Web 2.0

Brian DeLaet: Hi! I’m Brian DeLaet from EduCyber. My website is educyber.com. We’re here today with Mary Walewski of Buy The Book Marketing. This is the Mary and Brian Podcast, as I’m informed. I have really wanted Brian and Mary. And Mary’s website is buythebookmarketing.com.

Today, we’re here with Pastor Joe Burnham of… Well, let’s find out what he’s of and ask him a few questions. Mary, why don’t you go ahead and start?

Mary Walewski: Joe, we understand that you have, essentially, a cyber church. Would you tell us a little bit about that?

Joe Burnham: Yeah, our website is called “The Fishbowl,” that would be fshbwl.com. So, it’s the word “fishbowl” without any vowels.

Mary Walewski: It saves space that way.

Joe Burnham: Exactly! So, it’s an online community, an online faith community. It basically has different categories of content. So, seven days a week, there’s a different primary theme that we use. And then, we have an article or a podcast or a vodcast or something else that goes with the theme of that day.

So, seven days a week, fresh content and then we invite users to interact with the site and the material on it. We invite them to set up user profile and interact with each other. We invite them to blog and post their own thoughts. We have some discussion forums on that allow them to share other comments or ideas and suggestions.

And so, basically, forms an interactive community centering on content that we provided seven days a week.

Brian DeLaet: Joe, just to go back a little bit to make sure that our listeners and viewers understand, you do have a lot of terms there. Podcast, tell us real quick what’s a podcast?

Joe Burnham: Every Tuesday, we have a… Basically, it’s like a radio show that we send out in the Internet. And so, it’s two of us that gather and talk about what’s going on on the Fishbowl. It’s called “The Swim,” it’s “The Swim Podcast.” And so, you can actually find that now in iTunes if you type in “The Swim.”

So, it becomes the two of us talking about what’s going on in the Fishbowl, what are the articles that have been commented on the most, what are some of the new features and things that were added onto the site, what are again a submission spot on the site where users can ask a question. And so, they can submit any question they want to about faith, about religion, about life, how do you view the world? Those sort of things. And we take every week a user question and respond to it.

We have a voice mail where users can call in and leave a message and we plug that into the audio and address user comments and questions and interaction and feedback that way. So, it’s a weekly radio show, essentially, that we just distribute online.

Brian DeLaet: And then, you also referenced a “vodcast.” What’s a vodcast?

Joe Burnham: It’s basically trying to take the idea of podcast, which got its name initially from the iPod and then cast, so a cast designed for an iPod, to “vod,” which would be video-based, so it’s a video cast.

And so, in our case, every week we take something called “27 Hour Service.” So, it’s sort of like our church service kind of deal with online and we have a scripture reading and then sort of a meditation on it and then an invitation for users to respond to materials when we ask them some questions and we sort of close that. It goes out in video format.

We upload it right now onto the site in a flash format. And so, users can press play or pause. And so, they can use it in a variety of formats like if they want to take time and think about the questions or maybe write or journal something in response to the interactive material where they’re invited to do so.

And what we’re planning on doing next with that is we’re going to take it and much like you would a podcast through iTunes or anything else that we were going to send out a videocast that people can subscribe to through an RSS feed and get in their iTunes, get it in whatever other video subscriber. We’re going to set it up so it’s good for Apple TV and other similar resources that way, so we’ll have a high def version to it.

Mary Walewski: So, what inspired you to start an online church? It’s a great concept.

Joe Burnham: I think, for me, part of it stems from… Well, depending on who you talk to, if somebody that I’m talking to is really geeky, they would call me a hack. If they’re not really geeky, they would call me a geek. So, depending on where you are in the spectrum, I’m somewhere… I have a love for technology, and I have a love for just sort of the whole online medium and that tech world.

And so, that inspired me to be involved. So, it’s an interest of mine in everyday life. And so, I’m very engaged in that world. I have my own blog; and regularly, I post there, so other elements that way, which’s just a big part of my life.

