The Top 8 Best Free Audio Podcast Downloads on the Web

Have you wanted to start learning more about Internet marketing but just haven't found the time? If you have a commute, household chores or any other time sink during which you could be learning, podcasts might be the answer for you. Podcasts are free audio downloads. They span many topics but there some especially wonderful Internet marketing podcasts out there. And today, Big Picture Web brings you our Top 8 Best Free Audio Podcast Downloads on the Web.

Free Podcast Downloads Could Save Your Company

Internet marketing is becoming more and more important each day to how our businesses grow and run. In fact, MarketingCharts.com presented data from a Forrester Research study predicting that Internet marketing will grow annually by 17% until 2014, from 12% to 21% of total spending. With so many companies shifting their eggs into this basic, education is the key to the future for many. Podcasts are a great way to learn and can be accessed from practically anywhere. I've listened to dozens of different free podcasts and have come up with my Top 8 Best Free Audio Podcast Downloads on the Web (in no particular order. Just kidding, it's alphabetical.):

• 10 Golden Rules Internet Marketing Podcast. Longtime Internet marketer Jay Berkowitz, CEO of 10GoldenRules.com, produces one of the best Internet marketing podcasts out there. Jay has worked for legendary marketing giants like McDonald's and Coca-Cola and brings to his audience a biweekly helping of industry news, expert interviews and listener questions. Big Picture Web and I owe a lot to Jay and 10GoldenRules.com.
• Digital Marketer from Quick and Dirty Tips. These 5-10 minute pearls of practical marketing wisdom range from social media "dont's" to which Internet marketing tasks you should automate. Quick and Dirty Tips also produces the very enjoyable free audio downloads from the Get-It-Done Guy and the Public Speaker podcasters.
• Internet Business Mastery. I heard one free audio episode of this best-of-breed podcast and was hooked. Sterling and Jay are flat-out inspiring as you hear them talk about getting an Internet business off the ground. These guys have one of the best shows out there and will really get your blood pumping with new ideas and energy towards Internet marketing.
• Managing the Edge. This fantastic show out of Des Moines, Iowa (yes, Des Moines, Iowa) brings weekly podcasts on learning the fundamentals of Internet marketing. Doug and Andy present everything at just the right level to make it both valuable an accessible to folks new to some of the concepts. Spend about 45 minutes and get to know my neighbors to the south.
• Marketing Over Coffee. Hosts Christopher S. Penn and John Wall meet up Thursday mornings for coffee and a chat about Internet marketing. It's a great back-and-forth from two experts steeped in experience. These 20-30 minutes podcasts are dense with insights that will have light bulbs going off over you head the entire time. Marketing Over Coffee is definitely in my top three.
• SEO Rockstars. Search engine optimization (SEO) (link to article) is a hot topic for Internet marketers and SEO Rockstars brings a great podcast about the most interesting events and stories within the industry. Their coverage of Affiliate Conventions's session on Black Hat vs. White Hat SEO was like listening to an epic battle between good and evil. WebmasterRadio.FM produces this and other great free podasts like Domain Masters.
• Social Media, What?. Produced right here in Minnesota, Social Media, What? is a fresh and insightful podcast on one of the Internet's hottest trends, social media. Hosts Ian and Graeme practically live and breath music, the Internet and social media.
• This Week in Tech. Despite the acronym, TWiT, by which its listeners affectionality refer to it, This Week in Tech is a superb source of news and insights for the technology industry as a whole. Tech Luminaries Leo Laporte, Patrick Newton, John C. Dvorak and more produce a weekly podcast that is a mix between comedy, news round-up and panel talk show.

Well, I hope you've enjoyed Big Picture Web's Top 8 Best Free Audio Podcast Downloads on the Web. There are many different podcasts and even more ways to learn about Internet marketing. Are you listening to Podcasts and if so, what are some of your favorites?

New Website ROI Tips: Online Goal Setting

We've all been there. Trying to plan for a new website. ROI can sometimes take a back seat to something frivolous if you're not focused. It's easy to get distracted but online goal setting for your website doesn't have to be this hard. It's a simple matter of identifying your business objective and tying it to a strategy and tactic. New website ROI can be tracked down to the penny, as long as you can tie your actions to your objectives. Today, Big Picture Web talks about the only three things you can do on your website: acquisition, engagement and conversion. Then I'll show you how to measure and improve these areas.

New Website ROI in Three Steps

When it comes down to it, you can only do three things on the Internet:

1. Acquire new visitors to your website or landing page
2. Engage visitors long enough to convey your  message about your ideas, products and services
3. Convert a portion of your visitors into subscribers, leads or customers

When making your new website, ROI goes up quickly once you limit your activities to only reflect these three core goals. Are you creating a new website and just starting your online goal setting? Perhaps your strategy will be to acquire new visitors and your tactic may be to use search engine optimization. Are you getting decent traffic but having trouble selling things on your website? Focus your efforts on tweaking conversion rates through making content more accessible or persuasive. Online goal setting will help you maximize new website ROI and focus on the strategies and tactics right for your business at the right time.

