In today's episode, I give you a detailed example of how I have used my TOC Technique myself to create a book, a podcast, and how you too can churn out blog posts and social posts at will and enter any group or community and add value right away, without being spammy.

So in the last episode, I introduced you to my "TOC Technique", where TOC stands for TOC, as in, Table of Contents. If you haven't listened to that one, then you should listen to episode #24 first, if not, this episode may not make much sense. So go to subscribeme.fm/24 to listen to the last one first, then continue with this one.

In today's episode, I'm going to give you some real-world examples so that you can get an idea of how powerful this technique is for churning out content at will, never getting writer's block ever again, never having to wonder what to blog about or how to do come up with content for your content marketing.

All of this starts by creating what I call your "Dream Book TOC". So you need to create the table of contents of what you would consider your "dream" book. And this dream book toc, will not only help with content creation and content marketing, but it will actually help you research your niche even BEFORE you ever get started.

And we're not talking about the monetizability - I'm not referring to the ability to monetize a market, but your ability to figure out the depth of YOUR OWN expertise in a market. If you can come up with the table of contents for a dream book in a niche, and you look at that entire TOC, and you look at each chapter and sub-chapter, and you go "Oh my god, I have no idea what any of that stuff is, and I don't have any clue how I'm going to even BEGIN to attempt writing this book", then you know right away that this is not the right market for you. Now, we're not talking about you partnering or hiring an expert in that niche and having them create the content. We're not going that far yet. I'm assuming you're a small business owner, an independent freelancer, and you're trying to carve out a name for yourself in your niche. So I'm going to assume that you're going to want to do this stuff yourself.

So if your dream book TOC scares you, then that's a HUGE warning sign that you're headed in the wrong direction, and this niche is not for you.

HOWEVER... if you look at your dream book, and it makes you go "Hell yeah, I can churn out content for this stuff day and night. I can write about these chapters, I can blog about these, I can do a podcast about this, all day every day. And when I do a podcast about this, I know so much about this stuff that I don't need to bring on experts and do interview guests to create the content. I can just pick any topic, fire up my mike and recording software, and I can start dishing and deep diving into these topics all day, ever day!'

See where I'm going with this? Yes, that's how I feel about my own expertise - which is all things membership sites, online courses, digital content delivery, and so on.

So let's say you were in my same niche, here's how you can go about creating your dream book toc.

The "TOC Technique" will help you become a master at creating content for your membership site, for your online course, youtube marketing videos, writing sales copy, writing books, creating a product, writing Facebook posts and Tweets.

And when I say "TOC", I mean T.O.C, as in Table of Contents.

The show notes for this episode is available at http://subscribeme.fm/24/ . And that's where, you will be able to play the episode directly from the web site, thanks to my podcast player plugin, called CoolCastPlayer. It is without a doubt the Prettiest Podcast Player on the Planet. It plays podcasts as well as regular MP3 files. So check it out at CoolCastPlayer.com.

Alright, let's jump right in...

So what is this TOC technique and why is it such a big deal?

I came up with this idea a few years ago, but had never given it a proper name that is easy to understand and implement, until recently.

Back in 2007, I published my first book, called "No Business Like E-Business", which at the time, went on to become a category best seller, which was a pretty big deal for me, because it was a physical book, and I had no list back then. Well, I did have a small list, but I never promoted this book to that list. Never even told anyone other than a few of my close friends and relatives. So the fact that it become a category best seller, was incredibly gratifying.

It initially took me an year to write most of it, then life happened, I took a couple of years break, then when I got back to it, from that point, it then took me another couple of years to rewrite it pretty much entirely. So roughly, it took me about 3 years to complete the book, writing at most a couple of pages a day, sometimes nothing at all for days and weeks together.

At the time, I had a lot of things going on. I had a full-time job, I had my PHP scripts web site, mywebmasterinabox.com, which is now defunct by the way, but you can still see what it looked like back then, as it's still online. My son had just been born, my wife had taken an extended leave of absence from her job, I was the sole earner, I was in a really, REALLY bad situation at my job, with an insanely angry and verbally and mentally abusive boss, I could not leave my job because I had to keep a job to keep my green card application going, it was a complete mess. Those few years were probably the darkest years of my life, and if not for my sweetheart, my wife Veena and my precious kids, I don't know if I would be here today. It was that bad.

And during this whole time, I was working in New York city. I would commute to the city by train every day. And at the time, I had a company provided laptop, which has some amazing stories attached to it, that I'll talk about in a future episode. So I had this laptop, but I didn't have a wifi card - don't know why. Never even thought about it. But that was the best thing that happened to me - that I didn't have wi-fi on the train. So I used to open up Microsoft word, and write my book.

Initially, I started writing the book sequentially. Acknowledgement, Introduction, Chapter 1, then Chapter 2, etc. But this sequential process started burning me out pretty quickly. There were some things I just had no mood to write about. You know, stuff you know in your head, but you know it's going to take you hours and hours to put it into words, and some of these were boring topics to me. It's like trying to teach a rank newbie some new skill. You just wish they would get it already, right?

