Don’t Hide Your Podcasting Light Under a Bushel
People create podcasts because they want to be heard. Businesses, in particular, podcast as part of their marketing, PR, or investor relations programs. Yet a surprising number of podcasts are hard to find, hard to listen to, or hard to identify once you’ve put them on your MP3 player.
Here at the Podcast Asylum, we call the two most common barriers podcasters erect between themselves and listeners Podcastus Inhospitus (the unfriendly podcast) and Podcastus Incognitus (the unidentified podcast). Let’s take them one at a time.
Podcastus Inhospitus
This is the podcast that’s difficult to find, difficult to listen to, difficult to subscribe to, and difficult to comment on—or any combination of the above. Common causes of this condition include:
- Not using a podcast blog to post show notes and provide space for listeners to comment.
- Not providing a direct link from the show blog or website to the podcast subscription feed.
- Not providing any instructions about how to subscribe either on the website or within the intro and outro on the recording.
- Not providing a “click to play” option on the show blog for those who prefer to listen at their computers.
- Using a proprietary audio file format which only works on certain portable media players.
- Not having a listener comment line and comment e-mail address, or not telling listeners about them in every single show.
- Not responding to listener comments when you do get them.
I recently discovered a podcast—a very good one, too—which suffered from almost all these problems. I would never have found out about it if another podcaster hadn’t mentioned it when interviewing the guilty show’s host. The podcast is only available through iTunes, is published in Apple’s proprietary AAC format, has no show blog, no click-to-play option, and no comment line. The podcaster only occasionally invites listeners to contribute opinions, without giving clear directions about how to do so.
She might as well be putting up a barbed wire fence around her podcast.
Have a Podcast Blog
Search engines can’t find anything in the iTunes Music Store, which is where its podcast listings reside. That means your podcast won’t turn up in response to a search on the subject that you’re talking about in that episode.
If you already have a blog, you can include your podcast show notes and click-to-play link there, instead of creating a new blog, though having a separate show blog makes it easier for listeners to find the episodes they want. Having a domain name for the show blog which is the same as your show name also makes it easier for people to find you if they hear someone else mention your show. Besides, blogs are inexpensive and easy to set up.
Having a show blog also makes it easy for listeners to comment, and for you to know which episode their comments refer to. Your blog will let you know every time a comment comes in.
Feed Me
Sure, iTunes is the 800-lb gorilla when it comes to podcatchers and podcast directories, and if your show gets featured in iTunes, people will subscribe. But not everyone uses iTunes to download podcasts. And since you (or your webmaster) have to create a feed for iTunes to use, you might as well put a link to it on your website.
Teach People to Subscribe
Not everyone you want to reach with your show know how to subscribe to podcasts. Even those familiar with the iTunes store may need some guidance. Make sure you explain that subscription is free (unless it isn’t). There’s a handy video with complete instructions at www.learntosubscribe.com.
In addition to posting subscription links on your show blog, make sure you include subscription instructions in every show. (You can just tell them the URL of your show blog and say “Follow the directions under ‘Subscribe’.”)
Always Include a Click-to-Play Option
As many as 60% of people who listen to podcasts listen directly from their computers. For many people, clicking on a “play” button that looks like what they see on their stereos is easier than downloading a file and then transferring it onto an MP3 player.
There are several options for embedding Flash-based MP3 players right into your show blog, including the brilliant PodPress plugin for WordPress blogs and the free MirPod player, which works on any website. (You can see a sample of the PodPress player on the Reports from the Asylum blog.) You might need a little help from your webmaster to set this up, but it’s definitely worth doing. PodPress collects statistics on the number of people who download or play the show from that link, too.
The MirPod Flash MP3 player works on any web page.
Use the MP3 Format
It’s true that MP3 doesn’t have the best compression or the best audio quality. And it doesn’t let you use advanced features like bookmarking or let you “enhance” your podcast with illustrations. But MP3 audio files have been around for at least a decade, and you can play them on anything. Even if you want to release an enhanced version of your show, you should make a plain MP3 version of each episode to make it easy for everyone to listen.
Encourage Listener Comments
If you want to hear from your listeners, tell them so. In fact, repeating your listener comment phone number or e-mail address after every topic you discuss can substantially increase your response rate. (You can get a free listener comment line from K7.net, or an inexpensive toll-free comment line from Kall8.com.)
