Starting or Restarting Your Web Site or Blog — New Media Tips #44

Over the last several weeks I have been consulting with clients who — perhaps as part of the typical New Year’s Resolution — called me in to help them start their website or blog. In most cases, they’ve had a website or blog for a long time, bit they’ve never really gotten the hang of using it to its best advantage. I would love to say this uncommon, but many of my clients are in just such a situation.

If you want to be part of the online world, and use it to your advantage, it does take time and energy. It doesn’t just do itself. Sure, you could hire someone to do it for you, but I have found that the best blogs and websites are curated by their owners. In some ways, they resemble your favorite little boutique — filled with little knick knacks that perfectly reflect the owners.  Sure, you could hire someone to do it for you, but I have found that the best blogs and websites are curated by their owners. In some ways, they resemble your favorite little boutique — filled with little knick knacks that perfectly reflect the owner’s interests and personalities.

Sure, you could hire someone to do it for you, but I have found that the best blogs and websites are curated by their owners. In some ways, they resemble your favorite little boutique — filled with little knick knacks that perfectly reflect the owner’s interests and personalities. Even more, I think the act of curating your own blog helps to develop a sense of why you should blog more often and how to develop more content for your blog.

Where to start?

Using my clients as an example, here are a few places to start when you want to get blogging again.

First, locate and notate all your login IDs and passwords. Time clouds our memories, so it may be necessary to reset passwords using the usual “Forgot Your Password” links on the various sites. If you can’t remember your password within a few attempts, simply reset it and choose a new password.

Once you have a new password, consider using a password service like Lastpass.com to store your passwords. You don’t want to have to go searching for login information — or change your password again in the future.

In most cases, here are some basic passwords you will need to get re-started:

  • Web Site Hosting (could be Dreamhost.com, GoDaddy.com, Bluehost.com or others)

This login information allows you to access the settings for your web hosting service, domain name and, in some cases, email addresses.

  • Blogging Software (could be WordPress.com, a locally installed version of WordPress, Blogger, Tumblr.com or others

This allows you to log into your blog, edit past posts, add new posts, upload photos, etc.

  • FTP (File Transfer Protocol)

FTP is a service which allows you to upload or download files from your website — operating much like copying files on your own computer. This allows you to upload photos, audio, video or PDF files. This is especially important if you want to share media files for podcasts, as they have to located on a web server before they an be shared as part of a blog post.

Usually, these three couplets of information are enough to allow you to get back to work. If you need further assistance, you may need to contact your service providers. It really isn’t that difficult to reset your password and such and get everything you need to get you blogging again.

Next Time: Figuring out what you want to share on your blog


Need more help? Add a comment using the “Leave a Comment” link below, contact me on New Media Interchange on Facebook or email at douglas@welchwrite.com

 

Video: New Media 101: Perfect is good. Done is better! from The What, Why and How of Blogging with Douglas E. Welch

Part of the New Media 101/Blogging 101 series…

A quick clip from this 45 minute presentation — The Why, What and How of Blogging.

Watch the entire presentation

New Media 101: Perfect is good. Done is better! from The What, Why and How of Blogging with Douglas E. Welch

 

Transcript:

What I will say, though, and I have to deal with this with podcasters and video a lot, is that the “P” word comes up — Perfection. They want it to be perfect before it ever sees the light of day. it will never be perfect. We all know, perfect does not exist. It is a great goal. It is a great brass ring out there that we constantly keep grabbing for. We are never going to get there. And unfortunately, what happens is, in reaching for that brass ring all the time, they never do anything. They totally abandon all the benefits they might get from all forms of new media — whether its blogging or podcasting, whatever — waiting for perfection. And I always say — I have a theater degree, that’s the degree I graduated college with. I worked in the costume shop as part of my theater degree. And we had a costume designer who was very fond of saying, “Perfect is good. Done is better! The actor has to go on stage wearing something. So if that stitch isn’t quite right, you know what? We’ll pin it. They have to go out there now.” That is something I took to heart back in the early 80’s when I was in college. Yeah, perfection is something we reach for, knowing we’ll never get there, but up until the point — we search for perfection up until the point where it prevents us from actually doing something. So, that is the balance you have to strike. You have to find that balance of “it’s not perfect, but it’s good enough. It presents my ideas clearly enough and to just try to avoid the analysis paralysis of “it’s not good enough. It’s not good enough,” and work around that because that is a very common problem that we run into.


