Repurposing your podcast content is a great way to be time efficient and boost your audience by providing alternate ways for people to discover your podcast.
Virtu@dmin
Digital Audio Transcription & Typing Services
podcast to text
How to easily get the most from your podcast
Podcasting is becoming a rapidly increasing multi-media communication tool, especially for business as a marketing strategy. It is reported by Edison Research that podcast listeners are rising at a rate of 21%-24% year on year, probably due to its ease of consumption; in the home or driving and the top 2 ways to listen.
This is a great way to market your products or services, social media management tips as an agency, and other gems of information.
If you are already podcasting are you optimising it and understand your audiences’ needs and requirements and fulfilling them? In this post, I am going to explain how to easily get the most out of your podcast and why.
Transcripts for Podcasts
It was while I was doing my usual Twitter search in relation to transcription a few days back, the main freelance job I undertake daily when I came across a tweet from Lev Mirov @theonlinemachine. The screenshot below has contributed to the writing of this blog post.
As you can read, his reply to a valid question from Se’mana @SamanaThompson who originally asked, “Questions for #disability podcasters: in what ways do you make your podcast accessible? Do you release transcripts same time as podcast?”
The response from Lev Mirov stating that he would listen to more podcasts if he could read the transcripts. This immediately says how to increase your podcast listeners, make a transcript available as soon as possible after your show!
He went on to explain in a separate tweet that he prefers a transcript because of migraines and that mumbling is a huge issue.
For listeners that want a documented transcript of your podcast, they shouldn’t have to incur the cost themselves for the transcription. As you can read in the screenshot above, “asking disabled people to fund their own participation is basically telling us that we are too expensive to be included by creators”.
This is because your potential listeners are of the opinion transcripts are expensive to obtain. (Also stated by anther ‘Twitterer’ in the screenshot) For someone who is disabled their budget may not expend to audio transcription, and nor should it have to.
Podcast Transcripts the affordable way
For podcast hosts there are cheaper ways for you to create a script for your podcast:
- Transcribe it yourself afterwards
This is a cheap and cost-effective way to produce your transcript, depending on how quick you can type and whether you can stand listening to your own voice or not! - Outsource to a transcription service provider
Could be expensive if you want your transcript quickly, therefore details won’t be as fresh in your listener’s minds by the time you do receive your transcript, at the rate you can afford. - Outsource to a freelance transcriber
Apart from transcribing your podcast yourself, this is probably your quickest and easiest route to take to get your podcast transcribed quickly and cheaply. By asking certain questions that are detailed in my Infographic ‘7 Tips to Outsource to The Best Freelance Transcriptionist’, reading testimonials and feedback wherever possible, you’ll get your professional documented transcript at the rate you can afford.
As a podcast creator, although you would have the additional cost of audio transcription, it is not just Virtu@dmin that is advising you add a script to easily get the most out of your podcast Business 2 Community, the website that covers all Social Media, Digital Marketing, Content Marketing, Social Selling, Social Business and more, they recently posted “Getting Inbound Mileage from Your Company Podcast“.
In their post podcasting, they also recommend to add a transcript and post content. All of which is so easy to do, copy and pasting from your script from your freelance transcriber or transcription service. By an additional transcription there are also these benefits from just one investment of a digital transcription service:
- By making an available transcript free of charge, your deaf and/or hard-of-hearing community will appreciate the ultimate availability of your script with no cost to them. By doing this you are immediately telling your community of listeners you care about them and what they require in addition to your great content. If they like your podcast and regularly wish to listen to it, they are more likely to do so if your transcript is available as soon as possible after you have finished airing.
- As mentioned in the opening paragraph, podcasting is popular multi-media communication channel as a marketing tool. Another way to entice more listeners to your shows is to promote the fact you will make a transcript available, free of charge in such and such time. Make it clear when it will be available for download. (You will need to consider how long after your show to contracting the transcription service to receiving your transcript.) *Tip: Have the transcriber or transcription service ready to receive your podcast as soon as it is complete. In doing this it will be available for download quickly after it has been aired, while the information is still fresh in your listener’s minds.
- Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is a big bonus benefit you’ll get from the investment in transcription. Search engine bots that crawl the internet for indexing new information cannot hear audio or see visuals. They can read the text, and it is for this very reason you need a transcript to help your podcast rank higher in search engine results pages (SERPs). Think of the natural flowing speech all around your niche subject area, the transcript will be full of keywords that are rich in your niche! Rank higher in search results and you will get more reach, more listeners, your business grows.
Expert or beginner in podcasting, maybe even considering starting a podcast for your business, one thing that you will need, moving forward in the new age of digital technology, is a transcript. This is one of the ways you are making your podcast more accessible to your listeners. Think back to the tweet, Lev Mirov, “he would listen to more podcasts if he could read them as well”.
It doesn’t have to be an expensive process for you, and the cost will give you a good return on your investment. Having a script that you can use yourself can save you heaps of time too. I’ve written a post on this too, and created an Infographic, “9 Top Ways to Use Your Audio Transcript”.
One of the ways you can use your document is to use it for social media status updates. Highlight the text you wish to use, right click copy, paste, edit and post! No typing as such, just find the text, copy and paste and it’s done.