And then, I’m planting a church in downtown Denver. We’re sort of exploring how you do church planting in an urban setting through this. I set up a MySpace profile and started having conversations with people through MySpace and this is interaction that happens in these environments that prompted me to say, “Well, maybe there’s other ways that we can take advantage of this web medium to just sort of…”

I think, in a lot of ways our goal is for people who have… They’re either standing on the outside of the church or they’re having odd experiences in the church and they’re trying to sort of deal with some of the issues they have, but they are still sort of curious.

We can give them a chance to sort of voyeuristically look in on this Christian community and participate that way. Though, also, that becomes a place to challenge and talk to Christians from a broad spectrum of places where people now that are commenting from England and from Australia and from the US all on this side and interacting and just sort of talk about what’s going on in your world and how does faith play out in the context that you live in and challenge each other as well.

So, I think, it’s just sort of a mix of those things. It became a natural sort of connection there for me.

Brian DeLaet: We say that this is the Web 2.0 podcast. What technologies are you using that you would say makes it that. I mean, we’ve already talked about the podcast and the vodcast.

Joe Burnham: I think, for me, a lot of Web 2.0 isn’t so much the technology itself. It’s what the technology enables. We talk about commenting features and we talk about video and we talk about audio and we talk about the technology in itself, but really, I think that the primary difference between a Web 1.0 model and a Web 2.0 model is Web 1.0 is very much sort of your bulletin board website.

It was one direction communication, it was whoever’s in charge of the website puts something up and it’s the readers’ job to just consume the information. Web 2.0, on the other hand, is bi-directional. I mean, it’s about establishing community, it’s about interactivity, it’s about creativity, it’s about collaboration.

And so, it’s all of those things where it’s no longer just an online bulletin board, it’s an online community. And so, I think, that’s at the heart of Web 2.0. And so, things like all of our articles have comment features on it so people can begin to interact. We have user profiles where we invite users to express themselves. Whenever we talk about the Fishbowl, we don’t talk about it as our site, it is the entire community’s site.

So, the people who come and visit are feeling this isn’t just ours, it’s yours as well. And so, we want your thoughts, we want your ideas, we want your input into helping to shape and form and mold this thing because it’s not about us, it sort of levels that hierarchy in a lot of ways.

And so, it invites people into conversation and discussion. I think at that end, there’s a mix of things we do technology-wise: the common features of the podcast, the vodcast, the user profiles, the ability to comment on user profiles, user blogs. Not only can they blog from the Fishbowl site, but they can also set up to grab their RSS feed from wherever else they might blog. It publishes their blogs on the Fishbowl site as well. We’ve done a number of things that way. All of our content is available through RSS feeds and iTunes.

Eventually we want to run a feature where we’re going to do something called localized. The idea is that as community is formed online, we want to create a bridge from virtual to physical, and invite users who have met in cyberspace to begin to connect with other people with similar interests and similar geography in physical space.

That’s what we’re going to start to mash up with things like Google Maps and other technology that way, and start to find out where people are in space and how to gather and meet and interact in real-time as well as in the online world.

Brian DeLaet: Almost a Web 3.0 where you’re taking the 2.0 technologies that allow you to get together from all over the web and then translating that back into physical encounters.

Joe Burnham: Exactly. I think the negative thing that can become of Web 2.0 is, the community can happen so much online that you begin to… Well, look at the whole website Second Life. For a lot of people, Second Life is now their primary life.

I don’t think that’s a healthy thing. I don’t think that’s a good thing. And so, at that level, rather than wanting to create an option for a secondary life or an alternative primary life, we want to bridge the two and allow the two to interact. We’re integrating technology and the web with everyday, physical, real corporal existence.

Mary Walewski: How long has the site been live?

Joe Burnham: Since Easter Sunday 2008, which puts us at not quite three weeks.

Mary Walewski: And how did you get the word out to let people know this was available?

Joe Burnham: I have a fairly healthy network of people, and so I’ve been talking about it and pushing it through my network for an extended period of time. The guys that helped develop the site have their own networks. And so, we used a mix of my personal network and then the website that I have.

The guys that helped develop it have a podcast that they do on a weekly basis called “Geeks and God.” You can find that at geeksandgod.com. They put it through Geeks and God. They’re also very involved in the Drupal community, which is a content management system. The site itself is actually built in Drupal, and so the site was submitted into Drupal and that network as a site built using that technology.

