Repurposing Podcast Audio

This podcast audio served as the source for the blog post “A Shortcut To Writing a Book.”

The transcript was rewritten to produce the blog post, which is the cornerstone of the Shortcut Content system.

Transcript:

Shayla: Welcome to the Shortcut Content Podcast. I’m talking with Dave Young who is the founder, CEO, the mastermind behind Shortcut Content, and, Dave, we know that you record podcasts, you get them converted into written blog posts, but beyond that, what can you do with a podcast besides just putting it on your website? What are the other mediums for getting it out there?

Dave: Well, putting it on your website is the easiest thing to do and that can be as simple as uploading the audio. If you don’t have very many people that are going to be listening to it, it’s good to give people a choice. If you can just put it in WordPress and make it so they can hit a play button to listen to it, that’s fine.

You can take it to another level though by getting it on iTunes so that people can actually download it and listen to it every time another episode comes out. And that’s not hard to do. There are some WordPress plugins that do that quite nicely. It’s not rocket science to get your podcast listed on iTunes.

We have a couple other things that people have done with their podcasts or could do with their podcasts. One is if you don’t want to have a podcast that lives on your site, you can put it on a service like Soundcloud. Have you seen Soundcloud? So there’s a lot of music on it, but there’s a lot of podcasts that go on it as well. So that’s an entirely separate website than yours and I think the thing to remember is if you’re going to put it on Soundcloud, there’s a place for a descriptions of the audio or the episode that you’re putting up and you can actually put a link in that description and what that does is it’s going to help you with some SEO, because you can actually describe what it is you just talked about and link it back to maybe the corresponding blog post on your site. And that provides the search engines with a little pointer that says, hey, here’s something about this topic and here’s a link to something that’s also about that topic. And it just helps the search engine understand what your site is about.

I think one of the coolest things about Soundcloud is that it is one of the only ways that I’ve ever come across that lets you embed audio into social media like Facebook. It’s really hard to upload an mp3 file on Facebook and have it so that somebody can actually play it and listen to it, but for some reason Soundcloud can do that. It may be that technically Soundcloud is embedding a video on Facebook, because it has that little sound bar that goes along with it.

Shayla: Speaking of video, Youtube is another option, right?

Dave: Exactly. We’ve had customers that have taken the audio of their podcast that we record for them and turn it into a static video. So we’ve all seen YouTube videos, like of old songs from the sixties where they didn’t have music videos, so whoever uploaded the song just put a static image of the album cover and let the audio play. So we’ve had customers who do that, and we can do that for customer as well. Just basically put your logo or a picture of you, and turn that audio into a video that you can put on YouTube.

Same thing, you can put a link and a description on YouTube, and that link goes back to your site.

Shayla: And it kind of goes back to what Shortcut Content does anyway; it’s getting your content out there on multiple platforms because not everyone likes to absorb content in the same way.

Dave: Exactly, and because we source it by the short conversations just like the one we’re having right now, that’s the source of all this content, it makes a lot of sense to repurpose it in as many different directions as you can. Reusing that audio in two or three different ways is a beautiful way to do it.

I’ve got one more idea and I don’t think we’ve had any of our customers do this, I’ve suggest it, and I’ll throw this offer out, if somebody wants me to help them negotiate the buy, I’d be happy to step in and do that, and that’s to take these podcasts and put them on a weekly radio show. Every city’s got an old AM station that’s playing news and information on it and all you have to do is call and say, hey, look, I need to know your program rates. I’d like to put my podcast on as a Saturday morning feature or a Sunday morning feature, something like that. They’ll give you a price. It’s probably going to be shockingly low. You’re just talking about one 5-minute sponsored program every week. It’s a lot less expensive than people think it would be. Of course, it’s going to vary by market, but I think if you’re producing that content anyway, you should take every avenue that you can to get it out in front of people.

Shayla: If someone is listening and is thinking, “I’m interested in that option,” or one of the other, how do they get a hold of you and what’s that process look like?

Dave: Well, our contact information is at ShortcutContent.com and I’m happy to get on the phone and talk to anybody about this, especially ways that they can repurpose content, and if they need some help from us creating that content at the beginning, we’re happy to help out as well.

Shayla: Shortcut is the name of game. It’s not rocket science, and Shortcut Content can help you get your information out there. Thanks so much, Dave.