 Enjoy this video? Consider a donation via PayPal to support further new media demos, talks, videos, and podcasts.


Previously on New Media 101/Blogging 101:

More information on Douglas E. Welch and Careers in New Media:

Video: New Media 101: Blogs as a place for your stuff from The What, Why and How of Blogging with Douglas E. Welch

Part of the New Media 101/Blogging 101 series…

A quick clip from this 45 minute presentation — The Why, What and How of Blogging.

Watch the entire presentation

Video: New Media 101: Blogs as a place for your stuff from The What, Why and How of Blogging with Douglas E. Welch

Transcript:

The other thing you can do with blogging, too, is blogs give you — is anyone familiar with George Carlin — they give you “a place for your stuff.” Too often, with our web sites, it’s like “Oh, I want to put up these photos but I have to figure out how to a make a gallery page and I’ve got to format all the pictures and …” Now, you don’t. With a blog, a blog gives you a ready-made place — and by typing to other services on the Internet like Flickr for photo sharing, and YouTube for video sharing, whatever — you suddenly now have the ability to put something up on YouTube — a little short video you took. You take that little embed code that they give you. How many people have seen the embed code there? You hop over to your blog and go, paste. Publish. That video is now on your web site. It’s now on your blog and everybody can read it. It’s not that hard. This is what I try to reinforce with people all the time. It’s not that difficult. It’s not that hard and I hope that if you dive into this, I hope that you will see that, by using these others services. The Internet world has become so much simpler over the last even 5 years compared to what we had to face early on of — I mentioned ftp and command lines — Oh, I need to upload this so ftp (space) login and ok — it was, if not difficult, it was cumbersome. Nowadays, especially with the advent of blogs, it is so much easier, because all these sites exist. YouTube and Flickr and Picasa and other sites that simply say, “Oh, ok, you sent your content up to us, that’s great. Where do you want to use that?” I want to us it there and I want to use it here and I want to use it here and I want to use it on Facebook and…you can put it everywhere from that one source.


 Enjoy this video? Consider a donation via PayPal to support further new media demos, talks, videos, and podcasts.

 

 


Previously on New Media 101/Blogging 101:

More information on Douglas E. Welch and Careers in New Media:

Video: New Media 101: Effective Reblogging from The What, Why and How of Blogging with Douglas E. Welch

Part of the New Media 101/Blogging 101 series…

A quick clip from this 45 minute presentation — The Why, What and How of Blogging.

Watch the entire presentation

New Media 101: Effective Reblogging from from The What, Why and How of Blogging with Douglas E. Welch

 

Transcript:

The other thing that is great about blogs — you should be reading other blogs as well, which a lot of you probably are, whether you realize you’re reading a blog or not, you probably are. One of the great things you can do is, what we call, reblog and that doesn’t simply putting that blog post on your blog and saying, “Hey, isn’t this net!” I don’t care necessarily about that blog post you’re putting up there. Yes, the information is interesting — the reason you put it on your blog is to give me your take on that information — taking a news story of the day and giving me your, unique thoughts and ideas about that topic. If you look at my blog, you’ll often see I do tend to reblog fairly frequently, but I try to my darndest to make sure I have a good paragraph up top that explains my thoughts about why this was important and interesting to me and what my thoughts are about that particular topic. Why it caught my eye and why I put it in my blog to share with all my readers. 


 Enjoy this video? Consider a donation via PayPal to support further new media demos, talks, videos, and podcasts.


Previously on New Media 101/Blogging 101:

More information on Douglas E. Welch and Careers in New Media:

Noted: Next Time You Offer Advice, Turn It into a Blog or Podcast via Lifehacker

Exactly what I recommend to everyone, too! – Douglas

Next Time You Offer Advice, Turn It into a Blog or Podcast via Lifehacker

Next Time You Offer Advice, Turn It into a Blog or Podcast via Lifehacker

Those of us more experienced in life sometimes get asked by colleagues to be a mentor and give them some advice. Instead of giving the same answer over again, consider turning it into a podcast or blog post and sharing it with others.