So that's when, I said to myself, I'm going to start writing the entire table of contents first. Start to finish. I'm going to think of all the questions that someone new to an online business would ask, and then create the most exciting titles for the chapters and sub-chapters, and someone should simply look at the titles and get excited about buying this book.

So I sat down and created what I felt at the time, would be an amazing set of chapters and sub-chapters, which would cover everything someone needed to know about creating an ebusiness.

And once I had completed the TOC - as in TOC , as in table-of-contents, then every time I opened my laptop, I would just scan the titles and sub-titles, and I would just pick one that interested me at that moment, and I would dive right into that section, ignoring all other parts of the book.

This is how film-making is done as well. They don't shoot the first scene of the movie first, and second scene of the movie next. The scenes are shot in a completely random order, depending on availability of the actors, location, etc.

So I started writing my book in this controlled-chaos. And that's when I made the most progress.

So I would choose any topic that I felt like writing about that day, and then if I wasn't able to complete that chapter, or felt that I needed to revisit and change or add more, then I would simply type in the letters "XXXX". So that way, I could come back at a different time, and just search for the word XXXX, and I could keep jumping to every section that I had left unfinished, and could either go on to finish one of them, or get started on a new one. I gave myself the permission to be free and chaotic and random and write in any way I felt inspired to. And I did the exact same thing when I recently published my latest book, "Subscribe Me". I started with the TOC - the table of contents.

And this technique is so powerful, that it can be used for brainstorming and creating so many other things.

In fact, this is a more powerful version of a mindmap in many ways.

I've used this technique to write documentation for DigitalAccessPass.com, map out an email series, series of blog posts, series of FB posts, etc.

So let me quickly give you a couple of examples:

I've already told you how you can use it to write your book, really fast.

For the rest, listen to the episode at http://SubscribeMe.fm/24/

Let's talk about the types of videos there are:

#1: Sales page videos
#2: Content Marketing videos
#3: Native videos on Facebook & Twitter
#4: Documentation and Tutorial videos
#5: Members-only, private videos that are reserved just for members who have registered for free, or have paid for your online course

For Sales page videos, content-marketing videos & tutorial videos that you post on your own blog, or for posting on online forums, and any public-facing videos that you are ok with people sharing with one another, or you actually WANT people to share it, use YouTube for all of those videos. Many years ago, in the early years of Youtube, for a while, it wasn't considered cool or professional to put a youtube video on your home page. And all that was before youtube became the 2nd largest search engine, after.... you guessed it, Google.com. Millions of people start their search on youtube, especially for do-it-yourself stuff, tutorials, product reviews. And for your video to rank high on youtube, say, when someone searches for "how to potty train a puppy", and you have an online course about puppy potty training, then you want your videos to come up high in the search results. And one of the factors that can help your video rankings, is the number of video views, among many other things. And the fastest way to rack up video views for your main sales videos and other documentation and tutorial videos, is to upload them all to youtube, then take the embed code for those videos and put them on your web site on your home page, in your documentation section, when you do content marketing on your own blog, and so on. So for all public-facing videos that do not need to be protected, use youtube. That will help your videos rank better not only on youtube, but also on Google.com searches, when google will sometimes show videos from youtube among the search results. So it helps your overall SEO efforst, where SEO stands for search engine optimization.

Next, if you have private members-only videos, then do NOT, and I repeat, do NOT host them on Youtube.

Now there's a common misconception that your videos are secure if you make them "Private" youtube - what that means is, there's a setting in youtube that will allow you to make the video private. And private videos will not show up in searches, in side-bars or in recommended videos that show up right after a video has finished playing on youtube. So just because it doesn't show up anywhere, doesn't mean it is fully protected from prying eyes. If you make your youtube video private, and then embed that video in your member's area, then once someone gets to that page, and sees that it's a youtube video, they will be able to click on the Youtube logo, and get directly to that video on youtube.com.

And they can now share your quote unquote private video link with just about anyone on the web, or send the link by email, or post it on Facebook, and suddenly, your private members-only video is now public and out in the open.

Next you might think... what if I used a video plugin that will hide the youtube logo from the video? You could, I guess. But that would be a violation of youtube's terms of service, and could get your account banned. So don't do that.

So for private videos that you want to publish in the member's area, and make it available to only your members, make sure they cannot pass around your link, you have 2 options:

Option 1: Amazon S3. S3 is fantastic for hosting private videos, and I have also developed a plugin called S3MediaVault.com, which will help you secure your S3 videos, and embed them in your member's area in such a way that it is secure, and cannot be viewed or shared outside of your web site. You should check out my last episode - at subscribeme.fm/22/ , where I talk a lot about Amazon S3, which is a super-cheap and fast option for hosting your media files.

