ever course, which the cart is going to open up for in a couple of weeks. Just by way of full disclosure, it is an affiliate link that I’m giving you. This is an internet marketing show, so we want to have these things out in the open. The LifeScore Assessment is worth taking, so even if you just go there and get the assessment and immediately unsubscribe, I think that can be a real eye-opener for people like me, if that’s you, who are struggling to keep all of the balls in the air.

I talk about that on the show a lot. A lot of the times the ball I have dropped in the past is this ball, the podcasting ball. As you know very well, I am super highly committed to never ever dropping that ball again. That means I have to worry about maybe dropping another ball, whether that’s a marriage ball or a taking care of my kids ball, or managing my personal finances ball, or whatever it means. My health – that’s the hard one for me. I am always looking to lose a few pounds, or maybe more than a few. Whenever I’m sitting in front of the microphone podcasting or doing whatever, it’s hard for me to do that.

That’s the kind of issue in this struggle that entrepreneurs like us have that this LifeScore Assessment tries to get at. So, I definitely recommend that you pop over there and grab that even if you have no interest in spending money on Michael’s course it will be time well spent.

Late Night Listener Feedback

A quick thing on listener feedback. I got this Speakpipe voicemail from Phil. Thanks, Phil, that was super cool. I love Speakpipe because you get this really clear audio that you can hear and understand really well, it comes to my email inbox. You can find that over at LateNightIM.com/connect, where you can find all the places to connect with me.

Phil says, “Thanks for the podcast, I enjoy it, but your site, I can’t find the podcast, your social media links are broken. Here are some things that you may not be aware of.

Sure enough, I wasn’t aware of them. There are a lot of things changing on the site. As you guys know, I’ve been in the middle of a huge site redesign, complete and total from the ground up sort of redesign over the last couple of months. I keep uncovering these things that appear to be correct but they’re not and people keep bringing them to my attention.

Phil, I really appreciate that.

I think the bigger lesson from that is that sometimes you’re going to get some criticism about whatever it is that you do. In the case of Phil, he couldn’t have been any nicer. He was super polite and says, “I’m only mentioning this because you might not be aware of it and I’m trying to help you.” Sometimes the feedback is not so polite. Phil was awesome. Not everybody is.

I think the thing we have to do as content creators is take the feedback and our first position has to be something that is not defensive. I think the first thing we have to do is say, “Thanks for the feedback. Appreciate you taking the time to do that.” and then try to get the nuggets of information out of whatever the feedback is.

As my wife likes to say, there’s a little bit of truth in everything that we say. If people give you some kind of criticism or feedback based on the content that you’re creating – in Phil’s case it was technical fact based feedback delivered very politely, but in some cases it’s kind of nasty opinion based feedback delivered not so politely – a lot of times there is something to that.

If somebody tells you they don’t like the sound of your voice, or you ramble too much, or you talk about yourself too much, or whatever, usually that’s worth considering. You may consider it and choose to ignore it. As they say in showbiz, haters gonna hate. You’re always going to have these detractors. People are going to go out of their way to call you up and call you out and tell you they don’t love you, for whatever reason. You have to have a thick skin against that.

I think you’re missing an opportunity if all you do is have a thick skin and you have this big wall or barrier that you put up in front of people and you don’t try to listen to whatever nuggets of truth there are in the feedback that they’re bringing you. Lesson for today on listener feedback is hear your critics, hear the core of what they’re trying to say before you totally blow them off.

Phil, thanks for the feedback. I really appreciate it. Hope you have a fantastic day.

This Week in Internet Marketing

One of the ways that I have renewed my commitment to podcasting and making sure that I get everything done that needs to be done in my internet business to grow it in the way that it needs to be grown is I’m trying to really keep a lid on my non-value-added entertainment. This would be like television.

I do still watch television. My wife and I watch a little TV together occasionally. I like the Dallas Cowboys and I love the Texas Rangers. Thankfully, baseball season is over for the moment, so I’m not constantly distracted by baseball. But the Cowboys are crushing it right now. I apologize for those of you that are outside the United States, I’m talking about American football, not what you would call real football. I do get that. American football, the one with the ball that’s shaped sort of like a rugby ball, that’s what I’m talking about.

