Welcome back listener! I’m James Reynolds and you’re listening in to Traffic Jam episode #9, this week and every week here on Traffic Jam I invite on to the show the very best internet traffic experts so that you can learn how to build and grow a profitable audience for your own website. So what do we have coming up on today’s episode? As always, we’ve got our regular segments – this week’s news in traffic, the one minute traffic tip, and the traffic jam jam which plays out the show. And as you’ll know if you’re a regular listener to Traffic Jam, the main segment of the show is a feature interview with a special guest who has a particular expertise in one particular traffic channel.

Now podcasting is the focus of today’s episode as I invite on to the show Pat Flynn from SmartPassiveIncome.com. Until now you may not have actually considered podcasting as a traffic channel in its own right but of course it is! iTunes in itself is a search engine with its own rank determining algorithm, and of course that’s not the only place you can place your podcast to get in front of a new audience, you’ve got places like Stitcher and even Soundcloud as well. Of course, I’m a big advocate of podcasting and it’s exactly why I put together TrafficJam and one of the main reasons behind doing that was to reach out to a new audience and build traffic to my own products and services so I’m especially excited to get Pat on the show because he is a very experienced podcaster with over 67, I believe at the time of recording this and approaching somewhere near 4 million downloads of his show. So let us get stuck straight in as this is another content packed episode, here we have it, podcasting with Pat Flynn.

James: My name is James Reynolds, your host; this is episode #9 and our special guest #9 joining us on the airwaves today is none other than Mr. Pat Flynn of SmarPassiveIncome.com. Pat welcome to Traffic Jam!

Pat: Hey thank you for having me I appreciate it.

James: It’s cool to have you here, I mean, you’re the expert podcaster, if I got the terminology right, and you’re really joining me on the airwaves, I don’t guess you are, are you?

Pat: Airwaves not so much but we do it on the internet by voice which is really cool as opposed to text and I think there’s just something about that that’s just amazing; just the whole power of podcasting and using your voice to get people to do stuff.

James: Well, we’re going to dive deep in to that today because that is the kind of the topic of conversation that we’re going to be podcasting. But before we do that, it’s nice to paint a bit of a picture of who you are. If I get my facts right, you’re a former architect, born in Connecticut, USA as quite a large baby I understand at 11 lbs 12 oz and you grew up liking Back to the Future; now you’ve got one of the most popular business podcasts on iTunes, I guess I’d like you to fill in the gaps a bit for me. How did you get where you are today?

 Pat: Well from 11 lbs to 160- a lot of things happened. But I guess I’ll just really quick just share my story so we can start where this all came from. I went to school for architecture, like you said I got out of school and got my great, dream job right out of school. Everything was perfect, I had proposed to my girlfriend, everything was going well, I got promoted- and then all of a sudden in mid-2008 I learned that I was going to get laid off. And that was very traumatic to me, I was on the verge of depression, I was angry, I was just disappointed at myself. I discovered on the internet there’s this podcast and on the show they had a guy named Cornelius Fichtner who was talking about how he was making a living by teaching people to pass this exam called The Project Management Exam, and that’s when the light bulb went off for me because when I was still in architecture, I was studying for a test and I built a website that would help and a couple of others study for this exam and I passed that exam and I just let that site sit there. And so when I heard that story it was a hit, maybe I can share this website with other people around the world also who are studying this exam. Little did I know, after I put in a tool on to the site just to gauge the amount of traffic I was going to get? Little did I know that for how long, thousands of people are already visiting that website that I created every single day – 4,000- 6,000 people every single day and I have no idea that’s happened; I was actually initially freaked out about it because when something is going on and you don’t know about it you’re kind of like – what happened? Apparently I have written so much good stuff about this exam, it’s called LEED exam – my website can be found at greenexamacademy.com; I’ve just written so much stuff about this for over a year that Google picked up a lot of the keywords and ranked them really high for a lot of keywords that people were typing in and people started finding the resource to share it, talk about it on blogs, forums and link me to all these good stuff and so to make the long story short, October of 2008, right at the time when I was officially going to get laid off, I published an e-book study guide for my audience there and that very first month it had made $7900.55 and it was just a $19.99 e-book. Later I raised the price and I included an audio guide to go along with it, I was just cruising, I was making $20,000 to $30,000 a month- it was just so life changing and that’s when I knew I wanted to be an entrepreneur, and that’s when I started the Smart Passive Income blog because not only was I making this good money, it was done in a way where it’s mostly animated. So I had this website, people can come to it, buy a study guide, and get it automatically delivered to them without me having to fulfill that transaction and it just changed my whole world as far as internet business was concerned. Before I always thought it was sort of a scammy industry, and here I was providing this valuable resource for people, getting paid for it and getting thanked for it on top of that, and now on smartpassiveincome.com what I do is I build businesses and I talk about the businesses that I have, everything that goes right, everything that goes wrong, things I wish I had done better in hopes of inspiring other people and sharing with other people the roadmap that I had made so that they can make a roadmap of their own. I have helped other people be able to create side incomes, full incomes and it’s just so amazing and I have this podcast as you were saying that is nearly approaching 4 million downloads now, one of the number 1 rated business podcast in iTunes and I’m just a regular guy, you know, right there next to Jim Kramer and Fast Money and MSNBC and Susie and Oprah, and then it’s like Pat Flynn! It’s just so crazy and that’s one of the cool things about Podcasting, it’s still sort of the wild, Wild West and the gold rush when it comes to podcasting, I mean there are 420 million active US blogs, there’s only 250,000 to 300,000 active podcasts so it’s still wide open and hopefully that swayed in to what you’re going to talk about next well.