Read More


“Noted” items are particularly good finds from my daily reading which I share via all my social media accounts.

Find more Noted items here

Video: New Media 101: Capturing the Content You Already Have from from The What, Why and How of Blogging with Douglas E. Welch

Part of the New Media 101/Blogging 101 series…

A quick clip from this 45 minute presentation — The Why, What and How of Blogging.

Watch the entire presentation

Transcript:

A lot of the pushback I get on blogging from people is “It’s too much work. I can’t add all that work. Oh my god, I’ve got to update every day. I can’t do that. That’s too much extra work” And I tell them, it isn’t extra work. Your goal is to simply capture what you are already doing. The fact is, each and every one of us creates content every single hour of every single day. The trouble is, for most of that content, we throw it away. We don’t capture it. We dont’ sit down and write a 4, 5 sentence paragraph of “Wow. I had this problem and this is how I solved it” — and post that to the blog. It just evaporates. This is why people think, “Oh gosh, it’s so much extra work. I have to sit down and look at the blank page and write.” Which is probably secondary to standing up in front of people as one of the biggest fears that a lot of people have. “What do you mean I’ve go to write? I’ve got to write a paragraph. Oh my god, I can’t do that.” The fact is you’re already doing it. What you need to do is capture it. And that means, capturing a 4 to 5 to 6 sentence paragraph of how you solved a particular problem you were faced with today. How you addressed a particular issue for a client.


 Enjoy this video? Consider a donation via PayPal to support further new media demos, talks, videos, and podcasts.


 

Previously on New Media 101/Blogging 101:

More information on Douglas E. Welch and Careers in New Media:

Video: New Media 101: Gain permission to enter people’s lives from The What, Why and How of Blogging with Douglas E. Welch

Part of the New Media 101/Blogging 101 series…

A quick clip from this 45 minute presentation — The Why, What and How of Blogging.

Watch the entire presentation

New Media 101: Gain permission to enter people's lives from The What, Why and How of Blogging with Douglas E. Welch

Transcript:

Your goal in having a blog, in having a podcast, in having a web site, is to gain people’s permission to speak to them on a regular basis. This does not mean spamming them and hoping they read your message. This is getting their permission. One of the adjuncts of a blog is — there is this thing called an RSS feed. Have people heard of RSS feeds? it’s basically a machine-readable version of your web site — of your blog that automatically gets updated that people can then subscribe to in an RSS reader. It sort of looks like an email program. It’s an RSS reader that can then tell them whenever you publish something new. They don’t have to come to your web site saying, “Is there new information? Is there new information? Is there new information?” It comes to them. What that means is, that’s one way for them to give you their permission to you for you to come into their life whenever you have anything interesting to say. Which I always add on, please make sure you have something interesting to say. That’s actually less of a criteria — less of a stumbling block — than you might think.

 

Previously on New Media 101/Blogging 101:

More information on Douglas E. Welch and Careers in New Media:

Video: New Media 101: What do you blog about? from The Why, What and How of Blogging with Douglas E. Welch

Part of the New Media 101/Blogging 101 series…

A quick clip from this 45 minute presentation — The Why, What and How of Blogging.

Watch the entire presentation

 

Transcript:

What do you blog? It sounds ridiculous. It sounds a little silly, but the fact is — everything. By that I mean, everything that means something to your clients. First of all, one of the craziest rules about the Internet, which goes totally against modern mainstream mass media is — you actually no idea who your audience is. You can’t say — you may say, “Aw, I’m going to target males 25 to 35 with this much income.” It doesn’t really matter, because these days, outside of mass media, your audience had to find you — going back to the search engines again. It’s your job to put stuff out there so that people can stumble upon you. There’s actually a web site called StumbleUpon you might played around with a little bit. It is by putting your information out there that you allow people to stumble upon you. You want to get your message out there so that when people are searching on accounting, up you pop. When they’re talking to a friend, their friend will say “Oh here’s a great web site I found about that and pass that along. 

 

Previously on New Media 101/Blogging 101:

More information on Douglas E. Welch and Careers in New Media:

Video: New Media 101: Where should you “advertise”? from “The What, Why and How of Blogging” with Douglas E. Welch

Part of the New Media 101/Blogging 101 series…

A quick clip from this 45 minute presentation — The Why, What and How of Blogging.