Online Goal Setting for your Website

Don't go it alone. There are excellent free tools to help you measure your new website's ROI. For example, Google Analytics allows you to view information on all website traffic coming your way. 4Q's simple user experience survey can provide incredible insights. These tools are powerful and excellent in helping you with your online goal setting. Avinash Kaushik, famous web analytics blogger and author, describes the importance of these types of analytics tools in his book, Web Analytics: An Hour a Day. He describes how the absence of a data-driven culture on your website team can lead to many arbitrary decisions that ultimately aren't any good for your website or your business. Online goal setting for your website becomes much easier when you can measure to improve your new website's ROI.

So there you have it. Focus your efforts in terms of acquisition, engagement, and conversion. Measure and improve your results for free. This approach will help you maximize your new website ROI and your online goal setting efforts for your website.

Choosing Content for a Usable Website

I did a great thing if you stayed on my website long enough to read the end of this sentence. You see, this site aims to be usable. And as you learn more about how to design a website, you'll see that helping your website visitors find your products and services more easily can lead to a dramatic positive impact on your business goals. How effective are websites in changing behavior, you say? "The average business metrics improvement after a usability redesign is now about 83%," according to a January 2008 survey. But choosing content for your website can be a challenge. Today, Big Picture Web brings you a crash course on usability and how to design a website.

How Effective are Websites in Changing Behavior?

Steve Krug is a well-known expert in the field of usability. He certainly knows how to design a website. His book, Don't Make Me Think, describes how people don't read websites like a book or magazine. They scan them for about fives seconds, more like a car speeding past a billboard. If they don't find what they want, they can quickly leave your website. If you learn how to design a website properly, you can grab your visitors' attention, clearly describe why they should do business with you and then give them the chance to so.

How to Design a Website

When choosing content for a website, you'll want to follow some standard website conventions. For example, always put your your company's logo in the upper-left corner of your website, and link it to your homepage for those that click on it. For an excellent visual on a these website conventions, check out UserEffect's Anatomy of a Usable Website. Their 25-point website usability checklist is also quite helpful. Choosing content for your website becomes a lot easier when you follow these simple guidelines.

Choosing Content for Your Website Made Easier

If you're new to website usability or choosing content for websites, there is much to learn. You'll see how an effective website can change the behavior of your visitors, enabling them to learn more about you and hopefully do more commerce too. Let your customers do business with you. If you're learning how to design a website and have a question, visit the resources in this article or post a comment with your thoughts.

Find Your Social Media Tools and Purpose

It's the new buzz. Everyone is talking about and participating in social media, the communication and sharing phenomenon where anyone can play an active role in your Internet brand management. And "tweeting" is a blast, but Twitter and the like are not just fun and games. Behind every social media strategy, and for that matter Internet marketing strategy, are numbers waiting to be looked at and a clear path to be taken depending on your business' goals. Social media analytics, you might say. Have you set business goals for your Social Media endeavors? Today, Big Picture Web talks about social media tools and purpose.

Social Media Tools, Toys and Tactics

First off, social media is a broad playground full of tools, toys and tactics . There are communication tools (Twitter), communities ( Facebook), bookmarking sites (StumbleUpon), the blogosphere (Technorati); even user reviews and ratings that you see on Amazon.com are considered social media tools (my friends at Social Media, What? uncover and review new social media tools all the time). Every social media tool has a different purpose waiting to be applied to your business. And that's the real question... have you found your social media purpose?

Internet Brand Management

In the days before social media, only a quarterly earnings statement or a carefully crafted press release would make it to the masses. There was a limit to who could define your brand through media. With social media, everyone is a publisher with an opinion. Including your customers. Andy Beal's Radically Transparent is all about Internet brand management and describes how word-of-mouth has gone online. In a nutshell, Mr. Beal stresses the potential impact of social media on your business and explains how to participate in these public conversations to further and protect your brand. This is your social media purpose. And there are tools that will help you get there.

Social Media Analytics. Like Google Analytics

You can combine your social media tools and purpose in three easy steps. Find and listen to the conversations. Participate. Use social media analytics to measure your progress.