James: It was perfect and it’s very interesting to listen back to your history, I can see how your path was indeed set out, listening to that podcast with someone else teaching tactics and strategies for doing stuff online and lo and behold, a few years later, it’s exactly what you are doing yourself on your own very successful podcast. It’s amazing how history repeats itself.

Pat: It’s crazy! Paying it forward is for sure what I want to do.

James: Awesome! Let’s talk about Smart Passive Income because this is kind of the focal point, you are of course extremely well known for it now, you’ve said that you’re approaching nearly 4 million downloads, you’re ranking #1 in iTunes in its category, these are real good strong indicators of kind of the level of exposure podcast has given you and your business, but I’d be very interested, kind of in order to set the scene of the discussion, to get an idea from you what business results podcasting has given you and what you can directly attribute to it? Maybe things like leads, sales, revenue – what has podcasting been able to do for you?

Pat: Sure, that’s a fantastic question and I’m going to get in to it, but it’s hard to look into it from the outside because podcasting – it’s just your voice to translate – how can you track those things like ROI and there’s a few things  I want to talk about. 1, is I actually ran a survey on my blog, not my YouTube channel, not my website, but just my blog, people reading my website, and I asked them a question, how did you first discover Pat Flynn or Smart Passive Income? That’s the only question I asked and over time I had over 7,500 people respond to the survey; the number 1 way people found out about my website was through my podcast. 19% -1 out of every 5 people discovered me now reading my blog and I have become a part of their lives as a result of finding me on iTunes or listening to my podcast. #2 was actually YouTube and #3 was links from other sites. So that is crazy, 52% of the way that people discovered me is on stuff that is outside of my own website, and the number one way again was through the podcast. So that’s great tangible results right there when it comes to that, but what does it actually mean? Well, I have started to do a lot of public speaking lately and that is another sort of byproduct of doing the podcast and getting comfortable with it. I was definitely afraid of the microphone at first and I would never have dreamed to do public speaking, and because I started the podcast and I just did it. I was scared but I just did it, and said “hey what’s the worst that can happen?” – I became more confident as a communicator and it has helped me become more confident enough to do public speaking, it has helped me communicate better with other people I do business with, also communication in my family – when I think about it I’m just a better speaker because of it, I mean it has taught me so much. Going back to where I was earlier, I go to these conferences like New Media Expo with some of the other bloggers where I am sort of a “celebrity” – I never want to call myself that, it’s sort of weird that people are coming up to you and say, “oh my god, it’s Pat Flynn!” I’ll never get over that, it’s crazy. But people come up to me, and the first thing that they say is the podcast, and it’s crazy. And there’s another interesting thing and I want to tell this story, I was at a conference and they’re having a dinner cruise and I was going out the bathroom, a woman comes up to me and she kind of gives me a funny look and I thought maybe I have toilet paper stuck at my shoes or something, but then she looks at me and asked, “are you Pat Flynn?” and I was like, yeah, yeah. I’m Pat Flynn, and she was like, “oh my gosh, I listen to your podcast, I love it so much, I listen to it every day when I go to work on my car or when I’m at the gym. I can’t get enough of it, thank you so much for podcasting.” I was like, that’s so awesome and I caught her name, her name is Michelle, and then I asked her, this is a question I ask everybody who mentioned they’ve heard my podcast, I ask what do you remember from the show? And I love that question because it’s so very general and I can get a really good idea what people remember from the show, and I’ll never forget what she said, and she said,- and you already mentioned it actually, she thought for a second and she said, well, I remember you were a big baby. At first I could not remember what she was talking about and really I was thinking she was talking about some attitude I had but she was like, “no, no in one of your episodes you talked about how you were an 11 lb. 12 oz. baby. And it’s really interesting that it was a fact that you mentioned in the beginning of the show too. What’s interesting about that is that at everything that she had listened to, and at this point I had 61 episodes I believe, and out of the all the content that she’s listened to, that was the one thing she remembered or that she pulled out first, and that is a fact that you would remember about a friend or a family member, not somebody that you’ve never met before. And here I was talking to Michelle and this was the fact that she pulled out and that just shows you the power of podcasting, the ability to build a real relationship with a person through the power of your voice. And you know, when we talk to people we use our voice and when you think about it, when people listen to your podcast, they’re plugging you in to their brain, like in to their ear. I mean that’s even more intimate than talking to people face to face. It would be weird to put your lips to someone’s ears right?  