Many people think that corporate or business podcasting is difficult and expensive. But with the free services that are available today, cost can be whittled down substantially. After the production itself, using these services to host and distribute your company’s content can be absolutely free, assuming you don’t mind 3rd party branding and/or a little extra work on your part. One caveat, this method produces a non-downloadable podcast which many argue is not technically a “podcast” at all. An example from our friends at Omega ATC is shown above. I will be referring to it as we go along.
Let’s start with the part that is not free, but is the most important aspect of any business podcast.
The production can be as simple or as complicated as you want it to be. You can go crazy and produce a full fledged video talk show, or you can re-purpose existing content—like a conference call or webinar—and call it a day. While we at AudioFile Solutions always suggest you put your best foot forward and produce a completely professional event, many businesses find that extending the life of content that has already been produced can also yield marketing fruit. For the rest of this article, we’ll assume that you already have an event—like a webinar recording—that you want to use as your podcast (in this case, a video podcast). Our conference call recording service and high definition web conference recording service can both be used for this application.
After the webinar has been recorded, you’ll need a 3rd party to host the video file.
To host a video on YouTube, open an account and click “Upload”. It’s that easy. For a webinar recording, it is important to use a high definition video as your source to keep the text and images crystal clear. Using a low resolution video file means that large text will be blurry and small text will be unreadable.
Note: View the embedded video above at 30:00 to see a good example of small text. In full screen mode, at 360p, the text is extremely blurry. Toggle the video to 720p to see the sharpest text.
Now that your video is live on YouTube, you can embed the video directly on your blog (as we did at the top of this article) by going to the YouTube page containing the video. From there, click “share” and copy & paste the embed code directly to your blog. If you don’t already have a blog, there are many free blogs to choose from. WordPress.com, Blogspot.com and WordPress.org are all good places to start. Or see Mashable’s article 40+ Free Blog Hosts.
Note: Keep in mind that YouTube can change this process at any time, so you may have to use some common sense when using future versions of YouTube.
A final thought, but no less important, don’t forget to have your podcast transcribed. This will allow you to place the entire text of the podcast on the same page as the audio or video. Not only is this great news for the hearing impaired, it is a necessity to receive SEO (Search Engine Optimization) credit. SEO is beyond the scope of this article, but suffice it to say, search engines like Google must have on-page text in order to index your blog post, and a word-for-word transcript is the best way to do this.
Happy podcasting!
View Andy R's profile
Asa long time podcaster I’m always searching for innovative ways to increase subscribers to my site. Using SEO tips like you recommend works very well once you have all the tools in place to do it. Transcribing audio can be difficult with a 30 minute podcast, what do you use? Recording tracks of a guest and myself need to separate and transcribed. The same for video interviews. As a new Mac user I have my moments.
I will check out your categories for more information, thanks.
Peter
Hi Peter. It sounds like you may be having trouble transcribing your podcasts. If you’re looking for help, give us a call. Our transcriptionists are all US-based and we never use any automation. Automation can really hurt SEO. http://www.audiofilesolutions.com/blog/2012/04/automated-transcription-services-acceptable-for-business-podcasts/