Finding Joy in Snarkville

Audio/Podcasting

What this session is going to be about:

Instructors will be on hand to serve all user levels. Beginners will create & post an audio entry with Susan Kitchens. Advanced users will get hands-on instruction and interactive Q&A about advanced techniques, plus best practices in promotion and distribution from Nicole Simon and Anita Campbell.

Notes on the session:

Please note that I am typing during this session. I expect a blanket forgiveness on any spelling, grammar, or nonsense mistakes. I may come back and clean this up and add any content in the “post production” of this entry. If I have anything to say that isn’t part of the live-blogging itself (read: my personal running commentary), I will note it by the italics.

Ok, I just found out that they are going to be spliting the group up into parts, so I’m going to do my best to follow one group in each of the repeats, so here goes nothing.

Session One: Beginning Podcasting with Susan Kitchens
Audicity is a cross platform tool with one set of instructions that Susan LOVES. It is available on the BlogHer Box.
Steps:

Record; Bring it into the computer; upload it.

This is kinda visual — sorry. (there is a podcast of this session — the guy getting the sound has been trying to “stick something on Susan, but and I quote “I don’t want to touch you.” — poor fellow)
Methods: a Mic connected to an iPod (external recording of a podcast) OR record directly into your computer.

Go to the sound control panel under preferences. Go to input — watch for sound levels going through it.

Launch Audicity — make friends with red record button and yellow stop button. Check the Audio I/O and that it is recording from what you want to record with — like the external mic. Under file format, you need to download lamelib (a library) install it in the same place as the audicity. Then you choose how compressed you want the file to be.

Be sure to save the file where you have the most space.

Monitor Sound Levels. You can turn on a red indicator so you can see the slider.

How loud? Idea to go loud without “clipping” — going to the far right red. So loud without being too loud — understand? Like mud, right?

Then you record. Susan interviews a group member.

Stop and Save. Easy to create the audio file. If it is perfect we export. (editing is an advance technique)

Little editing: to delete silence — highlight the sound wave that you want gone and HIT DELETE. Save again.

Next step, make sure the file name has no spaces — for the net. Use the software to create an MP3 file to upload.

Susan put up a site to house the beginning podcasters interviews.

Create an enclosure: rel=enclosure — this is the thing that makes the podcast downloadable within a feed. This is the enclosure part.

It is the feed thing that takes care of the World Wide Wait — to download while I am sleeping. This allows you not to have to click on long files and WAIT. (You should have seen the dance Susan did — sorry, missed the photo)

Then they interview each other. I’m going to let you enjoy the podcast for this fun.
Sesson Two: Promoting Your Blog With Anita (So you Started a Podcast — Now What?)

Podcasting since 2004, blogging since 2003 — Anita is now internet radio.

Attracting people to come to your podcast and get people to be loyal to your podcast. And some of this applies to what you do for blog promotion.

(the powerpoint is available online at the BlogHer Digital Locker — and there is other stuff Anita is making some other things available)

Promotion begins with great content. Crappy content can’t be well promoted. Ounce of upfront thought is worth a pound. What is your purpose? Personal Branding? Expert? tips series – serve customers? Just to have fun? have ONE purpose.

Distinguish your podcast. Think of something that makes it different or unique. Jokes, humor, something that is YOURS. Understand your audience. Easier to craft content by knowing who you are speaking to.

Be natural. Feel comfortable in what you are doing. You need to do what feels good for you — it is a personal medium and you must be true to yourself.

Length. What is the right podcast length? there is no one right answer and it depends. Research determined:

Long Podcaster likers: These are searchers for content and will download the show and not listen on the computer. You may not want to reference tons of URLs because people might not be in front of the computer when listening.
Short Podcaster likers: Surfers and quick read of the blogs.

8 tips:

1. Have good Sound Quality — use better quality tools.
2. Prepare, prepare, prepare — write down your notes — have something in front of you. But Don’t READ it.
3. eliminate Ums and Ahs — be mindful of what you are saying.
4. Stand up be heard — it will help projection and will come across so much better.
5. Master the sound bite — be quotable. — be pithy quote and make great show notes for the blog.
6. Use power words and create theater of the mind — Concrete nouns and evoke a picture. Kiss of death is conceptual words. Jargon — words without real meanings.
7. Vary your voice tone — use highlights to emphasis on some words.
8. Be YOU. — show off your personality.

Blog, Podcast, and RSS go together. Marry the pieces together. Use this as your number 1 tool to promote your poscast. Everyone and communities are jumping on the bloggin bandwagon — and the search engine benefits are great for this. So think of your podcast as being in partnership with your blog. Use Robust bloggin software. This gives you the capability of doing this things.

do you set up a blog for housing your podcast or put your podcast in your blog.

Podcast specific blog: Really highlight your podcast. it is easier to find the podcast. Disadvantage is unless you write good show notes you won’t get the good search engine benefit out of it. Use keyword rich and optimized show notes to get people there

Or you can podcast without have a blog. It is another idea too.

Turn your blog into a promo workhorse:

1. Optimize your blog pages to highlight your Podcast and blog. Descriptive name, tagline, and URL.
1. There are catchy name people and descriptive people. Great if you combine the two.
2. Pay attention to your Meta tags. The description Meta tag — spend time writing this.
3. Enable Trackbacks. If you need to moderate them, to control spam. But it allows someone to get a link out there without asking for it. Be sure to write words to get the search engines to help promote the show.
4. Use categories wisely.
5. On-site audio Players
6. Create some key information pages
1. set up a good about Page.
2. index Archived shows
3. Contact form – FAQ and guest inquiries and how to get on this show is invaluable.
4. how to listen instructions — bring it back to the basics again. the more you know the harder it can be for the newbie to get to what you want them to get to.
7. One click subscribe button — ADD THEM. (Yes, I’m screaming — DO THIS NOW!!!!!) Pick a few of them and not a long list of the one-click options. Look at your traffic and apply the 80/20 rule.
1. Think of iTunes, myYahoo

Create Loyal Repeat Listeners with RSS feeds. This is becoming more user friendly and people are slowly catching on to this. Optimize your feeds with Feedburner. So you can learn lots about what your readers/listeners are doing and how they are getting to you.

Creating text on your blog to talk about your podcast. (Don’t podcast as a way to avoid blogging — you need to blog about your podcast). Consider getting a transcription — it is fairly cheap (castingwords.com) Put the transcript up if you don’t wish to blog your podcast.

To make a site a destination site, which means you need to write additional information and not just podcasts.

Market your blog:

1. E-mail newsletter and alerts. and easy way to do this is to recycle your blog content.
2. Press release sites. prweb.com — otimize your press release.
3. Blog carnivals. BlogCarnival.com
4. Voting aggregotor: Digg.com and reddit.com
5. Traffic trading sites: blogexplosion.com

Tag Section:

blogher_06

This entry was posted on Friday, July 28th, 2006 at 8:34 pm and is filed under BlogHer: Liveblog. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.