But you’re actually putting yourself in to their brain in almost complete isolation. Yeah they might be doing something else like driving, or walking or jogging or whatever, and that’s the cool thing, you don’t need to be in front of the computer in order to enter yourself in to someone else’s life through the podcast, that’s another big part of it and people can consume it anywhere and you can imagine how many people drive to work every day, how many people go for walks or go to the gym- more people are listening to podcasts and companies like Ford and BMW, they’re integrating podcasts in to their cars soon, and at social media marketing world, which is where I did this thing they mentioned that podcasting was the hottest trend in social media in 2013 which is really interesting. But going back to the power of podcasting, you’re speaking in to people’s ears and you have the power to build a relationship just like Michelle did with me and I have not been able to meet her yet, but you’re able to do that on a scalable level so to each person who is listening to you may seem one on one but you’re able to reach many people at the same time, and when you speak about speaking for instance in front of a crowd of people in a conference, and that’s cool you get to present one time and speak to 200 different people. Now imagine doing that, but to thousands anywhere in the world, you don’t need to put a conference to put your message in front of people and I did this really cool presentation at a demonstration and I asked people, how long does it take you to read a tweet? And they’d be like, 8 seconds, and I ask the next person, how long does it take you to read a blog post? And someone would mention 5 minutes average. And then I asked people to raise their hands if they’ve listened to a podcast longer than 8 seconds, and 90% of the room raised their hand. And then I said, how about longer than 5 minutes, everybody kept their hand up, 10 minutes, everybody kept their hand up, 30 minutes, everybody kept their hand up, maybe a couple of people put their hands down, I said an hour, maybe 4 or 5 hands went down. An hour of your time, your message, your brand in to people’s lives is huge in a world where we are fighting for attention these days, we’re tweeting for people’s attention. Imagine putting an hour of your message in to people’s lives, it’s absolutely huge.

James: Well to put that in to context, you said you are approaching 4 million downloads, let’s just say hypothetically that it’s an average of maybe people listening to you for half an hour at a time, I mean that is a serious number of one on one hours, as you said, I don’t know how you can do that today in any other medium.

Pat: Yeah, it’s crazy, I remember when I got to 1 million or 2 million and I calculated the actual man hours of listening and I think it was a 174 years of consecutive listening time. I mean that number means nothing but it just shows you how much time people spend listening in to the stuff.

James: Yeah, if you were to summarize your purpose to podcasting, are you using it as a sort of medium or channel, perhaps to sell some sort of product or service or monetize something else, are you looking to use podcasting to sort of deepen relationships with your existing customer base, what’s the kind of main focus for you?

Pat: Yes. You can use podcasting for a many reasons and for me I use it for all that stuff- mainly for building relationships but obviously it’s been a great way to reach out and finding people to get to know my brand. Again, one of every five people who discovered my discovered me through my podcast and so it’s about discoverability and getting people to find me, but then it’s also about stickability, getting them to find me but also listen to me and resonate with what I have to say and want more and then it’s also about sharing or the ability to share, and you can do that on podcasts. When people listen to you for an hour or even 30 minutes, you have permission to do something for you, to take some sort of action, whether it’s share or buy something if you were to pitch it nicely, or obviously if it offers value to them, and that’s the beauty of it. You have permission to ask people to do something, to take a call to action, they’re not called leads anymore and you have actually a call to action, and you’re not going to get the negative feedback that you are to get if you are doing something like cold calling people. You’re providing value for x number of minutes and then you’re pitching something. I don’t pitch that often myself, I like to use the podcast as a way to bring people back to the website and I do that favorably getting people to understand that the show notes that I do on each of the episode is really important – they contain the links, the resources and other important things that are related to that episode which gets people back to my website and it’s on my website where I recommend products and services and affiliate commission from them or get people to download my book or things like that.