You could use it to write a complete blog post, an edit here and there, another easy way to use your transcript. It could even be a Q & A style blog post or this in itself another type of blog post.
Once you have the editable document it has so many uses, for you and for your listeners. SEO being of a high benefit, being accessible for everyone is another. Your business needs to be seen as user-friendly and all times. You need to be demonstrating consideration for your listeners and potential new listeners, subscribers, and hopefully buyers of your product, or contractors of your services.
How to Grow Your Podcast Audience with Transcription Services
Podcasts are a great way to connect your audio (or video) content into the public sphere, it is not just about music these days. If you are a business, for example, if it is quite a specialised niche, this can be a great way to get your product or service noticed, holding regular podcasts online or distributing regular content via this medium. This new way of communication can gain valuable new customers and increase relevant traffic to your website.
Currently, most who are familiar with podcast hosting are technically savvy, but it is clear that podcasting will be more than a passing fad as many businesses are adopting podcasting and employing it in unusual yet powerful ways. Podcasting can be used for talk shows, tutorials, music demos, educational training, stories, comedy clips, debates or even foreign language tutorials.¹
Not only is podcasting a type of advertising, it gives you more visibility for your niche subject. It also has great SEO (search engine optimisation) benefits too. Listeners will visit your website to listen to your podcast or download it. For them to find it in the first place, your podcast has to be optimised for it to rank highly and be found.
Transcription Services
Podcasts can vary in their format but usually are delivered in audio, video, PDF and ePub formats. Luckily, all of these formats can very easily and economically have a transcript produced and uploaded to them, further increasing the SEO of your website, therefore more visitors seeing and listening to your podcasts.
A freelance transcriptionist like myself here at Virtuadmin or transcription vendors can all assist in the process of creating your accurate text document that acts as a transcript to upload to your podcast.
By hiring a transcription service to transcribe your podcast content into text will boost your reach as it is supporting content that you want to be exposed to search engines for indexing. By uploading your transcript that is by the nature of the transcribed content will be keyword rich, to your podcast, search engine bots can accurately index it, increasing your search engine results pages for that particular niche search.
Show Notes
When you are getting higher results, more visitors and listeners, you could then move on a step further with the text content you have invested in from your transcriptionist or transcription service. You could:-
- Brief synopsis of the episode
- Turn the transcript into show-notes with time-stamps and sub-headings
- Offer the transcript in its original form to listeners
- Create key takeaways
- Create slide presentations
- Get ideas for checklists and worksheets
Once you have the transcript all the bulleted points above can be produced easily. Ask your transcription service if they can assist, as they are transcribing the content. Ask for your transcript to be time-stamped and specify the regularity. If you don’t have the time to create presentations, key takeaways, checklists or worksheets your transcriptionist may be able to assist or outsource to a Virtual Assistant like me at Virtuadmin. Freelancers and virtual assistants are a fantastic way of getting a professional job done without incurring the high expense!
If you don’t have the time to create presentations, key takeaways, checklists or worksheets your transcriptionist / virtual assistant may be able to assist, like me at Virtuadmin. Freelancers and virtual assistants are a fantastic way of getting a professional job done without incurring the high expense!
When people ask what I do and I reply a Transcriptionist their face goes blank for a second. I then explain that I produce transcripts from recorded audio, video, podcasts or webinars. Ah, typing people think, typing what people are saying yes that’s easy once you can type. Contrary to popular belief audio transcription is a skill that takes years of touch typing repetition and experience to be able to turn around an hour’s audio in four.
The Infographic created by us, Virtuadmin, I hope puts into perspective that even the most professional and quickest of touch typists cannot type at the average speech rate. I have used 15 minutes of recorded audio for simplicity but hope that it illustrates that typing at the spoken word rate is virtually impossible.
There are also other factors to be taken into consideration:
- Number of Speakers
- Audio quality
- Speech clarity (accents?)
- Is there any background noise
- Is this an intelligent or strict verbatim transcription?
- Is the transcript to be time-stamped?
All these affect the average turnaround time of your text document. Keeping these things in my when hiring a transcription service will help you understand the complexities of what goes into producing an accurate transcript.
To conclude that with just one speaker, with good audio quality professional transcriptionist that types 80 words per minute (that’s fast but that’s our average typing speed) would take approximately 30 minutes to transcribe and a professional that types 50 words per minute would take 45 minutes. That therefore on these statistics would mean than an hour’s audio that was just one speaker and straight forward intelligent paragraphing would take the professional 4 hours. For 2 speakers because each time a speaker changes a new line is started, therefore that takes extra time.
Audio transcription is a skill, you must love typing and love hearing people speak. If you love what you do, have a passion as we do, you will want to produce the best transcript possible. This isn’t always possible but transcriptions produced by Virtuadmin always aim to never insert an “inaudible”. Again, that is time-consuming replaying a part of the audio that you just cannot hear. You’ll probably get it in the end, but that’s another 5 minutes or so added to the completion time.
Hope the Infographic helps put things in perspective for the time taken when audio transcribing, typing into text the spoken word is just not as easy or quick as you think!