When I was watching football the other day I saw these ads that I had been hearing about for Facebook Live. I thought that was totally fascinating. Talk about something that has penetrated the mainstream consciousness of the entire planet, Facebook is kind of amazing just the level of penetration that they’ve been able to get.

The question is what does it mean to you and me that Facebook is spending hundreds of millions or tens of millions of dollars on ads on television? I don’t really know what the budget is, but I know TV ads are expensive and I’ve seen dozens just in the little bit that I watch TV of primetime ads, so I know they’re spending a lot of money.

One of the things that I keep hearing about, one of the things that Facebook is concerned with inside of Facebook kind of secretly is this phenomenon they call content collapse. I think what Facebook is seeing is that people are sharing less and less updates about what’s going on in their life during the day. When Facebook first started a lot of people updated all the time, in fact maybe too much about what they were having for breakfast, what they were doing, a picture of what was going on, of their baby, so on and so forth.

Facebook doesn’t talk about this directly, at least not very much, but I think the data that is being discussed is this idea that as far as original content that is being created, that is actually on the decline inside of Facebook. So Facebook Live, which was a pet project of Mark Zuckerberg himself, I think on one level may be an effort to get more original content created on the platform. After all, content on the platform is the lifeblood of a tool like Facebook. That may be an indication that they’re fighting that or at the very least trying to grow it.

Another problem that Zuckerberg has is he’s running out of earthlings to give Facebook to. At some point the majority of people that have computers and phones have a Facebook account, when you reach that you’re kind of saturated so you have to grow on another axis, which would be the amount of content that is created.

The great thing about video is it engages you and keeps you on the screen, if it’s a good video, for however long that video runs. The neat thing about that is when you make your money selling ads the more engagement you have the more those ads are worth. The more time on page that you have the more you can charge for ads, the more clicks you’ll get, and so forth. When people are flying through their newsfeed, if video stops them that’s a good thing.

The other thing about Facebook Live that I think is critical for Facebook and very interesting is that it’s creating some urgency around getting to Facebook. Right now with the newsfeed algorithm the way it is, if you set live video aside, you can check Facebook pretty much whenever you want. There’s no reason for you to stop what you’re doing right now, pause this podcast, and go check Facebook. But if I have your attention and your phone dings and it says, “So-and-So is live,” while you’re listening to my podcast, there is a very good chance that you might pause my podcast to go check out the live video.

Now, how dare you ever consider doing that, but I’m sure there is one or two of you out there that might actually pause this incredibly valuable podcast and go over and check out the Facebook Live video. That’s what Facebook wants. It has that urgency, it has that SnapChat thing. We don’t want to miss someone’s SnapChat Story because it’s about to disappear or we don’t want to miss someone’s Periscope because it’s live right now. Facebook Live has that sense of urgency. All of those things are good things.

What does that mean for us marketers? I think it means that what you’ve been hearing from people that if you’re not in Facebook Live and you’re not doing it that you probably should be, or at least thinking about whether or not you should be.

I think for me, Mark Mason from Late Night Internet Marketing should be doing more Facebook Live. It’s tricky. I don’t know exactly what I’m going to do about that, because we just talked about the fact that podcasting is at the top of my list and adding in another thing probably means some other ball has to drop somewhere. So I have to personally be careful about adding too many things.

For you, I think you need to be thinking about whether or not Facebook Live makes sense for you. What does your reach look like?

I think I like Facebook Live a lot better than SnapChat, because the content persists, you can download it and repurpose it. If people aren’t there live they get a pseudo-live kind of like a recorded webinar experience, it’s really nice where the comments come in at the same rate that they came in and the same time they came in during the video, so it’s super cool.

