Smart Podcast Marketing

Have been going through my archive of podcast audio which I recorded over the past three months, and I've discarded a lot of podcasts. The ones that ended up in the virtual circular file, are my old guerilla podcasts, which don't have the kind of sound quality I want. Three months ago, the idea of having background noise wasn't an issue for me -- podcasting was still so new, that there were a lot of different qualities of sound out there, and my guerilla podcasts didn't sound that bad. At least, that's how it seemed to me at the time.

Now, however, I'm going back to the drawing board with the podcasts I'm posting, and I'm focusing more and more on the audio quality. I've discovered some tricks and tips for how to handle audio more effectively (some of which I'll share, others of which are trade secrets which I'll guard fiercely). There's no reason, anymore, to have all that background noise that marked the first bunch of podcasts.

I'm tempted to just trash them, but for the sake of posterity, I'll save them off in a different directory on my computer, so I can use them for reference later on... to see how far I've come.

I'm starting from scratch for 2006. Podtopia.net has been in existence for a few months, now, and it's time to "bump it up a notch" and make some significant changes.

One of the big changes I've made with Podtopia.net, is that the filename for your MP3 can be whatever you like it to be. I had been going with the approach of always requiring that it be named "current.mp3", so that all the subsequent podcast episodes don't take up a whole lot of room on your hard drive. If MP3s are all named the same thing, everytime you download a new one, the most recent will overwrite the previous one, thus avoiding taking up a whole lot of space on your hard drive. It seemed like a good idea, at the time, especially since I've been hearing complaints about the hard drive space considerations on podcasting message boards.

But after talking to an associate of mine about this philosophy, she gently reminded me that she'd much rather have the choice, herself, about which files are taking up space on her hard drive, and it occurred to me that, yes, it would be a good thing to have prior podcasts available in your iPod or computer or wherever else you listen to them, so you have choice.

So, I made the change in the interface. Onward and upward.

How, to continue production on the other podcasts I've got going. And to post them as I go.

One of the things I'm really coming up against with podcasting, is how labor-intensive it can be, to produce episodes each week. I've streamlined my process about as much as I can, using my iRiver handheld (and my microphone headset when I'm in my car), using the iRiver music manager to conver to mp3, and then doing production in Audacity. I've got a quick and easy interface for updating podcast information on Podtopia.net, and I've got all the podcast directories identified that I want to submit to.

The thing is, podcasting well takes time. It takes time to plan, it takes time to envision. It's not the sort of thing you can just sail into without having a plan of action. There's a fair amount to learn, and a lot of it is learning by doing, but if you don't have the time blocked out to do your podcasts and learn as you go, well, the whole experience can sour you to the exercise.

What's more, if you don't have your podcasts planned out ahead of time -- you don't know what you're going to say, you don't know how you're going to say it, etc. -- then you can end up just talking into a microphone and not really offering anything more than an "egocast".

Podcasting is such a powerful medium, but it runs the risk of becoming redundant, if it doesn't offer something completely different, and completely useful to people. So, if I'm going to make a "go" of podcasting, and I want my episodes to not only draw people in, but get them to subscribe, I'm going to have to come up with something inherently useful to them, that's going to have them coming back for more, each week.

I've got to have a "USP" for each and every one of my podcasts -- a Unique Selling Proposition, that points out how my podcast(s) are completely different and unique from other podcasts, and which tells people why they should bother investing their time and attention in my podcasts. Let's face it -- of all the commodities people have today, time is the least abundant, and the most expensive. I'd say time is even more valuable to some people than money. After all, people will spend a tremendous amount of time trying to get money, but no amount of money can buy back time. And for those folks who are interested in having a high quality of life, having plenty of time is absolutely critical.

So, your podcast (and mine) needs to be useful and valuable to people, and it needs to add to their lives, not detract from it. Remember, you want people to subscribe to your episodes, so they can get a new one each week. It's awfully easy to unsubscribe from a podcast. Make it a better idea for them to subscribe and stay that way, than to move on to other pastures.