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Brian shares what is part one of his beginning in podcasting dating back to 2007 when he helped a radio show host spread their content online.

Transcription

Universal content strategy.

Hi I’m Brian Pombo, welcome back to Brian J. Pombo Live.

Today we’re going to discuss the universal content strategy.

So how do you take your content and make it completely universal?

I got this stupid thing from Dollar Tree (Brian’s holding a kids microphone).

It really comes down to Well, let me tell you a story.

I’m going to tell you a story about how I discovered universal content strategy. It’s going to go by many names. But I’m surprised how few people actually discuss it. And when they’re talking about content marketing, very few people discuss how powerful this thing is.

I found it in the same time when I discovered search engine optimization, it’s funny how these things all meet together.

So I’ve got a handful of stories, and I’m going to start with one today.

I’m going to go through and tell you how this idea progressed. You’ll find clues on how you can use your reversal content strategy for your business.

You can also find out more in my book, 9 Ways to Amazon-Proof Your Business. I have an entire chapter, in fact, is the ninth way that I discuss here in my ninth chapter.

For, 9 Ways to Amazon-Proof Your Business, you can get a free copy of this book, or you can go and purchase a hardbound book wherever books are sold. But you can get your own free copy on AmazonProofBook.com.

So let’s talk about universal content strategy, shall we?

It started in 2007, I had begun work with a radio network, and I was working for one particular host.

We were testing something out, they wanted to start testing out podcasts. Now, this was kind of the first string of podcasting that had come out. I had been watching and listening to podcasts for, I don’t know, a good year or so at that point. On my own, before I had taken up this job.

And they wanted me to dig in and find out how to go about podcasts. I’d never done it before. But I was just kind of tossed in there, I had some idea of how the internet worked.

I had just enough knowledge to make me dangerous.

So I was just kind of let loose to start a podcast for this radio show host. So I had like I said, I had listened to podcasts, I didn’t have an iPod, which at that time was why they named a podcast was via the iPod.

They were the month the only places you could find podcasts at that point initially, was on iTunes, which was the place where people listened to podcasts. That’s where it originated.

Well, there had started springing up a whole lot of other podcast networks. So one podcast could be found all over the place online. At that point, Google had not completely cracked down on all these link farms and so forth, then they gave a whole bunch of value in where you ranked in Google based on how many backlinks you had.

There was this whole science of linking from one site to the next and to the point to where people could take advantage of it.

That was a huge piece of at least gray hat what they call grey hat SEO search engine optimization, which is so what’s the difference between white hat and black hat shall I say white hat was doing things as close to buy the book as possible that Google told you to do and things they told you not to do.

The main thing they told you not to do was not take advantage of the rules that they had set up. So it was kind of a tough thing to follow.

Blackhat was paying attention and no rules absolutely at all. And just doing whatever the heck you want to and you’d oftentimes end up getting in trouble with Google long-term over something like that.

And so the about the best you can hope for if you want any success with SEO is to do relatively grayhat area. Where is the area that Google really hasn’t commented on yet on what you can and can’t do.

So you took advantage of the things that you could take advantage of in order to get more jobs and more results when people were searching for random things.

I didn’t know any of this at this time. I didn’t know what SEO was, I knew nothing. But I jumped in just with the idea of starting a podcast.

And so we started, I looked into all the options to starting a podcast. And what I did was I was looking at some of the people’s podcasts that I had been following and looked at how they set up and just kind of copy them.

One of the common ways back then was to set up…so there was this site called blogger blogger.com, it’s still out there. It’s a free form of blogging website.

Well, with blogs, you have an RSS feed.

Even to this day, podcasts run off of an RSS feed.

So, what you do is you set up a blog on blogger.com, for free. I went about doing this and I went about figuring out how MP3 are encoded, and how you put that into your blog post.

How you then take that RSS run it through a company back then it was called Feedburner. They ended up getting bought out by Google. And Feedburner was this site that made it accessible to podcast aggregators like iTunes.

So I ran all this, I’m not going to get into all the tech stuff, but just to give you an idea, went through and set up this whole site based on this radio show, and we took clips off the radio show and directed people back to the website to listen to the whole thing.

And it really went well, went extremely well, became one of the top podcasts for all the different areas that this radio show host covered.

Well, then we started putting out other podcasts. And I came across a really magical idea that someone had was already about six months ahead of me in terms of figuring out some of these concepts that Google was rewarding people for.

I’m going to tell you all about him tomorrow, because he was a person that was already big in the entertainment industry is still big, and still behind the scenes, not as well known outside of animation circles.

That’s a little clue.

I’ll tell you more about him tomorrow. And how that the idea really took me to the next level, which I would call ubiquitous, ubiquitous content strategy.

We’re going to talk about that tomorrow night. So we’ll be back then. Come on back then and we’ll continue this conversation.

In the meantime, you have a great one. Get out there and let the magic happen.