Article Surfing Archive

If you have always wanted an online radio show, here's a way to try it out.

Seth Godin mentioned a service where you can do your talk show right into your phone...the service shows you how to post it online, on your blog or wherever.

So, if you have always wanted to start an online radio show, AKA podcast, about any topic you love to talk about, here's a way.

The podcast I do each week now also began life with a phone service just like the one above. THEN, after I decided I enjoyed doing it and decided I would do it regularly, that's when I spent a few more shekels to set up a little recording studio. That's me editing on the right.

"No one wants to hear how wonderful we think we are."

So said the owner of a restaurant near a major ski resort in New Hampshire, when he was asked what he wrote about in his restaurant blog. Its purpose: to retain customers. Not "to sell sandwiches via PayPal" nor to tell strangers they should come and eat.

So how would his blog help him get new customers?

"Word of mouth," he said. From happy customers who read his blog.

And to keep his patrons interested in his place during the off months, his blog talks about what his patrons talk about, like ski and river conditions, historic tidbits on a perilous ravine right in his backyard where extreme skiing began...(From the blog book, Naked Conversations.)

This is of course the idea in Seth Godin's little ebook "Flipping the Funnel." Let your happy customers sing your praises to bring in new converts for your new thing. Not you.

"No one wants to hear how wonderful we think we are."

Indeed.

But tell that to network marketers. Each one's program is touted as "the greatest thing since..." and everyone's products "sell themselves." Other marketers do it too: the wrong people are doing the talking. (Thanks gulliver, for this link.)

Almost no one believes marketers anymore, and the more they scream about how they're the best, biggest, brightest and finest, the more suspicious we all become.

When I was teaching English as a Second Language years ago at Boston University, the teacher trainer I had told me I should talk louder to my students - newly arrived Vietnamese learning English.

I never forgot that. TALK LOUDER? The problem was not their hearing. They didn't understand the words. Their hearing was fine.

Talking louder is not the answer in our business either. Not when the wrong people are doing the talking.