James: Got it, got it. Cool! And have you been able to directly track those conversions to podcasting, have you been really able to define down its strength and quality as traffic channel down to the point of conversion- it this achieved or is it not possible?

Pat: It’s somewhat possible if you are to create a special link with a tracking ID that may be redirected to a URL that you created, I mean for example I have a number of easy URLs that I’ve created which I sort of consider as wormholes, they are actually domains that I purchased which are easy to memorize and type in and it just redirects them to a certain page – be a landing page or sales page or something that would normally have a really long URL so it forwards to that long domain. So I have for instance, if you got to ebookstosmartway.com, it redirects people to my page where they sign up and they get that book for free; or I have keywordresearchwebinar.com or patsfirstbook.com or things like that. So that’s a really cool strategy for podcasting or even video to have these really easy URLs for people to direct traffic to and you can put tracking code on to those things and see how many people are going through, you can create campaigns out of that and to see how many people exactly are going through those links actually convert.

James: Alright, you clearly love podcasting, you’ve been doing that for some time now, you’re probably what, 70 episodes in to smart passive income podcast, thereabouts?

Pat: Yeah absolutely, #70 is coming later this week, it’s on its way. There is a guy named Cliff Ravesncraft, which is where I learned podcasting from, he’s done over 2,000 episodes in 6 or 7 different shows. He got his start actually by doing a podcast for the show Lost – it was a fan podcasting, he had tens of thousands of subscribers and they connected with him so well on that podcast that he was able to throw a sort of farewell party for Lost when it was the very final episode and had people fly in to see him and watch the sort of finale with him and watch, that’ the sort of connection that people have with people through the podcast.

James: It’s obviously working for you also, and this might give our listeners an option on how you answer these questions but I’m interested to get your take on how big an opportunity podcasting is right now because you said people are calling it the next big wave and opportunity, but it has been around some time, are we still in the infancy of podcasting, is there still plenty of opportunity there or is it starting to get saturated?

Pat: I think it’s in the toddler stage where this toddler is starting to get really active and crazy; it’s been around for years, 2005 and even before that, but it’s initially a geeky and techy type of thing and now it’s just starting to go mainstream and they’re just starting to be – there are tutorials out there for easier ways to start a podcast, before you would have to understand all those techy stuff and hack your way in to it, but now it’s becoming so easy that anybody can do it and the people who are doing it are getting featured in iTunes because there’s just not that many other people doing it right now. They’re getting featured in new and noteworthy, they are getting a lot of new eyes on their brand, a lot of people have just recently started, there’s a guy named John Lee Dumas who has a show called Entrepreneur on Fire, he started last October, he’s already getting 2,000 downloads every month. He is doing a daily show which is crazy, he must have good systems going on because it just takes a little bit of stuff to edit and there’s people that help do that for him. So might have people do that for you too, to edit then post and do things like that but he’s already seeing a ton of listens and downloads, he now has sponsors to sponsor the show and he’s also making money from that and then some product too.

James: Got it, now I’m going to ask you how to set up a podcast, because there are plenty of resources out there that teach that and even you might have one which you might want to plug at this stage, you’ve got a little mini course I believe?

Pat: Yeah, it’s free, it’s absolutely free, no email required – it’s already helped tons of people start their own podcast, you can go to podcastingtutorial.com,  and it will redirect you, just like I taught you earlier, to a page on smartpassiveincome.com which will show you six different videos, step by step how to do it, I believe it’s the best resource out there and it’s something I wish was around when I first started.

James: OK, cool, that will be positioned in the show notes beneath this recording which I guess we’ll talk about in a moment, we’ll talk about show notes. But what I’d like to talk to you about now is your three keys to becoming successful at podcasting and you’ve touched upon them a little bit already- that’s discoverability, stick-ability, and share-ability. If it’s cool with you Pat, let’s tackle each one by one.

