Having your podcasts transcribed and publishing the text content on your website may sound unintuitive at first, but it has several advantages and is worth considering.
Reading vs Listening
Reading is a much faster process than listening. Many of your visitors would want to quickly scan through the transcript instead of listening to it. Some of these visitors might even end up as subscribers for your podcast. This goes for your regular listeners too. Sometimes they just might just want to scan the podcast quickly before deciding to listen to it.
Social Media Sharing
Having the complete text of the podcast online makes it easier for people to share it via Twitter, Facebook, Google+ and the myriad of social media sites which are there nowadays. Your listeners can quote a part of the text or highlight a particular section which they want to emphasize and share it with their own circle. Higher sharing rates means more traffic for your website and associated benefits.
Indexing & Search
The biggest advantage is that the search engines can now easily index your content since the text of the podcast is available. Better indexing will lead to more search traffic and more visitors to your site. You will also benefit from the long tail search traffic, those obscure terms for which your site appears on the search result. Your podcast might be linked by others which in turn will mean a higher Page Rank and even more search traffic.
Contextual Advertisements
If you are using Google AdSense then the transcripts will lead to better contextual advertisements being displayed on your site and higher earnings from AdSense for you. This happens because the Google AdSense crawler first mines the text content on your website and matches it to the ad’s. Since the text content will now be closely related to your niche or topic, your visitors will get to see more relevant advertisements and a higher click-through-rate for you.
E-book Packaging
Selling e-books based on the content of your podcasts is a direct way of monetizing your podcast. Once you have the transcripts it becomes an order of magnitude easier to create an e-book. There are various sites which help you sell digital information content, ClickBank being one of the popular one’s. You can also sell these e-books to your listeners and visitors. An e-book is also a perfect freebie to give away if you want visitors to sign up for your newsletter.
There are several ways you can get your podcasts transcribed. If you are good typist you try transcribing yourself or outsource it via Scribie.com for $0.99 per minute of audio. It is ultimately an investment which will pay off very handsomely in the long run.