The guy that started Drupal is now launching a new anti-spam software called Mollom. It’s Dries out of Belgium, he’s the guy behind Drupal. The guys, actually, from the Geeks and God podcast helped him with his web development for Mollom, and now all of the anti-spam stuff on the Fishbowl is through Mollom, and so you don’t see any CAPTCHAS or anything.

None of that happens on the Fishbowl, because we use this alternative software for all of our comments and all of our feedback, run it through that, and it catches all of our spam. We don’t have to worry anything about testing to make sure it’s a real user or anything like that. So, we’ve got a system set up that way.

I’ve taken advantage of my synodical branches and connections, and so we did some bulletin inserts on Easter Sunday. We did some bulletin comments at that period of time as well, and some newsletter announcements. I was just this past week on a radio show for a radio station that our denomination owns. They own a radio station, and so they had me on their afternoon show talking about the site and what’s going on there. They want to have me back on a regular basis.

So basically, taking advantage of a broad variety of feeds, and now we’re really focusing on the idea of word of mouth. Actually, this past week on ‘the Swim’ we asked our listeners “What resources would you like for promoting the Fishbowl? What would you want so that you can share it with the people that you know?”

And so, we’re beginning to get some comments and some feedback from them which, again, is part of this whole “it’s all of our site, it’s this community site.” It’s not just RT, or we want to tell you how to promote your site. We want you to let us know how you want to promote it.

Mary Walewski: It’s going to be interesting to see whether or not you end up getting most of your listeners from Internet connections or from conventional media.

Joe Burnham: So far, by far and away it’s been Internet. Far and away. We were sort of expecting an initial spike when we put out the bulletins and the inserts sort of stuff, and that didn’t come. And we were expecting a spike when we put out the radio show, but that didn’t come. But when we put it on Drupal, when we put it on Geeks and God, when we put it on all of those we got this massive spike those days of attention.

Brian DeLaet: So, it’s the viral Internet marketing. Again, that goes back to using the Web 2.0 technologies because of the nature of the way they work. It shoots out to everybody.

Joe Burnham: Absolutely. When you hit people that aren’t used to that medium, they don’t respond. But, when you hit people in the medium that they’re used to and that they’re engaged in, they’re already involved in, it’s a very natural bridge.

We can see that even in the number of… I think, just over 40% of our users are on the Firefox browser, which is well above the market share that Firefox has. Why? Because Firefox tends to be used by your younger, tech-savvy Web 2.0-style folks. That’s the browser that they use, that’s the way that we’re connecting to them, that’s the browser they’re coming to our site with.

Brian DeLaet: So, you’re getting your target market in that respect.

Joe Burnham: Absolutely.

Mary Walewski: Your target market is actually going younger than 30?

Joe Burnham: We’re going to have an element probably of some of the teen market, there’s going to be some pieces there, but I would say predominantly college students up in their 30s.

Brian DeLaet: We realize that you’ve probably been doing this for a short time. You’ve been live with it for a very short time. But what would you say has been your biggest success so far?

Joe Burnham: Probably some of the things that I’m most excited about with the site to this point… There’s a church body in Australia. I’m not exactly sure how they found the site, but we’ve had a couple of people from this church that have begun engaging in comments on the site and have begun engaging in the site.

One of them is responsible for teaching non-clergy adults who are filling in preaching roles in different situations how to preach. They asked to use part of our 27-hour service as a model of how to integrate media and preaching together. It’s actually taking it and moving it off the actual site as a model of “how do you do this and do this well?” That was exciting that that happened on our third week of putting up the 27-hour service, we’re getting that invitation.

Now, we have a guy from the same church, one that is very involved in integrating it into the scientific world. He made a comment at one of his blogs, when something had come up about Richard Dawkins. He made a comment about what Dawkins believes and what he believes. In parentheses he says, “And yes, I have told Richard this personally.”

The fact that we’re connecting with that sort of audience, to me, that’s a huge thing for us. And our target market part of it, every Thursday we do a piece called “Intelligent Faith,” and it talks about where does faith come in with psychology and reason and history and science, all of those sort of fields, and how does all of that intertwine.