Watch the entire presentation

Video: New Media 101: Where should you
 

Transcript:

We talk about advertising a lot in the podcasting world and the blogging world and the web world and I often use the analogy of if you are, you have an alpaca farm up in Northern California and you make the world’s best, finest alpaca yarns. Where should you be spending your advertising dollars? Are you going spend your advertising dollars during CSI at 9 o’clock on CBS where less than 1% of the audience wants to hear your message? Or are you better off advertising on a knitting blog or a knitting podcast of which there are probably at least 35 of them a last count I saw in the iTunes Podcast Directory – where 99% of the people want to hear your message. That’s what the power of blogging, the power of web sites, the power of New Media brings to you. it’s talking to the people who want to hear your message. In fact, through the search engines, they’re seeking you out. They’re coming to your site saying, “Oh, they do accounting consulting. They do computer consulting. They do life coaching. Through a search engine they found your web site. The trouble is, your web site has to be out there telling people that’s what you do so that the search engine find you and presents your results to these people so that they can then come to your web site. 

 

Previously on New Media 101/Blogging 101:

More information on Douglas E. Welch and Careers in New Media:

Video: New Media 101: New methods of making your work visible from “The What, Why and How of Blogging” with Douglas E. Welch

Part of the New Media 101/Blogging 101 series…

A quick clip from this 45 minute presentation — The Why, What and How of Blogging.

Watch the entire presentation

http://welchwrite.com/cip/2014/07/31/video-new-media-101-visibility-for-your-work-is-the-best-seo-from-the-what-why-and-how-of-blogging-with-douglas-e-welch/

Transcript:

Last year for me was the year of visibility. That was my focus for the last year. That was the focus that I was sharing with everyone last year. You can be the best consultant, the best accountant, the best computer person, the best plumber, the best whatever, but if people don’t know what you do, it dos you absolutely no good. you are working a vacuum. Blogging is one way — along with podcasting and online video sharing and other forms of new media to gain visibility for what you do. Ok? The other important part is getting your message out to the people who want to see it and hear it. Too often we rely on other people to get our message out for us. Frankly,that’s because that’s the way technology works. If we wanted to get press coverage, we had to go to — the press. You had to get in the newspapers. You had to get on television. You had to get on radio. You had to get on the talk shows, whatever. That was your only method of getting out to people. For the first time ever in the history of media, as we know it. Since cuneiform tablets said, you know, “Joe is a favorite of the king today” or whatever. We now have the ability to take our message directly to the people who want to hear it. 

 

Previously on New Media 101/Blogging 101:

More information on Douglas E. Welch and Careers in New Media:

Video: New Media 101: Visibility for your work is the best SEO from “The What, Why and How of Blogging” with Douglas E. Welch

Part of the New Media 101/Blogging 101 series…

A quick clip from this 45 minute presentation — The Why, What and How of Blogging.

Watch the entire presentation

Video: New Media 101: Visibility for your work is the best SEO from

Transcript:

Why do you do it? we;;. first of all, to feed the search engines. My joke is — you may hear the term Search Engine Optimization. there are company’s out there — some of you may actually be doing this for people — of where you try to improve their search engine ranking. My joke is, my method of Search Engine Optimization is to bury Google in data. Ok? If you search on Douglas E. Welch. If you search on Doug Welch. I am the first hit in Google for Douglas Welch. I am the second hit for Doug Welch. That is a pretty common name. I know, because I see all the other Doug Welch’s that pop up. I dont’ do any gaming. I don’t do anything special. I don’t really thing about it that much, but what I do do is when I have something to say, I make sure it gets on one of my blogs. I put it out there. Google indexes it. It knows more about me because I put more out there. That actually is one of your first goals in a blog. It is to simply get more information out there. Why? Visibility for what you do and how well you do it.

Previously on New Media 101/Blogging 101:

More information on Douglas E. Welch and Careers in New Media:

Video: New Media 101: What are search engines looking for? from “The Why, What and How of Blogging” with Douglas E. Welch

Part of the New Media 101/Blogging 101 series…

A quick clip from this 45 minute presentation — The Why, What and How of Blogging.

