By Dan Baldwin, TA Executive Director, 951-251-5155 email
Many entrepreneurs suffer from a lack of regular fresh content on their websites, email newsletters and blogs. TA uses recorded audio podcasts as an easy way to generate content. It's as easy as interviewing people on the phone and then publishing the interview. Following is how TA does it.
1. Come Up With A Sexy "Countdown" Headline to Attract Attention
Think David Letterman's "Top 10" Lists. If you have list like this suggested in your headline the prospective reader/listener will expect you have a thesis of some sort and a semi-organized content payoff (and they can scan your list to find what they're really interested in.) A smaple headline would be, "Top 5 Questions to Ask Before Buying Hosted VoIP (and what the answers mean)".
2. Write the Countdown Questions, Answers or Topics
This part is really just a quick one or two sentence each brainstorm list. Pretend you're about to go into a meeting with the world's smartest but most distractable salesperson and you want to keep them on point. What are the top items you want to make sure they address and in what order do you want them addressed?
3. Find a Smart or Chatty Person to Do the Podcast With
This part is pretty easy since we're all surrounded by know-it-alls especially in the business world. Send him or here the headline & outline the day before & say, "I'm going to call you tomorrow and we're going to record a podcast to publish on our website, email newsletter or blog". Good interview subjects are business owners, product managers or salespeople. The best interview subjects are people who do a canned sales pitch that have lots of customer anecdotes they can belt out.
4. Get on the Phone and Record the Phone Call to Your Computer
Make sure you're both using your phone's CORDED handset or a CORDED headset. (Don't use wireless headsets, wireless handsets or speaker phones). The phone handset is the world's best cheap microphone. If you don't already have the ability to record your phone calls to a WAV or MP3 file you can use what I use is the Plantronics MX10 headset amplifier and Audacity software. Other people I know use CallBurner and Skype to capture recordings, The Levelator® to smooth out their recordings and dBpoweramp to compress audio recordings to MP3.
5. Transcribe Your MP3 File
Do this primarily for the search engines and for your readers that like to scan articles. Very few people have the patience to listen to an MP3 that's longer than a minute unless there's a clear index or a transcript. You can find fairly cost effective transcription service providers on the web at Elance.
6. Publish a Playable & Downloadable MP3 on Your Blog or Webpage
I use PodSnack to create a nice player. (Note that audio and video "players" are great for a web or blog page but not for email blasts as the "Flash" player won't work or be seen in the email recipient's email inbox. For the player to be seen take a JPG "snapshot" of the player on the web or blog page (we use SnagIt) and then use the picture of the player in the email blast but make sure you hyperlink the picture of the player to the web or blog page with the actual player on it.)
That's it!
Feel free to email me questions at [email protected] if you need help.
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