And so, to have someone like that interacting on that forum is a sign we’ve hit our target audience and beginning to connect with the people we’re wanting to connect with at that level. If we can continue to have that happen in other realms on the site where we talk about pop culture or we talk about art, or we’re talking about current events and things like that, that would be… If we can continue to replicate that in other areas, those would be continued markers of success.

Mary Walewski: Any challenges that you’ve encountered so far?

Joe Burnham: I think a mix of making sure that you really have time to test the usability of a site. Web 1.0, you put your site up and there it is. It doesn’t have to necessarily be all that usable, other than people being able to find the links, to find your five or six content pages, whatever it happens to be.

Web 2.0, if it’s interactive, it’s online community, you need to make sure that the bugs are worked out. You need to make sure that people that don’t necessarily know a whole lot about technology can figure out their way around the site and understand how it works.

It’s a long story. Some of the challenges we faced were pretty large. We were shortened in our time span to actually get the site developed and up and live and going. And so, our whole first week was largely spent pulling one some bugs and tweaking the way some things worked, and figuring out how to begin to do a better job.

Brian DeLaet: So, it’s mostly been usability issues and just making sure that it’s friendly?

Joe Burnham: In Web 2.0, usability is key. If you’re doing a community site and it’s not usable by the community, all you’ve really done is a really complex Web 1.0 site with some nifty technology built into it that’s really not useful.

Brian DeLaet: You said that you’re using Drupal. What other cutting-edge technology kinds of things would you say that you’re using?

Joe Burnham: We’re still on the 5.0 Drupal. We didn’t roll into 6.0 because a lot of the modules we wanted weren’t available yet. But, that whole idea of the content management system I think is huge.

[phone rings]

Brian DeLaet: That happens every time.

Joe Burnham: Yes, and we’ll turn that off. I apologize about that.

Mary Walewski: That’s OK. Mine will go off next.

Joe Burnham: I’ll turn mine off now. So, we’re using Drupal 5.0, but that’s a fairly heavy architecture, a content management system. Luckily, that was actually the developer on the phone. As soon as 5.0 came out, he was already talking about 6.0, because he was involved in the beta testing and getting it ready to actually launch. So, we’re right on the cutting edge of what’s happening with Drupal that way.

Mollom, our anti-spam software, that has actually just moved out of private beta. Our developer and designer were involved in the private beta process. It just moved into public beta and we’re already up and live. Our whole site has been functioning on the public beta from basically the day it went live.

I think, in some of those areas, but not so much on the interface of the site. And I think, there’s value in waiting a little bit on interface material simply because, if you’re too cutting-edge, then only early adopters are going to use the site. You need to give a little time for people to start to get used to things.

We’re discovering even things like RSS feeds, which have been around for quite a while… So, Really Simple Syndication, a simple way to get stuff, content pushed to you. I’ve been using it for a few years but I’m just now starting to convince my wife that it’s something that she should be using and that it has value. So, it takes a little while.

We not only have it available on RSS feeds, but also doing email feeds. And so, if you want the content emailed to you, you can set that up to do it that way as well. Even on some tech-heavy blogs, people seem to still prefer email over RSS. I’m not sure why; RSS to me is so simple. But I’m an early adopter, and when it came out and I found out about it, I jumped on it.

Brian DeLaet: So you’re saying that RSS feeds are really simple?

Joe Burnham: I would say so. RSS, really simple… It makes sense to me, but I can see why people would struggle with it, because it’s a shift and it’s a change.

It’s funny, because my dad the other day, we were talking about a YouTube video that my brother had posted, and he wanted to get it onto his hard drive so my grandmother could see it. He had to call me and say, “How do I get a video off of YouTube?”

Mary Walewski: I’ve never thought of that.

Joe Burnham: It was just a quick Google search to say, “OK, here’s the software you need to download. You’re on PC. This is what to do.” I have the Mac software to do it, but I didn’t have the PC software to do. So, you do the search, you find what you need. I sent it to him, he downloaded it no problem. But, unless you’re right there on the cutting-edge, you’re not used to using cutting-edge technology, and therefore it’s scary. There’s sort of a drift-down time.

So, I think there are a lot of the stuff behind the scenes, we’re definitely right there, maybe even not on the cutting-edge but on the bleeding edge, a little further out even, as we’re adopting some of this stuff. But, as far as the stuff users are interacting with, we’re allowing them a little time for it to seep into the culture at large. So, it’s a usable site.