Watch the entire presentation

Video: New Media 101: What are search engines looking for?  from
 

Transcript:

The fact is, the search engines actively try to prevent from gaming the system and so they hide their algorithms — the way they rank people behind, inside a “black box.” We don’t know actually what’s going on inside of that black box. We can make some assumptions and that assumption that I just gave you is one, which is, it seems to be through, you know, if you we study our stats and everything else, the more often we update our web sites, the more likely that search engine is going to come back and reindex our site. Because it learns. It says, “Wow, this site is updated on a daily basis. I need to go back there every day.” And you can actually text this. You may know that there are ways of putting in searches in Google — a system called Google Alerts — you can actually put in a vanity search and say put in your company name, put in your personal name, whatever. You’ll actually see then, when you post something, you’ll see an alert come back once Google has indexed that site and, in my case, I know that can post something on one of my blogs today and, within about 3-4 hours, I will see the result come back. So, I can, through kind of a weird way of testing, actually see that, Dang, that GoogleBot came around about every 4 hours and just taps my site. If you check your log files for your web site — which a lot of people don’t actually monitor their web sites and their analytics and analyze their log files — in your log files you can actually see every time, when one of these search engine “bots” comes and indexes your site. It’s another thing to kind of be aware of.

 

Previously on New Media 101/Blogging 101:

More information on Douglas E. Welch and Careers in New Media:

Video: New Media 101: Why update a web site regularly? from “The Why, What and How of Blogging” with Douglas E. Welch

Part of the New Media 101/Blogging 101 series…

A quick clip from this 45 minute presentation — The Why, What and How of Blogging.

Watch the entire presentation

Video: New Media 101: Why update a web site regularly? from
 

Transcript:

Why do we want to update our web sites every single day? The fact is, there are a number of reasons for that. First and foremost is, if you haven’t realized it already, most of the hits to your web site today do not come from people sitting down at their computer and typing in www.blahdeblah RETURN. If you’re like me and most people, 90% plus of the hits of the people that come to your web site come there through a search engine. Ok?

Now, search engines — Google being one of the better known ones — they have a variety of criteria of how they rank web sites in search results. One of the foremost ways they rank information is, how current is it? AND how often is is updated. Well, guess what? Blogs give you a way to feed these search engines a constant stream of new information — that’s constantly being updated. And the more you update your blogs, the more often the Google searchbot will come through your web site and check it for information.

 

Previously on New Media 101/Blogging 101:

More information on Douglas E. Welch and Careers in New Media:

Video: New Media 101: Douglas E. Welch Segment from “Toot Your Own Horn: Self-Promotion In The Digital Age”

Part of the New Media 101/Blogging 101 series…

Douglas E. Welch Segment from “Toot Your Own Horn: Self-Promotion In The Digital Age”

Watch the entire presentation

Wga toot your own horn panel

This a clip of my segment during this talk at the WGA (Writers Guild of America West) – Toot Your Own Horn: Self-Promotion In The Digital Age

WGA Panel entitled “Toot Your Own Horn,” with Writers’ Program alum Zoanne Clack (Grey’s Anatomy), and moderated by Writers’ Program Instructor Bill Taub, offers great insight into promoting yourself as a writer.

“TOOT YOUR OWN HORN: SELF-PROMOTION IN THE DIGITAL AGE”

In these challenging times, it is imperative that writers take control of their own careers. Be proactive, “do it yourself,” especially regarding publicity and marketing. Technology has swiftly changed, providing writers with new avenues to promote themselves and their work. Have you tapped in?

A DIY panel features publicist Henri Bollinger, president of the Entertainment Publicists Professional Society, discussing personal publicity vs. when to bring on a “professional”; screen and TV writer/author/award-winning columnist W. Bruce Cameron (8 Simple Rules, A Dog’s Purpose); Zoanne Clack (Executive Producer — “Grey’s Anatomy” and former Writers’ Program student), Gregg Kilday (film editor at The Hollywood Reporter); psychotherapist Rebecca Roy (TheIndustryTherapist.com) to broach writers’ resistance to self-promotion; and independent new media consultant Douglas Welch (also a Writers’ Program instructor) addressing new media and social marketing platforms.

Panel followed by smaller hands-on breakout sessions. Moderated by Bill Taub.

