Podcasting is an exceptional way of allowing experts and professionals to share their work and experiences with a potentially huge audience over the internet. People from different walks of life are increasingly using the internet to promote their work and achievements and podcasting is an excellent way to accomplish this task.

What is Podcasting?

Podcasting, is essentially a communication tool on the internet that allows individuals to distribute their work in the form of audio and video files. The audio and video files, commonly termed as Podcasts are distributed using syndication feeds for playback on portable media players and computers. The host or author of a podcast is often called a Podcaster.

Podcasting is supported by RSS 2.0 which allows the content publishers to add the description of new content in an XML based RSS file which includes dates, titles, descriptions and links to MP3 files. Podcasting allows you to automatically receive new shows and programs when they are broadcasted or podcasted without going to a specific site to download them. You can listen to a variety of programs that are podcasted anytime by using portable players or media players on your computer.

Podcasting and Social Media Marketing

Podcasting has been used since 2004 as a complimentary marketing tool for word of mouth marketing to reach customers. Podcasting can help you achieve your marketing, business and communication objectives and goals. By harnessing the internet’s natural syndication power, podcasting gives corporations the ability to connect with an on-demand society.

Previously, people used to read about something that they liked, but now they have the ability to listen instead of reading. Considering the fast pace of life, it is no surprise that podcasts are so popular. There is a rapidly growing community of people that have subscribed to podcasts using software, such as iTunes. People listen to podcasts while they are completing other tasks, such as commuting, exercising and working. They simply take the audio in mp3 format with them and listen to it while they go.

It is a good idea to add audio or video podcasts to your website or to create a separate channel for the podcasts, so that people can subscribe to them and listen to what you have to offer. It’s also a good strategy to promote your podcasts through your blogs and email marketing. Before creating podcasts, it’s advised that you lay out a complete marketing plan that you want to accomplish using podcasts.

A powerful aspect of creating podcasts is that once your audio and video contents are podcasted then other podcasting directories will pick them up. Customers can browse through RSS feeds and find your content if it is in the category they are looking for. Podcasting complements other marketing mediums and it can also act as a separate marketing channel.

Key Components of a Podcast

Below are some ideas that you can consider for creating and broadcasting your own podcasts.

• Podcast to communicate about new products and ventures.
• Podcast about your achievements.
• You can create podcasts with interviews conducted with product and service managers.
• Educational podcasts can be created that contain detailed information about products.
• Podcasts about new services, new white papers, webinars, seminars, events, etc.
• Conduct interviews with executives to provide information to their audience.

Podcast Directories

Once, you’ve created and posted podcasts, several podcast directories will automatically pick up the subscription. You will also want to submit them to most of the available directories and podcast channels by yourself. So far, iTunes is considered as the number one channel for the podcasts which alone has 40 million users. Evan Williams has provided a list of podcast directories in his blog evhead, according to their Alexa Ranking. You can also visit masternewmedia to get a comprehensive list of podcast directories.

PodPusher is a new service which is designed to reduce the time and effort needed to submit your podcasts to the podcast directories and engines. With the help of PodPusher you can submit your podcast to over 60 of the most popular podcast directories and search engines at once.

Benefits of Podcasting:

Podcasting is very beneficial for the promotion of marketing campaign of any business. Through podcasting, anyone can use the power of voice which is far beyond text. No one can ignore the fact that the impact of voice is very strong and long lasting. For a serious web marketing campaign podcasting shouldn’t be ignored as it is a great way to leverage the contents.

If you’re concerned about measuring the impact of your podcasts then it’s not a big deal.

• You can find it by calculating the total number of people subscribing to the RSS feeds of your podcasts. Feedburner provides a very easy method to track the number of people subscribing to your podcasts.
• Design special landing pages in your website and refer to them in your podcasts to track the number of people coming to your website after listening to the podcasts. This way you can easily calculate the traffic being generated from your podcasts.

You’ll be amazed to see the success and impact of your podcasts if your contents are unique and you have produced good quality podcasts. Here, I’m talking about quality in terms of voice and video recording along with the quality of contents.

Podcasts containing valuable, informative, engaging and entertaining contents can be very useful in getting a lot of traffic to your website. Podcasts that are extremely long have a disadvantage as somehow they fail to deliver what they have, so try your best to deliver what you have in 15-20 minutes. Last but not least, make sure that the individual shows in podcasts are very organized and well presented, like business presentations.

References:

1. http://www.pcreview.co.uk/articles/Internet/What_is_PodCasting?/
2. http://r.evhead.com/hodgepodge/podcast-sites-alexa.html
3. http://www.masternewmedia.org/podcast_directory/index.html

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