When I heard that Steve Jobs passed this week, I went numb.

As much as we all knew it was inevitable, I wanted to believe it was not true.

I was at our company’s leadership conference when I received the message on my iPhone. At the time my CEO was speaking about Steve  – and talking about his role in leading Apple to all the great success it has achieved through visionary leadership, collaboration and insanely-great innovation.

Sometime during our CEO’s speech, the world lost Steve Jobs.

This was the man who created the Apple IIe, the first computer I ever used.  Steve brought the world WYSIWYG publishing with the Lisa – the precursor to the Macintosh – an idea sparked when he dropped-out to take a calligraphy class in college.

He  revolutionised animated film and built a PDA in the 80′s  that was decades ahead of it’s time – the Apple Newton. The Newton’s younger cousin, the iPad is now turning the publishing industry upside down with ebooks and digital newspapers all at the swipe of a finger.

Steve Jobs  took a $1 salary from Apple, and should have taken a trademark out on the black skivvy.

He transformed mobile phone ownership with the iPhone, and of course I am writing this post on my lightweight MacBook Air.

But above all of this – and perhaps most importantly for me as a podcaster – is the fine work Steve did to open podcasting to everyone.  Apple under his leadership created the awesome tools for podcasting  that are used every day to create great original content.  And in the process he allowed everyone to experience the joy of having an audience, as well as being a fan!

I witnessed Steve Jobs change my world, while I was watching.

Steve Jobs… you have been shaping my experience of life for nearly as long as I can remember.

I will miss you, the world will miss you.

I recently read an article by Angela Bray on propodder.com that suggested podcasting success came through running it like a business. The article pointed to the highly successful Keith and the Girl podcast and suggested ways that they have been successful. I agree with the idea that a podcast can be run like a business, but felt that I could build on this article to help you get a better handle on the steps to success.

I have to confess, I was puzzled by the opening lines of the article:

“Podcasting is fun because the truth comes out. According to Keith and Chemda…
No boss = nobody tells you what to do = freedom to say whatever you want to say
It is empowering to say what’s on your mind.
If you put a mic in somebody’s face for long enough, they will eventually be completely honest.”

The first thing that really smacks me in the face is the statement about podcasting is fun. No boss, equals nobody telling you what to do and the freedom to say what you want to say. In the business world saying what’s on your mind without any filtering can lead to a cease and desist order or worse according to Social Media lawyer Gordon Firemark who recently wrote a book on how to keep podcasters out of jail.

I’m not sure about whether putting a microphone in someone’s face for long enough will cause someone to become completely honest. It will probably succeed in making them mightily crapped-off!


Developing a passionate audience is much more than talking at people via social media channels, and getting them to promote your show. A passionate audience are those people who actively involve themselves in your show, and share your show because they love what you do. That is more about the techniques you use to engage your audience, more than what features you give them access to on your website. Taking a personal interest in your listeners and making them an active part of your show – wherever you can – is a great way to engender the type of passion that will really make or break your show.

I certainly wouldn’t be worth arguing the point that podcasters need to have a social media presence and a way to stay in touch with your audience, but building a passionate community around your show is an entirely different matter altogether.

Treating your podcast like a business is important and building a listener community around great content is key. Like any business, your podcast will have a bell-curve life-cycle to it. As you begin and you have a few listeners you will be able to personally interact with each of your listeners. It would be impossible to have a personal connection when your listener numbers reach 10,000.

So too, the services and the way you monetize your show will change over that time as well. With the smaller number of dedicated fans, you may choose to use donation tools to draw in some regular income. If you have quality content that is niche enough then people may be willing to pay you a regular small amount to keep producing it. The key to donations is audience involvement. If you can involve your community in the vision and what you want to do, then they will happily donate if they can share your vision.

A great example of someone who has done this very successfully is Cliff Ravenscraft of Generally Speaking Podcast Network – he has a whole raft of fans who share his vision and directly give towards his income. The key to Cliff’s success is sharing his vision of becoming a ‘full time’ podcaster, explaining what was required monetarily to support his family and be able to podcast full-time. He then asked people who felt called to contribute regularly. Sure, he had the tools to accept the donations, but the way he approaches his audience is key to the success he has had in building a serious income from the network of shows he produces.