Brian DeLaet: What does the future hold for Fshbwl?

Joe Burnham: I think the big thing, and this is where it moves into unique… You coined the idea of the Web 3.0 concept of how do you move from virtual to physical. To me, that’s one of the really exciting aspects of the site, especially from the church world. While online community is wonderful and powerful, and it’s been a huge part of my life, when I have a chance to meet people in person that I’ve met online, I jump on the opportunity.

I think, there’s more and more of that, where people on MySpace are shifting to meet in person. People that somehow connect through friends of friends, or people who connect through LinkedIn… Mary, this is the first day I’ve met you, but we’ve interacted through LinkedIn, we’ve interacted through phone conversations and stuff like that, through a connection from Brian. But, there’s something nice about actually face-to-face interacting, meeting, getting to know somebody.

The opportunity to do that, we want to really facilitate that. We’ve had all these conversations online with people. To say, “OK, let’s move from 2.0 to 3.0″ in that sense and begin to dive into this real-time physical… How do you facilitate and make that happen? I think, that’s huge for this site.

Of course, that’s going to demand that we have a regular interactive community that is much larger than the one we have now. There’s going to be continued taking advantage of viral Internet marketing and communication in the networks that happen that way. Allowing things to expand, continuing to incorporate ideas from people in the community into how the site works, that’s going to be huge, and to give it that community feel that way.

And to allow things to develop and rise up, and probably get a little more complex at certain points. Maybe simplify at others. We’ll see how it all goes. More users submitting content, more user interaction, improved user profiles, all of those things to enhance the social networking side. But all of that is leading up and building towards, “OK, now that we have a massive online community, how do we jump to in-person?”

How do we get people who connect to maybe engage in certain projects in their community? We’re going to all have people from around the Fshbwl that are in the United States meet in San Antonio, and then cross the border into Mexico and go spend a week building houses. Maybe, you get a hundred or a thousand people just engaged in building houses for the poor, and doing medical work for the poor in Mexico off of this site, and allowing that to distill back into the U.S. as people connect in community and develop relationships that much more.

I think that’s going to be our next major jump. There’s a lot of building up to get to that point first.

Brian DeLaet: Well, Joe, thanks so much for being part of the Mary and Brian podcast today. Please tell us again how we can find you on the Internet.

Joe Burnham: The easiest way is the Fshbwl. It’s Fshbwl.com. So, the word “Fishbowl” without any vowels. You also can find me at my own personal blog. It’s joeburnham.com. You can email me either joe.burnam@fshbwl.com, or you can try joe@joeburnham.com.

Brian DeLaet: OK, very good. Well, thank you very much for being a part of our podcast today, and thank you for joining the Web 2.0 podcast. You can check out Mary’s site at buythebookmarketing.com. You can check out the EduCyber at educyber.com. If you found this podcast some other way, you can visit us on the web at web2.0denver.biz.

Brian DeLaet: Welcome to our podcast. I’m Brian DeLaet, CEO of EduCyber, Inc. Today we’ll be speaking with Mary Walewski of Buy the Book Marketing.

Mary has been helping authors sell their books for several years and has created several different practices designed to meet their specific needs. So, what is the connection between selling books and Web 2.0? Let’s find out from Mary.

Mary Walewski: Thank you.

Brian: Mary, how long have you been in this line of work?

Mary: About four years now. I had a friend who self published a book and she called me up one day and said, “I need some help marketing this. Do you want to do it?”

And I said, OK, but I knew nothing about it. So she gave me a copy of Dan Poynter’s self-publishing guide, which is one of the bibles of the field. I started reading and then I started studying and four years later, I have a business. It’s been a lot of fun.

Brian: And you’ve had this business for the four years.

Mary: For four years.

Brian: OK. Good. And since this Podcast is about Web 2.0 technologies, we’re going to be moving in that direction. But just in general, what are some of the changes that you’ve seen happen in your business over the last year?

