Shameless Self Promotion - #2

Another outcome from attending the Podcast and Portable Media Expo, was that I also met Chris Christensen from the Amateur Traveller Podcast. We chatted, (as you do!) and the subject of my home town came up. I'm based in Liverpool in the North West of England (born and bred) and is a City currently undergoing massive re-generation due in part to the recent World Heritage Status bestowed upon the City, along with the awarding of the "European Capital of Culture" to Livepool due to kick off in 2008. And that's even without mentioning the links with the Beatles :-) To cut a long story short, Chris invited me to chat about Liverpool on an episode of his Podcast. Nothing to do with ScreenCastsOnline or Macs but if you'd like to know more about my home town and the amazing changes that are taking place, check out the podcast. Chris has put together a great page with direct links to the MP3 plus a cool player so you can listen directly from the page. Not only that, but he's put together a fantastic set of links for most all of the things I mention. Check out the page and the podcast here Thanks Chris!

Technorati Tags: Podcast Expo, podcasts, ScreenCastsOnline, Liverpool, Capital of Culture 2008, Albert Dock, Tourism, Beatles, Paradise Project, Mathew Street

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Shameless Self Promotion - Plug #1

Despite being the shy and retiring type, last month was pretty busy with respect to promotion for the ScreenCastsOnline service. As well as the ScobleShow (still to be published but on its way!) I was asked to do several other interviews which are now starting to appear on the web. So here's the first! I've been following Paul Colligans blog Paul Colligans blog for a few months now. Paul is a well known Internet Marketing Guru with a special interest in Podcasting as a Business and the Monetisation of Podcasts. He also has a number of Podcasts including Podcast Tools and Profitable Podcasting. When Paul switched over to the Mac, I sent him a complementary Premium Extra! membership which he accepted and found to be really helpful during the transition from Mac to PC, so much so that he also got his wife involved in using the ScreenCasts to learn iLife! We exchanged some emails and he was blown away by the business model I had put together. That resulted in a brief mention of ScreenCastsOnline in his recent book The Business Podcasting Bible. I managed to meet with Paul during the Podcast and Portable Media Expo and we had a great conversation on all things related to podcasting as a business. The result of that was Paul invited me to appear on his Profitable Podcasting podcast to talk about my experiences of setting up and transitioning ScreenCastsOnline from a hobby podcast to it being my sole source of income and supporting me and my family! The interview is about 30 minutes long and can be found here. My thanks to Paul for the exposure and the chance to appear on his podcast. PS The project I mention at the end of the interview is still in its infancy but if you want to sign up to get more details as they are available, there is a web page with some more information at http://www.buildasubscriptionpodcast.com

Technorati Tags: podcasttools, podcasthosting, Podcast Expo, Premium Podcasting, Subscription Tools, Podcast Expo 2006, Business Podcasting Bible, ScreenCasts, ScreenCastsOnline, podcast infrastructure, subscription podcast, business podcasting

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PC Pro Mag Votes Apples BootCamp as 2006 Software of the Year

Yup, the UK PC magazine PC Pro has voted Apples BootCamp as 2006 Software of the Year - Issue 148 - Feb 2007. Plus in the same issue: Apple 2Ghz Macbook reviewed and given "PC Pro Recommended" status plus Apple 24" iMac reviewed and also given "PC Pro Recommended" status Way to go Apple!

Technorati Tags: apple, switch, mac, PC

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Email Broken?

The more I use email to communicate with the ScreenCastsOnline audience, the more I realise just how powerful a medium it is! Paul Colligan blogged yesterday about his frustration with people who keep stating that email is dead...

Email marketing ain’t dead - and I’m not talking Spam - I’m talking legitimate relationships made with people who ask to be updated by email because that channel works best for them.