If your show is reaching into the thousands of listeners, then you have a potential opportunity to offer your audience to advertisers. Now there are pros-and-cons to this activity, primarily because your audience may think that you’ve sold them out. You need to be careful about the way you introduce advertising or in-show promotion and make sure that your audience understand why you are doing it, so that you keep them engaged and on-board with your change of direction.

If you are offering advertising on your website, then make it easy for people to buy. Using Paypal means that they can pay on your site, and by using form submission software or plugins, you could even take the advertisers banner directly after a successful sale. With your first steps into advertising, it’s better to start small than overshoot the mark. Make your show a bargain to advertisers first, and then as demand grows you will be able to adjust your advertising prices to match.

Google Adsense creates a way for you to place advertising on your site. Joining Adsense is free, but recent studies show that the effectiveness of online advertising has dropped by as much as 25% from 2010 to 2011. This direct drop means less revenue in your pocket.

Online stores can be a useful way of generating more revenue, but you need to have a really clear brand to make that happen. Often – and in my experience – online stores selling merchandise that requires shipping don’t do as well as you might think. With a significant audience, selling digital content like ebooks and audiobooks – like internet astrologer Jessica Adams – will see you drive a healthy revenue through your site.

But before you launch into producing your first digital content – think about what you’re working with. You will need to have an established reputation and a significant audience before digital downloads are going to reap benefits for you. They key is to create content that does not expire, that you create once, and deliver many times. That way you can keep selling that content for years, as web visitors discover it.

And finally let me leave you with this thought which I was reminded about by a fantastic Brisbane based podcaster called Ian Kath from the Create Your LifeStory podcast… to be a successful podcaster, you need to put significant effort into your podcast blog.

Blogging creates the words that search engines ‘read’ and rank your site by. If you are just publishing the audio content, then you will not be successful in drawing large numbers of people to your site through search engines like Google.

When you blog, describe in detail what’s in your show using phrases and keywords that people might use search for the content you’re putting on your site. It’s simple Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) but according to Ian it brings you a whole lot more website traffic courtesy of search.

So yes, use these tips and run your podcast like a business and you’re bound to go a long way.

There are many other similar products available as plugins for WordPress, but I’m going to talk a little about why these plugins are bad for your site’s performance and could cause you problems. I’m also going to offer you a great alternative.

Statpress

Over the last few days I had a problem with a popular site I look after for a client.  I had installed Statpress and in recent months the site performance had slowed considerably. 

The site is hosted on a shared server (one of those cheap ones with several other hundred hosting accounts), and so I thought the performance could have easily been caused by overcrowding or the performance of another site.

I was surprised to find that the hosting account was suddenly suspended due to a terms of service violation, and digging a little deeper discovered that the performance hit I was experiencing, was also affecting several hundred other customers hosted on the same box with me.

The source of the problem – according to the hosting company who had investigated the problem – was Statpress.  The solution was to remove the offending plugin, and they dutifully removed the suspension of the site.

The site performance improved immediately. 

The issue did get me thinking about the way these plugins work, and how it impacts performance of sites. Software like Statpress records a lot of information each time a page is hit, and this information needs to be written to the database.

It figures that as a site becomes more popular, not only does the CPU and database get an increased hit from the traffic, that hit is multiplied by the effort of recording all that statistical information.

Effectively popular sites are being punished by the plugin for being popular.

Where I landed is that third party reporting like Google Analytics is far better, because the load of recording statistics is not borne by the site serving the content.  So then, how could I get the same convenience of dashboard statistics for my client?

I did a little bit of research and found a great plugin called Google Analytics Dashboard that gave me quite similar stats on the front page of the dash.  The detail remains in Google Analytics.

Google Analytics Dashboard widget

As for setup it’s very simple with OAuth – simply log the site in and select the profile you wish to track.

Some additional features include the ability to determine who can see the stats dashboard widget.  It can be offered at every level from Subscriber (not recommended) through to just Admins.

So if you’re using a plugin like Statpress and you’re suffering performance problems, perhaps it’s time to rethink the way you record and display your stats.