I’ve received a few e-mails lately asking about how I handle some of my shows release schedules. In short, how often should a podcaster or video podcaster create a new episode? Every situation may be different but there are some obvious trends I’ve seen over the last few years.

Although a release schedule really depends on your shows content and purpose, the best possible scenario would be short episodes on a daily basis. This turns out to be a lot of work if you’re working alone or in a small group. This is most challenging if your content is time sensitive, such as daily news, industry news or the like. Large firms have benefited from daily shows like CNET Buzz Out Loud. Others, such as Wine Library TV grew from a retail store into a daily show by pushing out great content for 18+ months before making it big.

A daily show between five and ten minutes seems to be the sweet spot for video shows (and 20-minutes or so for audio shows.) Viewers will be able to watch your show during lunch, breakfast or sneak one in during work hours when the boss is not looking. You’ll find it’s fast to edit and produce a show that’s small and tight because there are few chances for major errors or interruptions and the post production is quick with very little render time required. Audio episodes requires less attentiveness so longer shows will be more acceptable.

A short video show will lend itself well in terms of disk storage, quick downloads and easy to post content on sites like Blip.tv. The downfall? You’ll have limited time to squeeze in all your content per episode. If your information isn’t time sensitive you can sit down and record five episodes in under 30 minutes of real time! You can edit each show individually (which could take an hour or so depending on how much post production you’re doing) and launch each one at the start of your day.

You may opt for a weekly show because it fits your schedule better while still working in about 20-30 minutes of great content. Nothing says you have to meet a 20-minute marker, a 10-minute weekly show is fine too. The downfall to a short weekly show comes down to keeping your audience attentive over the long term. A short show might leave less of an impression and they could forget to visit your site each week. If you provide great syndication methods, such as iTunes, you can help remind your audience to tune in each week.

There may be opportunity for a video show that runs only once or twice a month if you’re looking to test the waters, have a rough schedule or your show guests are hard to coordinate. The major downfall being the slow growth of your audience because there is less content to consume. You’re statistics will increase greatly as you have more shows for people to go back and watch after they’ve discovered your content. We’ve got plenty of people new to our shows that go back and re-discover old episodes and that greatly pushes up our download count.

Look at the release schedule over a single year. If you run a show once a month you’re going to end up with 12-episodes at the end of the year. If you run a show twice a week you’ll have 104 episodes after the year is through and, of course, a daily show will have upwards of 250 episodes (if you take weekends off). More shows means more statistics and a better chance to grab new listeners because you’ve always got something new to promote.

Now, let’s talk about statistics. Granted, many video podcast producers will tell you “it’s not about the numbers, its about the content” but we’re human and we love to categorize, organize and know what the heck is going on. What we’ve noticed, with trends in Common Man Cocktails, is that each episodes viewership peaks the first two days after its launch. Then, viewership declines as everyone has seen the latest show while a few new viewers are slowly keeping your numbers going throughout the dead-space between launches.

When we launched the show once a week on Wednesday we’d have big numbers from Thursday to Saturday and then they would fade nearly to nothing by the following Tuesday night. Then, we started pushing out an episode on Wednesday and Saturday, our numbers would pop from Sunday through Tuesday night, just as we prepared to launch the next show. This allows our viewership to maintain a constant rise throughout the week as we gain more momentum and new viewers.

The end result, each new episode peaks the day of launch by another twenty views or so, incremental growth each episode shows progress and interest in the brand. So, wouldn’t it be in our best interest to do a new show everyday? Sure! Except for the small issue with having a few other jobs to do and producing video podcasts as a hobby as this is not quite the best time to bring a brand to investors.

If you’ve got time and dedication to cut a new show every day, the other technique I’ve seen used quite a bit is to run four short episodes a week and one medium length show during the middle of the week. The small shorts can be used to keep your audience attentive, progress your shows content throughout the week and give them a large dose mid-week as something to look forward to viewing.

While a few techniques may work for you, knowing the different possiblities to work towards gives you a nice goal to achieve. Many people are looking to get into video podcasting and hopefully this gives them something to think about in their preparation.

Just remember, the most important part of creating your podcast is the content. You can produce a show nobody wants to watch each day if you want, but that’s not really worth your time.

No matter how great your writing is, no matter how awesome your site looks, you may still have issues gaining traffic to your site because you’re on page 99 of google’s search results. Let’s face it, if you’re on page-3 of the google search results you might as well be on page 300. I’ve had plenty of pages arrive on page six and seven and I’ve had some clicks… but it’s never relevant. If they’ve not found a site to service their needs in the first five pages… you’re probably way off from what they are looking for, or a re-hash of something they already don’t care about.