My action for you out of all of this and the Facebook Live information that is in the news and on your TV in commercials now is to make sure you’ve at least given some thought to whether or not you need a Facebook Live strategy. It can be as simple as getting your phone, turning it on, and hitting the Live button; or as complicated as getting in a studio and cranking up some studio-worthy software like Wirecast from Telestream if you have $500 in your pocket, or OBS Studio if you don’t, you can set up a whole studio and do screen sharing and all that kind of stuff in Facebook Live.

I encourage you to take a look and see if livestreaming makes sense for you. For me, you’re going to see some livestreaming from me. We’ll see when and what that’s going to be like. Right now what I’m thinking is some question and answer sessions where maybe once a week I get on Facebook Live, probably at night, and do some live question and answer stuff. Maybe have a couple of prepared questions that I answer while people are getting on the livestream and then take questions live for maybe half an hour or so.

Thinking about that. If you have some feedback on that, head over to the show notes and let me know what you think. I’m kind of on the fence on exactly what I’m going to be doing with Facebook Live.

Late Night Niche Site Update

I wanted to give you a niche site update. When last we spoke about the niche site we spent some time identifying a niche, we decided it was youth baseball. Then in a subsequent episode we talked about how to select a domain name, we created the Ultimate Domain Name Checklist, which is available for you to download. We bought the domain name YouthBaseballZone.com and that has been sitting idly since that time.

Tonight what I did, and it only took five minutes, is I logged into SiteGround, which is the place where all my niche websites start now, and I created some hosting space for YouthBaseballZone.com. Basically inside of cPanel, which is software that you use inside of tools like SiteGround, I told it I was adding a domain and that it was called YouthBaseballZone.com. I pushed a button and installed WordPress.

By the time you hear this there should be a very minimal landing page at YouthBaseballZone.com set up that says the website is coming soon.

youth baseball zone coming soon landing page

What I’ll be doing over the next weeks is configuring WordPress a little bit and installing a theme. I plan to use the Elegant Themes framework called Divi. That’s super beautiful, that’s what I’ve been using for all of my sites. I absolutely love that thing, that’s what is running LateNightIM.com now. We’re going to build something cool. I’m going to create some content and we’re going to build out this niche website. That’s the plan for the Late Night Niche Site.

So we’ve taken the next step. YouthBaseballZone.com is up and running, it exists, and it was super easy to do that with WordPress. I’m looking forward to creating some content for that site that is going to really bring it to life so you can see what it looks like to build an affiliate niche site.

Hopefully in the month of December we’ll have another episode where we talk about the configuration of WordPress and the different plugins that I’m going to use, or that I typically use on a site like this, to kind of give you an idea of what happens after you hit that one-click install button that you’ll find in most of your hosting solutions like SiteGround and Bluehost.

Wrapping Things Up…

That does it for this week. Short, sweet, and to the point.

Next week we’re going to talk about some more feedback that I’ve been getting.

I have this cool automation where if you follow me on Twitter @LateNightIM, what you’ll find out is that some time later I will @ mention you and say, “Thanks for the follow. I really appreciate it. What can I do to make your day awesome today?”

Then about a week after you follow me I’ll tweet you and say, “Hey, thanks again for the follow. Is there anything I can do to make your day awesome?” Then finally at some future time after that I will tweet you and ask you, “What’s your biggest internet marketing challenge?”

These initial prompts are automated because I have people following me all the time and obviously I can’t reply to every follow, I can’t track that, but I can have automation do that. I do reply to every reply. If someone says, “You can make my day awesome by sending me a million dollars,” I either reply to them with a “yeah right,” or I send them a million dollars. You’ll have to try that and see what happens.

One of the feedbacks that I’ve been getting is procrastination is one of the things that is really causing people a lot of trouble. When I say, “What’s your biggest problem?” I get answers back of procrastination and/or finding the time, which I think are a lot of times somehow related.

So in next week’s episode we’re going to tackle this procrastination and finding time thing and see if we can’t help you get some more stuff done during your week so that you can make progress on your internet business.

Until next week, I hope you make some progress so you won’t feel so bad about the procrastination. Don’t procrastinate waiting on the procrastination episode. Go ahead and get something done this week.

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