Pat: Sure, discoverability is the ability for your podcast to be discovered, and there are certain things you can do within iTunes for your podcast in general to make it stand out and to make people find it. What people don’t realize it and don’t think about is that iTunes is actually a search engine. Apple’s a little bit more discrete with things about the algorithm but it is a search engine, and if you go in to iTunes right now and type in blogging you’re actually going to see my podcast is number 1, if you type in online business, it’s going to be number 1 or number 2. So there are opportunities there to put yourself in front of people who are searching for you already but just don’t happen to be there yet. So it’s very important that you think about it like that, that it’s a search engine and people are looking for you, they just have not found you yet and using iTunes is a great way for you to put yourself in front of them, and also the mobile apps for podcasting, it’s just one sign that podcasting is growing. Apple initially created the podcasting mobile app in iTunes, they built their own app and that just recently came out several months ago and so that’s a good sign, they know that something’s going on with podcasting enough to create their own apps. And in that app there’s a big, huge search bar at the top where people could search for stuff so again, that’s a really important thing. Another important thing, when you’re thinking about SEO, you want to make sure that you have keyword rich titles, keyword rich description and also you can have keyword rich hostname, so my hostname for example is Pat Flynn Collin: Online Entrepreneur and Business Blogger, so that allows me to potentially rank for keywords as well. You obviously want to write for humans, you don’t want it to keyword stuff but it doesn’t sound attractive at all, you want to combine search engine optimization strategies with the description and the title and the host name that you have here on iTunes. There’s other thing like rankings when it comes to search engine optimization as well, discoverability, when you first create a podcast, when you have good artwork, that’s another key thing for discoverability, it’s having good artwork, something eye catchy but also looks good a smaller resolution. Again, people are searching and finding these podcasts to their phone and before anyone listens to anything you have to say, they’re going to look and see the artwork that you have created for your show, so make sure that they are really good, and that they’re clean, and you can type in some of the keywords that go in to the category before you even create your own podcast that you are going to go in to and see sort of what stands out to you and what stands out to you or maybe what you might be able to do differently to stand out which is a good tip. There’s also sort of how Amazon has the whole people who bought this also bought this type of algorithm where you see across items. iTunes has that as well for shows so one good thing to do if you want to get in front of other big brands is to mention those brands or those podcasts on your show, get your listeners to listen to them, what happens is that it cross references both your podcast and theirs and you’ll actually show up on that popular podcast’s related list and that’s another cool trick that you can use when it comes to discoverability and the rankings again, it’s not known exactly how they work but generally speaking, people have noticed that the more downloads you get, the more listens you get, the more ratings you get within a short period of time, the higher you’re going to climb. So I’ve always noticed that when I come up with a new episode, I’ll typically get to number 1 and number and 2 in marketing and management. And then over time if I don’t get another episode or a day or two before, I’m typically in 5 or 6 and then when I come up with a new episode I go back up. The more consistent you are and the more you push people and you can ask people to do things at the end of your show, to subscribe if they have not already, to leave a review or rankings on iTunes because the rankings are a proof if your show is actually worth listening to or not.

James: Got it, cool, I guess we’ll talk about how to encourage reviews and downloads in moment but I’m just going to review a set of action steps that you’ve just told us there, we’ve got keywords, we want to make sure that the podcast title and the description is rich with the keywords on a rank for but not stuffing. We’ve got artwork, and we’ve got cross promoting- to try and talk about other podcasts so that hopefully they’ll reciprocate in the also like or what they say, also liked or also downloaded, listened?

Pat: Related- they call it related but it’s sort of the same with what you just mentioned. But just mentioning other podcast and sending them an email and say hey, I love your show I mentioned you in my show here. More often than not, you’re going to get some reciprocation in one way or another.

James: Well, we’ll send a message over to John Lee Dumas, make sure we know that we just plugged him. There you go.

Pat: I almost guarantee to you he will tweet it.

James: Awesome, that’s discoverability, next is stickability, and just walk us through that one Pat.