Problem One: Effort

You’ll have to put in a lot of effort to receive page-1 or even page-2 results in google. It doesn’t happen over night, so be patient. In a highly competitive keyword space it also won’t happen on a single blog post.

Here are two scenarios, you are considering a site to write about “video games” because you know a lot about them, or “baby carriages” because you’ve recently had a kid and you feel you know enough about them to write articles involving baby transportation in the way of a carriage. Which one will be more profitable?

The average cost-per-click for a video game keyword ad is:

The average cost-per-click for a baby carriage ad is:

So, technically you’ll make more money on the keyword baby carriage as long as you realize the total searches are going to be much less (almost half says adwords traffic estimator). I don’t think it’s any surprise that more people are interested in search for video games than they are for baby carriages.

So, video games is the place to apply all our efforts, right? Maybe not. Do a quick search for video games and you’ll see something like this:

If you do a search for baby carriage you’ll see something like this:

You may discover, as I did, there are many less competitive pages for baby carriages, 323,000 compared to 799,000,000 for video games. Judging your competitive marketplace you’ll see it will be far easier to rank on page-1 on google for baby carriages and they’re going to give you better ad pricing (in general) using adsense.

What does this mean to you, the blogger? The market space is less competitive for baby carriages and thus you’ll have an easier time ranking on the first page of google’s organic search results. Less people are searching for baby carriages, however, you’re more likely to be the one getting clicks if you try hard enough because ranking for video games on any of the initial google page results is going to be a rough road. In the end, you’re effort will pay off much higher for something with less search results.

Problem Two: Luck

There is some luck involved with organic search. Some days people won’t do that many searches for your content, or, if it’s season dependent, some seasons may receive less organic search results. The next nature of luck… are the competitive sites trying to rank for your keywords any good at it?

To change your luck, you can do some deeper research and check the top ranked sites to see if they use the meta-keywords field or have content that’s really relevant to the search keywords. You can take what could be random luck and focus it into a well thought out plan and avoid having to rely on a lucky roll of the keyword.

Luck also plays into the niche field you’re getting into when writing content. You can start writing about a topic that’s rarely talked about on the Internet and then, one day, it becomes a huge hot button topic and you find yourself getting traffic you never though you’d get. Luck can be awesome at times.

Problem Three: Google Magic Sauce

How organic searching works is a mystery, a well-understood mystery, but it’s still a mystery none-the-less. SEO experts have found ways to “game the system” by making your content more relevant to google; crafting your text in a specific manner…using good keyword density but not overdoing it, is a good example of some basic SEO practices. You can take their advice and follow it like the SEO bible and google can change their sauce at any time and all your effort goes to the gutter.

Luckily for you, google tries to make subtle changes to their system and not revamp their organic search system from the ground up. Some subtle changes may indeed change how you rank in search results but those are the issues a Search Engine Optimizer deals with on a quarterly basis (usually google updates their ranks and such every three months, “big changes” will probably come at this time).

Problem Four: Relevance

Your content will have a specific relevance when it comes to how google views your site since an automated system is scanning your words, not a human. When writing content focus on what your site is about and less about other random stories. If you’re making a blog about baby carriages you probably want to shy away from talking too much about products outside the space or writing articles about other industries.

If you start changing your topics you may start arriving on page results not truly pertaining to your overall content. It will be hard to keep subscribers coming back if they think you’re about one thing but you’re really a site about something entirely different. And, adsense will start giving you ads that aren’t related to the keywords you originally did research on. You don’t want ad’s that are low pay CPC when your research ads that are high CPC.

Problem Five: Patience

Don’t expect to rank the day your site opens up. It may take a few weeks or a month before you see a single organic search arrive on your site. Using google analytics or 103bees to monitor your organic searches will allow you to see what’s going on in terms of search traffic. I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again, patience is key to so many areas of a good blog or website.

Google likes sites that grow slowly, over time, they also give higher weight (or so people say) to sites that are well aged, so your competitors whom have been around for six years or more will usually show higher than you for the same keywords. That’s okay, people don’t always click on the first result in google, they’ll read the meta-description that google presents before clicking (usually) or at least the title of the result. They also may click on many of the first page results while doing research.

Keep at it for six months or so and see what you can do with your site. Watch the search results to see how people are finding your site and focus on what’s working. It’s important to realize this may not be what you want to work in all cases, but making money sometimes requires you to do things you may not want to do (in moderation anyway).

