Podcast Packages: The Affordable Way To Get More Listeners
If you are in business and thinking of starting a podcast or already have an established podcast series, this post is how to affordably attract listeners to your show. The affordable way is to get a ‘podcast package’ produced by a specialist transcriber such as us at Virtuadmin. We were informed by our client that we are currently working with that transcription vendors do not necessarily do a bespoke service for podcasts. Our client required an all-in-one solution for his show notes and we have provided that solution.
After reading a post we wrote ‘How to Grow Your Podcast Audience with Transcription Services’ that was also published on Upwork he got in touch asking for a podcast package that we talk about in the post. We have been working successfully together ever since.
Let us begin with a clear explanation of what a podcast is. A podcast defined by ‘Wikipedia’ is:
“ A podcast or generically netcast, is an episodic series of digital audio or video files which a user can download in order to listen to.”
Podcasts can consist of music, chat, interview, or simply one person speaking about advice or guidance in a specific niche. They are also so versatile to listen to; you can listen to a podcast whilst driving, jogging in the part, walking the dog, working out at the gym. These are just a few examples of how easy it is to listen and retention is much higher than watching a video, for example.
Whatever type of podcast your produce, or you are maybe considering starting a podcast, you need a podcast package. Alternatively known as ‘show notes‘ they consist of a few different elements that will not only give your podcast more accessibility for the deaf and hard-of-hearing communities but also increase its Search Engine Optimisation ranking, giving your digitally recorded audio a higher place in results when a specific keyword or phrase is searched for.
“ By having a podcast package it makes your podcast more accessible and enhances its SEO ranking”
By having your podcast episodes transcribed and making the full transcript available for free to download you immediately open your podcast up to a whole new group of listeners. They could be deaf, hard-of-hearing or have auditory processing issues. Therefore they can still participate in the ever-growing popularity of podcasts and this helps them hugely with the aid of a transcript.
SEO Benefits of a transcript
Now you’re probably thinking to yourself how does a transcript help with Search Engine Optimisation? Well, I will try and explain this as clearly as I can. Search engine crawler bots, whichever search engine you use by choice, Google, Bing, Yahoo, Ask, DuckDuckGo to mention a few of the popular search engines, they all have bots that index pages of websites, text posts. They index audio and video content by title and description to enable them to show up for a specific query.
They cannot view or see videos and they cannot hear or listen to the speech spoken in audio, they can only read the text. This is why the title and meta descriptions are so important for indexing and SEO purposes. They tell the SEO bots that are crawling websites and indexing them what the content of your podcast is about. So, in general, the more text the bots, (also known as spiders, crawlers, robots and bots) have available the more that they can read and understand what your content is about and index it accordingly.
The benefit of a transcript is that it adds so much more text regarding your spoken audio content. For example, a transcript of a 30-minute podcast that we did recently amounted to 6,227 words. That includes the subtitles; that is 6,227 extra words that crawler bots can analyse and index, because of the additional transcript.
The text document is full of keyword-rich keywords that are spoken naturally, either by yourself or you and participants in a podcast, like during an interview about a particular topic, for example. The client we work with, the podcasts we transcribe are business related and interviews experts on things like podcasts, pricing, and LinkedIn.
Also to be taken into consideration is that we are all different, some people prefer to read content and not listen and vice versa. Therefore you could potentially offer the transcript as an incentive to listeners by offering the full transcript as a free download.
They could download the podcast and transcript, see the time-stamped highlights and locate the particular place in the podcast audio that is of interest to them. It’s an incentive to draw listeners in, without them having to take the time to listen in full if they are short of time, and reading can be so much quicker.
Benefits of a podcast transcription
- The transcription process of a podcast can be easily outsourced for a budget that you can afford. You can find experienced freelance transcriber either by using networks such as People Per Hour or if you have the time, send out some emails for a quote and turnaround time
- Non-native English speakers who are interested in learning English or have some knowledge of the English Language, for them it would assist in their improvement of English as a second or maybe third language.
- Your listeners have the option to download the transcript, print it out if they wish and makes notes easily, without having to constantly play and replay the audio for a particular point that stood out to them.
Facts and Statistics of Podcasting
The statistics of how many podcasts shows there are is growing. Podcast Insights tells us from their data that currently there are 630,000 podcast shows with the UK having nearly 6 million adult listeners and the US has 73 million listeners to a podcast at least once a month. The number of weekly UK podcast listeners has almost doubled in five years — from 3.2m (7% of adults aged 15+) in 2013 to 5.9m (11%) in 2018. The ease of listening helps also, mobile phone, laptop, desktop are all viable means of consuming the content of a podcast.
With your podcast able to reach so many people, how can a podcast package benefit you?
How a Podcast Package Helps Your Listeners
Having an introduction to your podcast show on your website gives your listeners information about the show, giving them the choice as to whether this episode they want to listen to or not. The same for your hosting site, giving a description shows a snippet of what the show is about. Highlights of your show with time-stamps then gives your listeners the option to jump to a particular part in the audio that is of particular interest, saving them time.
By offering the transcript for free to download will encourage more listeners to your show. If they like what they hear, find it interesting they will listen to future episodes, especially if they find it useful. Your audience may want to make notes and will be more inclined to listen if you have a full transcript being free. Who would want to listen to a great podcast if they had to pay for the transcript? That would only put your future and potential audience off from listening in the first place.
Podcasts are a great way to consume and retain information, whether it is for business or pleasure. Going for a walk with the dog, working out at the gym, cooking in your kitchen, driving can all be done while listening to a podcast, as opposed to watching a video that you visually have to watch. You can’t watch a video while driving for example, or if the video is demonstrating something you cannot do any of the things mentioned because you are having to view a video. A podcast is a much easier way of taking in great content and by having a podcast package, this makes your podcast easier to access and saves your audience time if they do not want to listen to the whole episode. The highlights will enable them to jump to the parts they want to listen to, saving them the time of having to keep playing and replaying the audio.
The Future of Podcasting
The future of podcasting looks brights, it is on the increase in the UK. A post from September 2018 by ofcom.org in the UK shows the increase in listening from a range of sources including Rajar, ACast and TouchPoints to investigate the rise in podcast listening. Here is what they found:
The United States has also experienced an increase of podcast listener activity and Podcast Insights published these statistics:
There’s no doubt that podcast listening is on the increase, globally. What isn’t yet as popular is adding show notes (podcast packages) to the podcast to make is more searchable. With the extra text you are adding with the transcript the SEO bots have so much more information about the content, your SEO is immediately enhanced.
So, if you haven’t started a podcast show or series yet, this is the year of the podcast. It’s versatility of listening, quality, for businesses, podcast show notes are a must to make it accessible and searchable.
If you would like us to produce your podcast show notes for you, at a cost-efficient rate, just get in touch here: pph.me/virtuadmin and have your next podcast episode optimised for a wider audience reach.