Pat: Sure, stickability is the ability of your podcast to keep people around and it’s obviously very important to be found, a lot of people find things all the time and forget about them. You want to be remembered. That’s why you call it discovered, because it’s more than just being found you want to be discovered by people who want to keep you around. A couple of parts to this that I want to talk about, the first thing is first impressions, the first impression people have the first time people listen to you or even your artwork is very important, obviously you have to have great sound quality, if you have the best content in the world and your sound quality is terrible, a lot of people aren’t going to listen to you, because a lot people are going to be listening to you hopefully for a very long time and if it’s not pleasing to the ear, it does not mean that you have to worry about your voice, just the quality of the sound. If there’s a lot of crackling, or it gets to the red area of the little meter all the time, you don’t want to happen. You want to have great sound quality. We also want to make sure that the information that you share is relevant to what they’re looking for. So it’s really key right away to share what you’re going to talk about so that people understand this is something I have to download to listen to or something I don’t want to miss. Another thing, and this is what bothered me at first when I started discovering podcasts in 2008. A lot of people were fluffing around. They were talking about all these stuff that did not matter. They would talk for 1o minutes about breakfast they had the other day in this really cool restaurant, which is pretty cool, which had nothing to do with financial planning which is one of the podcasts I was listening to. It’s okay to talk about a little about the personality side, that’s actually the 4^th key in first impressions so you want to inject your personality a little bit but you don’t want to do it so much or just talk about stuff that does not matter. You want to inject your personality in to stuff that’s relevant to what people want to listen to, the next thing is you want to have valuable content and one of the first things that you have to remember is, this show, although it’s by you, it’s not about you. It’s about your audience; what’s in it for them. Always keep that in the back of your mind. You always have to make the content special. A lot of people come out to me and say hey can I take audio from my YouTube channel and just repurpose it in to podcasts? Yeah, you can do that and you might get more ears on your brand by doing that but you’re missing out a lot of opportunity to provide content on this really powerful medium if you just do that. I would definitely create content especially for the podcast. Interviews are great for that. Actionable content that’s also something that’s very good. Something with great results too, that’s the key, not just being able to take action based on what you educate them on or what you share but also giving them something that they can get immediate results from, that’s a good  trick that I learned from Derek Halpern of SocialTriggers.com. you can get people to do really quickly and actually ask them to do it in the podcast if you see results right away, they’re going to stick around. They’re going to say, wow! That worked. I want more! So instant results are good; another thing for stickability is social proof. The ratings and reviews are very important but another thing you can do that would actually get people involved. You can have people voicemail their questions and and there’s a tool called Speakpipe.com where you can set up a voicemail thing and it’s awesome, you get to share a special page where they can go to, they can record right from their computer a question that gets sent to you, you can pop that right in to your podcast, and what that does is that even though you’re not able to connect with everybody who’s listening to the show, you’re able to connect with one person but everybody is listening to you connect with that one person. It’s going to make you seem more real, it’s going to get people interested, and a nice way to break up some of the content in the show so it’s not so monotonous, so you’re hearing from somebody else who has a question that potentially will have that same question too. And also another thing for social proof as far as stickability is concerned; sharing your achievements, that’s why I always share my download numbers because I know they are pretty impressive and that gets people to understand that my show is worth listening to, I also share – I think I just passed 850 5-star ratings in iTunes, that’s another big one. Once you get to start those ratings, and it might be smart just in the beginning to call out some of the people who have left really good ratings for you or reviews and just to share them really quick, what’s cool is those is that those people will be pretty stoked about it and they might share your podcast as a result of being on it and a lot of other people will be like oh, wow maybe it’s my time to leave a review, I might get on the show wow that’s really nice of that person I’m going to and he’s right I’m going to leave my review too. So those are some important things for social proof. The last part as far as stickability is tactics you can use while you’re speaking, while you’re doing your show to keep people engaged. The last thing you want to do is have people fall asleep. And so you want to keep people engaged, and listening and entertained and it does not mean you have to have music all the time, and be silly and crack jokes all the time although that may help you and that depends on you of course, there are certain things you can do while you’re speaking, and one of the best tactics you can use, if you’re trying to prove an important point, this is probably the best thing you can do, the thing you want to do is Pause, like I did there. What it does, even just for one or two second pause is going to get people to think what’s he going to say next? And they’re never going to forget that. So you’re never going to forget now that pausing, just a little bit, right before when you are about to say something important, is a great way to make sure people listen to what you are about to say. Another cool thing to do is to is to repeat yourself. That’s another way to show that whatever you just said is really important. That’s a tactic that I remember from high school I think. Every time I would hear somebody like one of my teacher say something twice, I knew that it was definitely a note that I had to take in that potentially could be on the test. Another thing that’s cool and unique to podcasting is the ability to have a wide range of dynamics in your show. So at certain moments when you get excited, it’s good to be excited. And to share, speak a little bit louder. And if something is really personal, or really important then it’s cool to whisper a little bit because that gets people to understand a different feeling, right? And so you can utilize dynamics during your show and also transitions. If you have a rather long show, it’s good to break it up just like a blog post right? You want to break it up in to little chunks so it’s scan able and yeah it’s audio but it’s more listen-able and if it’s sort of broken up and people can sort of reset in between these segments. So that’s stick-ability.

James: Got it, okay cool. Well, I’m going to reinforce one of your points there by repeating by what you said earlier about reviews and I know that the comments that I’ve received from people that I’ve read out on the show for leaving an iTunes review or comment on the site has been has been so well appreciated they say hey James, I just heard my name read out on the podcast, thanks so much for mentioning me. I think it kind of brings them inside the show, and for us that has been extremely effective.

Pat: Awesome.