Problem Six: Niche Market

This is, by far, the most lectured topic in search engine optimization and web marketing in general. Selling a product someone else already has market dominance over is going to be frustrating and if you’re a low-budget shop (or have little time) try sticking to something that’s not so overdone…baby carriages for instance. If you’re not passionate about the topic you can look around for something else or do some research and learn the topic anyway, perhaps you’ll grow fond of it.

If you really want to do video games or something like that, pick a specific genre of video games (Role Playing Games, Racing Games) or a single video game fan site and dedicate your time to it. Just remember, if you grow bored of that video game you’re still going to have to maintain the site if you want to bring in ad revenue. As a blogger who writes about video games I’ll tell you up front: it’s a long frustrating road before you gain any type of search hits that net you revenue.

If you want to write about “news” on your topic make sure their is a lot of news going around because you don’t want it to dry up and go stale. News sites also require much more effort and consistently daily blogging (hourly is best) to keep people interested. News, on the Net, doesn’t last long so you’ll always be searching for the next hot story.

You can pay USD $5,000 in consulting fees to learn this, or take my word for it… targeting a niche market is going to be the difference between making some money and making nothing. Affiliating with a niche market is also a great idea if you don’t plan on selling products yourself and play to rely on ad-revenue to make a dime (more dimes with affiliating + ad’s than doing only one). Provide niche market content to help your readers make an intelligent decision about a product and continue to update it to keep those fans coming back for more.

Have Fun!

If you want to write daily content you must enjoy it or it will grow more like a “real job” that you hate to commute to each day. Enjoy yourself, have fun writing content and be smart about what you’re doing.

Good Luck!

If you’re providing content there is a good chance you could pimp someone else’s products to your advantage. Unless you’re considering creating your own physical product you may want to consider selling someones product for some type of return. Affiliation is always a good outlet for a bit of extra money.

Don’t expect to become a millionaire selling someones product, even if they, themselves, are millionaires because you’re just one of many people trying to sell their products. However, if people do buy from you over someone else you do stand to make a bit of cash. Let us assume you have google adsense giving you a bit of money in your pocket, what does it hurt to have a few affiliate advertisements pushing a product?

Their not ad’s per se, they’re suggestions you provided to your readers because you like the products yourself. I guess you can never have used them or just try to push some random products but having used them gives you a bit of experience that you can talk to your viewers with telling them why they should buy them as well and more importantly, buy them from you.

People buy products all the time and if they’re on your site there is a good chance they found you because they’re looking for services or products that which align with their needs. If someone is coming to your site via organic search with a casino game product and you’re chatting about childcare safety devices then you managed to rank for keywords you didn’t intend to…that person probably isn’t interested in your content. As a matter of fact, they probably clicked the back button two seconds after loading.

Will people buy from you? Maybe, maybe not, but what’s the risk in trying? If it doesn’t work out after six months or so, try affiliating with a different product or resource, no harm no foul. If you managed to make a few bucks then it’s better yours than another content provider! If you manage to bring in enough income to consider it a great hobby or part-time job (or better) than you’ve done well, give yourself a pat on the back.

If you’re a content writer you might as well get used to writing content and providing users with what they want: products aligned to their needs. Affiliate Baby!

You’ve probably seen sites on the web that try to trick you to click on ad’s by making a blog post that is one big ad with absolutely no text of usefulness on it. Normally, these seem to be track-back attacks, sites that link to your blog hoping you’ll put the track-back in the comments of your blog so they get clickers who accidentally click on their ads. These are obviously breaking the terms of service google set up, but it’s also possible to make an equally ugly legit website.

I’m a firm believer in making a bit less money through click-thru ads by making a site that’s about content as it’s primary objective and about advertising as its second objective. I don’t think a site needs to be overloaded with crazy animated advertising on all sides of the site with huge banners outlining the content.

Having a site that focuses on content will keep users entertained for longer but may stop a mass from clicking on your ads because they’re less obtrusive. In the end, if you have rich content that’s useful you’ll have more returning guests to your website and returning guests offer a constant source of page views. Page views becomes a secondary weapon when you start getting advertisers coming directly to you to pay you for advertising space on your site because it has a growing community… not just a few flash crowds of traffic.

Perhaps I’m alone in thinking quality content is more important than an extra few clicks per day. It works for me and at the end of the day I feel good about what I wrote and any money I made supporting the writing. Respect your reader, keep the ads out of their face and let them focus on your skills and creativity.