Mary: Even going back a little bit further than that, what I have been seeing is a steady change of traditional publicity, which used to be with major newspapers and magazines. From that being the standard that you would get publicity, to getting more and more on the Internet, because not only is the readership getting higher for even regular newspapers who have a web presence, but there are all these social media sites where you can connect directly with your audience and meet people on a very personal level.

Brian: You’re talking about the social media sites. What is a social media site?

Mary: One of the first ones that came on the scene was MySpace, and MySpace originated as a site for garage bands to promote their music. They would be able to upload clips onto their site, they could alert their fans as to when they were touring and make announcements, all sorts of things.

Pretty soon, other people started catching on. Kids started creating their own MySpace page and then their parents joined in. And now the average age of people on MySpace is about 35.

Brian: 35?

Mary: Yes.

Brian: So MySpace is not just for kids in the garage bands.

Mary: It’s not kids. There’s still a very large music presence. I found out when we did a report on MySpace and we created a page for our dog, there are a lot of dogs on MySpace. There are corporations. There are celebrities.

Brian: You created a web page for your dog?

Mary: She has more friends now than we do.

Brian: [laughs] OK.

Mary: All over the world, too.

Brian: All right. I won’t ask how she types because that’s probably a topic for another day.

Mary: Better than I do, actually.

Brian: But thinking about Web2.0, can you tell us what are three specific either technologies or methods that you use in your business to help your clients who are, of course, your authors?

Mary: Yes. Most of my authors are self-published. What that means is they paid for everything, from the cover design to the editing, to actually printing the book. And now they have, chances are, about 500 to 3000 books sitting in their garage waiting to be sold. So the first thing I ask them to do is sit down with me, and we think about what should go on their website.

And that is critical, because it is not only a place where someone interested in buying their book is going to go, it’s also where any media that becomes interested in their topic is going to go to check out and see what their credentials are and what they have written on the subject.

They have to really give some good thought to, what do they want people to do when they get to their site? And how do you get them to stick around, sample some of your writing, and get an idea if it’s something they want to buy?

Secondly, they need to really start connecting with their audience and establish their expertise. So, I usually advise them to think about starting a blog. And if they blog–about two or three times a week would be terrific–they start to gather an audience. They can also tap into what other people are saying on the subject. They can comment on other people’s blogs, they can start getting some traffic to their own sites and they start to establish a little more of a presence up there in their subject.

The third thing is to really use all the tools that Amazon.com has available for authors.

Brian: Let’s back up just a second because you’re talking about the blog. Your first technology website, I think that’s a given to be Web 2.0, but that is a good basis. I’ve heard of the blogosphere, but there’s lots of different sites to put blogs. Where is the best place for an author to have their blog?

Mary: I’ve had authors on Blogger, which is one of the better known sites that Google now owns. It’s a little rigid, you can’t really customize it terribly well, but it’s free so it’s OK.

There are a couple of paid ones out there. TypePad comes to mind and they have a lot of technical support and I think you can pay maybe $5 a month to be up there. They allow you to customize your blog a little bit more.

WordPress has a free site, too, that you can use. These are all different, slightly different blogging software–some you can download, others you can host on somebody else’s site–and there’s probably about a zillion more I don’t even know about.

Brian: Do you have any recommendations or preferences on where or how is the best place for somebody to do a blog?

Mary: I would suggest either TypePad or WordPress, simply because they’re a little more professional looking. Blogger is OK, but it tends to be more for people’s personal blogs.

Brian: So either WordPress or TypePad to host their blog site.

I’m sorry to have interrupted you; you were starting to tell about your third technology, which is using Amazon.

Mary: Yes, Amazon is a little bit more than just a place to sell your books. It’s a really good venue. It’s probably the best-known place in the world to buy books on the Internet. But what a lot of people don’t know is that you have a lot of services available through them, at no charge if you are an author, that allows you to publicize your book.

First of all, you can host a blog on Amazon as an author. You’re given a profile page. In fact, everybody is, but very few people, I think, really use it except authors. And you can create what they call “Listmania!”. Listmania! Is a list of, I’ll say favorite books on your topic.

Of course, you’ll probably include your own book, but you can also include your competitors’ books. It’s another way to allow your readers to get to know you.