Previously on New Media 101/Blogging 101:

More information on Douglas E. Welch and Careers in New Media:

Video: New Media 101: A Blog is a Template for Your Web Site

Part of the New Media 101/Blogging 101 series…

A quick clip from this 45 minute presentation — The Why, What and How of Blogging.

Watch the entire presentation

New Media 101: A Blog is a Template for Your Web Site
 

Transcript:

Blogging is at its very heart, a web site, like every other web site. Google’s a web site. My web site’s a web site. You web site’s a web site. A blog is just simply one way of presenting a web site. It is a web site, but easier. That’s what I try to tell people everyone about it. The fact is, with a blog — I often describe a blog as being like a piece of boilerplate letterhead. Where, you know, you have the company name, your logo, the address, all printed, then you print on that letterhead.

A blog is very similar, but for your web site. It’s designed on a template. Its designed on all your typical information is around the outside frame and the, if you want to put something new up — you want to put new content up — you want to announce a new press release, you want to have some new piece of information there, you can easily go to one page, much like a word processor, you type or cut and paste into that site what you want, hit publish and it’s on your web site.

 

Previously on New Media 101/Blogging 101:

More information on Douglas E. Welch and Careers in New Media:

New Media 101: Why don’t we update our web sites? from “The Why, What and How of Blogging”

Part of the New Media 101/Blogging 101 series…

A quick clip from this 45 minute presentation — The Why, What and How of Blogging.

Watch the entire presentation

New Media 101: Why don't we update our web sites? 

Transcript:

Our web sites are arid fields of old information, in most cases and the reason is — it’s not your fault — it really isn’t. It’s technology’s fault. It’s people like me who can’t write — or couldn’t write — systems that allowed you update your web sites easily.

If you have to bring up Dreamweaver. If you have to bring up a web site editor program to edit your web site, guess what? You will never update your web site. (indistinct audience comment) If you have to bring up a huge program and actually edit static pages, you’re probably not going to update your web site. Simply because it is too difficult for your average person.

 

Previously on New Media 101/Blogging 101:

More information on Douglas E. Welch and Careers in New Media:

Video: New Media 101: Where do you find content? from New Media Question Time

Part of the New Media 101/Blogging 101 series…

A quick clip from this 30 minute presentation — New Media Question Time for UCLA Voiceover Class.

Watch the entire presentation

 
Nm101 where content
 

Transcript:

You need to capture ideas as they occur to you, because we tend to throw away lots of content every day. We simply have a great idea on our walk or in the shower, whatever, and don’t capture it and it’s gone. It’s very rare that you get those ideas back unless there’s similar stimulus to trigger them again. Most times, they just kind of go down the river of thought and you never think about them again.

Integrate it into your life. Think about those questions that come into your life that you’re answering for other people. Think about the opinions that you’re being asked for at a party, at a dinner, by friends, by family. What are your opinions? Maybe that’s worth sharing in your podcast, if it’s on the topic of your podcast. Read the news. Read your RSS feeds. Read blogs. Check out stuff on the Internet. Set up Google News Alerts to trigger you with — to send you email when there’s a new news items on your topic. I’ll think you’ll be surprised how much content is really out there and how much information is available to you to draw upon to use in your own shows.

We have so many tools at our fingertips today that simply weren’t available 10 years ago. It’s easy to go out and shoot a video — of very high quality. It’s easy to go out and record audio of very high quality. We carry a little movie studio — for the most part — a little audio studio, in our pockets these days, along with a camera, a video camera, and a ton of other tools. There’s really no reason for you not to be marketing yourself every single day because the tools are there. The tools are no longer your limitation. It still tends to be our own limitations about marketing that hold us back.

One of things I recommend to people, too, is to get good at grabbing the content that you already create. If I’m at a museum and I’m visiting and looking around the collection, I’ll take photos. I’ll take some video. I’ll maybe do some audio. I’m going to be there anyway. I’m going to be engaging in activity anyway. It’s not like I made a special trip out there or anything like that. I’m already there doing the event. Why wouldn’t I capture some of the content from that event to later share on my blog, on my podcast, whatever? I see a lot of people who don’t do that. They go off and do some very cool things, but then they don’t capture anything to share with their friends, their family, and their audience, later.