Let us call it Ad Etiquette .

Assuming you’re going to use adsense over a firm like AdBrite then you’re in the market to bring content that shows high paying ads. Don’t go it alone, do some research on topics you think you could write a ‘journal’ about on a daily basis before you start your potential money making campaign. Don’t be that guy who has a great idea that nobody actually wants. Think ahead, plan smart and do a bit of research.

Think like a company trying to sell ads to a website and invest in opportunities. A company wishing to make their presence known may choose google adwords to start bidding on keywords to bring up their content on websites and search results. Although many companies may opt to only advertise on google search results plenty of high paying bidders are on the Net trying to get the word out about their business. You are here to carry their words.

First, pretend to be like those companies and research keywords to see what the average prices is for them. You can use adwords traffic estimator [or non-user-based external tool] to achieve this goal, in our example we’ll use a few keywords to get some relative idea about a market we can write about: kids. In our example we’ll use the keywords: “baby cloths”, “daycare”, “infant”, “safety” and “toys”.

We can see the terms have some good search volume to them and adwords online help says:

“Higher search volume keywords or keywords with higher advertiser competition don’t necessarily provide more qualified leads. They can also result in higher costs with a lower return on your investment.”

That means the marketing folks are going to need to spend more because their is a high competition for the words to be displayed on websites around the Internet. Although google won’t tell you the percentage of revenue you’ll make from the ad, it’s safe to assume if they get more you’ll get more. So, focusing on these keywords, along with those that complement them may be a good idea.

Now, an advertiser is going to want to know what their about to spend, on average, and the next column breaks this down. The total cost doesn’t always correlate to the total volume of searches but it will probably be close.

What you can look for here is a set of keywords with a sweet price. The “toys” keyword has a great volume and a pretty nice click price of 79 cents to $1.15 on average. The higher price they pay, the better price you’re going to make. A good rule of thumb, if what you want to write about has really low average CPC you’ll have to work very hard to make money on the site or provide thousands of users to your site to make money on sheer volume of low priced clicks.

The last fields define the estimated clicks per day and how much it will cost them to advertise with the keywords. Please note the keywords “baby cloths” don’t receive too many clicks on a daily basis and have a lower price while “toys” receive around 20,000 clicks a day.

Of course, you probably want to write about more than just “toys,” so you can try to find some other keywords with nice average pricing to broaden your scope. The moral of the story, do some research before you start writing because once you’ve got yourself invested in days and weeks of writing you want it to pay off in the end… that’s the goal, right?

How long can that take? Let’s be realistic, you’ve got a blog and you start writing but you have no fans of your website… as a matter of fact, nobody even knows your website exists. This is going to be your first challenge.

Don’t think about making money right away, think about marketing your site. Name a single startup company that jumped into the market and was instantly making piles of cash. Can you think of any? Probably very few, if any because making money does indeed require you to put in a bit of effort.

Pinning up a blog with a few cool articles isn’t going to rake in mad cash for the average person. Those that claim they make over $100.00 a month on ad revenue probably forget to mention they work at it on a daily basis. Over the coming months I hope to explain a few techniques to making a bit of money off ad revenue by bringing content to users that is relatively interesting.

You can try to cheat the system, you can try to brute for a search-engine-optimization solution but, in the end, effort, creativity and inspiration will pay you more than any shortcuts you’ll find on the internet.

Like any good company, you should start slow and build up a theme of content and work towards providing users with information they can you. I, like many people on the Net, plan to explain to users my experience with growing web presence and how to get some exposure. Am I a success story? I’m not sitting at home on piles of money if that’s what you think, but I can tell you a few ways to start making some supplemental cash with a little bit of effort.

If you’re starting up a blog, don’t think about money and monotizing your blog unless you’re planning on living it as a lifestyle. My method is to live it as a hobby with a dream to live it as a lifestyle. Not every idea is going to make you tons of money in ad revenue and attention so think small and hope big.

With Adsense, you can plan to make little to no money for a few months as you start building your web presence and gaining impressions on your site (aka “web hits”). Once you start getting 30 or more hits a day you can start looking to make some adsense revenue (if you’re articles are written well and provide good keyword content for adsense). When I say “making money” I’m measuring in pennies, not dollars.

There is no get rich scheme, start with pennies and work to dollars over time. It may take three to six months for you to see a USD $1.00 a day adsense revenue.

Later, we’ll talk about finding something interesting to write about that also may provide good adsense revenue. A little research will be required, stay tuned.