Why Podcasts?

You may be asking yourself why podcasts and not books or websites. Well, aside from the fact that money books are a dime a dozen (that means there are a lot of them, not that they actually cost a dime a dozen by the way) and websites seem to sprout like mushrooms on the web, there is another reason we suggest podcasts on finance. The reason is that podcasts can be downloaded to listen to on your way to work. Most of these are relatively short and easy listens, meaning that you can get yourself up on all the finance knowledge you need in no time.

Rich Dad Podcasts

Before we abandon the discussion about books completely though, let’s mention the Rich Dad, Poor Dad series. These books offer a different way of looking at money and have helped millions of people to become more financially secure.

However, for those who don’t feel comfortable reading the books or simply want more than what the books have to offer, we found the Rich Dad podcast to be deeply satisfying. It’s short and to the point with some very useful tips for saving money and making money.
Note however that this particular podcast isn’t being updated anymore, so it should be used to learn about finance, but not about the latest trends in the world of finance.

Money Girl Quick and Dirty Tips

Another great podcast which is designed to just provide you with the information you want without all the fuss is the Money Girl series of podcasts. These podcasts are very short and to the point, with some great tips for saving money, making them an excellent choice to learn about finance. The podcasts are continually updated, around once per week, so you’ll always find something fresh to listen to, however they also have their entire archive of podcasts on finance available to download and listen to whenever the mood happens to strike you.

Wall Street Journal Market Watch

While the Wall Street Journal may not be free anymore, you can still listen to their podcasts online. These podcasts cover recent news and tips for those who are interested in money and financing. The podcasts are of course professionally produced which means that you’ll never lack for high quality material to listen to learn about finance. The site also includes links to previous episodes meaning that there are dozens of podcasts on finance available to listen to whenever you want.

Kiplinger’s Personal Finance

This magazine, known for decades as being one of the premier magazines on the subject of personal finance has been online for a number of years now and they offer all of their content free of charge online. However, beyond that, they also provide an excellent podcast which will teach you everything you need to know and everything you want to learn about personal finance.

Motley Fool

The investor’s standard for investing has always been Motley Fool – the website and newsletter, both of the same name. Now, you can also check out the Motley Fool radio show which includes news about finance and stocks you may want to pick. While it may not teach you new things about finance, it will provide you with great podcasts to learn about finance in the current market, which can help you to make money today.

George Gallagher is a prolific blogger for finance, investing, and education. He is currently working in the education sector with private student loans that help students afford college.

The first interview was with Caroline Middlebrook. I don’t want to go into all of the details, but one thing that got me thinking was how Caroline made a free ebook on setting up a wordpress blog. The ebook can be downloaded directly from her website without having to give her your email address. The ebook has made her thousands of dollars from providing useful information for novices by simply including a link to an affiliate program for web hosting.

I have at least one ebook that I have yet to finish, that I could easily apply this principle. Perhaps it will give me some new inspiration to get it finished!

The second interview was with a guy who writes a blog and makes money with freebie offers. He made around $32,000 working on his system part-time. Not something I am interested in doing myself, but it is pretty amazing since he just started doing it over a year ago.

Caradvice is ranked in the top car websites in Australia, just behind sites that are run by big media companies like NewsCorp.

Alborz created a blog on a topic he loves and is passionate about and has turned it into a successful business. I think we see people all of the time creating websites purely for profit, sometimes they work, but mostly they fail. Just check out the sites for sale on sitepoint, most of them are crap. I am just as guilty as anyone though.

I think a lot also can be said for just working on one or two websites at the most and putting everything into them. Running multiple websites in many ways is just not practical and I think you waste time running from one niche to the next. Pick a niche that you love and write good content – it can be as simple as that.

This has worked for me to some extent with my Beijing site. At first I was running around trying to get links, but after a while I realized that if I wrote a funny/interesting/informative post, people would just link to it naturally. I think Google also prefers this. Link exchanges, link swaps and blogrolls are basically dead.

The hardest part to this of course is finding a niche that you are passionate about and is profitable. It is something I am going to have to spend some time thinking about once again when the Olympics are done.

I have been pretty diligent lately working out everyday and one thing that keeps me going is having interesting podcasts to listen to. If anyone knows of any good ones, please let me know.

Podcasts are great, but they seem to be overshadowed a little now by video. Video is also great, but if it is only a shot of an internet marketer speaking, I can’t really see the point.

When you have something as popular as Facebook, you really need to learn how you might be able to leverage its popularity. I have some ideas as to how I could promote an ebook I have written.

One thing I didn’t know about was Facebook pages. You can create a page for free to promote your business. Here is one I just started to promote my Beijing Olympic site.

It’s not going to stop me selling links, at least on this blog. I am still making money with Text Link Ads and Linkworth, so it is going to be interesting to see how this income goes.

One thing I can see happening is that there are going to be more sponsored posts in blogs and linking from articles rather than from links in sidebars and blogrolls. Google kind of made the market for buying and selling links and now they are trying to close the market. Perhaps it is a good thing, I am not really sure right now. Selling links has become a very good source of income for many bloggers, especially where Adsense didn’t work so well.

I agree with what Darren has written on the subject:

I think that what Google has done this last week means that we’ll see more and more of the text link selling go further underground. We’ll see it happen less using systems like TextLinkAds and more happening in less transparent ways.

And if Darren is right, which I think he is, the internet is going to become an even less trustworthy source of information.

It was the first time I had been to John Reese’s new income site. What a great domain! I wonder how much he paid for the domain.

I have put $25 into my account as an experiment.

Things like how smart pricing works, click fraud, accidentally clicking on your own ads and the new Adsense policies. Shoemoney also asks him about YouTube revenue sharing for publishers, which is a very exciting development for video producers. It sounds like they will be using some Adsense technology to calculate revenue for publishers.

I have been thinking of an idea for a video site the last couple of days so I was very interested to hear how this might work.