A special e-mail address for listener comments also makes it easy to know which messages are about your podcast and which relate to another aspect of your business. Many podcasters use Gmail accounts for this, in part because there’s room to store large attachments like MP3 audio comments from listeners.
When you do get comments, respond to them promptly. You can read or play them on your show, send an e-mail, or post on the blog. Including listener comments on your show encourages people to “tune in” to hear themselves and builds loyalty to your show.
If you follow these guidelines, you’ll have a listener-friendly podcast, and that means more listeners!
Podcastus Incognitus
Podcastus Incognitus may or may not accompany Podcastus Inhospitus. It’s found quite often on its own, and frequently appears in podcasts which are repurposed from other content, such as teleseminars and radio programs.
These are the podcasts that you download, copy to your MP3 player, and then never seem to be able to find, because whether you sort by Album, Artist, or Title, nothing comes up but “Unknown.” You might just be able to figure out what the show is by looking at the file name, but otherwise, the only way to find out what’s on it is to listen. And unless the listener is very curious, that unknown podcast will be the last one s/he listens to.
So what makes these podcasts effectively invisible when others broadcast their identity? Their ID3 tags are all blank. For an MP3 file, that’s the equivalent of wearing a paper bag over your head. It’s terrible marketing, and it makes things hard on the listener.
So What the Heck is an ID3 Tag?
You can read the technical definition of an ID3 tag over at Wikipedia, but the important thing to know is that ID3 tags are the place you get to tell listeners everything you want them to know about your podcast. This is the information that gets displayed on the screen of your portable media player or in the “Now Playing” window in iTunes and Windows Media Player.
Many kinds of electronic documents actually let you fill in title, author, keywords, and so forth, but most people either don’t know this or don’t bother to do it. It’s not surprising if someone who doesn’t fill out these fields under “Properties” in Word or PDF files has no idea they exist in sound files. It’s pretty counter-intuitive to think you can include words in your audio files. Even people who are used to working with audio files and recording to CD usually add the text during the CD-burning process and not to the file itself.
This is one of those places where reading the podcasting books help, because all of the how-to-create-a-podcast books explain ID3 tags and how to fill them in. But I’ll give you a short course on ID3 tags for podcasts right here.
Using ID3 Tags for Podcasts
The down side to ID3 tags is that they were designed for music, so they use terminology like “artist,” “album,” “track,” and “lyrics.” Those aren’t words that apply very well to most podcasts, but podcasters quickly adopted fairly standard conventions for using them:
- Under “Artist,” put the host’s name.
- Under “Album,” put the name of the podcast.
- Under “Track,” put the episode number. (This one is not critical, but can be useful)
- Under “Title,” put the show title, such as “<Podcast Name> Episode <number>: Interview with <Guest’s Name>.”
- Under “Comments,” put your URL and any other information you want people to know, like a short summary of the content. You can also put show notes in the “lyrics” section.
- Under “Album Art,” you can attach a .jpg file with your podcast logo on it. (The largest size for these is 300 x 300 pixels.)
Podcast
“album art” and ID3 tags displayed in the iTunes “Now Playing” window
Editing ID3 Tags
The software you use for recording and mixing your podcast should also allow you to edit the ID3 tags. (In Audacity, “Edit ID3 Tags” is under the “Project” menu, but only provides the basic fields.) For editing tags on MP3 files created elsewhere (in Skylook, for instance, or by a teleseminar recording service, or from a podcaster who hasn’t filled them in) I like the free AudioShell plugin for Windows, but you can edit ID3 tags in most media players. (In iTunes, it’s “Get Info” under the “File” menu; in Windows Media Player, right-click on the item in your Library and select “Advanced Tag Editor.”)
Using the AudioShell Tag Editor
Is Your Podcast Having an Identity Crisis?
Some podcasters do provide ID3 tags for their shows, but they change them with every episode. This happens most often because the show host puts the guest’s name in the “Artist” field. It’s a well-meant gesture, but the result is confusion if the listener is sorting podcasts by artist.
Another common mistake is alternating between “&” and “and,” or other small inconsistencies that make media players think files belong to different albums or artists when they’re really the same. Any human could figure out easily that the two are the same, but software has no brain, and computers take everything very, very literally. So decide what you’re going to put into each field, write it down, and post it where you can see it when preparing your next episode.
© 2007 Sallie Goetsch