James: Ace, well we move on to the third category and that’s share-ability; so I guess this is getting your podcast read even further by your audience but you’ll explain better than me Pat, so dive in, what’s share-ability all about?

Pat: Yeah, well it’s exactly what it is, how primed is your podcast to be shared by those listening to it, and there’s some obvious things that you can do which is just create something more sharing whether that’s something either controversial or that’s something that you’re in to or something that’s sort of epic. Just create something epic and something that nobody’s ever done before. Something noteworthy and that does not necessarily mean you spend hours in to it, just create something epic, and for me a great example is episode 51 when I had Tim Ferris on the show. Having him as a guest was epic in itself but the way that I conducted the interview and I did a lot of research before that interview because he was promoting the book called the 4 Hour Chef which is why he agreed to do a bunch of podcasts and interviews, so I listened to all of them, or most that I could and I started to see what questions most people are asking and I made sure to ask completely different questions. And as a result of that, a lot of people listening are like hey this is a different interview than all the other ones I’ve heard and would share it, and so that’s what’s something worth sharing. And whatever that is for your particular brand or niche, you would know that better than me so create something that is worth sharing and a good sign of what that may be is what are people asking you about all the time, create a podcast episode about that. That is something that is going to be shared. Also create something that is incredibly to share. One thing I like to do which I actually learned from Michael Stelzner from SocialMediaExaminer.com is that at the end of his podcast, he says, if you really enjoyed the show, I really want you to go to socialmediaexaminer.com/love and share your love for the show there. And so if you go to the site, it actually takes you to a page where there’s a prepopulated Tweet that has a specific hash tag and also a link back to the podcast saying something like “thank @michaelstelzner I loved the podcast…” and then a link to the show or whatever you want in there. And it’s just so awesome! You get so much viral quality out of that particular strategy and that’s something that I have not done on my podcast yet but I do that live whenever I speak live, if you go to Patislive.com it does the same thing and I’ll get hundreds of tweets from people in the room and it’s just really cool! And so the method for doing that is there’s actually a few steps here; the first one is you want to go to bit.ly and there you can shorten any link that you want to a really tiny 12 character link that you want; that is a bit.ly link and you’ve probably seen that before. And what that does is that it shortens the big links in to small ones so that you can fit more stuff in to the next step which is at clicktotweet.com, so what you do at this site is you create that prepopulated tweet that you want and you enter that link in there, put in any hash tags that you want, any @replies to your name or anybody else’s name that you want to capture, and what you do is click generate link and then it spits out a link, and when you go to that link that’s that prepopulated tweet page, it just makes it really easy to share. You can take that one step further if you want to, the way Michael did and how he got it to be his domain/love. He used the WordPress plugin called Pretty Link so you can put that click to tweet generated link in to pretty link as the target URL and then you can customize any sort of link that goes after your root domain names, so for me it might be like smartpassiveincome.com/awesome or whatever, you can be whatever you want as long as it has not been used before and that really good tip to get people to sort of share your stuff, also, you can use that similar that which is similar specific pages, you can also use landing pages, or your show notes or anything that you might be selling. I think I have 8 different domains that I am paying for that to redirect to someplace to my site, or someplace off my site that’s really important and that’s a really cool strategy that you can use and that’s generally what share-ability is.

James: Yeah and I guess that would be kind of like creating what would previously be described as the radio domain, that easy to pronounce and understand domain that you’d say across the airwaves, but in this case of course, it’s a podcast domain. But good tips Pat, love it. Cool, thank you for helping us create something so epic, there you go, picking up on something you just said there, we’ve gone for a long time, I think we should get close to wrapping up, but not before we find out what’s next on your agenda, I know you’ve got a few things in the working and a project that’s just recently come out, what does 2013 look like from here on for you?

Pat: There’s lots of stuff happening, I just released a book called, Let Go, which is my story and is released in a new platform called Snip it up in iOS which was recently released and reformulated for Amazon and when it went to Amazon this book went to number 1 in small business and entrepreneurship so I am very proud to say that in 2013 I am now a bestselling author which is really awesome and there’s more books coming in the future potentially a traditionally published book which is always a goal of mine, it has always been a goal of mine to take my kids to a bookstore and show them daddy’s book on the bookshelf. I’ve always wanted to do that, and I have a couple of online courses coming out, they have been a high demand from me for years now and I’m at a point now where I have the ability and I feel like I should be doing these to help people even more than I am now and then just more speaking – I have my first Kino Presentation in October at the financial blogger’s conference in St Louis, and my second Kino a month later in Arizona at another conference- just amazing things happening. Getting paid for speaking out is just awesome and again, this is somebody who is definitely afraid of the microphone, let along getting in front of a crowd before, and yeah, that’s really the big lesson here. A lot of people will fear podcasting when they get in to it but for me whenever that fear shows up it’s actually a good sign now. I know that it’s a sign that whatever it is that I am about to do is something worth doing.

