Have you considered having your podcast episodes transcribed? I’ll be getting transcriptions for at least one of my podcasts soon. There are a few reasons to consider doing this:
- Posting the transcriptions to your web site provides rich text content for search engines to index. Most engines do not index your audio. You need regular, quality text content if you want to get search traffic.
- Some of your listeners will enjoy having a text version to skim, mark up, or keep for reference
- Some people just prefer to read
I know. This goes against the whole foundation of podcasting as an audio medium, but this is the age of giving the consumer the convenience that they want before they go somewhere else. Is your goal to be an audio purist or to get your content out to as many people as possible?
How about this idea:
Create a premium version of your podcast episodes on CD and sell them along with the transcriptions
Here’s a new transcripton service for podcasters that looks very interesting. I have not tried it yet, but I have heard good things and it looks worthwhile. The rates are competetive. Here’s a review and run through of how the service works.
July 6th, 2006 at 5:42 am
The idea of creating a premium service that offers a transcript of the show on CD is excellent. Well done, Jason.
September 4th, 2008 at 9:11 am
Hey Jason, that was useful and I would like to add to it that its extremely important that podcasts containing specific or technical terminology be backed up with their respective transcripts coz it kind of literally get the difficult terminology ‘marked’ which one can google and get further details, while listening to the podcasts it might become difficult to remember or interpret those terms correctly. Hope it helps.