You can put up articles and the overall topic is called, “So you’d like to.” So you’d like to know more about Web 2.0, for instance. So, you can put articles up there. A lot of people review books on Amazon. You as an author could also review books on Amazon. If you review your competitors’ books, you get to put after your name “author of…” put your own title in and hopefully, if they like what you have to say, they are going to check out your book.

Brian: OK.

Mary: So, there are a lot of different ways that you can up there and really become very well known on Amazon.

Brian: OK. You’ve given us some really good pictures of broad topics. Can you give us an example of a specific author you’ve helped use one of more of these technologies recently?

Mary: Yes. I have several authors who have been doing that. My first author, Mary Jo Fay, who writes relationship books, has been doing a variety of things like that. Of course, she has a website. We’ve got her books on Amazon.com and she has reviewed books and also put Listmania! Up on various topics in relationship books, things like that.

We have also done–this is totally new for what we’re talking about here–we’ve done a book trailer for her, where we could put that on YouTube. That was for one of her books called, “The Seven Secrets of Love.”

So, from her website you can go to YouTube and see a video that describes her book. And also, it has been very good for driving traffic to both Amazon and to her website. That’s one example.

Another one is a non-profit I’ve been working with called the Legal Center for People with Disabilities. Their specialty is special education law, and they’ve done two guides on special ed law for parents. The author decided to start blogging, and he not only blogged, but he also commented on other people’s blogs.

As soon as he stated doing that, in a very short period of time, they started noticing an increase in sales. So, Randy is living proof that the sort of one-to-one interaction on the Internet does get good results.

Brian: So, are you saying that he noticed the change after he started putting comments on other blogs?

Mary: Both.

Brian: For doing both.

Mary: And he started getting comments on his own articles that he was posting on his blog. The traffic also went up on the website. A lot of times in their case, parents really have no idea. If they have a special needs child, they don’t really know what their rights are. A lot of times the counselors and the teachers at the school really don’t know what the child is entitled to for various reasons.

The law is very complicated. Randy’s book gives parents a very clear interpretation of the law and how it applies to their circumstance. So, anyone who is looking for that kind of information would find a blog like that very illuminating.

Brian: That’s very wonderful. At the beginning of this conversation you were talking about how maybe the traditional methods don’t work. Why is it that the Web technology, Web 2.0, works and works better than traditional, enough that that’s what you’re really marketing right now?

Mary: It’s kind of a sign of the times. They’ve done polls nationwide on where Americans are getting their news from. Over70% are getting most of it from the Internet. So, the influence of traditional newspapers is waning.

Also, the costs are going up. They’re having to pay more to print, to distribute, because of the cost of fuel going up. People are moving around more. They’re not subscribing to newspapers the way they used to. Instead, they’re using the Internet.

So, with the change in circulation, ad revenue is dropping. Reporters are getting laid off. I mean, it’s not really a great state of affairs for a traditional newspaper these days.

Brian: Yes, that’s true.

Mary: And as a result, too, sections like the book review section, which used to be a mainstay for book publicity, are shrinking or being eliminated.

Brian: If you can do it on Amazon for free and in real time, why take the time to do it on a book or paper.

Mary: And also book editors are tending to only review books from very large traditional publishers like Simon & Schuster or Random House, places like that. If you’re self-published you have practically no chance of getting reviewed. So, the Internet has provided a very level playing field.

Brian: That’s that great leveling effect that people like about the Internet.

Mary: It’s a lot of fun up there. You can become a very big fish in a very small pond. So even if your market is people who build guitar amplifiers, for instance, you can find devotees in that very narrow little niche all over the world.

Brian: Uh-huh.

Mary: And you can become the big fish.

Brian: So that that small pond isn’t right here where we are, but that small pond is in that niche, wherever it is in the world.

Mary: It could be in Australia. It could be in New Zealand. It could be in Canada. It doesn’t matter.

Brian: OK. Very good. Well, thank you very much. That’s Mary Walewski from Buy the Book Marketing. And Mary, can you tell us how can we contact you?

Mary: You can go to my website, which is BuytheBookMarketing.com and my email address is Mary@buythebookmarketing.com.

Brian: And that’s Buy the Book Marketing, B-U-Y. Buy the Book Marketing.

Mary: Thank you.

Brian: Thank you, and have a great day.

Transcription by CastingWords