James: Yeah, it’s definitely proven today how leveraged podcasting can be and the level of audience you can reach through it so you’re a testament to that Pat. I’m going to make sure all of those links are placed in the show notes beneath this recording and I’m going to give a call to action now which you said is a good tip, go and check Pat out at SmartPassiveIncome.com. I suggest you subscribe on iTunes and if you’ve enjoyed his show, also leave him a review, he’d welcome that very much, so Pat, thanks for joining us today and I look forward to joining you again soon.

Pat: Thank you for having me, I really appreciate it!

This week’s news in traffic; rarely does a week go by where there’s no news coming out of Google and this week is no different. In the past seven days they’ve landed themselves in a spot of bother with the federal trade commission who’ve opened up a new case against investigating whether the search giant abuses its market leading position to curb competition in display advertising. They’ve also been receiving some criticism in the UK Press over alleged tax avoidance. But the big news for us marketers is the release of version 2.0 of the Google Penguin ranking algorithm. This is the much anticipated release supported by the announcement from Matt Cutts recently who said that Google Penguin 2.0 would go much deeper than its previous incarnation. The truth is, the roll out of Penguin on Wednesday, the 22^nd of May, passed without too much of a halo baloo. Whilst a large amount of the search results have been affected, most hard hitting being the real estate and retail sectors, the results only affected 2.4% of search queries comparative to version 1 of search engine affecting 3.1% of queries. I have a full report of Penguin 2.0 over at SEOSherpa.com/news where I reveal the findings of the very interesting case study of SEO Sherpa which received an immediate 27% growth in search results impressions for the few days following Penguin 2.0’s release.

Google’s rival Yahoo has also been in the news this week as they acquired Tumblr for $1.1 Billion. The Yahoo – Tumblr deal is being described by the CEO of Buzz Feed as representing a shift in media. He said social is no longer a niche method of consuming content. It’s now the dominant way people discover information online.

Twitter, they have been on the news as well. They’ve been out with some new program for TV advertising and promoted tweets using video fingerprinting technology. This is a pilot program available to just a few where digital marketers can see real time when their spots air and what resulting tweet activity occurs about either their brand or their TV show, then at least in theory, they can then target more intelligently Twitter users with promoted tweets based on who tweeted about the commercial or show. For a link to these stories in full visit TrafficJamCast.com and check out the show notes.

Thank you to Nick Elison and Charles Kirkland who’s passed on very nice comments this week saying how much they are enjoying the show, thank you guys! Comments and reviews are always welcome and I’d always love to hear from you so please be reminded you can do that in one of three ways – you can leave a comment over at TrafficJamCast.com in the normal comment section, you can send a voicemail message via the SpeakPipe voicemail function on the site if you really want to get your voice heard on the show or even better still, head on over to iTunes and leave us a review.

The one minute traffic tip: Now this week’s tip is simply this; match your traffic source to your landing page to increase conversions. Match your traffic source to your most relevant landing page to increase conversions. Now what to do I mean by this? The more relevant the page you send people is to where your visitors came from, the more effective that traffic will be for you. For instance, if you have an ad that talks about how to improve your Spanish, send that traffic to page in your site that talks specifically about Spanish Language classes as opposed to a page that talks about learning a language. It will be more relevant to your visitor and thus more likely to convert. In another scenario, if you are advertising on Facebook and want to send that traffic off Facebook to your own website, you may want to make that page blue and white in the same color scheme as Facebook therefore ensuring your visitors feel comfortable when they first visit the page.

On a third scenario, if you are promoting a product on your website, you should probably consider sending your past customers to a different page than your new prospects. Your past customers already know about you so may just be interested in the product itself whereas your new prospect may want to know more about you and the product- so different pages will be relevant. So my tip is this, consider where your traffic came from before they arrived at your website and ensure that traffic is directed to the most relevant page for them.

So that’s a wrap on another episode of Traffic Jam, of course we’ll be doing it all again real soon with another expert interview and the latest traffic tips and news. If you’ve enjoyed this episode log in to iTunes and leave us a review. We’ll probably give you a little shout out.

At the time of releasing this podcast we’re just heading on to the summer month of June so what better tune to play out the show than Seven Days in Sunny June by Jumeraquai. I’ll be back in 7 days from now. See you then!