1. Monitor. Sites like Social Mention and Search.Twitter.com allow you to search social media for mentions of your brand, service or product. These passive listening devices are phenomenal for identifying everything from customer service opportunities to copyright infringement issues. Finding your customers can be a challenge, but you'll be happy you did.
2. Participate. Once you find your audience and have identified your business goals, you can begin to use social media for Internet brand management. Use Twitter to communicate with customers voicing concern about your product via their tweets. Use social bookmarking sites to seed your newest content in an effort to bring new customers. Encourage customers to review your products or services. Just be sure you have a specific business goal in mind as you join the conversation.
3. Social Media Analytics. Now that you're listening and participating, measure your success with social media analytics. Track Social Mention for the number of good, bad and indifferent comments are made about your brand. You can tag your URLs (e.g., links to your homepage) before you tweet them to make them trackable in your Web Analytics software. Use Twitteranalyzer to see how people are reacting to your message. If you have a business goal, there is a way to track it and folks out there eager to show you how. (In fact, Andy and Doug at Managing the Edge just did a great show on Social Media Measurement.)

So there you have it. Social media is important for Internet brand management. Monitor and participate in these conversations and then use social media analytics to gauge your performance. Combine your social media tools and purpose to achieve results!

Business-to-Business Email Marketing Strategy

Everyone loves super powers, right? What if I told you I could get a certain number of people to do my bidding at this very minute? Well, it's true. It only works about 20% of the time, but it works. You see...I have an email marketing strategy. I can send people to wherever I want on the Internet with one simple email.

Imagine if you had this power! Where would you send people? What would you ask them to do? Today, because you're here at Big Picture Web, we're going to cover the basics of business-to-business email marketing so that you and I will both have the super power of email marketing strategies.

Business-to-Business Email Marketing Strategy. No Paper Required.

If having super powers doesn't entice you to start business-to-business email marketing, maybe talking about the economy might help. Look, print is hurting. Print sales dropped nearly 30% in the first quarter of 2009. Newspapers are going out of business left and right. In this economy, the only paper we can truly count on for revenue is when our customers decide to pay in cash. Sorry, I couldn't resist the pun. No one is saying to stop print advertising altogether. It's more of an all-your-eggs-in-a-basket thing. And really, it's mostly about just having super powers.

Imagine an Email Marketing Strategy

Now we're going to imagine something wonderful. Let's say you have these super powers of business-to-business email marketing. And let's also say there are 50,000 people in your domain (again with the puns!) each month over whom you have this super power. What do you want those 20% who respond to you to do? Being the benevolent force of stewardship and goodwill for your company that you are, you would surely do things that were mutually beneficial for you and the customer. It could mean 10,000 folks looking at your offers. Or 10,000 relationships fostered. Or 10,000 business partners' questions answered. These are the powers of email marketing strategies at hand.

Business-to-Business Email Marketing Strategy. Using Your Powers.

In honing your email marketing strategy powers, you'll need to master three things:

1. Your email list is at the core of your powers. It is your audience, your denominator for all efforts. You may need to exert a little effort at first to ensure your email marketing strategy consists of a list of opted-in subscribers and adheres to the CAN-SPAM Act guidelines. But once you do, you'll have a large audience that's in tune with your message.
2. Next, you integrate this list with your Websites and email servers. You can either do these things in-house, through a vendor, or a mixture of both. Folks like Constant Contact and iContact can get you up and running in no time. You even get a Sign-up box to put on your Website to encourage even more people to join your happy audience (Ahem. You'll notice it over to the right-hand side of the screen. I'll wait here while you fill in your info.)
3. Finally, your business-to-business email marketing powers come through in the form of a stellar process. Have measurable goals. Go through all the right steps. Use best practices. It should end up looking something like this:

Email Marketing Strategies on the Cheap

In addition to being very effective, an email marketing strategy is familiar, cheap and low-risk. Now that's a good investment in these times, right? Even for someone with super powers.

• Familiar. An email marketing strategy is just a combination of email and your marketing strategy. Most of the regular elements (target, focused objectives, brand positioning) are the same as usual. There are just a few tags and .pngs thrown in for good measure. You'll be familiar in no time.
• Cheap. The aforementioned Constant Contact allows unlimited emails sent with packages starting at $15/month. Yep.
• Low-risk. Business-to-business email marketing doesn't require a huge service agreement or lengthy implementation. You can be up-and-running within days and always have the option to take your data and go elsewhere at a moment's notice.

Business-to-Business Email Marketing Strategy. The Greatest Power of All.

Best of all, email marketing strategies give you the power of knowledge. How do I know that you can get 20% of people to respond? Because other companies have Email Marketing Success Rates. That's right. You can track how many people receive and open your emails, as well as if they clicked on any links. You can also tie in your Web Analytics platform (e.g., Google Analytics) to see if they bought anything when they got to your site. You have the power to know these things down to the penny. It's no wonder 75% of business-to-business marketers have email marketing strategies.

And so are you ready to use your super powers? Ready to have your message resonate with a verifiable 20% of your audience? Ready to do it on the cheap and with a close watch on the details? Oh yeah, and don't forget to sign up for the website over on the right-hand side of your screen.

What tips or comments do you have about business-to-business email marketing or email marketing strategy in general?