Podcasting
This article covers how to create and promote podcasts. Learn what works and what doesn't.
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Key information about podcasting
- Podcasts can be played from someone's computer but most likely will be listened to on a iPod or other MP3 player.
- Podcasts should be educational and not come across as "sales pitches". The best podcasts are "edu-tainment", blending educating someone in an interesting and entertaining way. Remember, people are choosing to listen (and continue to listen) to your podcast. Your job is to grab and keep their attention.
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Typical formats include:
- Question and Answer
- Talks
- Podcasts are used effectively by many business-to-business marketers to educate physicians, nurses and other professional target audience groups.
How to create a podcast
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Decide on a topic for your podcast and write an outline of key points and information you want to share.
- Public speaking has more information on how to write a speech. A podcast is just a recorded speech. You won't have the benefit of visuals or people being able to see/read your body language so you need to do everything you can to communicate well just using your (or someone else's) spoken voice and sound effects.
- You may want to do some keyword research to determine what words and phrases people are searching for online related to your topic. That will help you get more free website visitors who are looking for the information you are providing.
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Record the audio for your podcast
- You'll need: a computer; a good microphone for each person speaking; audio recording software; a website or blog hosting service that has enough bandwidth to handle podcasts.
- Mixcraft, GarageBand are popular software tools for this
- Audacity and Wavepad are free
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Make your podcast so it can be found by others
- Tag it with the keywords and phrases you did the research on in step #1
- Assign it ID information about the artist and album
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Optional: create "album art" for your podcast
- Do this yourself. Top graphic design software suppliers
- Or hire a graphic designer to do this for you.
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- Best sources for marketing freelancers
- What it costs to hire a graphic designer
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Save the audio file in MP3 format on your computer
- Do not use characters like %, # or ? in the file name.
- You'll want to open the podcast on your sound editor and remove background noise.
- You can add music for the intro and ending if you want to.
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Create your RSS podcast feed
- Use a free service like Podblaze or Podomatic
- Or create a blog with the title of your podcast
- If you want the RSS feed to work in Apple iTunes, you must add special fields.
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Put your RSS podcast feed on the internet
- Go to feedburner and type in the URL of your block and click "I am a podcaster". You'll then be asked to set up your podcast.
- Your feedburner feed is your podcast.
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Go to OurMedia.org and sign up
- Upload your MP3 file with your podcast
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Post your podcast on your website and/or blog
- If you've created a series or episodes, you'll want to explain something more about each episode
- Feedburner will add your feed and now your podcast is online for others to find and listen to
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To get more exposure for your podcast
- Post your podcast on popular podcast directories. Two reputable directories that specialize in podcasting are:Podcast Alley and Digital Podcast
- Add the buttons on your blog and website so people can subscribe to the RSS podcast feed
- FreshPodcasts is a helpful site
Resources to help you with podcasting
- This website is helpful in explaining now podcasting works technically: podcastFAQ
- There are lots of companies and individuals who specialize in creating podcasts.
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