 

Previously on New Media 101/Blogging 101:

More information on Douglas E. Welch and Careers in New Media:

New Media 101: Use New Media to Gain Visibility from “New Media Question Time”

Part of the New Media 101/Blogging 101 series…

A quick clip from this 30 minute presentation — New Media Question Time for UCLA Voiceover Class.

Watch the entire presentation

 
Nm101 visibility
 

Transcript:

In today’s world, the way we get jobs, the way we get attract opportunities to us, is by telling people what we do and how well we do it and the fact is, the best tool we have for doing that is — for showing people what we do and how well we do it — is new media. It’s making a video. It’s recording and audio podcast. It’s doing a reading of an audio book for a friend. It’s performing our own music. It’s live streaming our own performances of our band or us as an individual. It sharing what we do with as many people as possible. In that way, you attract opportunity to you. You’re trying to give people as much opportunity as possible to stumble upon your work. If you’re not out there sharing what you do and how well you do it with people, you’re limiting the opportunities that are going to come to you. You’re limiting the opportunities that are just going to show up knocking at your door, because people simply don’t know about you.

Most importantly, if you’re not being presented with opportunities to show people what you do and how well you do it, you’ve got got to create them yourself. You’ve got to do what we did — start your own reading, get together with a group of people and start putting together a radio show — like an old-fashioned radio show — where you can all use your voices, can all play different characters, can all act. Do a video series where you go out and interview people. Do whatever it takes for you to gain exposure.

 

Previously on New Media 101/Blogging 101:

More information on Douglas E. Welch and Careers in New Media:

New Media 101: Marketing Your New Media Projects from “New Media Question Time”

Part of the New Media 101/Blogging 101 series…

A quick clip from this 30 minute presentation — New Media Question Time for UCLA Voiceover Class.

Watch the entire presentation

 
Nm101 marketing
 

Transcript:

How would you grab and build your audience — marketing yourself — if you start blogging in a sea full of bloggers?

That is probably the most difficult question of any person who is starting out new, because, yes, it can be very hard to raise your head above, what we call, the noise level of what is already out there. And I am going to give you some probably counter-intuitive advice on this. Don’t worry about it. Each of us, as I said earlier in this video, each of us has and audience already. We have an audience that is looking for our expertise, our opinion, our information, our entertainment, whatever. In most cases, if you are out there doing the work, if you are putting the shows out, you’re sharing them on your social media, sharing them in your blogs, sharing them with your friends, your family, everything, people will find you. Those people will tell their friends, their contacts, and so on and so on and so forth.

It truly is very much, at the beginning, a word of mouth process. You, though, have to do the work of creating the product in order for people to discover it. The fact is, if you have great content — if you have something interesting to say — people will find you and they’ll tell people about you and that’s what you truly want. Seth Godin, a famous writer on marketing and sales and stuff says, “The best marketing you can have is to have some something worth talking about.” ‘Cause if you have something that’s cool, something thats neat, something that’s worth talking about, people will talk about it. You won’t have to market it. The product itself markets itself. It sells itself. The more you focus on what you’re producing and making it available to people, the more it’s going to grow — I think just by the very nature of the beast. People, if they enjoy it, will tell other people, will share it, and it will simply start to gather a momentum snowball — like a snowball rolling downhill. It’s going to grow in that regard.

 

Previously on New Media 101/Blogging 101:

More information on Douglas E. Welch and Careers in New Media:

New Media 101: What makes a podcast unique? from “New Media Question Time”

Part of the New Media 101/Blogging 101 series…

A quick clip from this 30 minute presentation — New Media Question Time for UCLA Voiceover Class.

Watch the entire presentation

 
Nm101 unique
 

Transcript:

What makes a podcast unique? Well that is a very easy question to answer. You are what makes your podcast unique. We are all unique human beings and individuals. We all have our own interests, our own likes, our own dislikes, our own opinions. You are what makes your podcast. Every podcast that has been out there is really about you. It’s about your thoughts, your expertise, your feelings about your topic and that is exactly what you should be sharing. Stand up and, if something effects you, if something interests you, if something offends you, changes are its going to offend a certain percentage of your audience as well. It is going to intrique a certain amount of your audience as well. And that is who is going to want to listen to your podcast.

 

Previously on New Media 101/Blogging 101:

More information on Douglas E. Welch and Careers in New Media: