Ravi's Rants

Do NOT use your web host to store audio or video files (or even PDF/Zip/Doc etc). Regular web hosts (think Godaddy, Dreamhost, Hostgator, etc – which are terrible web hosts, by the way) are not suited for media hosting, not even if you have a VPS or Dedicated Server.

If you’re a podcaster and host your MP3 files on your own server, then when you release a new episode, your RSS feed could get hundreds (or hopefully thousands) of hits, and that will in turn download thousands of copies of your mp3 file. And that can put a great strain on your web host.

CDN’s like Amazon CloudFront and CloudFlare were created just for this reason.

And if you’re an Online Course Creator and you have Audio, Video and PDF in your courses, and you release a new course, or do a launch, then when a (even reasonably) large number of your members try to access your online course, that means potentially hundreds (or thousands) of requests to your video, audio and pdf. That could cause the same kind of spike in server utilization on your web host. That kind of load increase on your website could cause problems for your members: Website being too slow, errors when trying to log in and navigate through your membership site, videos and audio loading very slowly (or not at all), your website crashing and your members can’t even get to your member’s area, etc.

Podcasters: Use a regular podcast host like Libsyn (what I use and recommend; coupon code subscribeme gets you up to 2 months free) , BluBrry or PodBean.

Online Course Creators using WordPress: Store the files on Amazon S3 and use a plugin like S3MediaVault.com to securely embed your members-only content in your website from a fast and powerful media hosting service like Amazon S3, and then add CloudFront to it to deliver it at blazing-fast speeds.

No, the above image is not broken. That’s a screenshot of an email from my inbox.

95% of email newsletters I subscribe to these days are practically unreadable, what with large images, unnecessarily fancy design, and read like a mini-book scrolling 30 pages long.

And because I’ve turned off images in my email reader, which is Thunderbird, all of the images are blocked, so all I see is large outlines of what should be an image, and then little bits of text in between.

So don’t make it a pain for me to read your email, where I keep skipping it thinking I’ll come back to it later (hint: almost no one ever comes back to it). Your email doesn’t have to be short, but write to me like you’re my trusted friend & adviser, like you value me and my time – and not like you’re Google News and have to be my news source for everything in your niche.

Apple naming their podcast app: “Podcasts”

Microsoft naming their to-do list app: “To Do”

A Membership plugin called “Membership”

John Wick naming his dog “Dog”.

What next? Someone naming their kid “Kid”???

#IKnowItAintHisRealName #kidrock

PS: The pic above is of American singer, Kid Rock.

Content Marketing lends very well to Batching.

The “Setup” is one of the hardest parts for most of us – whether that’s getting ready for the gym, or getting your gear, light, mic, clothes, hair etc. for podcasting or creating videos. So once you’re “in the mood” (lol) and already have done the boring setup, you’re already there anyway – why not just crank out multiple pieces of content together, so you can skip the boring setup and have something ready for the next few days (or weeks) of publishing?

Like with podcast recording/editing, video recording/editing, article / book writing (writing a bunch of posts or chapters together), even cleaning your home or desk!

So when it comes to your content, you could plan the topic and content for multiple pieces of content in one sitting.
Then in another sitting, you write and script all of them.
Then in another sitting, you do the recording.
Then in another sitting, you edit them and get them ready for publishing. And you could even use scheduling tools to publish them over time.

So it’s very similar to the manufacturing assembly line. At any given time, one person, is doing just one task, which speeds things up tremendously.

So if you did one type of work at a time, and did a bunch of similar tasks together, that’s batching for you right there.

And it becomes easier to split up the work as well. Maybe it’s all you, or you have a small team. Either way, if you, or you team, does planning on Monday, scripting on Tuesday, Recording on Wednesday, Editing on Thursday, and publishing on Friday, then everything becomes a lot easier to plan, create and publish.