Tag: podcasts

Business Podcasting: Are Transcriptions REALLY Worth It?

Rajiv PoddarLeave a comment
Podcast_Scribie_Transcription_Services

Podcast Transcription

Two Birds With One Stone

 

Podcasting has grown to be one of the hottest marketing trends. It makes sense why this relatively new form of content is making such a buzz. It allows business owners (and bloggers/brands) to demonstrate their voice and build relationships with listeners.

podcast headset

If you’re a business or solo-entrepreneur trying to make the most of your podcast, the topic of  transcription services has probably come up. This is a tricky subject because podcasting is normally seen as a “free” channel of marketing. On one hand, most people don’t want to turn podcasting into a “paid” channel.

First off, here’s why that assumption doesn’t hold up:

  1. Podcasting requires your time… for most marketers/business owners, this is going to be your most valuable asset in the long-run.
  2. Podcasting benefits from your own social media promotion along with any organic visitors that come in from search engines (in many cases, companies will spend money on advertising their podcast to kickstart the growth)

Essentially, podcasting may seem like a “free” initiative, but in reality, you have to pay for it in some currency.

Here’s where audio transcriptions come into play:

Think about the business goal of your podcast — Are you trying to drive more traffic to your website, blog, landing page? Then there is a specific monetary benefit from maximizing your podcast’s viewership.

More listeners on your podcast = more leads, signups, sales. It’s as simple as that.

For this reason, you need to treat the podcast just like your website or any other branch of online marketing for your business. Transcribing the audio from your podcasts and making it available on your website is a huge piece of this.

Check out just a few of the huge benefits of getting a transcription for each of your podcast episodes:

  • Convenience for the listeners — Sometimes your listeners don’t have an hour to sit down and listen to the podcast… in this case, having a transcription allows them to skim through to the important parts or copy and paste the info they were looking for.
  • Added benefit for search engine optimization — Currently, search engine “crawlers” cannot understand audio content… so they aren’t going to index and value your podcast episode the same way as a blog post. For this reason, the transcription acts like a textual map of the content on the page. More indexing, more ‘searchability’, more traffic.
  • No headphones… what do I do? — What if your listener is in a place where audio can’t be played… a waiting room perhaps and doesn’t have headphones? Most people aren’t going to bookmark the page and come back hours later to play it. This is why audio transcriptions can help get the message across to previously lost traffic.

Having a transcription done for your podcast might seem like a complicated question… but it really comes down to your business goals.

Do you really NEED to get the most views from each podcast episode? Do you really WANT to make the most of your time?

Remember that you’re dedicating hours upon hours into podcasting to craft quality content for your listeners… now take the final step and make sure that everyone can find your podcast so they can benefit from it.

 

Audio Transcription: An Underutilized SEO Trick For Content Producers

Rajiv Poddar1 Comment

audio-transcription

Work Smarter Not Harder

Digital marketing is becoming more and more competitive every day. That’s why when it comes to SEO you can’t afford to miss any best practices.

Podcasts, videos, webinars… all some of the most engaging pieces of modern media, yet they all fall into the same SEO trap. As pointed out by Moz, if google can’t index your file, then it is essentially invisible to searchers.

This is a huge problem if your business relies on search engine marketing to generate traffic. After all, if you’re putting in the time to create that awesome content, doesn’t it deserve to get seen?

What’s the solution?

One of the most underutilized SEO tactics (that is just starting to catch on with the larger marketers) for these types of non-text media, is audio transcription.

  • Getting your podcast/video transcribed essentially takes that engaging media and makes sure that it will get the same SEO benefit as say a blog post. Essentially, it makes sure that all of your “SEO bases” are covered.
  • Transcriptions increase viewer engagement. Studies have shown that video transcriptions can increase the completion rate of videos significantly.

Think of audio transcription as a helpful SEO tactic that will help you get ahead of the competition — if they aren’t posting text transcriptions they are missing out on all of these benefits.

 Alternative Benefits

Ironically, there are many benefits to transcribing your audio or video content beyond SEO.

Let’s take a look:

  1. User Experience – Often, viewers won’t be able to listen to a video (maybe they’re at work, or without headphones in a library) so that entire piece of content will be unavailable without a text version.
  2. Searching – From a user’s point of view, text content is easily searchable using a browser’s built-in search function… whereas this is impossible with a podcast episode. Want to verify a specific spelling or detail from the video, just find that segment in the transcription — voila!

Tips And Tricks

Keep in mind there are a few areas where you can improve further on the benefits of audio transcription. First, make sure that the content is formatted well. Often, websites will hide (partially) the transcript in a small boxed area that can be expanded. This makes it so that the text is available but not taking up the entire page. A few minutes of video can turn into multiple pages of text, so this option offers a more user-friendly way to display both types of content.

If you are hosting your videos on Youtube, you can take this even further. Google utilizes the annotations in Youtube videos for SEO. That means keywords, content, and branded text or links that are placed onto videos affects rankings. Utilized correctly, there is a lot of room for improvement for video and overall SEO.

Audio transcription provides a very straightforward way to improve SEO, the user-experience, and the overall value of your content. Having multiple forms of the same content on your site ensures that your viewers can see the content how they want. This is an enormous piece of the digital marketing landscape that is only going to become more important in coming years. Stay ahead of the curve and keep your viewers happy with audio transcriptions.

Podcasts: Five Reasons To Have Them Transcribed

Rajiv PoddarLeave a comment

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.