Email marketing ain’t dead - and I’m not talking Spam.... at Paul Colligans Blog

Despite having a podcast with reasonable audience figures, I decided to not just rely on my RSS feeds to communicate with my audience. RSS feeds are great but if the viewer stops viewing for any length of time,  iTunes will kindly stop downloading my show. If there is a problem with my feed, I have no means of communicating with the audience. As this is my livelihood, it's not a good place to be! So I started building a couple of email lists a few months ago - one for my Extra! membership and one for the free feed. These are opt-in lists - absolutely no spam and people have to confirm membership. The Extra! membership list has over 80% adoption but this is to be expected as these are my paying members and are fully engaged with ScreenCastsOnline. The list for viewers of the free show is much less but building up day on day. I treat both lists with respect and use them to add value to the overall ScreenCastsOnline experience. Only recently, I started a weekly newsletter to both lists that "follows up" each weekly show with supplementary material and additional hints and tips. It takes me a couple of hours to put together but the feedback has been tremendous. But the reason for this post was to re-emphasise Pauls point that email is certainly not broken in all cases. Only last night, I decided to throw together a quick and dirty survey for ScreenCastsOnline Extra! members to get some feedback on recent developments and looking for new ideas for the future direction of ScreenCastsOnline. I sent a link for the web based survey to the Extra! email list with a covering note. Immediately after sending the email, I made the survey live and then completed the survey myself to test it. Two or three minutes later, I'd finished the survey and logged on to check the results from the single session I'd created. My jaw nearly hit the desk when I realised in that two or three minute period, 27 people had received the email, clicked the link and completed the survey. Amazing! Now approx 8 hours later, 74% of the emails have been opened and 30% of the readers have kindly completed the survey. The results are an eye opener and I've got enough data to spend the next few days analysing the results to make ScreenCastsOnline a much better service. Yes, email can be a pain but handled correctly, is an absolutely indispensable method of communication. PS I'll be looking at setting up email lists and other mechanisms that go towards "Building a Subscription Podcast" in the new year. If you'd like a sneak peak of what I'm planning, check out http://www.buildasubscriptionpodcast.com/. This is just a marker page but guess what, you can sign up for the mailing list and I'll keep you in the loop as things progress. Technorati Tags: podcasttools, podcasthosting, Premium Podcasting, Subscription Membership, Podcast Expo 2006, Business Podcasting Bible, podcast infrastructure, subscription podcast, business podcasting

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Dons Day Out - ScobleShow Update

Well, I'm sitting on the train heading back home after my day out for the ScobleShow (I've posted this once I got home - obviously!). The journey down to the smoke was pretty uneventful and I managed to arrive at the venue in good time to meet up with Robert. I'd previously checked the MacBook Pro to make sure that all the apps were installed to give him a quick demo of screencasting. I'd also checked that an offline version of the ScreenCastsOnline website was installed as here in the UK, you can never guarantee Internet Access anywhere either fixed or Wifi. I'd previously checked I had a completed FCP project to show some of the complexity of some of the shows with the extra graphics and text overlays etc. As I had 30 minutes to spare I thought I'd triple check. Powered up the MBP and fired up FCP - no project! In my haste I'd forgotten that the project file and all the associated media files were on my firewire drive back home - doh! Ah well, I quickly created a new project and thought I'd stick with a simple version. Robert had another guy to video so I sat in the empty conference room and waited my turn - very nervous by this point. You should know that although ScreenCastsOnline has a big audience, I deliberately don't get in front of the camera so I'm not really that used to it. My turn came and I had a brief chat to Robert but he didn't want to talk too much off camera. The interview went really well, I'd relaxed a bit and things were flowing. I was hitting all the points I wanted and everything was great....until..... About 25 minutes into the interview (could have been more could have been less) Robert stops the recording as he noticed a problem with the audio. A quick check shows that audio is toast and we'd have to do it all over again. Typical! The second attempt went OK but only know I realise that there was a section I talked about in the first attempt that we didn't revisit in the retake. Ah well! Hopefully the show will be released next week and I'll post a link when its available.

Technorati Tags: ScreenCasts, ScreenCastsOnline, scoble, scobleshow

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