Option #2: Vimeo.com. Now, Vimeo is just like youtube in that, people can upload their videos, there's a common directory to search for and watch videos, it's social in nature, and so on. And vimeo also has a way to make your video private, which means your video will not show anywhere on vimeo.com or in recommended videos at the end of other people's videos. However, the one big difference between vimeo and youtube's private feature, is that vimeo has a setting where you can tell vimeo, allow this video to ONLY be embedded and played on www.mywebsite.com. It's called "whitelisting" - so this is the same thing that my plugin S3MediaVault does for S3. It whitelists your domain, so that your video can only play from your web site. One drawback of Vimeo.com is that even if you store your private videos on Vimeo and embed the private video code securely on your site, there’s still the question of other file formats – like audio, PDF, zip, doc, images, etc, none of which vimeo supports. So even if you use Vimeo for videos, you still need a solution for the other file formats, and I recommend Amazon S3 + S3MediaVault.com for that.

Now, once you've ensured that your video can ONLY be played on your web site, then you now have to make sure that ONLY a certain group of people - like your registered free members, or your paid buyers, or your monthly subscribers - can even get to that page that has this private video. And that's where you need a membership plugin, like DigitalAccessPass.com.

So 2 levels of protection: 1) Make sure your video only plays from www.yoursite.com, and 2) make sure only authorized members or buyers can get to that page.

If you use Vimeo for this, then you need to sign up for their "Pro" package, because that's the one that has the whitelisting feature. And pro costs 199 dollars per year. So it's not really cheap. But  the advantage of Vimeo is that you can customize your player colors to match your web site look & feel, and you can get some video analytics. And you won't pay more than 199 a year, whether you have 10 view or 1 million views on your videos.

So, to summarize: For public videos and videos that you would like to encourage sharing and liking and commenting, use Youtube videos. And for private members-only videos, you can use Amazon S3 and a plugin like S3MediaVault, or you can use Vimeo.com. And for protecting all NON-video files, you should absolutely use Amazon S3.

Before you go... let me give you a REALLY sweet deal here, for my podcast player plugin, CoolCastPlayer.com. If you purchase a copy of CoolCastPlayer, then respond to the welcome email you get right after the purchase, and let me know that you are a listener of this show. And I'll give you free unlimited-site license of the S3MediaVault.com plugin for free. That's a 97 dollar value, and you can get it for free. S3MediaVault is a plugin that can protect your PDF, Audio, Video and other files stored in your Amazon S3 account. And S3MediaVault also comes with a built-in audio player and a video player, so you can embed secure audio and secure video on your web site, and make it available for members only or buyers only. So get a free copy of S3MediaVault with your purchase of CoolCastPlayer, but you must take action before Monday, March 14th. You can also contact me via the contact-us link at subscribeme.fm.

So thank you for listening to my show. I know you have a lot of choices in podcasts these days, and I'm super thrilled and appreciative, that you chose to listen to my show. That means a lot to me. Stay subscribed to this show, and I'll do my darnedest best to bring you great content every week.

Cheers and talk to you soon.

Most membership sites, will have a need to protect the following types of media: Video, Audio, PDF, Zip, Word Docs - well, don't use word unless you have to, because not everyone would have word installed, but you get the idea. Different types of files need to be protected. But for the most part, we're talking about video, audio and PDF reports.

If these files are stored right on your web site, AND if you have a bunch of these files that are also big in size - like over 10 MB, for eg., then a lot of your members viewing and downloading them from your site simultaneously will use up a lot of resources on your server – when I say resources, I mean server memory, server speed, server bandwidth, etc – basically your site can get overloaded. Which means your site could slow down considerably.

Have you heard of the "Digg Effect" or "Slashdot Effect"? Many years ago, there used to be a social bookmark sharing site called Digg.com. If you have heard of Reddit.com, then Digg and Reddit were competitors. Big time traffic on both sites. Digg just slowly went away. But getting your site's URL on the front page of Digg, meant that you could end up getting tens of thousands of visitors in a very short time period. And that usually crashed most WordPress sites that were on shared hosting. Which is why WordPress unfortunately got a bad rap years ago. And things have changed a lot since then, and there are tools you can use today to make sure your site can withstand a sudden influx of traffic.

But I'm not talking about just site visitors. I'm talking about a large number of your visitors and paying members, downloading PDF's, watching video, listening to audio, and if all of those files are stored on your site, then your site could end up becoming super slow, and then might eventually even crash. And your host will have to restart your server, and then the whole thing could happen all over again.

On top of that, there are also bandwidth charges that your host will charge you with for all of those downloads, which are usually not very cheap.

Don’t put too much faith in your web host’s “Unlimited Bandwidth” clause, because if you read the fine-print carefully, you’ll see that as per their TOS, if you consume large amounts of bandwidth and use too much of the server resources, this could cause other web sites (belonging to others) on the same server to slow down and have a degrade in performance, especially if you are on a shared hosting account.

And your host could consider this as abuse of their terms of service, and they could either slap you with huge bandwidth or server utilization fees, or ask you to upgrade to a more expensive hosting package, or may even ask you to take your web site elsewhere because you’re causing issues for other site owners on the same server.

Instead, if your media files are stored on Amazon S3.... (listen to the episode for the rest)